Babbage

HUGH BROUGHTON, the architect behind the British Antarctic Survey's new Halley VI research station, explains how to keep scientists comfortable in the most adverse of conditions

NASA'S laser-armed, nuclear-powered, car-sized rover Curiosity is not on Mars to look for signs of life. If modern Martians exist at all—and there is no evidence that they do—then it will probably be in the form of tough, slow-growing microbes that dwell under the ground, sheltering from the solar radiation that bombards a surface only lightly shielded by a thin, bone-dry atmosphere. But Curiosity is, nevertheless, an astrobiological mission. One of its main tasks is to determine whether, at some point in its past, Mars might have had a more accommodating environment than it does today.

On March 12th a team of NASA scientists announced some fairly strong evidence that it may have done.

CHINESE hackers may get all the notoriety, but their cyber-security exploits against American targets are not the only ones. Huge damage is also being done by organised crime. This past week, a large metropolitan utility in the United States announced it had suffered a massive “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, knocking out its automated online- and telephone-payment systems and forcing 155,000 customers to pay their bills in person over the ensuing 48 hours.

At its peak, the utility’s back-end computers that run its customer database were flooded with 5.7m spurious packets of data a second, bringing all legitimate transactions to a standstill.

TONY FADELL led the team that developed Apple's iPod. Now he is running Nest Labs, a company that has designed a revolutionary kind of thermostat

THIS month the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) will turn 40. From March 3rd to 14th delegates from 178 countries are gathering in Bangkok to review the treaty, which regulates the sale of wildlife and allows for a global ban in the trade of a species when it is threatened with over-exploitation. One of the subjects on the agenda is whether such bans work.

Trade bans are controversial. They can be effective in stabilising population numbers. This happened with the African grey parrot, for instance. But evidence abounds that sometimes they may do more harm than good.

IN JOURNALISM, cynics suggest, three data points are enough to pronounce a trend. As of March 3rd, AIDS researchers hope that two might be sufficient. On that day Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University announced to the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, Georgia, that a child she had been examining had been cured of HIV infection. The announcement was hedged in the usual caveats (“functionally cured” was the exact term used). But the bottom line was clear.

WHEN Jesse Genet was 16 she wanted to print a photo on a T-shirt. Nine years on, together with her partner, Stéphan Angoulvant, she is finally happy with the result. Their company, Lumi, produces an ultraviolet-activated dye, called Inkodye, that can be exposed in sunlight or under high-intensity UV lamps. It enables continuous-tone reproduction, like that found in photographs developed in darkrooms or made using so-called dye-sublimation printers.

First, you rub or roll the dye, made of similar components to those used in frequently laundered clothing like hospital uniforms, onto a surface.