And they are exacerbated by bad management, says Simon Long AS IT SCOURS the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, NASA has a motto-cum-mission-statement: “Follow the water”. About 70% of the human
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the first successful human-to-human blood transfusion, conducted by James Blundell, an English obstetrician working just across the Thames from The Economist’s
IN MAY 2014 DOZENS of mourners attended the funeral of a healer in the Kailahun District of eastern Sierra Leone. She had died after tending to people struck by fever, vomiting and bloody diarrhoea. As
An hour east of Johannesburg, on the rolling highveld plains, six massive cooling towers sit around two belching smokestacks. The Kendal power station (pictured) is among the world’s largest, producing
For the past drought-stricken year, most of the drinking water consumed in Beijing has travelled 1,432km (895 miles), roughly the distance from New York to Orlando, Florida. Its journey begins in a remote
Imagine building a small pile of wood and kindling in the smallest room in your house, and setting fire to it. You can keep the door open, to let out some smoke, but cannot switch on an extractor fan.
In the 27 years since he became headmaster of a school in Trishal, in northern Bangladesh, Mohamed Iqbal Baher has noticed some changes in his pupils. Although boys and girls are often absent because
OIL shaped the 20th century. In war, the French leader Georges Clemenceau said, petroleum was “as vital as blood”. In peace the oil business dominated stockmarkets, bankrolled despots and propped up the
When it comes to energy, no country generates such bittersweet superlatives as China. It is the world’s largest consumer of coal and the second-largest of oil, after America. It has the largest power-generation
MR MCGUIRE had just one word for young Benjamin, in “The Graduate”: plastics. It was 1967, and chemical engineers had spent the previous decade devising cheap ways to splice different hydrocarbon molecules
