Babbage from The Economist The Economist

Imagine a power source that produces hardly any waste and is carbon-free. That’s the tantalising promise of controlled nuclear fusion, which physicists have been trying to achieve for 70 years. It is a simulacrum of the process that powers the sun, colliding atomic nuclei of various sorts to release huge amounts of energy. 
Fusion research was once the provenance of governments and national laboratories, but now private companies are getting in on the act. Dozens of them are exploring different ways to create the extreme conditions needed to achieve fusion here on Earth. And, contrary to the old joke that fusion power is thirty years away, and always will be, some of them think they can get there in a decade.
Fernanda Rimini, an experimental fusion scientist with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, explains how nuclear fusion works. Geoff Carr, The Economist’s science and technology editor, explores why fusion is coming back into fashion for private companies. Geoff also speaks to Bob Mumgaard of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Warrick Matthews of Tokamak Energy and Nick Hawker of First Light Fusion. Plus, Stephen Cowley, the director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory assesses how helpful the latest private fusion ventures are in advancing the field. Alok Jha hosts.

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OpenAI's Chat GPT, an advanced chatbot, has taken the world by storm, amassing over 100 million monthly active users and exhibiting unprecedented capabilities. From crafting essays and fiction to designing websites and writing code. You’d be forgiven for thinking there’s little it can’t do. 
Now it’s had an upgrade. GPT-4 has even more incredible abilities, it can take in photos as an input, and deliver smoother, more natural writing to the user. But it also hallucinates, throws up false answers, and remains unable to reference any world events that happened after September 2021.
Seeking to get under the hood of the Large Language Model that operates GPT-4, host Alok Jha speaks with Maria Laikata, a professor in Natural Language Processing at Queen Mary’s university in London. We put the technology through its paces with the economist’s tech-guru Ludwig Seigele, and even run it through something like a Turing Test to give an idea of whether it could pass for human-level-intelligence. 
An Artificial General Intelligence is the ultimate goal of AI research, so how significant will GPT-4 and similar technologies be in the grand scheme of machine intelligence? Not very, suggests Gary Marcus, expert in both AI and human intelligence, though they will impact all of our lives both in good and bad ways. 
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A new class of drugs for weight loss have become available and are showing promising results. That’s welcome news, as a recent report estimates that half of the world’s population is expected to be overweight or obese by 2035. Obesity is a disease which can lead to serious health complications–and most previous attempts at treating it have proven futile. Can the new weight-loss drugs turn the tide against this global threat?
Louise Baur, president of the World Obesity Federation crunches the numbers on the global impact of overweight and obesity. Stephan Guyenet, a neurobiologist and author of “The Hungry Brain”, explains the neurological and genetic factors that influence weight gain. Chris van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor at University College London and author of the upcoming book “Ultra-Processed People”, explores how the modern diet is contributing to the obesity epidemic–and other health problems. Plus, host Alok Jha asks Natasha Loder, The Economist’s health editor, how important the new skinny jabs are in the fight against obesity.
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The Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing was held this week in London. It was the first such meeting since 2018, when a Chinese researcher announced that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies—a move that was roundly condemned at the time. Host Alok Jha and Natasha Loder, The Economist’s health editor, report from the conference to explore the exciting future—and knotty challenges—of the world that gene-editing therapies could create.
Robin Lovell-Badge, a leading scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London and the organiser of the summit, explains how genome-editing technology has rapidly advanced in recent years. Claire Booth, a professor of gene therapy and paediatric immunology at Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London discusses the hopes of gene-editing treatments. Plus, Kelly Ormond, a bioethicist from ETH-Zurich, explores the ethical dilemmas that are raised by the technology, and Filippa Lentzos of King’s College London, explains why human genome editing presents potential biosecurity risks.
Listen to previous episodes of “Babbage” on the topic: the gene therapy revolution and an interview with Jennifer Doudna, the pioneer of CRISPR-Cas9 technology. 
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There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research. As many as one in 50 research papers may be unreliable because of fabrication, plagiarism or serious errors. Fabricated data can influence the guidelines which doctors use to treat patients. Misguided clinical guidelines could cause serious illness and death in patients. Fraudulent studies can also influence further research programmes—recent findings suggest that manipulated images may have resulted in scientists wasting time and money following blind alleys in Alzheimer’s research for decades. What can be done to combat scientific malpractice? 
Dorothy Bishop, a retired professor of psychology at the University of Oxford, explores the motivation behind fraudsters in research. John Carlisle, an anaesthetist and an editor of the journal Anaesthesia, explains the impact of fraud and how to detect it in research papers. Also, Elisabeth Bik, a former microbiologist and a full-time scientific image detective, discusses the consequences of whistle-blowing on both sleuths and the fraudsters. Plus, The Economist’s health-care correspondent, Slavea Chankova, investigates how to overcome the worrying unwillingness on all sides to do anything about fraud in research. Alok Jha hosts.
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Over the past few years, hundreds of rugby players have launched class-action lawsuits against the sport’s governing bodies, accusing them of failing to do enough to protect players from head injuries. They say that repeated blows to the head, sustained through years of playing rugby, or other sports, have caused neurodegenerative conditions like dementia, motor neurone and Parkinson’s diseases. But can scientific evidence prove a link between contact sports and these brain conditions? 
Alix Popham, a Welsh former professional rugby player, tells his story of head injuries on the pitch and his desired outcomes from the lawsuits. Plus, Lauren Pulling, who runs the Drake Foundation, explains the current state of neuroscientific research and what further studies are needed to investigate the connection. Alok Jha hosts with Natasha Loder, The Economist’s health editor, and Georgia Banjo, our Britain correspondent. 
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