Few important articles from THE HINDU

Glimpse of black hole swallowing star, shooting flareScientists for the first time caught a glimpse of a black hole swallowing a star and shooting out a high-speed flare of matter at the centre of a nearby galaxy.

The finding, reported in the US journal Science, tracked this star — about the size of the Sun — as it shifted from its customary path, slipped into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and was sucked in, Xinhua quoted lead author Sjoert van Velzen of the Johns Hopkins University as saying on Thursday.

Though extremely rare, supermassive black holes were spotted previously eating a star alive. Scientists have also seen flares, or jets, from supermassive black holes.

“But this is the first time we got a clear view of the stellar destruction, followed by the jet,” van Velzen said.

“The jet is also of much lower power than what we have seen before, which is present an interesting puzzle.”

Van Velzen led the analysis and coordinated efforts of 13 other scientists in the US, the Netherlands, Britain and Australia. The team compared the energy produced by the jet in this event to the entire energy output of the Sun over 10 million years.

They concluded that it was likely all supermassive black holes swallowing stars launched jets but this discovery was made possible because the black hole is relatively close to the Earth and was studied soon after it was first seen.

The black hole is only 300 million light-years away from the Earth and the team was able to make their first observations using radio telescopes only three weeks after it was found, they said.

“Our new findings suggest that this type of jet could indeed be common,” he said.

“Finding more of these rare events may further our understanding of the processes that allow black holes to launch such spectacular outflows.”

Zero-power ‘smart glass’ for smartphoneScientists, including one of Indian-origin, have designed a “smart glass” that may substantially slash the energy required to power a smartphone.

The touchscreen material, invented by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, is based on the technology used for rewritable DVDs.

The material uses electrical pulses to create vivid, hi-tech displays that require no power and can be viewed clearly, even in direct sunlight. The innovation threatens to shake up the smartphone and wearable device market, because more than 90 per cent of the battery power in a mobile device is used to illuminate its display.

“We can create an entire new market. You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that did not need much power, you could recharge it just once a week,” Peiman Hosseini, founder of Bodie Technologies was quoted as saying by the Telegraph.

The scientists found that by sandwiching a seven-nanometre-thick layer of a phase change material (GST) between two layers of a transparent electrode, they could use a tiny current to “draw” images within the sandwich “stack”, The Engineer reported.

The team went on to demonstrate prototype pixel-like devices. These ‘nano-pixels’ can be electrically switched ‘on and off’ at will, creating the coloured dots that would form the building blocks of an extremely high-resolution display technology.

Ramanujan’s gift: solutions to elliptic curves

1729 is the sum of two cubes in two different ways

As numbers go, 1729, the Hardy-Ramanujan number, is not new to math enthusiasts. But now, this number has triggered a major discovery — on Ramanujan and the theory of what are known as elliptical curves.

The anecdote goes that once when Hardy visited Ramanujan who was sick, Hardy remarked: “I had ridden in taxicab number 1729, and it seems to me a rather dull number. I hope it was not an unfavourable omen.” To this Ramanujan had replied, “No, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

Yes, 1729 = 93 + 103 and also 1729 = 123 +13

This story is often narrated to explain Ramanujan’s familiarity with numbers but not more than that. Recent discoveries have brought to light that it was far from coincidence that Ramanujan knew the properties of 1729. There are now indications that he had, in fact, been looking at more general structures of which this number was but an example.

Mathematicians Ken Ono and Andrew Granville were leafing through Ramanujan’s manuscripts at the Wren Library in Cambridge University, two years ago, when they came across the equation 93 + 103 = 123 +13, scribbled in a corner. Recognising the representations of the number 1729, they were amused at first; then they looked again and found that there was another equation on the same page that indicated Ramanujan had been working, even then, on a famous seventeenth century problem known as Fermat’s Last Theorem (proved by Andrew Wiles in 1994).

“I thought I knew all of the papers there, but to my surprise, we found one page with near misses to the Fermat equation,” writes Dr Ono, who is also a Ramanujan scholar, in an email to this correspondent. Having a sneaking suspicion that Ramanujan had a secret method that gave him his amazing formulas, Dr Ono returned to Emory University and started working on these leads with his PhD student Sarah Trebat Leder.

“Together we worked backwards through Ramanujan’s notes, and we figured out his secret…[Ramanujan] arrived at the formulae on this page by producing a much more general identity. One which I recognised as a K3 surface (a concept that mathematician Andrew Wiles used for solving Fermat’s last theorem), an object that mathematicians did not discover until the 1960s,” notes Dr Ono.

Ramanujan died in 1920, long before mathematicians discovered the K3 surfaces, but from research done by Ono and Trebat Leder, it transpires that he knew of these functions long before. Dr Ono continues, “Ramanujan produced so many mysterious formulas, which can be misunderstood at first glance. We have come to learn that Ramanujan was perhaps the greatest anticipator of mathematics. His bizarre methods and formulas have repeatedly offered hints of the future in mathematics. In this case, we have added to Ramanujan’s legend.”

Commenting on their own work on this, he says, “He [Ramanujan] anticipated the theory of K3 surfaces before anyone had the merest glimpse. These surfaces are now at the forefront of research in mathematics and physics. In addition to adding to Ramanujan’s legacy, Sarah and I were able to apply his formulas to a problem in number theory (finding large rank elliptic curves), and his formulas immediately set the record on the problem. We hardly had any work to do. Ramanujan’s formula was a gift to us.”

Why save the rocks of the Deccan Plateau?science and technology

As our Institute at Hyderabad started constructing a new building, we found a huge boulder on the site. Such boulders and rocks are common place in Hyderabad (and indeed in the Deccan region) and many builders have simply blasted them away to make room for buildings. As Hyderabad expanded during the last four decades, much of the landscape has been remarkably changed from a series of boulders to high-rise buildings.

This irreversible change in the landscape has bothered many, and the conservation group “Save the Rocks” at Hyderabad has canvassed against such thoughtless blasting of these natural gifts and for conserving them as much as possible. These have borne some fruit as some architects have come out with ingenious plans to build houses and complexes around the boulders, or making the boulders as part of the plan. We too decided to do so and made the boulder part of the ground floor of the new building, where it ushers visitors.

This is yet another example of the debate between ecology and environment on one hand and development and economic demands on the other, but with a different focus. Boulders of Deccan are not ‘green’, they play no role in agriculture, water or the livelihood of the people in any significant way. While we understand the role

of other ecosystems such as mangroves, forests or animal sanctuaries, of what use are these stones and rocks?

The answer comes once we realize how these rocks and boulders came about in the first place. The work of geologists over the last couple of centuries has unveiled the scenario of the area, which show us that these rocks, boulders and steps (of the kind we see in the rocks in Mahabaleshwar or Ajanta area) are the result of the churning of the earth that went on as early as 65 million years ago. Those were the pre-human days when giant dinosaurs roamed the Indian landscape in Punjab, Rajasthan and Deccan. The remains of one such dinosaur that roamed in the Adilabad area have been put together and exhibited at the Birla Science Museum (which itself stands on such boulders) in Hyderabad. Looking at the actual bones of the dinosaurs lying there, one wonders what caused their extermination from the ‘Jurassic Park’ of India of 65 million years ago.

Geo-chronologists study such events and estimate their time periods. We have such experts at the National Geophysical Research Institute at Hyderabad, Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad and IIT Bombay. One such, Professor Kanchan Pande of IIT Bombay, has been working on the geo-chronology of the Deccan, and has recently co-authored a paper in the journal Science, which gives us an insight to the scenario.

It was over 66 million years ago that a giant asteroid from space came and barged on earth. The impact was so huge that it led to catastrophic changes on earth. Giant series of earthquakes erupted and massive fires were ignited, wiping out most life forms, plant and animals on land and sea. Dark clouds of poisonous dust blocked sunlight, vitiating the atmosphere and climate. This catastrophic event changed the entire landscape and natural history of our earth.

The collaborative work of Professor Paul Renne of UC Berkeley, and Professor Pande on Indian geochronology shows that the effect of such an asteroid impact was not just a single bang, but a series of earthquakes churning out the Indian land mass, particularly in the Western and Central regions of India, an area almost the size of U. P. and M. P. put together. The impact was not just a ‘one-off’ event but a series of continuing re-adjustment of the layers of earth, which continues even today. The volcanoes that resulted and the lava that began flowing still continue. This is what led to the “steps” or staircase-like arrangement of the landscape in the Mumbai-Pune Ghats region. These regular formations as called the “Deccan Traps” (borrowing from the Swedish word ‘trapp’ for staircase). For some stunning views of the Deccan Trap, go to Google and ask for images.

Cynics may ask: what use is this barren land? For the people who live in the area, this is an irrelevant, indeed irreverent question. And for understanding the details of our own history, this is a natural gift. Save the Rocks Hyderabad fights a heroic battle and we wish them well and support.

Turning to the boulder in our building, we asked the world experts on geo-chronology based in Hyderabad, Drs. Kunchitapadam Gopalan and Kaigala Venkata Subba Rao. They tell us that this boulder is actually older than 65 million, perhaps close to 1 billion years old! In respect, we surrounded it with four walls and the artist Surya Prakash covered the walls with murals- as an ode to this priceless gift that Mother Earth has bestowed on us.

Poets retell the past and foretell the future. Saint Kabir wrote: The clay told the potter: “you are churning me today. There will come a day when I will be churning you”.

Deciphering history

The imprint copy of the inscription. Photo: Special Arrangement

IMPRINTS OF THE PAST: The Jain Temple at the top of the hill. Photo: Special Arrangement

TOPICS

Epigraphists find a rare stone inscription in Tiruvannamalai that refers to one of the earliest Sepulchral Jain Temples in Tamil Nadu

Social activist S. Anantharaj never thought that he would be part of a startling discovery when he stumbled upon a piece of history dating back to more than thousand years.

It was a revelation of sorts for him when he found an inscription belonging to the 9th Century A.D., hidden under the bushes at Thirakkol Village in Thiruvannamalai District. The inscription is held by archaeologists and epigraphists as a significant find, as it refers to one of the earliest Sepulchral Jain temples in the State. “So far, references to Palli Padai (Sepulchral temples) have been found only in the inscriptions belonging to 10th and 11th Century A.D,” says C. Santhalingam, Secretary, Pandyanadu Centre for Historical Research.

It was during the cleaning activities for the Panchakalyana (consecration) of a Jinalaya (Jain Temple) of Mahavira in Thirakkol, that Anantharaj and his retired teacher friend Nagarajan identified a stone slab, inscribed in Tamil and Grantha Script. “I went to participate in some service activities when I saw bushes being cleared to provide a resting area for the people attending the function. The machine suddenly got stuck and we stopped the operator from trying to move ahead. That is when we noticed a boulder with some letters engraved on it and immediately sought the help of Santhalingam,” says Anantharaj.

Upon reaching the site, a team of epigraphists including Santhalingam and Udayakumar found the inscription referring to 24 Thirthankara Jinalaya.

The inscription read that a Jinalaya was constructed on the place where the mortal remains of an elder Gurukkal (Priest), was laid to rest. In the Saiva Sect, temple built on the burial of a Guru or King is called a ‘Palli Padai’ and a number of these can be found in Tiruchuli, Melpadi, Thondaiman, Arrur and Patteeswaram. But, according to Santhalingam, they all belong to a later period while the one found in Tiruvannamalai could be a forerunner.

Thirakkol Village is still a busy Jain Centre where two Jain temples Maisuththa Perumpalli andKangasurapperumpalli are located. The temples have boulders with bas relief of Mahavira, Parsvanatha and Adinatha.

In Tamil Nadu, more than 90 Tamil Brahmi inscriptions from the Sangam Age have been recorded, of which nearly 50 are found in and around Madurai. Madurai was a major centre for the Jains during the Sangam Age. They flourished till the advent of Bhakti movement, when King Koon Pandyan forced Jains to flee the city. They took asylum in Pallava Kingdom. Even today, around 30,000 Jain families are found in the belts of Kancheepuram, Tiruvannamalai and Tindivanam.

There were four different centres for different sects called Buddha Kanchi, Siva Kanchi, Vishnu Kanchi and Jaina Kanchi. Thirupparathikundram was the main hub for the Jaina Kanchi.

“Pallavas and Cholas patronised Jains and donated lands for the maintenance of their temples and muttams, which they called Pallichandam (donations).”

There are several Jain rock cut beds and Tamil Brahmi inscriptions found in Mamandoor, Jambai, Maraiyanpattu and Thondur. Those inscriptions talk about significant contributions of Nandhi Varma Pallavan, Parantaka and Raja Raja Cholan for the welfare of the Jains in the region.

“Jains in this part are called as ‘Neeru Poosi Vellallar’ as they are into farming activities,” says Santhalingam

The team also found another inscription in Thirakkol that talked about the King of Rashtrakuta Dynasty. “It is in damaged condition and we are trying to gather information,” he adds.

The Death of the Newspaper Industry

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Much of the newspaper industry's decline is directly attributable to the fact it no longer commands a monopoly over distribution and therefore advertising.

The concept of one newspaper serving a reader's needs is incompatible with what the Internet stands for. News, on the other hand, will continue to survive.

For years now, the lines between Silicon Valley and the media business have been blurring. Not only do software applications now look more like media products—in that they are advertisement-supported and constantly updated— but the opposite also holds true.

Media products not only provide original content now but, like software products, also come with a wide array of tools and functions that allow customer to fiddle around with the content in a number of different ways.

This is the crux of the new-media versus old-media debate as conceptualized by people like Ryan Chittum, who recently wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review that took aim at the more utopian views of the news industry.

For Mr. Chittum, who wrote a take-down of Marc Andreessen’s bullish piece on the future of the news, the Internet has “unbundled advertising”.

“The existential problem for the news is that the Internet has unbundled advertising from content creation. The new digital monopolies [Google, Facebook, Twitter] all have hundreds of millions of people creating free content for them. That’s where the big profits are,” he writes.

So what is the Internet really doing to the news industry?

For one, news is no longer synonymous with “newspaper” or even a “news website”. Secondly, the Internet has allowed all consumers of news to have access to the best news (both objectively and subjectively).

Take a look at the graph below. There are a number of newspapers in India that range from low-quality to high-quality. Unfortunately, in the pre-Internet, pre-digital age, much of what you read was determined by simply where you grew up.

If you were from Tamil Nadu, you read The Hindu. If you were from Bombay, you read The Times of India. If you were from Calcutta, you read The Telegraph. And so on and so forth. This was because newspapers couldn’t be in all markets, constrained as they are by physical obstacles like printing presses, distribution channels etc. (Even today, with the best technology, we still can’t get all newspapers everywhere.)

Why we can’t solve big problems

On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed gingerly out of Eagle, Apollo 11's lunar module, and joined Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility. Looking up, he said, "Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent desolation." They were alone; but their presence on the moon's silent, gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive collective effort.

Eight years before, President John F. Kennedy had asked the United States Congress to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." His challenge disturbed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's original plan for a stepped, multigenerational strategy: Wernher von Braun, NASA's chief of rocketry, had thought the agency would first send men into Earth's orbit, then build a space station, then fly to the moon, then build a lunar colony. A century hence, perhaps, humans would travel to Mars. Kennedy's goal was also absurdly ambitious. A few weeks before his speech, NASA had strapped an astronaut into a tiny capsule atop a converted military rocket and shot him into space on a ballistic trajectory, as if he were a circus clown; but no American had orbited the planet. The agency didn't really know if what the president asked could be done in the time he allowed, but it accepted the call.

This required the greatest peacetime mobilization in the nation's history. Although NASA was and remains a civilian agency, the Apollo program was possible only because it was a lavishly funded, semi-militarized project: all the astronauts (with one exception) had been Air Force pilots and naval aviators; many of the agency's middle-aged administrators had served in the Second World War in some capacity; and the director of the program itself, Samuel Philips, was an Air Force general officer, drafted into service because of his effective management of the Minuteman missile program. In all, NASA spent $24 billion, or about $180 billion in today's dollars, on Apollo; at its peak in the mid-1960s, the agency enjoyed more than 4 percent of the federal budget. The program employed around 400,000 people and demanded the collaboration of about 20,000 companies, universities and government agencies.

If Apollo commanded a significant portion of the treasure of the world's richest nation and the coöperation of all its estates, that was because Kennedy's challenge required NASA to solve a bewildering number of smaller problems decades ahead of technology's evolutionary schedule. The agency's solutions were often inelegant.

To escape from orbit, NASA constructed 13 giant, single--use multistage rockets, capable of lifting 50 tons of payload and generating 7.6 million pounds of thrust. Only an ungainly modular spacecraft could be flown by the deadline; but docking the command and lunar modules midflight, sending the lunar module to the moon's surface and then reuniting the modules in lunar orbit demanded a kind of spastic space dance and forced the agency's engineers to develop and test a long series of astronautical innovations. Men died, including the crew of Apollo 1, who burned in the cabin of their command module. But before the program ended in 1972, 24 men flew to the moon. Twelve walked on its surface, of whom Aldrin, following the death of Armstrong last August, is now the most senior.

Why did they go? They brought back little—841 pounds of old rocks, Aldrin's smuggled aesthetic bliss and something most of the 24 emphasized: a new sense of the smallness and fragility of our home. (Jim Lovell, not untypically, remembered, "Everything that I ever knew—my life, my loved ones, the Navy—everything, the whole world, was behind my thumb.") The cynical, mostly correct answer is that Kennedy wanted to demonstrate the superiority of American rocketry over Soviet engineering: the president's challenge was made in May of 1961, little more than a month after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. But it does not adequately explain why the United States made the great effort it did, nor does it convey how the lunar landings were understood at the time.

Kennedy's words, spoken at Rice University in 1962, provide a better clue:

"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? . . . Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills . . ."

Apollo was not seen only as a victory for one of two antagonistic ideologies. Rather, the strongest emotion at the time of the moon landings was of wonder at the transcendent power of technology. From his perch in Lausanne, Switzerland, the writer Vladimir Nabokov cabled the New York Times, "Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra—these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known."

To contemporaries, the Apollo program occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. The first half of the century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis; in the middle years of the century, polio was on its way to being eradicated; and by 1979 smallpox would be eliminated. More, the progress seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler dubbed an "accelerative thrust" in Future Shock, published in 1970. The adjectival swagger is pardonable: for decades, technology had been increasing the maximum speed of human travel. During most of history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail; by the First World War, automobiles and trains could propel us at more than 100 miles an hour. Every decade thereafter, cars and planes sped humans faster. By 1961, a rocket-powered X-15 had been piloted to more than 4,000 miles per hour; in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 flew at 25,000. Wasn't it the very time to explore the galaxy—"to blow this great blue, white, green planet or to be blown from it," as Saul Bellow wrote in Mr. Sammler's Planet (also 1970)?

Perhaps the most influential photograph from the Apollo lunar landings: Buzz Aldrin's footprint in the moon's gray, powdery surface.

Since Apollo 17's flight in 1972, no humans have been back to the moon, or gone anywhere beyond low Earth orbit. No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 10. (Since the last flight of the supersonic Concorde in 2003, civilian travel has become slower.) Blithe optimism about technology's powers has evaporated, too, as big problems that people had imagined technology would solve, such as hunger, poverty, malaria, climate change, cancer and the diseases of old age, have come to seem intractably hard.

I remember sitting in my family's living room in Berkeley, California, watching the liftoff of Apollo 17. I was five; my mother admonished me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of the Saturn 5 rocket. I vaguely knew that this was the last of the moon missions—but I was absolutely certain that there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime. What happened?

Parochial Explanations

That something happened to humanity's capacity to solve big problems is a commonplace. Recently, however, the complaint has developed a new stridency among Silicon Valley's investors and entrepreneurs, although it is usually expressed a little differently: people say there is a paucity of real innovations. Instead, they worry, technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys.

The motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, is "We wanted flying cars—instead we got 140 characters." Founders Fund matters, because it is the investment arm of what is known locally as the "PayPal Mafia," currently the dominant faction in Silicon Valley, which remains the most important area on the planet for technological innovation. (Other members include Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman, executive chairman of LinkedIn; and Keith Rabois, chief operating officer of the mobile payments company Square.) Thiel is caustic: last year he told the New Yorker that he didn't consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough. "Compare [it] with the Apollo program," he said.The Internet is "a net plus—but not a big one." Twitter gives 500 people "job security for the next decade," but "what value does it create for the entire economy?" And so on. Max Levchin, another cofounder of PayPal, says, "I feel like we should be aiming higher. The founders of a number of startups I encounter have no real intent of getting anywhere huge ... There's an awful lot of effort being expended that is just never going to result in meaningful, disruptive innovation."

But Silicon Valley's explanation of why there are no disruptive innovations is parochial and reductive: the markets—in particular, the incentives that venture capital provides entrepreneurs—are to blame. According to Founders Fund's manifesto, "What Happened to the Future?," written by Bruce Gibney, a partner at the firm: "In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of future ... Venture investing shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems ... VC has ceased to be the funder of the future and instead become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances." Computers and communications technologies advanced because they were well and properly funded, Gibney argues. But what seemed futuristic at the time of Apollo 11 "remains futuristic, in part because these technologies never received the sustained funding lavished on the electronics industries."

The argument, of course, is wildly hypocritical. PayPal's capos made their fortunes in public stock offerings and acquisitions of companies that did more or less trivial things. Levchin's last startup, Slide, was a Founders Fund investment: it was acquired by Google in 2010 for about $200 million and shuttered earlier this year. It developed Facebook widgets such as SuperPoke and FunWall.

But the real difficulty with Silicon Valley's explanation is that it is insufficient to the case. The argument that venture capitalists lost their appetite for risky but potentially important technologies clarifies what's wrong with venture capital and tells us why half of all funds have provided flat or negative returns for the last decade. It also usefully explains how a collapse in nerve reduced the scope of the companies that got funded: with the exception of Google (which wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"), the ambitions of startups founded in the last 15 years do seem derisory compared with those of companies like Intel, Apple and Microsoft, founded from the 1960s to the late 1970s. (Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, promised to "put a computer in every home and on every desktop," and Apple's Steve Jobs said he wanted to make the "best computers in the world.") But the Valley's explanation conflates all of technology with the technologies that venture capitalists like: traditionally, as Gibney concedes, digital technologies. Even during the years when VCs were most risk-happy, they preferred investments that required little capital and offered an exit within eight to 10 years. The venture capital business has always struggled to invest profitably in technologies, such as biotechnology and energy, whose capital requirements are large and whose development is uncertain and lengthy; and VCs have never funded the development of technologies that are meant to solve big problems and possess no obvious, immediate economic value. The account is a partial explanation that forces us to ask: putting aside the personal-computer revolution, if we once did big things but do so no longer, then what changed?

Silicon Valley's explanation has this fault, too: it doesn't tell us what should be done to encourage technologists to solve big problems, beyond asking venture capitalists to make better investments. (Founders Fund promises to "run the experiment" and "invest in smart people solving difficult problems, often difficult scientific or engineering problems.") Levchin, Thiel and Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, had planned a book, to be titled The Blueprint, that would "explain where the world's innovation has gone." Originally intended to be released in March of this year, it has been indefinitely postponed, according to Levchin, because the authors could not agree on a set of prescriptions.

Let's stipulate that venture-backed entrepreneurialism is essential to the development and commercialization of technological innovations. But it is not sufficient by itself to solve big problems, nor could its relative sickliness by itself undo our capacity for collective action through technology.

Irreducible Complexities

The answer is that these things are complex, and that there is no one simple explanation.

Sometimes we choose not to solve big technological problems. We could travel to Mars if we wished. NASA has the outline of a plan—or, in its bureaucratic jargon, a "design reference architecture." To a surprising degree, the agency knows how it might send humans to Mars and bring them home. "We know what the challenges are," says Bret Drake, the deputy chief architect for NASA's human spaceflight architecture team. "We know what technologies, what systems we need" (see "The Deferred Dreams of Mars"). As Drake explains, the mission would last about two years; the astronauts would spend 12 months in transit and 500 days on the surface, studying the geology of the planet and trying to understand whether it ever harbored life. Needless to say, there's much that NASA doesn't know: whether it could adequately protect the crew from cosmic rays, or how to land them safely, feed them and house them. But if the agency received more money or reallocated its current spending and began working to solve those problems now, humans could walk on the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.

We won't, because there are, everyone feels, more useful things to do on Earth. Going to Mars, like going to the moon, would follow upon a political decision that inspired or was inspired by public support. But almost no one feels Buzz Aldrin's "imperative to explore" (see the astronaut's sidebar).

Sometimes we fail to solve big problems because our institutions have failed. In 2010, less than 2 percent of the world's energy consumption was derived from advanced renewable sources such as wind, solar and biofuels. (The most common renewable sources of energy are still hydroelectric power and the burning of biomass, which means wood and cow dung.) The reason is economic: coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. Because climate change is a real and urgent problem, and because the main cause of global warming is carbon dioxide released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels, we need renewable energy technologies that can compete on price with coal, natural gas and petroleum. At the moment, they don't exist.

Happily, economists, technologists and business leaders agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development and broad use of such alternatives. There should be a significant increase in public investment for energy research and development, which has fallen in the United States from a height of 10 percent in 1979 to 2 percent of total R&D spending, or just $5 billion a year. (Two years ago, Bill Gates, Xerox chief executive Ursula Burns, GE chief executive Jeff Immelt, and John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, called for a threefold increase in public investments in energy research.) There should be some kind of price on carbon, now a negative externality, whether it is a transparent tax or some more opaque market mechanism. There should be a regulatory framework that treats carbon dioxide emissions as pollution, setting upper limits on how much pollution companies and nations can release. Finally, and least concretely, energy experts agree that even if there were more investment in research, a price on carbon, and some kind of regulatory framework, we would still lack one vital thing: sufficient facilities to demonstrate and test new energy technologies. Such facilities are typically too expensive for private companies to build. But without a practical way to collectively test and optimize innovative energy technologies, and without some means to share the risks of development, alternative energy sources will continue to have little impact on energy use, given that any new technology will be more expensive at first than fossil fuels.

Less happily, there is no hope of any U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect this intellectual consensus, because one political party in the United States is reflexively opposed to industrial regulations and affects to doubt that human beings are causing climate change, and because the emerging markets of China and India will not reduce their emissions without offset benefits that the industrialized nations cannot provide. Without international treaties or U.S. policy, there will probably be no competitive alternative sources of energy in the near future, barring what is sometimes called an "energy miracle."

Sometimes big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so, or could more plausibly be solved through other means. Until recently, famines were understood to be caused by failures in food supply (and therefore seemed addressable by increasing the size and reliability of the supply, potentially through new agricultural or industrial technologies). But Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate economist, has shown that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. (Sen was influenced by his own experiences. As a child he witnessed the Bengali famine of 1943: three million displaced farmers and poor urban dwellers died unnecessarily when wartime hoarding, price gouging, and the colonial government's price--controlled acquisitions for the British army made food too expensive. Sen demonstrated that food production was actually higher in the famine years.) Technology can improve crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food; better responses by nations and nongovernmental organizations to emerging famines have reduced their number and severity. But famines will still occur because there will always be bad governments.

Yet the hope that an entrenched problem with social costs should have a technological solution is very seductive—so much so that disappointment with technology is inevitable. Malaria, which the World Health Organization estimates affected 216 million people in 2010, mostly in the poor world, has resisted technological solutions: infectious mosquitoes are everywhere in the tropics, treatments are expensive, and the poor are a terrible market for drugs. The most efficient solutions to the problem of malaria turn out to be simple: eliminating standing water, draining swamps, providing mosquito nets, and, most of all, increasing prosperity. Combined, they have reduced malarial infections. But that hasn't stopped technologists such as Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft (who writes about the role of private investors in spurring innovation), from funding research into recombinant vaccines, genetically modified mosquitoes, and even mosquito-zapping lasers. Such ideas can be ingenious, but they all suffer from the vanity of trying to impose a technological solution on what is a problem of poverty.

Finally, sometimes big problems elude any solution because we don't really understand the problem. The first successes of biotechnology in the late 1970s were straightforward: breakthroughs in manufacturing, in which recombinant E. coli bacteria were coaxed into producing synthetic versions of insulin or human growth hormone, proteins whose functions we thoroughly understood. Further breakthroughs in biomedicine have been more difficult to achieve, however, because we have struggled to understand the fundamental biology of many diseases. President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971; but we soon discovered there were many kinds of cancer, most of them fiendishly resistant to treatment, and it is only in the last decade, as we have begun to sequence the genomes of different cancers and to understand how their mutations express themselves in different patients, that effective, targeted therapies have come to seem viable. (To learn more, see "Cancer Genomics.") Or consider the "dementia plague," as Stephen S. Hall has. As the populations of the industrialized nations age, it is emerging as the world's most pressing health problem: by 2050, palliative care in the United States alone will cost $1 trillion a year. Yet we understand almost nothing about dementia and have no effective treatments. Hard problems are hard.

What to Do

It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology; we can. We must. But all these elements must be present: political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem, our institutions must support its solution, it must really be a technological problem, and we must understand it.

The Apollo program, which has become a metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria, but it is an irreproducible model for the future. This is not 1961: there is no galvanizing historical context akin to the Cold War, no likely politician who can heroize the difficult and dangerous, no body of engineers who yearn for the productive regimentation they had enjoyed in the military, and no popular faith in a science-fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. Most of all, going to the moon was easy. It was only three days away. Arguably, it wasn't even solving much of a problem. We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won.

We don't lack for challenges. A billion people want electricity, millions are without clean water, the climate is changing, manufacturing is inefficient, traffic snarls cities, education is a luxury, and dementia or cancer will strike almost all of us if we live long enough. In this special package of stories, we examine these problems and introduce you to the indefatigable technologists who refuse to give up trying to 

Knitting IT all together

How are Indian companies gearing for the imminent lifting of global quotas in the garment business? And why is IT seen as a key enabler?

FIRST COMES the sleep suit, a soft, snug cocoon of comfort for baby. Then there is the body suit, for day wear, with a vest, a bib, a pair of mittens and a tiny pair of trousers with attached feet for warmth. To top it all, a handsome hat and a little cardigan made of velour.

The 8-piece gift pack for a new born baby, is ready and passed through a metal detector to make sure that pieces of broken needle and other metal parts have not got into the final package by mistake.

Soon, identical gift packs like these, will appear on hundreds of shelves of the Mother Care store chain, across the U.K. Few of the customers will ever know that the 8-piece baby pack was manufactured in India in the factories of the Network Clothing Company Ltd (NCC), at Tirupur in Tamil Nadu. Other production lines in the plant are busy turning out ready made cotton garments for leading international store groups like Carrefour in France, Wal-Mart in Canada and Health-Tex in the U.S.

Less than 5 kms away, one of Tirupur's oldest garment manufacturers, Jupiter Knitting Co (JKC), dating back to 1957, keeps two plants working full time, turning out innerwear, tee shirts, pyjama sets and night gowns from computer-controlled cutting and stitching machines that can roll out 25,000 pieces a day.

Their products will appear 20 days later in European stores like Tati, Tescos and Littlewoods as `own brands' ... but somewhere the label will proudly proclaim, "Made in India/ Fabrique en Inde".

"Welcome to the Garment capital of India!" reads a sign at the turn off from the Salem- Coimbatore section of the National Highway that runs 12 kms to Tirupur. Three thousand apparel units have indeed made this India's densest textile cluster.

While hundreds of small factories sell to international customers through consolidating agents and middle-agents, less than 20 have the financial clout and the large scale necessary to deal directly with global wholesale buyers. For all of them, this is a crucial year — because after December 31 2004, the reins are off so to speak.

Export quotas dating back 30 years, to the days of GATT, the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will vanish worldwide — leaving Indian garment and hosiery makers free to produce as much as they can sell.

Which is why the more savvy among Tirupur's knitted kings have already geared themselves for the future — laying new automated production lines; vying for quality certification ... and harnessing Information Technology every way they can.

Last week at Tirupur, I saw the transformation at work in two plants whose managements had decided that investing in IT was the best way to gain that vital competitive edge when the commercial flood gates will open in 2005.

"In 2000 we began creating our own integrated information system with a small IT team of four", explained JKC's General Manager, P. Muthuswamy, " Our two plants were 6 kms apart and the challenge was to manage the inventory and production at both locations in a unified way. We tried an ISDN connection, but the traffic was so high, we erected our own radio tower and linked the two plants (a server and about 65 nodes) by RF."

Jupiter's turnover is not too different from NCC, another Tirupur-based export-only factory. Indeed they share quite a few customers in Europe and have sometimes combined their capacities to meet large orders.

And both have faced a common problem — production uncertainties that sometimes put them in danger of falling behind in delivery schedules. ``The penalties for late delivery in this business are very high,'' NCC's finance head, R.S. Suresh explained, "rushing one consignment by airfreight rather than by the surface, to keep a schedule, wipes out profit margins of the next ten orders".

So both companies decided in mid 2003 to implement a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to ensure that complex supply logistics were automated. To meet that one Mothercare baby gift pack order, NCC had to ensure that 3 different fabrics, in 3 colours, with 50 separate accessories were all available and flowing smoothly on to the assembly floor. A shortfall in any one item — and the entire schedule had to be reworked.

JKC and NCC carried out a joint evaluation and homed on SAP R/3( Enterprise Version 4.7) as their ERP backbone. Today, they have almost identical installations: encompassing sales and distribution; finance and control; production planning and manufacturing; materials management and quality control.

The hardware consists of twin HCL Net Manager servers running Windows 2003 Server and is based on the Intel Xeon 2.6 GHz processors for development and production activities while the client PCs are fuelled by AMD Athlon processors and run Windows 2000 Professional. The hardware is completely indigenous.

Each company paid between Rs. 50-60 lakhs for the SAP implementation ... a lot of money, but as NCC's Chief Operating Officer S Kathiresan explained, it was around 1 per cent of their turnover.

"We are committed to a recurring annual expenditure of around Rs 15 lakhs. This is a big investment for a company of our size, but we believe it will pay for itself in production efficiencies alone and make us more competitive" Jupiter's Partner S. Krishnaraj added.

Beyond the bottom-line — and the current concern to knit IT all together by year-end, both companies have invested in an international workplace ambience and quality consciousness.

In addition to ISO 9001 standards for quality management systems, they adhere to ISO 14001 environmental standardsand are practitioners of Social Accountability — internationally known as SA 8000 — a global standard for humane and socially responsible working environments.

"The CFO and the CIO are our key contributors as data is increasingly important in our decision making process", NCC"s Managing Director M. Ravi told me over the telephone in a conference call from Chennai as I concluded my Tirupur visit.

The garment business is a global 200 billion U.S. dollars opportunity. In 2005, the US and Europe will open their doors to the best suppliers, in a new quota-less regime. Tirupur-based companies can well take 2 billion U.S.dollars of this, A. Sakthivel, Chairman of the Tirupur Exporter's Association told BusinessWorld recently.

For that to happen, the Indian apparel industry needs to adopt cutting edge technology and state-of-the-art management practices.

And the sight of engineers last week, installing a long computer controlled lay cutting machine at JKC, even as a class room full of women supervisors hammered out the optimal production flowchart on their PCs, for the next big batch of knitteds for Tescos convinced me that some at least, were doing precisely that

90 million-year-old fossil shows how snakes lost their legs

The reptile lost its legs when their ancestors evolved to live and hunt in burrows as opposed to previous research that suggested they lost limbs in order to live in the sea.

Snakes lost their limbs when their ancestors evolved to wriggle through burrows, and not in order to live in the sea, according to a new analysis of a 90 million-year-old reptile fossil skull.

Comparisons between CT scans of the fossil and modern reptiles indicate that snakes lost their legs when their ancestors evolved to live and hunt in burrows, which many snakes still do today.

The findings from University of Edinburgh in the U.K. show that snakes did not lose their limbs in order to live in the sea, as was previously suggested.

Scientists used CT scans to examine the bony inner ear of Dinilysia patagonica, a 2-metre long reptile closely linked to modern snakes.

These bony canals and cavities, like those in the ears of modern burrowing snakes, controlled its hearing and balance.

They built 3D virtual models to compare the inner ears of the fossils with those of modern lizards and snakes. Researchers found a distinctive structure within the inner ear of animals that actively burrow, which may help them detect prey and predators. This shape was not present in modern snakes that live in water or above ground.

The findings help scientists fill gaps in the story of snake evolution, and confirm Dinilysia patagonica as the largest burrowing snake ever known.

They also offer clues about a hypothetical ancestral species from which all modern snakes descended, which was likely a burrower.

“How snakes lost their legs has long been a mystery to scientists, but it seems that this happened when their ancestors became adept at burrowing,” said Hongyu Yi, of the Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who led the research.

“The inner ears of fossils can reveal a remarkable amount of information, and are very useful when the exterior of fossils are too damaged or fragile to examine,” Yi said.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.