How common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children - The Economist | How science will be transformed by AI - The Economist | Propane-powered heat pumps are greener - The Economist | Animals can be tracked by simply swabbing leaves

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How common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children - The Economist

It was a sunny day in September 2007 when Garrett Pohlman, then seven years old, came home from school. Crying, he warned his mother that radiation was coming out of the house’s electrical sockets. If they went outside, he said, birds would peck them to death. These pronouncements were accompanied by odd facial movements. The boy would stick his tongue out and jerk his arms and legs. The day before, Garrett had been a normal boy. Both the paranoia and the tics had come out of the blue, but they proved to be the start of a horrifying mental decline.

In the end, Garrett was lucky. A hospital scan three months later revealed a bacterial sinus infection. A course of antibiotics cured the infection and brought about a striking improvement in his psychiatric symptoms. Garrett had been suffering from PANDAS, which stands for Paediatric Autoimmune-Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus.

Many other children are not so fortunate; some have suffered long-term damage. In plain English, Garrett’s unsettling behaviour was the result of an immune system gone haywire following an infection with group A Streptococcus, a common bacterium. (A similar illness, triggered by other infections, goes by the acronym PANS, for Paediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome.)

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How science will be transformed by AI - The Economist

Over the next week, The Economist will investigate how AI could change the enterprise of science. We kick off with the first in a two-part series of “Babbage”, our podcast on science and technology.

Also, in a new film, The Economist will bring together Yuval Noah Harari, the historian and philosopher, and Mustafa Suleyman to grapple with the biggest technological revolution of our times. They debate the impact of AI on our immediate futures, how the technology can be controlled and whether AI could ever have agency.

Next week on “Babbage”, we will investigate whether AI will revolutionise the paradigm of science. We will visit the robots that are automating some of the drudge of the scientific process and we will hear from The Economist’s correspondents on the ways research could accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

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Propane-powered heat pumps are greener - The Economist

ELECTRICITY CAN be made from the sun, the wind or the atom rather than by burning fossil fuels. Cars, buses and perhaps even lorries can be powered by batteries rather than petrol or diesel. But other parts of the economy are trickier to decarbonise. One such awkward chunk is the heating, in homes and business, of air and water. In the EU, where much of this is done by burning oil or natural gas, commercial and residential heating accounts for about 12% of the bloc’s greenhouse-gas emissions (see chart).

In principle there is a solution, in the form of heat pumps. These work like a refrigerator in reverse, gathering heat from the outside, concentrating it, and piping it into a building. The EU hopes to replace a third of the 68m gas and 18m oil boilers in residential buildings with heat pumps by 2030. That could mean a 28% fall in the total residential emissions generated by oil and gas—and that number should rise as more of the electricity powering those pumps comes from low-carbon sources.

But there are problems with ambitious targets. Compared with boilers, heat pumps are expensive, often costing twice or three times as much as a fossil-fired boiler. Another is that, since they pump cooler water to radiators, they work best in new, well-insulated buildings. Around 60% of Europe’s housing stock is estimated to fall short of the required standards, and will need extensive—and expensive—renovation work to make them suitable.

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Animals can be tracked by simply swabbing leaves - The Economist

Biological fieldwork can mean trips to exotic places. But the work itself can be tedious, especially when you are trying to track down elusive subjects. The most common method is to send a few eager graduate students armed with camera traps and several weeks of spare time. But perhaps not for much longer. A paper published in Current Biology, whose lead authors are Christina Lynggaard at the University of Copenhagen and Jan Gogarten at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Germany, suggests an easier method: simply swabbing nearby leaves for DNA.

The DNA in question is called “environmental DNA” (eDNA for short). It refers to all the genetic information that animals shed as they go about their daily business: breathing, urinating, moving around, or interacting with their environment in any way. In recent years gene-sequencing technology has become quick and sensitive enough to pick out genetic sequences from particular animals—including humans—from this ubiquitous eDNA.

One way of doing so is simply to blow air through filters, then analyse them to see which critters live in the vicinity. Aware of that technique, Drs Gogarten and Lynggaard wondered if there might be a simpler approach. Air-sampling systems can take days to do their work. Maintenance must be done, and filters must be changed. But given that eDNA is literally blowing around ecosystems, the researchers wondered if it might be collecting on leaves.

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