On july 16th Royal Dutch Shell, an oil and gas company, and Scottish Power, a subsidiary of Iberdrola, a Spanish electricity utility, made an announcement. They were, they said, jointly submitting proposals to the British authorities to build, off th
The struggle to save lives and the economy is likely to present agonising choices. Planet earth is shutting down. In the struggle to get a grip on covid-19, one country after another is demanding that its citizens shun society. As that sends economie
Economies can suffer both sudden crashes and chronic diseases. Housing markets in the rich world have caused both types of problem. A trillion dollars of dud mortgages blew up the financial system in 2007-08. But just as pernicious is the creeping dy
The Economist Climate change touches everything this newspaper reports on. It must be tackled urgently and clear-headedly From one year to the next, you cannot feel the difference. As the decades stack up, though, the story becomes clear. The stripes
Welcome to one of Europe’s biggest infrastructure projects: an ambitious scheme to encircle Paris with a new metro loop, with 68 new stations, it will cost nearly €40bn. The new station at La Défense, built as part of the westward extension of the e
Sir Antony Gormley’s, one of Britain’s foremost public artists, sculptures are a rare exception to tight rules on the uses of Greek antiquity. Euclid, the father of geometry, ordained that the centre of a circle must be a fixed point. The Greek isla
“The suburbs are the place where energy is in the city—in the good, in the bad,” said Renzo Piano in 2015. Old left-right distinctions are fading as class identities break down. The big-tent party families, the social democrats and Christian de
Nocturnal luminosity is one of the few reliable sources of information about the country. It implies that North Korea’s economy is poorer, more volatile and more vulnerable to weather than formerly thought. Night lights are a strong proxy for economi
The idea of cooling the climate with stratospheric sunshades that would shield the planet from the sun’s warming rays moved up the international agenda this week, with mixed results. On the one hand, new research suggested that it is theoretically po
Anti-drone technology is, nevertheless, improving. Indra, a big Spanish technology company, said it had completed extensive testing in “dangerous” places of an anti-drone system called Arms. Once the system’s sensitive radar has picked up a drone, ar
Over the course of many years, the authorities in New York disabled most of the control buttons that once operated pedestrian-crossing lights in the city. Computerised timers, they had decided, almost always worked better. By 2004, fewer than 750 of
The air in modern homes and offices is pretty clean, but not as clean as it might be. Often, it contains small amounts of volatile, toxic, organic compounds such as benzene, formaldehyde, butadiene, carbon tetrachloride, naphthalene and chloroform. C
Buildings can become greener. They can use more recycled steel and can be prefabricated in off-site factories, greatly reducing lorry journeys. But no other building material has environmental credentials as exciting and overlooked as wood. The energ
Many governments in the rich world want to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from constructing and using buildings. They have created rules forcing developers to build new projects to “zero energy” or “zero carbon” standards. Through a combination of e
Beyond the Great Wall and the chain of rugged hills through which it snakes, workers are putting the finishing touches to a colossal edifice. The beams of its roof are curved. The China Pavilion, as the structure is called, is for an international fl
The mathematics of origami has moved beyond early efforts to show how much higher maths could be recapitulated in folds (answer: a surprising amount). The need for such approaches becomes acute when you move to materials other than paper—materials wh
Architects are adapting to the need for more multisensory design. Chris Downey, a blind architect who contributed to the Selis Manor renovation, an apartment block for the blind, was invited in 2015 to consult for Grimshaw Architects. With both hands
All being well, November 26th will see the touchdown of the latest mission to Mars. InSight, an American craft, is intended to examine the planet’s interior. Once it has landed it will use a robotic arm to deploy a seismometer and a probe designed to
Some 4,500 satellites circle Earth, providing communications services and navigational tools, monitoring weather, observing the universe, spying and doing more besides. Getting them there was once the business of the superpowers’ armed forces and spa
Hilma af Klint did not trust her peers to understand her work. She sensed her paintings were too weird and too radical for her fellow Swedes. As a star pupil of Stockholm’s Royal Academy, she made a living selling impressionistic landscapes. But she
Si usted tiene un gnomo, vaya con cuidado. El Frente de Liberación de los Gnomos de Jardín lleva más de un año actuando en Francia, y es sólo cuestión de tiempo el que se extienda a nuestro país. En los bosques galos vienen apareciendo periódicamente
