Technology Synthetic trees drag water to new heights SYNTHETIC trees could one day extract and purify the traces of water held even in arid earth, and help make high-quality wines. That's the claim of a team who have reproduced the way plants pump water to heights of many tens of metres. For years, it was thought that capillary action couldn't raise water more … 51¶¯Âþ
Comment: The other food crisis IT IS hard to ignore the fact that we are facing a food crisis. As 51¶¯Âþ has reported , recent increases in the prices of staples such as rice, wheat and eggs could push 100 million people who have escaped from poverty back into it, and make life for the poor even more desperate. … Opinion
Life The origins of willpower WALTER MISCHEL can predict the future using a bag of marshmallows. In experiments he started in the 1960s at Stanford University, he discovered that if 4-year-olds could resist eating a marshmallow while he briefly left the room – for the promise of two marshmallows on his return – they were more likely to have higher … Features
Review: The Noble Lie by Gary Greenberg IN THE face of life's inconvenient facts – alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and craziness, to name a few – pseudoscientific medical concepts allow us to cast difficult moral problems as simple factual questions, readily soluble in the lab and in the hospital. Gary Greenberg's The Noble Lie is an impressive and fascinating round-up of such … Books & Arts
Feedback Cars that run on water THERE should be a law against it, we grumble. Back on 13 June, Mark Rowatt Anderson tells us, the normally reputable Reuters news agency – without whose accurate and precise business reports capitalism as a whole would be in deep trouble – distributed a short feature on the Japanese company … Regulars