News & Comment

China’s ambitious efforts to build an ‘innovation economy’ have led to a surge in patents as companies seek to protect their hard-earned intellectual property (IP). From 2008 to 2011, the number of patent applications grew by an average of more than 20% each year; last year China handled 526,412 applications, overtaking the United States for the first time, according to a report issued last week by the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland (see ‘Patent boom’).

The New Year is unlikely to be a happy one for thousands of Russian university teachers and students whose institutes are facing massive cuts and closures in 2013, following a controversial performance review. But some researchers are optimistic that despite the hardships, the most significant overhaul of Russia’s university system in living memory will help to improve science and innovation in the country.

The causes of infertility, which affects around 10% of couples, are often unknown, but may in some cases result from the body's inability to produce viable gametes — also known as sperm and egg cells. The first study of the development of such 'germ cells' from humans could help scientists to learn how to create them in the laboratory instead.

A laptop computer can double as an effective portable knee-warmer — pleasant in a cold office. But a bigger desktop machine needs a fan. A data centre as large as those used by Google needs a high-volume flow of cooling water. And with cutting-edge supercomputers, the trick is to keep them from melting. A world-class machine at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich, for example, operates at 3 petaflops (3 × 10¹⁵ operations per second), and the heat it produces warms some of the centre's buildings. Current trends suggest that the next milestone in computing — an exaflop machine performing at 10¹⁸ flops — would consume hundreds of megawatts of power (equivalent to the output of a small nuclear plant) and turn virtually all of that energy into heat.

On a dim February evening, seven people crowded around a row of television monitors in a shack on the rear deck of the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer. The research icebreaker was idling 30 kilometres off the coast of Antarctica with a cable as thick as an adult's wrist dangling over the stern. At the end of that cable, on the continental shelf 1,400 metres down, a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) skimmed across the sea floor, surveying a barren, grey mudscape. The eerie picture of desolation, piped back to the television monitors, was the precursor to an unwelcome discovery.