Science will win the technical battle against cancer. But that is only half the fight The numbers are stark. Cancer claimed the lives of 8.8m people in 2015; only heart disease caused more deaths. Around 40% of Americans will be told they have cancer during their lifetimes. It is now a bigger killer of Africans than malaria. But the statistics do not begin to capture the fear inspired by cancer'..
Google a photoshopped hoover What else could you call a photocopier? If you answer "a Xerox machine", you are one of the many people for whom the brand name and the generic item are one and the same. Like many brands that have gone generic, xerox is often lower-case and used as a verb. There are many more of these than people realize: aspirin was once Aspirin, a trademark of Bayer, which was for..
From Canada to Oceania, Guineas are in abundant supply Guinea. Equatorial Guinea. Guinea-Bissau. Papua New Guinea. The Gulf of Guinea. Guinea, Virginia. Guinea, Nova Scotia. The world has more Guineas than a pirate's treasure chest. What explains the prevalence of the name? Etymologists dispute the earliest origins of the word "Guinea". Some trace it to a word in Tuareg, a Berber language, for b..
Machines that read faces are coming Modern artificial intelligence is much feted. But its talents boil down to a superhuman ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data. Facebook has used this ability to produce maps of poor regions in unprecedented detail, with an AI system that has learned what human settlements look like from satellite pictures. Medical researchers have trained AI in sma..
These distinctions explain both the chancellor's strengths and her weaknesses Angela Merkel is the longest-serving head of government in the EU. When she became chancellor, in 2005, her international counterparts were George W Bush, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. She became leader of the CDU during the Clinton administration. Yet after all this time, she remains a conundrum to many. Der Spiegel ..
It may settle for more powerful conventional arms instead The runaways pace of North Korea's nuclear development has confounded predictions and diverted the attention of world leaders. It is also meddling with one North Korean grandmother's retirement plans. Ri Chun Hee, a veteran broadcaster at Korean Central Television, was promised a rest in 2012, after 41 years gleefully reading out propagan..
The next Republican civil war looms "DACA will continue to exist in Chicago," promises Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, half an hour before President Donald Trump's administration announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival programme, known as DACA. Ending DACA is morally, politically and economically wrong, says Mr Emanuel, the grandson of a Jewish immigrant who as a boy o..
As keen fans make and distribute models of protected intellectual property, copyright-owners are mulling their response Three-dimensional (3D) printers have proliferated in homes, schools and workplaces over the past five years. Last year more than 420,000 desktop-sized 3D printers, which make things by depositing one thin layer of material over another, much as printers ink a page one line at a..
But it may not have been the sort of powerful miniaturized warhead the rogue state claimed The skies to the east of the Korean peninsula have seen no fewer than 14 missile launches this year, but on September 3rd it was events underground that caused alarm. Several meteorological agencies reported a powerful earthquake in North Korea, centered on a known nuclear test site in North Hamgyong provi..
They face an uphill battle Loftily as they may disdain the profit motive, Britain's judges are, on a national level, money-spinners. English law is often specified as the one under which commercial contracts are to be interpreted and enforced. And disputes often end up being heard in British courts. But, like any business, the law is competitive, and other jurisdictions want to snatch a share of..
Unilever is the world's biggest experiment in corporate do-gooding Paul Polman runs Europe's seventh-most valuable company, Unilever, worth $176bn, but he is not a typical big cheese. A Dutchman who once considered becoming a priest, he believes that selling shampoo around the world can be a higher calling and detests the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of shareholder primacy, which holds that a firm's chi..
Humans will supply digital services to complement AI When the first printed books with illustrations started to appear in the 1470s in the German city of Augsburg, wood engravers rose up in protest. Worried about their jobs, they literally stopped the presses. In fact, their skills turned out to be in higher demand than before: somebody had to illustrate the growing number of books. Fears about ..
As if global warming were not enough of a threat, poor planning and unwise subsidies make floods worse The extent of the devastation will become clear only when the floodwater recedes, leaving ruined cars, filthy mud-choked houses and the bloated corpses of the drowned. But as we went to press, with the rain pounding South Texas for the sixth day, Hurricane Harvey had already set records as Amer..
Angela Merkel is on track for another win Posters have gone up around Germany. Angela Merkel is back from her holiday. The chancellor begins her election tour tomorrow, August 12th, with a rally in Dortmund. Next week she travels on to the Rhineland and the north-western city of Bremen. Martin Schulz, her Social Democratic (SPD) challenger, will launch his series of live events there a week late..
The sense of pervading gloom about the mainland’s control and Shanghai’s rivalry is overdone OF THE world’s three great commercial centres—New York, London and Hong Kong—two are on the defensive. London faces a rupture with the European Union, which wants to seize the City’s euro-related activities and shift them inside the currency zone. In Hong Kong the fear is of deeper assimilation by mainla..