★☆★Economist系列精读★☆★

GenevUID: 2543794

North Korea

Pictures from an exhibition

Aug 5th 2009 | NEW YORK
From Economist.com

Bill Clinton's private diplomacy in North Korea

AFP

THE pictures may yet turn out to be the most significant aspect of Bill Clinton’s surprise trip to North Korea this week. Images of the American former president in Pyongyang, stern-faced and stiff on a stool beside the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, appeared on newspapers, television screens and news websites all over the world. The White House declared the trip a “private” one earlier in the week, although North Korea’s officials
strained to suggest otherwise. Whatever its intended diplomatic weight, however, North Korea’s leader, who has craved bilateral talks with the United States over his nuclear programme, may claim a propaganda coup, after drawing an important American to pose at his side.

strained to

To make violent or steady efforts; strive hard:不懈：做出极大的或稳定的努力；努力奋斗：straining to reach the finish line. 努力到达终点

The immediate goal for Mr Clinton was to oversee the release of two young American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were arrested on the Chinese-North Korean border in March while reporting on a story about North Korean women forced by poverty into China. The two women had been sentenced to 12 years’ hard labour for allegedly entering North Korea illegally and committing “hostile acts”. Now pardoned, they left the country with Mr Clinton.

But there was more at stake than the two young women. Mr Clinton travelled with John Podesta, his former chief of staff who now runs a think-tank, the Centre for American Progress, that is close to the current American president. They were greeted by festivities in what looked more like an official state visit than one by a private citizen. The lead North Korean nuclear negotiator was seen in pictures greeting the former president. The state-run news agency claimed there had been an “exhaustive conversation”.

It is unclear whether Mr Clinton in fact carried any message to North Korea’s leaders on the nuclear issue. If so, it seems most likely that it would have been a call for North Korea to rejoin the six-party talks involving China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. It is clear that America’s leaders should be wary of the bilateral talks that Mr Kim seeks: North Korea has a history of negotiating in bad faith. It signed a 1994 deal with the Clinton administration, only to cheat on it. Another deal was struck with George Bush’s government, only for North Korea to flounce out and, eventually, test short- and long-range rockets and at least one nuclear device. In similar fashion, South Korea has been given little in return for intermittent friendliness and substantial aid.

In America some conservatives have grumbled that Mr Clinton’s trip was an act of obeisance that encourages further kidnapping. Others asked why a similar presidential trip had not been attempted to free Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist who was held in Iran earlier this year. One answer may be that, in this case America is testing how much North Korea—weak, nervous, unpredictable and hostile to its neighbours—might be seeking ways to come out of its shell.

One other consideration is whether Mr Clinton’s appearance might have played some role in the domestic politics of North Korea. Mr Kim is rumoured to be frail (he seemed stony faced although not visibly sickly when posing beside Mr Clinton), perhaps as the result of a stroke last year. He has been absent from some public events where his presence would be expected and speculation flares that he is attempting to prepare the way for a successor. One possibility is that he is trying to arrange for his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, who is in his twenties, to take over the top job. To that end he may have been keen to demonstrate to domestic rivals—within the armed forces and the ruling party—that a leader with the clout and the diplomatic skill to bring an American ex-president for talks should also be trusted to guide any possible transition.

GenevUID: 2543794

A link between wealth and breeding

The best of all possible worlds?

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition

It was once a rule of demography that people have fewer children as their countries get richer. That rule no longer holds true

Alamy

ONE of the paradoxes of human biology is that the rich world has fewer children than the poor world. In most species, improved circumstances are expected to increase reproductive effort, not reduce it, yet as economic development gets going, country after country has experienced what is known as the demographic transition: fertility (defined as the number of children borne by a woman over her lifetime) drops from around eight to near one and a half. That number is so small that even with the reduced child mortality which usually accompanies development it cannot possibly sustain the population.

This reproductive collapse is particularly worrying because it comes in combination with an increase in life expectancy which suggests that, by the middle of the century, not only will populations in the most developed countries have shrunk (unless they are propped up by historically huge levels of immigration) but also that the number of retired individuals supported by each person of working age will increase significantly. If Mikko Myrskyla of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues are correct, though, things might not be quite as bad as that. A study they have just published in Nature suggests that as development continues, the demographic transition goes into reverse.

Dr Myrskyla looked at the world as it was in 1975 and as it is now (or, at least, as it was in 2005). He compared two things. One was the total fertility rate (the number of children that would be born to a woman in a particular country over the course of her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates observed in that country during the calendar year in question). The other was the human development index for that country. The HDI, a measure used by the United Nations, has three components: life expectancy; average income per person; and level of education. Its maximum possible value is one.

Curiouser and curiouser

Back in the 1970s, no country got anywhere near one. Of the 107 places the researchers looked at, the best was Canada, with an HDI of 0.89. By 2005, however, things had improved markedly. Two dozen of what were now 240 countries had HDIs above nine—and something else remarkable had happened. Back in 1975, a graph plotting fertility rate against the HDI fell as the HDI rose. By 2005, though, the line had a kink in it. Above an HDI of 0.9 or so, it turned up, producing what is known in the jargon as a “J-shaped” curve (even though it is the mirror image of a letter J). As the chart shows, in many countries with really high levels of development (around 0.95) fertility rates are now approaching two children per woman. There are exceptions, notably Canada and Japan, but the trend is clear.

This result is both important and unexplained. Its importance lies in the change of assumptions that policymakers will have to put into their models of the future. The nadir of fertility appears to be 1.3 children per woman. Not every country drops that low before making the turn, but if those that do were to stay there, they would need to import immigrants equivalent to 1.5% of their population every year, for those populations merely to remain static. With the best will in the world, absorbing that many migrants would be tricky. Dr Myrskyla’s data, however, suggest the ultimate outcome of development may not be a collapsing population at all but, rather, the environmentalist’s nirvana of uncoerced zero population growth.

Why this change has come about, and why the demographic transition happens in the first place, are matters of debate. There are lots of social explanations of why fertility rates fall as countries become richer. The increasing ability of women in the developed world to control their own reproductive output is one, as is the related phenomenon of women entering the workplace in large numbers. The increasing cost of raising children in a society with more material abundance plays a part. So does the substitution of nationalised social-security systems for the support of offspring in old age. Falling rates of child mortality are also significant. Conversely, Dr Myrskyla speculates that the introduction of female-friendly employment policies in the most developed countries allows women to have the best of both worlds, and that this may contribute to the uptick.

No doubt all these social explanations are true as far as they go, but they do not address the deeper question of why people’s psychology should have evolved in a way that makes them want fewer children when they can afford more. There is a possible biological explanation, though. This is that there are, broadly speaking, two ways of reproducing.

One way is to churn out offspring in large numbers, turn them out into an uncaring world, and hope that one or two of them make it. The other is to have but a few progeny and to dote on them, ensuring that they grow up with every possible advantage for the ensuing struggle with their peers for mates and resources. The former is characteristic of species that live in unstable environments and the latter of species whose circumstances are predictable.

Viewed in comparison with most animals, humans are at the predictable-environment and doting-parent end of the scale, but from a human perspective those in less developed countries are further from it than those in rich ones. One interpretation of the demographic transition, then, is that the abundance which accompanies development initially enhances the instinct to lavish care and attention on a few offspring. Only when the environment becomes super-propitious can parents afford more children without compromising those they already have—and only then, as Dr Myrskyla has now elucidated, does the birth-rate start to rise again.

How far the process will continue, and whether it will spread to holdouts like Japan and Canada, remains to be seen. Indeed, the whole exercise is a warning of the risks of extrapolating the future from present trends. But, on present trends, things do, indeed, look hopeful.

GenevUID: 2543794

Taiwan and China

Reunification by trade?

Aug 6th 2009 | TAIPEI
From The Economist print edition

A plethora of free-trade deals is driving Taiwan closer to China

FREE-TRADE agreements (FTAs) are often contentious but rarely would one have as much strategic significance as that proposed between China and Taiwan. On July 29th Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, elected last year on a platform of liberalising business restrictions and easing military tensions with the mainland, said a China-Taiwan trade pact should be signed as soon as possible. The two sides have quietly concluded months of unofficial negotiations and Taiwan’s economy minister, Yiin Chii-ming, says he wants formal negotiations to start in October. The island is in a hurry.

Mr Ma is willing to take the political risk of tying a self-ruled democratic island economically to its giant authoritarian neighbour because of the rest of the world’s craze for free-trade deals. Taiwan has diplomatic relations with 23 countries. Most nations recognise China and fear to sign FTAs with Taiwan lest they incur China’s wrath. Already, says Huang Chih-peng, the director general of Taiwan’s Bureau of Foreign Trade, the world’s 230-odd bilateral or multilateral trade pacts are harming the export-dependent island’s economy.

Mr Ma is even more worried about what will happen next year when trade agreements between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations—so-called ASEAN+1—take effect. Taiwan’s exports to China face tariffs ranging from 5% to 15% and its government fears that, unless they are lowered, the island will be left at a competitive disadvantage in the giant Chinese market. This disadvantage would greatly worsen if a planned ASEAN+3 were one day signed, embracing South Korea and Japan.
Economic benefits, political costsA think-tank commissioned by the government said the proposed pact could increase Taiwanese GDP by 1.65-1.72%—more if services and investment were included. In addition, it argued, the pact could increase foreign direct investment by $8.9 billion in seven years and create around 260,000 jobs (though other economists said this was too high). The president wants an outline agreement in place before ASEAN+1 comes into force, with the details worked out and implemented bit by bit after that. An incremental approach, officials say, is needed because an immediate FTA would be too disruptive to Taiwan’s economy.
Disruptive is right, but not perhaps mainly to the economy. China still asserts that Taiwan is an integral part of the People’s Republic. Many Taiwanese, including the pro-independence opposition party, fear that the proposed accord is really a ploy by China to bring about unification by stealth. They also argue that once the pact is signed, there is no guarantee that China will not lean on members of other FTAs to keep Taiwan out anyway. In contrast, Mr Ma insists that the proposed pact would make it easier for Taiwan to sign free-trade accords with third parties.

“It is a suicidal policy that makes Taiwan locked into China,” says Huang Kun-huei, the chairman of the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union. In a sign of the popular unease raised by the pact, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which has virtually no parliamentary clout, still managed to collect over 120,000 signatories to a petition asking the government for a referendum on it (though Taiwan’s high threshold for referendum participation means that such a thing may not get off the ground).
get off the ground
v. 飞起, 开始发行


In fact, dramatic political shifts seem unlikely in the short term. Mr Ma has promised that when the deal is negotiated, the wording will not compromise the island’s political stance. And China-watchers think the increasingly sophisticated government in Beijing is not likely to make heavy-handed political demands in case this rebounds on Mr Ma and he is voted out of office in 2012 (the Chinese much prefer him to the independence-minded opposition). Nevertheless, in the long run China hopes that economic interdependency and goodwill will eventually encourage the island to return to the fold. The trade pact will be a test of whether that hope can be fulfilled.

lichiUID: 2653644

63# Genev
请问尊敬的斑竹 这个阅读应该咋练 是不是老这么看就能进步 我也每天都看点

GenevUID: 2543794

64# lichi

每天精读，查单词，摘抄好的句子。
关键是，在众多的题材中发现自己感兴趣的，在阅读中找到快乐，接触最好的书面英文。
兴趣是最好的老师，进步也是潜移默化体现出来的。

lichiUID: 2653644

65# Genev
谢谢喽 一定好好努力

GenevUID: 2543794

联发科技股份有限公司 MediaTek

MediaTek and mobile-phone chips

Fabless and fearless

Aug 6th 2009 | HSINCHU, TAIWAN
From The Economist print edition

How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers

The many guises of the chipset

MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year before, at NT$9.16 billion ($277m).

Although no household name, MediaTek makes products used by most consumers in rich countries. The Taiwanese firm is a “fabless” chipmaker, meaning that it only designs its chips, while subcontracting production. It started life in 1997 making chips for CD-ROM drives, and eventually took to building the brains of all sorts of consumer devices. Today MediaTek is the leader in these markets, equipping more than 50% of DVD players, for instance.

Yet these have become commodity businesses with low margins. So in 2004 MediaTek expanded into higher-value territory by making the bundles of chips, or “chipsets”, on which mobile phones rely. Being a latecomer, the firm opted to sell processor-, radio- and other sorts of chips together with the necessary software. This “total solution” makes it much easier for phonemakers to produce handsets.

MediaTek’s technology has revolutionised the manufacture of mobile phones in mainland China. A handset firm there used to need 20m yuan ($2.9m), 100 engineers and at least nine months to bring a product to market. Now 500,000 yuan, ten engineers and three months will do. As a result, Chinese handset-makers now number in the hundreds. Many churn out shanzhai (or “bandit”) phones: knock-offs of established brands, labelled “Nckia” or “Sumsung”. Others are true innovators, making handsets with big speakers or with two slots for SIM cards, so that one handset can be called on two different numbers.

This has thrust MediaTek’s revenues from $1.2 billion in 2004 to nearly $2.9 billion in 2008, when it sold about 220m chipsets to China. It became the world’s third-biggest fabless chipmaker by revenue in the first quarter of this year, behind America’s Broadcom and Qualcomm.

So far MediaTek only makes chips for low-end phones. Other developing countries, which already import 40% of all handsets made in China, are a huge opportunity, says Jon Erensen of Gartner, a market-research firm. But the firm is even more ambitious: later this year it will start selling technology for smartphones. Whether MediaTek can compete with Qualcomm and ST-Ericsson, Europe’s new champion for wireless chips, remains to be seen. Of the well-known handset brands only LG, a South Korean electronics giant, sells phones with MediaTek chips inside.

A more fundamental question is to what extent the industry structure spawned by MediaTek’s chipsets and software in China will spread across the globe. Lawsuits will thwart blatant knock-offs in rich countries. All the same, the barriers to entry for new handset-makers are getting ever lower. And Western consumers like variety as much as Chinese ones.

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14183077

vikki_baifnUID: 2618941

62# Genev 请问HDI 是什么的简写呢？ 多谢~

GenevUID: 2543794

68# vikki_baifn

Dr Myrskyla looked at the world as it was in 1975 and as it is now (or, at least, as it was in 2005). He compared two things. One was the total fertility rate (the number of children that would be born to a woman in a particular country over the course of her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates observed in that country during the calendar year in question). The other was the human development index for that country. The HDI, a measure used by the United Nations, has three components: life expectancy; average income per person; and level of education. Its maximum possible value is one.

HDI

人类发展指数（HDI，Human nations development index），是联合国开发计划署（UNDP）从1990年开始发布的衡量联合国各成员国经济社会发展水平的指标。
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA%E7%B1%BB%E5%8F%91%E5%B1%95%E6%8C%87%E6%95%B0

GenevUID: 2543794

Mixed-polymer recycling

The plastic sausage machine

Aug 18th 2009
From Economist.com

A new factory can turn almost any plastic into a useful product

Shutterstock

DESPITE efforts to recycle plastic, mountains of the stuff still end up in dumps and landfills. The problem is that plastic bottles, lids, punnets, film and the like must not only be clean, but must also be sorted into their various types, if recycling them is not to be prohibitively expensive. Recently, though, a factory has opened which changes those calculations. It is the first to be capable of taking mixed plastic waste, even dirty waste, and turning it into an environmentally friendly substitute for plywood.

Most plastics are made by coaxing the carbon-containing compounds found in oil into long molecules called polymers. If a plastic is made from one type of polymer, it can be usually be washed and shredded into pellets that can be reused. But when different polymers—and contaminants such as food residue, bits of glue and shards of metal—are mingled, the resulting recycled plastic may contain flaws that cause it to tear or break.

The new factory, which has been set up in Luton, England, by a company called 2K Manufacturing, turns mixed plastic into a composite board called EcoSheet. The board has been tested by Bovis, a construction company, which is supporting the project. EcoSheet costs about the same as plywood and, like plywood, can be used to build a variety of things including advertising hoardings, flooring and the shuttering used to contain concrete. It has a number of advantages over plywood, however. It is easier to work with because it does not produce injurious splinters. It does not rot. And, unlike plywood, which usually ends up in landfill because it contains adhesives and preservatives and is often painted, EcoSheet can be recycled into more EcoSheet—even if it is painted and full of nails.

2K Manufacturing was set up by Omer Kutluoglu, a bond-trader turned businessman, and Turul Taskent, a process engineer who used to build composite structures for racing cars. Their production process uses a form of encapsulation called powder-impression moulding. Workers at the factory grind mixed plastics into powdery flakes, spread the material over a polymer skin, cover it with another skin and sinter it. Sintering is a way of making objects by shaping them out of powder and then heating the powder to just below its melting point so that the particles adhere to one another. During the 2K process, air is blown through the sandwich to create a spongy-looking core. Once the material has cooled and hardened, it acquires mechanical strength from its composite structure.

In its first phase the factory in Luton will be capable of making 360,000 sheets of the material a year. Mr Kutluoglu is hoping to double that with a second production line and, eventually, to open another ten plants in Britain so that the waste used can be collected locally and transported over shorter distances. Britain uses about 5m tonnes of plastic a year, but barely one-fifth of that is recycled or recovered, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a government-funded agency. Mr Kutluoglu and Mr Taskent hope to change that.

b] 69# Genev

GenevUID: 2543794

American health care

Friend or foe?

Aug 14th 2009 | NORTH ARLINGTON, NEW JERSEY
From The Economist print edition

It is not wise for Democrats to bash America's health insurers

Getty Images

“I AM not a Nazi, I’m not being paid to be here, and I’m not un-American!” The elderly man who uttered those angry words on the afternoon of Monday August 10th was clearly boiling over. He and several hundred others had gathered in a poorly ventilated hall in North Arlington, New Jersey, to berate Steven Rothman, their Democratic congressman, for advocating health reform. The patriotic constituent echoed the sentiments of the angry crowd by declaring that the Democrats’ health plan was something his children and grandchildren simply “can’t afford”.

With Congress in recess this month, many members are holding such town hall meetings—and meeting a similar reaction. Across the country politicians are being confronted with the outrageous allegation that Democratic reforms will create a rationing bureaucracy of “death panels” to decide who lives and who dies.

What explains all this? The initial Democratic instinct was to see a dark plot masterminded by conservatives. Mr Rothman recalls encountering such open hostility at public meetings only twice before—during Bill Clinton’s impeachment saga and over the Iraq war—but the difference this time, he insists, is that the complainers are well-organised. A White House official claims that the protests were the result of a “concerted viral whisper campaign”. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, went so far as to suggest this week that the tactics used by those disrupting public meetings were “un-American.”

It is true that e-mails and other documents have surfaced confirming that conservative groups and talk-radio hosts have been fanning the flames of discontent. And prominent Republicans ranging from Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin have indeed pounced on the issue with glee. The former governor of Alaska even posted a note on her Facebook page claiming that Democratic reforms would somehow do in her handicapped child.

Look beyond such opportunism, however, and it becomes clear that there is much genuine anger and concern among ordinary people about health reform. For one thing, the punters at these meetings often have poignant and unscripted personal tales that explain their distrust of proposed reforms. Also, numerous polls now confirm that scepticism among Americans at large—and independents in particular—is growing about health reform.
The Democrats are using two other strategies to try to quell dissent. The high-minded tactic is the White House’s redoubling of efforts to address the concerns of Americans directly. To that end, the administration has set up a new website designed to debunk half-truths and myths and is pouring money into a huge advertising campaign. Mr Obama has also headed out on the road again, with three town hall meetings on health reform planned for this week alone.

The more underhanded gambit is the decision to bash the insurance industry at every turn. Ms Pelosi now calls its bosses “villains”, while Mr Obama wags a disapproving finger. This will score some political points, as many Americans have a deep (and often well-founded) distrust of health insurers. But the tactic could ultimately hobble or even doom reform. That is because the health insurance lobby may prove to be Mr Obama’s most important friend this year.

Though it has a shameful history, the insurance industry has done a U-turn of late. It now accepts the need for a radical overhaul of insurance markets through measures such as guaranteed issue of coverage and the creation of health insurance “exchanges”. But its leaders are increasingly unhappy about the shrill attacks. Can Mr Obama continue to bash the insurers one day and rely on them the next?

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

我来了。。。从明天开始，继续跟上！

GenevUID: 2543794

The Lockerbie decision
A long shadowAug 20th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The controversial decision to free Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomberTHE bombing that blew up Pan Am flight 103 in the sky above Lockerbie, a small Scottish town, on December 21st 1988, was the worst terrorist atrocity in British history. Of the 270 people who died, 189 were Americans; 11 were killed on the ground by falling debris. On August 20th the only person convicted of the crime was released from prison in Scotland.
After a tortuous diplomatic and legal process, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was tried in the Netherlands, but under Scottish law, in 2000-01. His co-accused was acquitted; Mr Megrahi was sentenced to life, with a minimum term that was later set at 27 years. Now suffering from advanced and terminal cancer, Mr Megrahi had asked to be released on compassionate grounds. Separately, under a prisoner-transfer agreement that they recently agreed with Britain, the Libyan authorities requested in May that he be sent home to serve out the rest of his sentence.

Under Scotland’s devolution settlement, a little improbably the man responsible for deciding Mr Megrahi’s fate was Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice secretary. Mr MacAskill, had three options: release (as sanctioned by a Scottish law of 1993); transfer; or keep Mr Megrahi in Greenock prison for his few remaining days. Mr MacAskill rejected the transfer request, managing several digs at the British government as he did so. But he approved the compassionate release; there was talk of the prisoner being whisked back to Libya in a jet sent by Muammar Qaddafi, the country’s erratic leader.

Many Americans vociferously opposed sending Mr Megrahi back. In unusually strident language, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, said it would be “absolutely wrong” to free him. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and others also weighed in. So did some relatives of the dead.
But others, including some relatives of British victims, will be disappointed for a different reason. There are lingering questions about Mr Megrahi’s role and those of other individuals and states. (In return for the lifting of sanctions, Libya compensated the families of the dead and acknowledged responsibility for the bombing—thought by some to be retaliation for the 1986 American air strike on Tripoli—but Libyan officials implied the move was motivated by pragmatism rather than guilt.) The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, had referred the case for a second appeal. But to be eligible for transfer, on August 18th Mr Megrahi dropped this appeal. So the evidence will now not be re-examined in court.

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, insisted before Mr MacAskill’s decision was announced that “there will be no consideration of international power politics or anything else.” But the Lockerbie case has always been intertwined with high politics, in particular with Mr Qaddafi’s efforts to launder his reputation and drag Libya out of international isolation. His country’s rich hydrocarbon deposits and its role in the fight against Islamist terrorism may also be considerations. The fact that his son recently bumped into Lord Mandelson, Britain’s powerful first secretary, on holiday in Corfu, has fuelled speculation about a stitch-up. Whether or not such chatter is overheated, and whatever the demands of compassion, justice seems not to have been well-served.

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

TechnologyBetter vaccinations
Hypodermic needlessAug 20th 2009
From The Economist print edition
How to improve the delivery of vaccines
AFP
VACCINATIONS are a pain. Any two-year-old with access to reasonable health care will tell you that. But injections are bad for reasons other than the discomfort they cause. If syringes are reused without sterilisation, they can spread disease. The liquid vaccines they require are often temperamental, needing constant refrigeration and thus what is known as a “cold chain” to keep them in tip-top condition as they move from factory to clinic. And hypodermic needles do not even deliver vaccines to the best place in the body.
Vaccines work by activating the immune system. For that to happen, they have to meet up with what are known as antigen-presenting cells. These cells recognise alien invaders, chop them up and then carry characteristic bits of them to the rest of the immune system so that the invader can be recognised and appropriate measures taken. If an invader is new, this process allows the immune system to learn to recognise it, and respond more rapidly next time. A vaccine (which contains either a dead or an attenuated form of a pathogen) lets the immune system learn about a disease without the body having to undergo the infection. But antigen-presenting cells tend to congregate in places where pathogens arrive, such as the lungs and the skin—not in the muscles where the tip of a hypodermic needle ends up.

How to improve this state of affairs was the topic of two talks at this year’s meeting of the American Chemical Society, in Washington, DC. Both proposals eliminate the need for painful needles and the need to transport liquids around. And both deliver their cargoes to places where antigen-presenting cells abound.
Just breathe deeplyRobert Sievers of the University of Colorado is working on a new way to deliver a vaccine for measles. Vaccination against this disease has become controversial in effete Western circles because of the malign effects of one or two hysterically reported scientific studies which suggested (wrongly, it is now believed) that the vaccine might occasionally be hazardous. In many parts of the world, however, measles itself is a serious hazard. It kills about 200,000 children a year, and vaccination—using a liquid vaccine and a hypodermic—is the only way to prevent it.
Because measles attacks through the respiratory tract, though, Dr Sievers reckons this is a better place to send the vaccine than the muscles of the arm. And one way to do so would be to have the person being vaccinated inhale a finely powdered vaccine that coated every inch of his lungs（吸白粉也是这个程序把＝＝！）. To make such a powder, Dr Sievers has perfected a trick that atomises liquid vaccine into tiny droplets. When the water evaporates, the particles of vaccine which remain are so small that they can spread through the lungs without clumping.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Atomisation nozzles are commonplace. They are used in everything from perfume bottles to car engines. But a nozzle alone is not enough. The droplets it produces—and hence the granules of the powder—are too big for Dr Sievers’s purposes. Instead, he has turbocharged the process by mixing the vaccine with ultra-high-pressure carbon dioxide.
When this mixture emerges from the nozzle, it bubbles like champagne. The bubbles fragment, forming ultra-tiny drops, and when these dry they leave a powder with granules that are between one and five microns across. This powder can be doled out easily in individual doses and inhaled from a bladder—and a monkey that did so was protected from influenza. Human trials are expected to begin next year in India.
Skin fixMark Prausnitz of the Georgia Institute of Technology and his team have devised a different way to replace the hypodermic needle. They have successfully inoculated mice against flu using scores of tiny needles that might be referred to as “hyperdermic”, because they do not fully penetrate the skin. This method, too, eliminates the need to transport liquid vaccine around.
Dr Prausnitz’s vaccine-delivery device is a steel patch with an array of needles, each about half a millimetre long, on it. The array is coated with liquid vaccine mixed with a thickening agent. This dries, leaving the needles impregnated with solid vaccine. The resulting device is robust and reasonably insensitive to heat.
To use it, you press it against someone’s skin (possibly your own). The needles painlessly puncture the skin, but do not go through it. Moisture from the body then dissolves the vaccine and it spreads into the skin in minutes.
That the patches are self-applicable is a huge bonus. Dr Prausnitz hopes it might be feasible to send vaccines to people by post during an epidemic, obviating the need for them to go to a clinic.
At the moment Dr Prausnitz’s technique, like Dr Sievers’s, has been tried only on animals, but it has such elegance and simplicity that if human trials are successful it could prove to be important in controlling influenza. Exactly who should receive influenza vaccine is the subject of this article.

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Caster Semenya and the issue of gender ambiguityBy Larry Greenemeier in 60-Second Science Blog


The controversy over South African athlete Caster Semenya's gender has given the public a view into the complexities of gender. At first blush, the issue should be fairly straightforward: a person is either a male (with an X and a Y chromosome) or a female (with two X chromosomes). But the reality is that a number of conditions can blur the gender line.

After her 800-meter final on August 19 at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, the International Association of Athletics Federations announced that they had asked Semenya to undergo tests to verify that she was female, with IAAF spokesman Nick Davies describing the tests as "extremely complex, difficult," 哈哈哈according to the journal Nature. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.)

Some people with two X chromosomes can develop masculine characteristics, whereas others with one X and one Y chromosome never develop masculine characteristics, Nature reports. Still, others (most notably, males who are XXY) defy conventional thinking of gender along the lines of XX females and XY males.

Some people with two X chromosomes have medical conditions that elevate androgen levels (which stimulate or control the development and maintenance of masculine characteristics); other people born XY fail to develop as men because of androgen insensitivity syndrome. Whereas XX individuals with plenty of androgens develop male characteristics, XY individuals who are not sensitive to it may grow up with female characteristics. This androgen-insensitivity makes gaining an athletic advantage through these conditions unlikely in most cases, Myron Genel, a pediatrician and expert in sexual development disorders at Yale University, told Nature.

About one in 4,500 babies show ambiguous genitalia at birth, such as a clitoris that looks like a penis, or vice versa, Scientific American reported in a 2007 article. In that story, geneticist Eric Vilain of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that, lacking the Y chromosome, an embryo will follow the "default" genetic pathway that leads to ovary development, although "antimale" genes are required to make functioning ovaries.

The controversy has also spotlighted the taboos associated with someone who might share both male and female characteristics. (The IAAF has asked Semenya to undergo a number of complex gender tests, according to The Los Angeles Times, so any judgments about her gender are premature at this point.)

Semenya's case is not without precedent. At the 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta, eight female athletes were determined to have XY chromosomes and were not allowed to compete, The Los Angeles Times reports, adding that further studies showed that they were physiologically female even though their genes said they were male, and they were reinstated. The Times article includes several examples of how genetics and gender don't always match.