The Economist, February 22
Trump v science : How the Trump administration wants to reshape American science
The consequences will be felt around the world
Extraits:
THE ANNUAL meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science afford researchers a chance to show off what they do best. Those roaming the corridors in Boston between February 13th and 15th were treated to talks on everything from plate tectonics and ancient DNA analysis to gene editing and nuclear power. All represent the cutting-edge research to be expected in a country that has long prided itself on, as per this year’s theme, producing the “science shaping tomorrow”.
At the moment, though, it is science itself that is being shaped. Mere weeks into the second Trump administration, scientists worry that their flagship institutions are under assault. The National Scientific Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example, have been told to prepare for hefty reductions to their budgets and staff cuts of up to 50%. Across several federal agencies, mass firings of thousands of “probationary” workers, meaning those recently hired or promoted, have already begun. Research institutions reliant on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, have been warned of restrictions on how they can spend their money.
These moves are part of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s aspiration to cut $2trn from the annual federal budget of approximately $7trn. This has put all the government’s outgoings, including the roughly $160bn spent every year on basic and applied research, under the microscope. Another motivation is a suspicion that scientists and their research have become tools of a “woke ideology”. Precisely which of the administration’s changes will survive legal challenge is still unclear. But the scale of the cuts and the manner in which they are being introduced could seriously damage American science.
The deepest slashes proposed so far concern the $44bn in grants allocated by the NIH. Many institutions routinely use NIH funds to cover between 50% and 70% of their “indirect” costs, which includes things such as laboratory maintenance, equipment provision and salaries for support and administrative staff. The administration sees that share as too high, and wants to cap indirect costs at 15% of the grant total, in line with similar limits set by private organisations, forcing institutions to pay for the remainder themselves. (…)
Analysis by The Economist finds that a total of $6.3bn in NIH funding could be at stake. Studies of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism would see cuts of almost a fifth of their total budget (see chart). This could have serious consequences for medical research. It may also backfire politically: many of the institutions hardest-hit would be in Republican states. Universities in Alabama, for example, received $386m in funding from the NIH in 2024, supporting more than 4,700 jobs and $900m-worth of economic activity.
Whether the cap will come into force, though, is still unclear. Federal judges have put the proposal on hold, in response to lawsuits filed by 22 states, plus national associations representing medical schools and some hospitals. (…)
Another prong of the administration’s actions is an attempt to influence what research is funded. Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, has previously suggested cuts as a way of ensuring scientific institutions like the NSF cannot “propagandise for woke ideology”.
Federal agencies are now required to review all grants in light of an executive order terminating programmes aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which Mr Trump has argued has made government less meritocratic. (…)
Removing boilerplate language from future grant applications will be time-consuming but doable. Getting exemptions for research that has been wrongly flagged may also be possible, though no process to do so has yet been made public. But some valuable research may be dropped.
It is research on climate change that faces the most pressing and concrete threats. Almost all mentions of climate change and programmes to combat it have been scrubbed from federal websites, and the National Nature Report—the first assessment of nature and biodiversity across the government, produced by more than 150 scientists and funded with government money—was cancelled weeks before the first full draft was due. One researcher who studies how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide says he envisages a future in which his team removes references to climate change in order to get grants approved.
The status of many other scientific projects related to climate change and the environment now seems uncertain—not least because plenty are funded, at least in part, by appropriations set out in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate legislation passed by the Biden administration, and which Mr Trump’s officials hope to unpick. (…)
That would have consequences beyond America’s borders. Several media outlets, including the Washington Post and Wired, reported internal emails to some NOAA staff instructing them to pause “all international engagements”. Many meteorological and climate agencies around the world rely on the observations and data collected by NOAA. The worst affected will be agencies in poor countries, which often do not have the money or infrastructure to make their own detailed weather forecasts and climate projections, says one top scientist at an international organisation, who could speak only anonymously.
Climate science in America is “possibly the strongest in the world”, the scientist points out, and reductions to it will “take out the foundations from others’ work”. Other organisations abroad will have to step up to compensate for the loss. But, the scientist notes wryly, that creates an opportunity to chip away at America’s long-standing scientific hegemony. Those gathered in Boston to celebrate America’s “advancement of science” might feel that promise ringing a little hollow. ■
The Economist, February 20
The power of love : Do lonely people have shorter lives?
What studying Britons can tell you about the risk factors for an early death
Full text : https://kinzler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/20-fevrier-3.pdf
Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/02/19/do-lonely-people-have-shorter-lives
Le Figaro, 19 février
Fusion nucléaire : des scientifiques parviennent à maintenir un plasma pendant 22 minutes, un record
L’exploit, qui s’est déroulé dans les Bouches-du-Rhône, nécessite un environnement d’une température d’au moins 100 millions de degrés Celsius.
Article intégral :
Des scientifiques ont franchi un «jalon» sur la voie de la fusion nucléaire en maintenant un plasma pendant plus de 22 minutes, un record, dans le réacteur opéré par le CEA à Cadarache (Bouches-du-Rhône), a annoncé l’organisme mardi. Promesse d’une énergie propre, sûre, peu coûteuse et quasi-inépuisable, la fusion nucléaire fait l’objet de recherches fondamentales depuis des décennies.
Elle consiste à reproduire les réactions qui se produisent au cœur des étoiles, en assemblant deux noyaux d’atomes dérivés de l’hydrogène. C’est le processus inverse de la fission, utilisée dans les centrales nucléaires actuelles, qui consiste à casser les liaisons de noyaux atomiques lourds. Provoquer cette fusion nécessite des températures d’au moins 100 millions de degrés Celsius afin de créer et confiner du plasma. Ce gaz chaud électriquement chargé a tendance à devenir instable, ce qui peut provoquer des pertes d’énergie et limiter l’efficacité de la réaction.
Le réacteur tokamak West, opéré sur le centre du Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) à Cadarache, est parvenu le 12 février à maintenir un plasma pendant 1337 secondes, «améliorant de 25% le précédent record» établi en janvier en Chine, indique le CEA dans un communiqué. Obtenir un «plasma long» montre «qu’on le maîtrise dans sa production, mais aussi dans son maintien», souligne auprès de l’AFP Anne-Isabelle Étienvre, directrice de la recherche fondamentale au CEA.
Les scientifiques doivent encore lever de nombreux «verrous technologiques» pour que la fusion thermonucléaire permette de «produire plus d’énergie qu’elle n’en consomme» ce qui n’est pas encore le cas, rappelle-t-elle.
Dans les prochains mois, l’équipe de West compte atteindre «de très longues durées de plasma, de l’ordre de plusieurs heures cumulées» et chauffer «ce plasma à encore plus haute température pour se rapprocher au mieux des conditions attendues dans les plasmas de fusion», indique le CEA dans un communiqué. Et «regarder l’impact du plasma sur la durée de vie des composants internes du tokamak face à ce plasma intense», ajoute Isabelle Étienvre.
L’objectif est de «préparer du mieux possible l’exploitation scientifique d’Iter», le projet de réacteur expérimental lancé en 1985 par l’Union européenne, la Chine, la Corée du Sud, les États-Unis, l’Inde, le Japon et la Russie, explique-t-elle. Initialement prévue pour 2025, la production du premier plasma d’Iter, confronté à des retards et surcoûts considérables, a été reportée cet été à au moins 2033.
Le Figaro, 15 février
Ces lunettes traduisent 40 langues à la volée
Elles savent aussi afficher des présentations ou enregistrer des interviews. De quoi révolutionner le monde professionnel.
Article intégral :
Après les smartphones ou les oreillettes Bluetooth, les lunettes connectées s’apprêtent à envahir notre quotidien. La start-up chinoise Halliday vient de dévoiler un modèle d’apparence classique mais intégrant un miniprojecteur sur la lunette droite, conçu pour projeter des informations directement sur la rétine de l’utilisateur.
Ce procédé discret permet de garantir la confidentialité des données mais aussi de fonctionner avec n’importe quel type de verre correcteur et quelles que soient les conditions lumineuses. Légères (35 g) et endurantes (8 heures), les Halliday Glasses (399 $, Hallidayglobal.com) se commandent via des instructions vocales, des gestes tactiles sur la monture ou encore avec une bague connectée servant de pavé tactile. Elles permettent de téléphoner, d’écouter de la musique, de suivre un itinéraire GPS, de naviguer sur internet, d’afficher le texte d’une conférence (que l’on aura précharge via une app mobile) mais aussi de traduire instantanément les conversations dans 40 langues (la traduction s’affiche sur l’écran).
Livrées à partir d’avril 2025
Elles peuvent également enregistrer et archiver les débats, voire fournir des réponses en temps réel via l’intelligence artificielle. Actuellement en phase de financement sur Kickstarter, elles devraient être livrées à partir d’avril 2025. Elles pourraient dynamiser les réunions professionnelles ! Et dynamiter le passage des examens…
The Economist, February 14
The Paris discord : After DeepSeek, America and the EU are getting AI wrong
Europe has a chance to catch up, whereas America should ease up
Extraits:
The attempt at global harmony ended in cacophony. As Emmanuel Macron’s ai summit drew to a close on February 11th J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, bluntly set out an America-first vision for artificial intelligence (AI), castigated Europe for being too rule-bound and left before the usual group photograph. eu countries, for their part, struck a collaborative tone with China and the global south, while stressing the need to limit the risks of using ai.
Both Europe and America should rethink their approach. After the work by DeepSeek, China’s hotshot model-maker, Europe has been given an unexpected chance to catch up—if it can cast off its regulatory straitjacket. America can no longer behave as if it has a monopoly on ai. It should change how it wields power over its allies.
The pace of innovation is astonishing. Barely six months ago AI looked as if it needed a technological breakthrough to become widely affordable. Since then reasoning and efficiency techniques have emerged, enabling DeepSeek to develop models close to the frontier even though it cannot use cutting-edge American chips. And DeepSeek is just exhibit A. Researchers everywhere are racing to make ai more efficient. Those at Stanford and the University of Washington, for instance, have trained models more cheaply still. Once there were concerns that the world did not contain enough data to train advanced systems. Now the use of synthetic data seems to be having good results.
For Europe, which looked hopelessly behind in AI, this is a golden opportunity. In contrast to Google’s search engines, where network effects mean that a winner takes all, no law of computing or economics will stop European firms from catching up. Better policy can help close the gap. Mr Macron is rightly encouraging investment in data centres. But just as important is cutting through the red tape that prevents companies from innovating and adopting ai. The EU’s ai Act is fearsomely stringent: a startup offering an ai tutoring service, by one account, must set up risk-management systems, conduct an impact assessment and undergo an inspection, as well as jumping through other hoops.
Another hurdle is privacy rules. Even big tech firms, with their huge compliance teams, now launch their ai products in Europe with a delay. Imagine the costs for startups. German manufacturers sit on a wealth of proprietary data that could feed productivity-enhancing ai tools. But fear of breaching regulations deters them. A wise relaxation of rules, as well as harmonised enforcement, would help Europe exploit AI’s potential.
Uncle Sam needs to wake up, too. China’s advances suggest that America has less monopoly power over ai simply by having a hold over cutting-edge chips. Instead, it needs to attract the world’s best talent, however distasteful that may be to maga Republicans.
America should also change how it engages with its allies. In Paris Mr Vance rightly warned against the use of Chinese infrastructure (and the fact that China signed the summit’s declaration on ai governance may explain why America declined to). But America would more successfully discourage the adoption of Chinese AI if it were more willing for its friends to use its technology. In his final days in office Joe Biden proposed strict ai controls that would hinder exports even to partners like India. Revising those would nudge countries to use American tech rather than pushing them into China’s embrace. American ai now faces competition. If it wants to reign supreme, Uncle Sam will have to entice, not threaten. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/02/12/after-deepseek-america-and-the-eu-are-getting-ai-wrong
Le Point, 14 février
Pourquoi les divergences entre hommes et femmes se sont accrues
Beaucoup d’écarts entre hommes et femmes se sont accentués dans les pays les plus égalitaires, infligeant un revers aux théories les attribuant au seul critère socioculturel.
Article intégral : https://kinzler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/14-fevrier-1.pdf
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14. Februar
Legalisierung von Cannabis: Eine neue Studie warnt vor den Folgen für die psychische Gesundheit von Jugendlichen
Psychiater weisen schon seit langem warnend darauf hin: Die Freigabe des Cannabisverkaufs wird zu einer Zunahme von Psychosen führen. Jetzt gibt es dafür handfeste Beweise.
Extraits:
«Cannabis-Studie – vier Jahre lang, wir suchen Studienteilnehmer!» Auf grossen gelben Plakaten wendet sich der Verein Cannabis Research an Mitbürger im Kanton Zürich, die gerne Drogen konsumieren. Gesucht werden 7500 Menschen in Stadt und Umgebung, die vier Jahre lang «für die Forschung Blüten, Haschisch, Vapes & Edibles» zu sich nehmen. 5000 von ihnen können das Rauschmittel in einer offiziellen Ausgabestelle kaufen. Die anderen müssen auf dem Schwarzmarkt fündig werden.
Durch ihre Studie wollten die Wissenschafter herausfinden, wie sich eine Cannabislegalisierung in der Schweiz sozialökonomisch, beispielsweise auf die Arbeitslosenraten und Bildungsabschlüsse, auswirken würde, erklärt Andreas Beerli vom Departement Management, Technologie und Ökonomie der ETH Zürich. Er ist einer der Organisatoren der Studie. In Bern, Biel und Luzern wollen Wissenschafter gleichzeitig herausfinden, wie sich ein solcher «regulierter Cannabisverkauf» auf den Drogengebrauch auswirkt. In Genf, ob regulierte Kiffer vernünftiger konsumieren. (…)
Deutschland ist schon einen Schritt weiter. Im vergangenen April wurde erlaubt, die Droge in Anbauvereinen oder Klubs zu erwerben. Unter lautem Protest der Psychiater: Eine Legalisierung könnte für die Psyche der Jugendlichen gefährlich werden, sagten sie warnend.
Dass der Konsum von Cannabis Psychosen auslösen kann, wird von niemandem bestritten. Die Deutschen haben es trotzdem legalisiert. (…)
Die Befürworter argumentieren, nach aktuellem Wissensstand sei nicht jeder gefährdet, durch das Kiffen den Verstand zu verlieren. Gefährdet seien vor allem diejenigen, die schon eine gewisse genetische Veranlagung dafür mitbrächten. (…)
Seit Mitte dieser Woche habe sich das geändert, sagt Rainer Thomasius, der Leiter des Deutschen Zentrums für Suchtfragen des Kindes- und Jugendalters am Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf. Denn am Dienstag wurde von Wissenschaftern des kanadischen Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in der Fachzeitung «Jama Network Open» eine neue Studie zum Thema präsentiert. «Das ist ein weiterer Beleg dafür, dass die Legalisierung von Cannabis zu einer Zunahme von psychischen Erkrankungen führt», sagt er.
Die Forscher berichten darin über das Ergebnis ihrer Auswertung von Gesundheitsdaten von fast 14 Millionen Menschen aus den Jahren 2006 bis 2022. Alles Einwohner der Provinz Ontario; dort hat man Cannabis bereits vor sieben Jahren legalisiert. Schon drei Jahre zuvor hatte man in Ontario damit begonnen, bei Cannabiskonsum oder -verkauf beide Augen zuzudrücken.
Seit der Freigabe, berichten sie, habe sich die Zahl der neu diagnostizierten Psychosekranken in der Provinz fast verdoppelt. Vor der Legalisierung lag die Rate der Neuerkrankungen bei 30 von 100 000 Personen. Danach bei 55. Zudem hatten unter den Cannabiskonsumenten knapp 15 Mal so viele Personen eine Schizophrenie entwickelt wie im Durchschnitt der Bevölkerung. Eine Schizophrenie ist eine besonders schwere und langwierige psychotische Erkrankung.
2019 hatten Wissenschafter bereits in der Fachzeitung «Lancet» ausgerechnet: Wer täglich den THC-Rausch anstrebt, bei dem ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass er an einer Psychose erkrankt, rund dreimal so hoch wie bei einer abstinenten Person. Konsumiert er zudem besonders THC-haltige Drogen, steigt das Risiko sogar auf das Fünffache. Rund 20 Prozent aller Psychosefälle liessen sich vermeiden, wenn der Cannabisverkauf vollständig unterbunden würde, lautete ein weiteres Ergebnis. In Grossstädten wie London sogar 30 Prozent.
Ein weiteres Ergebnis der kanadischen Studie. Nach der Legalisierung wurde tatsächlich deutlich mehr Cannabis konsumiert. Im Vergleich zu den Jahren zuvor hatte sich die Zahl der Menschen, die im Rausch eine Notfallambulanz aufsuchten, fast verfünffacht. Die Forscher hatten auf Basis solcher Klinikbesuche die Gesamtzahl der Drogenkonsumenten kalkuliert.
Auch das deckt sich mit älteren Daten: So hatten beispielsweise bereits 2014 Wissenschafter im US-Gliedstaat Colorado ermittelt, dass eine Freigabe 12- bis 17-Jährige geradezu zum Kiffen animiert. (…)
Teenager und Jugendliche gelten als besonders durch die Droge gefährdet. Der Grund: Ihr sogenanntes Cannabinoid-System im Gehirn, in dem die Nervenzellen mit körpereigenen, cannabisähnlichen Substanzen kommunizieren, ist noch nicht ausgereift. Wird dieses System dann auch noch durch Wirkstoffe von aussen überschwemmt, ist es völlig überfordert. Das stört wiederum andere Systeme, mit denen es verschaltet ist. (…)
Darunter das System mit dem Botenstoff Dopamin. Und dem wird wiederum eine entscheidende Rolle bei Psychosen und Schizophrenien zugeschrieben. Jenseits der Altersgrenze von 30 ist das System ausgereift und viel stabiler.
«Die neue kanadische Studie bestärkt mich weiter in meiner Position, mich gegen eine Cannabislegalisierung auszusprechen», sagt Euphrosyne Gouzoulis-Mayfrank, die Präsidentin der psychiatrischen Fachgesellschaft, der DGPPN. Für sie ist die Arbeit ein wichtiges Puzzleteil in der Beweiskette, durch das das Bild immer deutlicher wird: Je mehr Teenager und Jugendliche kiffen, weil sie durch die Legalisierung Cannabis leichter kaufen können, desto mehr verwundbare Teenager und Jugendliche werden die Droge konsumieren. Und dann auch manchmal psychisch krank werden. Hinzu kommt: Gerade Menschen mit psychischen Problemen sind besonders eifrige Kiffer. (…)
Forscher wissen, die Ergebnisse solcher Studien können noch von vielen anderen Veränderungen und Faktoren beeinflusst werden. Beispielsweise, weil die User nach der Legalisierung plötzlich beginnen, zusätzlich andere Drogen zu konsumieren. Beerli würde nur eine Studie gelten lassen, sagt er, die höchsten wissenschaftlichen Ansprüchen genügte: mit zwei Gruppen von jeweils kiffenden und nichtkiffenden Versuchspersonen, die einmal unter Legalisierungsbedingungen und einmal auf dem Schwarzmarkt ihr Cannabis organisieren könnten.
Er muss aber zugeben: Eine solche Studie wird aus ethischen Gründen nie durchgeführt werden. Man darf als Wissenschafter Versuchspersonen nicht geplant neuen schweren psychischen Risiken aussetzen. Wann reicht die Beweiskette? Müssen erst noch weitere, beispielsweise länger dauernde Studien vorgelegt werden? Solche Fragen müssen letztlich politisch beantwortet werden.
The Economist, February 12
Spoiler alert : Elon Musk’s $97bn offer is a nuisance for Sam Altman’s OpenAI
Tesla’s boss is willing to use whatever means he can to hobble his opponent
Full text :
For most startups, a buyout offer nearing $100bn is something to be celebrated. But OpenAI is not like other startups—and Elon Musk is not like other acquirers.
On February 11th a consortium led by the world’s richest man made an unsolicited $97bn bid for the assets of the non-profit entity that controls OpenAI, the world’s leading developer of artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Mr Musk, who helped found the firm, is in an escalating feud with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s boss, over its transition to a more orthodox, profit-seeking corporate structure, which Mr Musk claims would be a betrayal of its original safety-first mission. In reality, Mr Musk is determined to hobble the biggest competitor to xAI, a rival company he launched in 2023—and seems willing to use whatever means he can to do so.
Mr Musk’s offer is best understood as a spoiler. OpenAI is raising ever larger sums of money to fund the vast amount of computing power it needs to make advanced AI. To do that, it has promised outside investors, of which Microsoft, a tech giant, is the biggest, that they will get equity stakes in a for-profit firm, rather than the murky ownership fudge that currently exists. Negotiations are under way to determine what share of that new company the non-profit receives in return for ceding control over the current arrangement.
OpenAI swiftly rejected the outside bid. On X, Mr Musk’s social network, Mr Altman posted a facetious counter-offer: $9.7bn to “buy Twitter”, as the site was once called. “OpenAI is not for sale,” insists Chris Lehane, the firm’s spokesman. That apparently reflects the position of the non-profit’s board. Jill Horwitz, professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the board’s fiduciary duty is to act in line with OpenAI’s legal purpose, which is to build superhuman intelligence that is “safe and benefits all of humanity”. That may give it more wriggle room to deflect the offer.
Mr Musk’s target audience, though, may not be the board. More likely he is seeking to ratchet up pressure on the attorneys-general of California and Delaware, where OpenAI is located and registered. His lawyers have urged them to scrutinise the change in OpenAI’s ownership structure to ensure the charity surrenders control at fair-market value, and threatens a bidding war if they do not. Insiders at OpenAI think it absurd that the officials in the two Democrat-governed states will bow to the will of Mr Musk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump. But as Ms Horwitz puts it, they have “clear law to apply”.
It is therefore possible that, even if Mr Musk’s chances of gaining control of OpenAI are slim, his bid will complicate its future. It will be more difficult to justify valuing the non-profit’s assets at less than $97bn if there is a concrete offer for that sum. But such a figure will mean that a smaller share of the equity in the new for-profit company will be left for outside investors. OpenAI is reportedly in the process of raising some $40bn from investors including SoftBank, a Japanese tech conglomerate. Mr Musk may be hoping to derail those efforts.
The bid follows acrimony over Mr Altman’s announcement, together with Mr Trump, of the “Stargate Project” on January 21st, a fund of $100bn backed by OpenAI and SoftBank, among others, and intended to invest in data centres in America. Mr Musk, who was reportedly kept in the dark, was quick to argue that the backers didn’t have the money (something they have denied).
“I think he’s just trying to slow us down,” Mr Altman said on February 11th. “I feel for the guy. I don’t think he’s a happy person.” In fact, Mr Musk is never happier than when he is in the thick of a fight. ■
Le Point, 1 Le Figaro, 11 février
La fusion nucléaire, Graal de l’énergie
Alors que la demande en électricité explose, le monde de la recherche est en effervescence et les projets se multiplient pour maîtriser la fusion.
Extraits:
Pour un peu, et bien qu’il soit charmant, Rémi Delaporte-Mathurin pourrait s’identifier au Docteur Octopus, le méchant qui combat de ses bras tentaculaires Spider-Man. Ou encore à Iron Man, l’invincible héros Marvel. Car le chercheur français du prestigieux Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), le grand méchant et le supergentil ont un point commun : ils cherchent à perfectionner la fusion nucléaire, ce graal de la communauté scientifique.
Le Docteur Octopus et Iron Man y sont plus ou moins parvenus, qui l’utilisent comme source d’énergie. À 28 ans, Rémi Delaporte-Mathurin, lui, n’a pas fini d’y consacrer ses jours.
Malgré les milliards de dollars déversés sur les programmes de recherche, la fusion n’en est qu’à ses balbutiements. Son principe est en gros l’inverse de celui de la fission nucléaire, le procédé utilisé dans toutes les centrales nucléaires actuelles. Dans la fission, un neutron casse en deux un noyau d’atome d’uranium, ce qui libère de l’énergie. Dans la fusion, deux noyaux s’assemblent pour former un nouveau noyau.
Mais, comme l’a démontré Einstein avec sa théorie de la relativité, une curiosité apparaît après cet assemblage : la masse totale du nouveau noyau est inférieure à celle des deux noyaux de départ ; la différence, c’est de l’énergie. Chaque seconde, ce phénomène de fusion libère dans le Soleil une quantité phénoménale d’énergie, qui nous éclaire et nous chauffe.
Comme le Docteur Octopus ou Rémi Delaporte-Mathurin, toute la communauté scientifique mondiale regarde cette source d’énergie avec envie. Elle est simple à mettre en œuvre (il « suffit » de fusionner deux isotopes d’hydrogène dont les noms semblent ceux d’un camp retranché romain, le deutérium et le tritium) et sûre (aucune réaction en chaîne incontrôlée n’est possible).
De plus, la fusion est un procédé respectueux de l’environnement. La radioactivité des éléments utilisés est très faible, et la fusion ne produit ni CO2 ni déchets dangereux, en tout cas à long terme. L’enjeu est crucial : à l’heure de l’IA et des datas centers, la demande en électricité dans le monde devrait doubler d’ici à 2026, selon l’Agence internationale de l’énergie.
Mais il y a un hic : le modèle de fusion qu’on a sous les yeux, celui du Soleil, n’est pas entièrement transposable ici-bas. Notre astre triche. Sa densité considérable joue les entremetteurs entre les noyaux d’hydrogène : sa force d’attraction rapproche et marie sans problème les noyaux entre eux.
Comment faire sur la Terre ? C’est à première vue assez simple : à défaut de pouvoir recréer la pression exercée sur le Soleil, on peut recréer sa chaleur extrême, ce qui est un autre moyen de fusionner des noyaux.
Deux techniques sont explorées. La première consiste à chauffer du deutérium et du tritium par des lasers. Mais cette technique, dite « inertielle », est plutôt développée à des fins militaires. L’autre consiste à confectionner une sorte de bouillie d’atomes. Ce plasma est porté à quelque 150 millions de degrés, soit dix fois plus que la chaleur dégagée par le Soleil.
En France, pas très loin de Marseille, le projet Iter travaille sur ce deuxième procédé. Un gigantesque circuit fermé en forme de donut, appelé tokamak, devrait entrer en exploitation au mieux dans une quinzaine d’années. (…)
Quelque part dans la campagne du Massachusetts, Rémi Delaporte-Mathurin met toutefois en garde : Iter, comme les autres tokamaks, est porteur d’espoir, mais on a un peu mis la charrue devant les bœufs. Le carburant du plasma, à savoir deux isotopes de l’hydrogène (le deutérium et le tritium, donc), ne se trouve pas dans la station-service du coin.
Le premier composant du carburant, le deutérium, est abondant sur Terre, plus exactement en mer, car on le trouve sans difficulté dans l’eau des océans. Avantage, parmi d’autres : aucun pays n’a le contrôle de sa production, et tous les États riverains peuvent y accéder sans encombre sur le plan politique.
Le deuxième est en revanche beaucoup plus difficile à dénicher : les réserves mondiales naturelles de tritium s’élèvent à quelque 100 kilos, et seulement 300 grammes sont produits en plus chaque année.
Or, avertit Rémi Delaporte-Mathurin, une centrale fonctionnant par la fusion nucléaire aurait besoin de 50 à 100 kilos de tritium par an et par réacteur…« Ça ne sert à rien d’avoir la plus belle cheminée si on n’a pas les bûches à mettre dedans ! » compare le chercheur. Lauréat du prix solennel de thèse des universités de Paris en 2023, il travaille sur cet aspect ô combien essentiel de la fusion nucléaire, à savoir trouver des « bûches ».
La seule solution est de les créer un peu artificiellement. La nature est bien faite : en fusionnant dans le plasma, le deutérium et le tritium produisent de l’hélium et un neutron. Combiné avec du lithium, ce neutron produit de l’hélium et, eurêka, du… tritium. Et le lithium, ô chance, est abondant sur Terre, même s’il devient l’objet de toutes les convoitises, car il est nécessaire aux batteries des véhicules électriques, dont la production explose. Un réacteur est toutefois moins glouton qu’une Tesla : une seule batterie nécessite environ 60 kilos de lithium, ce que consomme un réacteur en un an. (…)
Viendra plus tard, sans doute beaucoup plus tard, la phase d’intégration, c’est-à-dire la transformation de l’énergie produite à partir du plasma en électricité. D’autres éléments devront entre-temps être perfectionnés. C’est le cas, notamment, des aimants ultrapuissants, dits « supraconducteurs », qui maintiennent comme en suspension le plasma au sein d’un tokamak.
Il faudra donc quelques décennies avant de pouvoir se chauffer avec de l’énergie produite par la fusion nucléaire. Les seuls à l’avoir domestiquée aujourd’hui s’appellent Docteur Octopus et Iron Man.
The Economist, Book Review, February 10
Brain fog : Have doctors been wrong about how to treat Alzheimer’s disease?
A new book argues that dogma and bad science led Alzheimer’s research astray
Doctored. By Charles Piller. Atria; 352 pages; $28.99. Icon Books; £20
Full text :
Alzheimer’s disease affects more than 30m people worldwide, mostly the elderly. After the age of 65, the chance of developing it doubles every five years. By 85, the odds are one in three. Its symptoms, which include memory loss, difficulty with basic tasks and depression, progressively worsen. As global life expectancy rises, so will cases of Alzheimer’s, making it one of the big public-health challenges of an ageing world.
There is no cure. Between 1995 and 2021, around $42bn was poured into more than 1,000 clinical trials. Yet only a handful of drugs has made it to market. Even those mostly treat the symptoms of the disease, rather than stop it.
The leading explanation of Alzheimer’s is the “amyloid hypothesis”, which suggests that deposits of beta-amyloid, a type of protein, accumulate between neurons and disrupt their function. But the theory remains controversial: all brains with Alzheimer’s show beta-amyloid plaques, yet not everyone with these plaques experiences cognitive decline. Whether amyloid build-up causes Alzheimer’s, or is merely a symptom, remains unresolved.
In “Doctored” Charles Piller, a science journalist, details how groupthink and dishonesty steered Alzheimer’s research off course. In 2006 a Nature paper by researchers at the University of Minnesota appeared to provide a major breakthrough. The study claimed that a subtype of beta-amyloid caused memory impairment. It quickly became one of the most cited papers and inspired hundreds of millions of dollars in public-research grants. Another influential paper published in 2012 by scientists associated with Cassava Sciences, a biotech firm, bolstered the amyloid theory by linking insulin resistance to amyloid plaque formation. The finding fuelled a wave of research into the idea of Alzheimer’s being a “diabetes of the brain” that could be managed with drugs. There was just one problem—both studies were based on falsified data.
“Doctored” follows Mr Piller’s investigation into the deception. Central to the story is a group of image sleuths, with a sharp eye for manipulated pixels of Western blots (a lab technique used to study proteins, which were doctored in the studies). Some chapters read like a scientific whodunnit. In one, Mr Piller has to work hard to earn the trust of a reluctant whistleblower. In another, he travels to Prague for a private meeting with a group of image detectives with cryptic pseudonyms.
Despite clear evidence of manipulated research results, journals and regulators were slow to act. Mr Piller blames powerful backers of the amyloid hypothesis who ignored red flags. It was only in June 2024—two years after allegations first surfaced—that the Nature paper was retracted by its authors. Cassava Sciences, while denying wrongdoing, stopped trials of its Alzheimer’s drug, Simufilam, in November after it failed to show clinical benefits.
These papers’ consequences go beyond the lab. For patients and their families, experimental treatments often represent a final lifeline. Encouraging people to pin their hopes on medicines that are ineffective, or even unsafe, is a betrayal. Fixation on a theory offering limited success in human trials may also have diverted resources from other more promising therapies.
Since 2023 the Food and Drug Administration, America’s drug regulator, has approved two new medicines that modestly slowed cognitive decline by attacking the amyloid plaques. They also come with dangerous side-effects for some, which include brain swelling and bleeding. Mr Piller remains sceptical of these treatments. So will many of his readers, after his gripping story of medical groupthink and warped incentives. ■
Le Figaro, 7 février, libre accès
Intelligence artificielle : les Émirats construiront en France un data center géant et investiront 30 à 50 milliards d’euros
Un «campus» axé sur l’intelligence artificielle, avec un data center géant d’une capacité de calcul pouvant aller jusqu’à un gigawatt, va être créé par le pays de la péninsule arabique.
Extraits:
Les Émirats arabes unis vont construire en France un «campus» axé sur l’intelligence artificielle avec un data center géant d’une capacité de calcul pouvant aller jusqu’à un gigawatt, «ce qui représente des investissements d’un ordre de grandeur de 30 à 50 milliards d’euros», a annoncé jeudi l’Élysée. Ces investissements font partie d’un accord de partenariat sur l’IA signé jeudi soir à Paris en présence du président français Emmanuel Macron et de son homologue émirati Mohamed ben Zayed Al-Nahyane. (…)
Il s’agit du premier grand investissement annoncé à l’occasion du sommet sur l’IA prévu jusqu’à mardi à Paris, à l’occasion duquel la France et l’Europe veulent se poser en puissances compétitives face aux Etats-Unis et à la Chine.
The Economist, February 3, pay wall
Meaning what, exactly? America and China are talking. But much gets lost in translation
How linguistic differences complicate relations between the great powers
Article intégral : https://kinzler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/4-fevrier-3.pdf
The Wall Street Journal, January 30, pay wall
DeepSeek AI Is the Competition America Needs
The company’s success demonstrates the futility of the U.S. policy of subsidies and sanctions.
Extraits:
The success of DeepSeek, the Chinese rival to American goliaths with radically more cost-effective artificial intelligence, reveals the futility of U.S. sanctions policies. Under the Biden administration, the American government was captured by some of the world’s most ham-handed national-security socialists, while the Chinese private sector under Xi Jinping commands some of the world’s most nimble capitalists.
The entrepreneur behind DeepSeek’s apparent breakthrough is Liang Wenfeng, who founded the High-Flyer hedge fund in 2015. Since DeepSeek’s launch less than two years ago, the venture has received no further outside funding. China has roughly nine times as many engineers as the U.S. and perhaps 15 times as many science and technology graduates. That means Mr. Liang had a cornucopia of technical talent at his disposal, all galvanized by the challenge of doing AI without violating U.S. restrictions on the memory bandwidth of their Nvidia graphics processing units. These chips, like the leading GPUs in U.S. AI data centers, are nearly all fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
“Do more with less” is the Chinese entrepreneurial answer to American “Stargate” program socialism, mobilizing a half-trillion dollars to do more with more, as governments and politicians usually try to do. (…)
By discrediting U.S. sanctions and subsidies, again, Chinese capitalists are performing a service for U.S. capitalism. American entrepreneurs are hamstrung by a putative $6 trillion in global climate-change mandates and subsidies for obsolete technologies, such as windmills and solar panels, specified by zero-sum Green New Dealers. The U.S. has been dissipating the bonanzas conferred in recent decades on our economy by Chinese manufacturing prodigies from Foxconn in Shenzhen and other Chinese fabricators. Chinese factories have been crucial to enabling American companies to command as much as 70% of global equity market capitalization, compared with 10% at best for China.
DeepSeek, by using microchips more efficiently, is similarly favorable to the U.S. economy. As my chip-guru colleague John Schroeter wrote in his newsletter—and both Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella have said—semiconductors are an example of the Jevons Paradox. William Stanley Jevons, a 19th-century British economist, discovered that when a resource is rendered more efficient, we use more of it, often so much more that total spending on the resource rises. When people used only fire for lighting, the world was a very dark place. Nobel laureate William Nordhaus has pointed out that as we progressed from candles to oil lamps to incandescent lights and now LEDs, the cost of lighting dropped by 99.97%, yet we buy more of it than ever.
Advancing at an even faster pace, the number of transistors a dollar buys has increased by several million percent in 70 years. At the same time, annual global spending on semiconductors has grown from less than a few hundred million dollars to nearly $700 billion. The cheaper computing became, the more it was demanded.
Today, the key breakthrough in technology isn’t some ingenious trope in AI software but the emergence of an era altogether beyond microchips. Called wafer-scale integration, it obviates the usual data-center welter of chips and “chiplets” in plastic packages backed by snarls of wire and racks of computer servers. (…)
Pioneering this breakthrough are U.S. companies such as Cerebras and Tesla. (…)
The most advanced wafer-scale project is Tesla’s Dojo system for AI training. It is based on the vast accumulation of video data from the cameras on Tesla’s automobiles. This system is based not on chips or internet data, but on real sensory inputs and “training tiles,” which are interconnected across entire wafers. (…)
Working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to overthrow the existing data-center era, these ventures promise processing economies of a scale millions of times greater than anything contemplated at DeepSeek or other AI companies. (…)
The chief obstacle to the success of such ventures is the U.S. national-security apparatus, which somehow imagines that by inflicting sanctions on China, it can help Americans. Beyond the huge challenges of replacing the existing paradigm of semiconductor fabrication, Mr. de Heer’s main obstacle is his previous links with Tianjin University in China and his Chinese students at Georgia Tech. He is under investigation by a congressional committee on China for alleged links between his research and the Chinese military. Mr. de Heer said several of his students are back in China, collecting about $350 million in investments for a wafer-scale project.
Technology is the key adventure of human progress, and it is intrinsically global. The key test of the Trump administration will be whether it can come to terms with this fact of life and enterprise.
Mr. Gilder is author of “Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think but Can Transform Jobs” and “Life After Capitalism: The Information Theory of Economics.”
L’Express, 29 janvier, article payant
Alain Aspect, Prix Nobel de physique : “Michel Onfray ne comprend manifestement rien au quantique”
Grand entretien. Le grand chercheur explique avec pédagogie les “bizarreries” de la physique quantique, tout en dénonçant les détournements pseudoscientifiques du mot “quantique”.
Article intégral : https://kinzler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/29-janvier-1.pdf
The Wall Street Journal, January 28, pay wall
The DeepSeek AI Freakout
The Chinese startup’s model stuns Big Tech—and Wall Street—with its capability and cost.
Extraits:
Who saw that coming? Not Wall Street, which sold off tech stocks on Monday after the weekend news that a highly sophisticated Chinese AI model, DeepSeek, rivals Big Tech-built systems but cost a fraction to develop. The implications are likely to be far-reaching, and not merely in equities.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 3.1%, driven by a 16.9% dive in Nvidia shares. (…)
Enter DeepSeek, which last week released a new R1 model that claims to be as advanced as OpenAI’s on math, code and reasoning tasks. Tech gurus who inspected the model agreed. One economist asked R1 how much Donald Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs will affect Canada’s GDP, and it spit back an answer close to that of a major bank’s estimate in 12 seconds. Along with the detailed steps R1 used to get to the answer.
More startling, DeepSeek required far fewer chips to train than other advanced AI models and thus cost only an estimated $5.6 million to develop. Other advanced models cost in the neighborhood of $1 billion. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen called it “AI’s Sputnik moment,” and he may be right.
DeepSeek is challenging assumptions about the computing power and spending needed for AI advances. OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank last week made headlines when they announced a joint venture, Stargate, to invest up to $500 billion in building out AI infrastructure. Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion on AI data centers this year.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said Meta would spend about $65 billion on AI projects this year and build a data center “so large that it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.” Meta expects to have 1.3 million advanced chips by the end of this year. DeepSeek’s model reportedly required as few as 10,000 to develop.
DeepSeek’s breakthrough means these tech giants may not have to spend as much to train their AI models. But it also means these firms, notably Google’s DeepMind, might lose their first-mover, technological edge. (…)
This could help give more small businesses access to AI tools at a fraction of the cost of closed-source models like OpenAI and Anthropic, which Amazon has backed. There are advantages to such closed-source systems, especially for privacy and national security. But open-source can foster more collaboration and experimentation. (…)
DeepSeek is vindicating President Trump’s decision to rescind a Biden executive order that gave government far too much control over AI. Companies developing AI models that pose a “serious risk” to national security, economic security, or public health and safety would have had to notify regulators when training their models and share the results of “red-team safety tests.”
Mr. Biden said such tests are needed to eliminate biases, limitations and errors. But open-source models allow the public to review and test systems. Some have pointed out that DeepSeek doesn’t answer questions on subjects that are politically sensitive to Beijing.
DeepSeek should also cause Republicans in Washington to rethink their antitrust obsessions with big tech. Bureaucrats aren’t capable of overseeing thousands of AI models, and more regulation would slow innovation and make it harder for U.S. companies to compete with China. As DeepSeek shows, it’s possible for a David to compete with the Goliaths. Let a thousand American AI flowers bloom.
The Economist, January 24, pay wall
Charlemagne : Europe faces a new age of gunboat digital diplomacy
Can the EU regulate Donald Trump’s big tech bros?
Extraits:
In an era dominated by tech giants worth trillions of dollars, no European firm started from scratch in the past 50 years is today valued at more than a mere hundred billion (Spotify, a music-streaming service based in Sweden, hovers around the mark). The absence of entrepreneurial vigour is a recurring source of frustration for European politicians in search of economic pep and tax receipts. With no local corporate tech titans to berate into creating jobs, German chancellors, French presidents and their like have had to grit their teeth as they beseeched one visiting American bro after another to consider setting up a research facility, artificial-intelligence (AI) hub or gigafactory in their country. As both sides posed for the obligatory selfie, it could be hard to tell who had the upper hand: the elected leaders, or the globally known plutocrats with net worths bigger than most EU countries’ budgets? At least, the politicians could tell themselves, even the mightiest Amazons or Facebooks of the world would have to follow European laws as a condition of doing business there.
It turns out that this may be an imposition too many for the world’s techies. Even before their bosses flexed their political muscles by snagging prime seats at the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th, a refrain could increasingly be heard that the European Union’s nagging regulations are an annoyance that some of them would rather not abide by. Newish EU rules designed to ensure that digital markets do not turn into cosy monopolies, to limit the spread of harmful bilge on social networks and to regulate AI are increasingly being painted as a Euro-ploy standing in the way of Trumpian plans to make America great again (again). Europe is already dreading the prospect of a trade war with its biggest commercial partner by far, not to mention the future of its decades-old security guarantee from America as war rages in Ukraine. If Mr Trump orders Europe to ease up on American tech firms to please his new corporate chums, can his demands be resisted? (…)
Getting the EU to stand down would be a win for big tech. Not only is the European market second only to America when it comes to rich users, but regulations crafted by the EU are often copied by jurisdictions far beyond its borders. This “Brussels effect” is a point of pride for Europeans. Anu Bradford, a tech expert at Columbia Law School who coined the term, says she expects the EU will hold firm. “Nobody in Europe will look at big tech companies this week and think, ‘We wish they were more powerful’.” The fact that Mr Musk has used X to boost hard-right parties in Europe has made policymakers there all the warier.
Various EU officials insist it is business as usual and that its many investigations of big tech firms will be concluded and made public soon, fines and all. But the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, told the World Economic Forum in Davos the day after Mr Trump’s inauguration, that Europe would have to be “pragmatic” in dealing with the new administration. The final stage of punishing tech giants is in part a political decision. There are reports of the commission “reassessing” how this might be done, though no clear sense of how this will happen in practice. Europe will find it very hard to stand down against big tech—but it may not like the price of standing firm. ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/01/23/europe-faces-a-new-age-of-gunboat-digital-diplomacy
The Economist, January 23, pay wall
A bad day for doomers : A $500bn investment plan says a lot about Trump’s AI priorities
It’s build, baby, build
Extraits:
When President Donald Trump announced a half-trillion-dollar of private-sector investment in American artificial-intelligence (AI) infrastructure on January 21st, his second day in office, he basked in the accolades of the three men backing the “Stargate” project: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech mogul, and Larry Ellison of Oracle, an IT firm. He called it the largest AI investment in history. Then came the kicker. “This is money that normally would have gone to China.”
Considering that AI will be the defining technology of his time in office, Mr Trump can sound awestruck by it. “AI seems to be very hot,” he said. But as the announcement of the four-year project (which starts with the construction of massive data centres in Texas) foreshadowed, AI is likely to be a priority within his administration. That is for strategic as well as economic reasons. The government’s “north star”, as one tech insider in Washington puts it, will be how to beat China in the AI war.
Silicon Valley has China hawks already nestled in the White House. (…)
The big question is, will Mr Trump continue the Biden administration’s approach of prioritising constraints on China, with export curbs and the like, to maintain America’s lead in AI? Or will he put more emphasis on freeing America’s tech firms to out-innovate China?
There are justifications for trying to keep China at heel. In Silicon Valley, supporters of a crackdown say Chinese firms steal American intellectual property, helping their large language models (LLMs) to advance fast. They argue that Chinese tech firms have evaded export controls on American semiconductors, either by buying cutting-edge American graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips used to train and run AI models, on the black market, or by renting out capacity on other countries’ cloud servers. This doesn’t only help China’s tech industry. They note that China is far ahead of America in incorporating AI into military tech, so hobbling it is justified on national-security grounds. (…)
In the tech industry, the hope is that as well as cracking down on Chinese malfeasance, the Trump administration will push to promote American competitiveness by loosening the reins. As John Villasenor, an expert on tech policy at the University of California, Los Angeles puts it, “The best way to stay ahead of China is not to over-regulate at home.”
On his first day in office Mr Trump took a step in this direction by scrapping Mr Biden’s executive order of 2023 that required builders of advanced LLMs to share information with the American government. Tech insiders in Washington say they expect the new administration to take a “sector-specific” approach instead. In other words, rather than overarching AI regulation, federal agencies would oversee the use of AI within their own domains.
Some may worry that, with less regulation, tech firms will overstep the limits of AI safety. But for now, AI “accelerationists” have overtaken the “doomers”. In a sign that deregulation is high on Mr Trump’s agenda, he promised the three joint-venture partners in Stargate to make it “as easy as it can be” for them to build their project.
One further force promoting AI innovation could be defence spending. America puts only a tiny fraction of its $850bn defence budget into AI. Silicon Valley executives hope that the Trump administration will allow more participation by startups building AI weapons and systems in the competition for defence contracts.
In short, there is synchronisation. Mr Trump wants lots of investment in America, a roaring stockmarket and the ability to claim he is vanquishing China. America’s AI giants want to build bigger models to compete with each other and keep ahead of China, and to have more customers to justify their investments. Stargate looks like the shape of things to come. ■
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 21. Januar, nur für Abonnenten
Vertrauenskrise der Wissenschaft? Gibt es nicht, wie eine Studie beweist. Sowieso besser als Vertrauen wäre: mehr Aufklärung
Ein internationales Team von Forschenden hat in 68 Ländern den Ruf von Wissenschaftern ausgewertet.Die Schweiz platziert sich im unteren Mittelfeld. Nun mehr Vertrauen in Forschung zu fordern, wäre falsch. Auch Wissenschaft braucht Skepsis.
Extraits:
Ereignisse brauchen oft nur Sekunden, um zu einer Nachricht zu werden, zu der jeder sofort eine Meinung hat. Streit und Diskussion sind Alltag. Gesellschaftliches Zusammenleben aber ist nur möglich, solange es Bereiche der Wirklichkeit gibt, die als unstrittig gelten. Indem sie Fakten erarbeitet, ist Wissenschaft das einzige Werkzeug, das eine kleinste gemeinsame Wirklichkeit garantiert. Das macht sie für einen sinnvollen Diskurs überlebenswichtig.
Umso wichtiger ist eine in den vergangenen Jahren häufig gestellte Frage: Steckt die Wissenschaft in einer Vertrauenskrise? In einer neuen Studie unter Leitung von Viktoria Cologna an der ETH Zürich und Niels G. Mede an der Universität Zürich, veröffentlicht in «Nature Human Behaviour», hat ein internationales Team von 241 Forschenden 71 922 Menschen in 68 Ländern innerhalb von zehn Monaten befragt. Dasselbe Befragungsinstitut, derselbe Fragebogen, eine vorangestellte Definition, was unter Wissenschaft zu verstehen sei. Zwar haben vergleichende Befragungen immer Schwächen, die vorliegende Studie aber hat sich um ein möglichst sicheres Fundament bemüht.
Vertrauenskrise? «Nein», heisst es von den Autoren. Zwar gibt es keinen globalen Vergleich zum Stand vor der Pandemie, heute aber sei das Vertrauen in Wissenschaft insgesamt moderat hoch: Etwa drei Viertel der Befragten haben Vertrauen in die Fähigkeiten von Wissenschaftern, 57 Prozent halten sie für ehrlich. Die Schweiz besetzt einen Platz im unteren Mittelfeld, knapp hinter dem Nachbarn Deutschland und hinter Ländern Skandinaviens und Afrikas.
Mittelfeld, das reicht nicht – weil Vertrauen in Wissenschaft wichtig ist, braucht es Verbesserung. Die Zahlen lassen sich so lesen. Aber diese Interpretation wäre falsch.
Man muss kein Fan von Science-Fiction sein, um sich eine Welt vorzustellen, in der Wissenschaft als höchste Instanz der Glaubwürdigkeit zur Dystopie gerät. (…) Und um Irrtümer zu entdecken, braucht es ein Mindestmass an Skepsis.
Das ist es, was die Philosophin Hannah Arendt meint, wenn sie schreibt, die «lebendige Menschlichkeit» nehme in gleichem Masse ab, in dem man auf eigenständiges Denken verzichte. Wissenschaft braucht kein blindes Vertrauen, sondern mündige Auseinandersetzung. (…)
Eine solche gelingt nur, wenn man Prozesse der Wissenschaft zumindest den Grundlagen nach versteht. Auch dazu findet sich eine Zahl in der Studie: 83 Prozent der Befragten wünschen sich Forschende, die mehr mit der breiten Öffentlichkeit kommunizieren.
Nun liegt darin auch Gefahr: Ein Forscher bleibt ein Mensch mit einer Meinung. Wer als Vertreter «der Wissenschaft» die Bühne sucht, gerät in Versuchung, objektives Wissen und subjektive Meinung zu vermengen. Ein Wissenschafter wird so vom neutralen Informanten zum Spieler auf dem politischen Parkett. Eine weitere Figur, die versucht, eigene Überzeugungen durchzusetzen. Das schadet der Glaubwürdigkeit. (…)
Daher fordern manche Forscher, Wissenschaft müsse gesellschaftlich unsichtbar bleiben. Das ist Unsinn. Wer unsichtbar bleiben will, fordert religiöses Vertrauen. Nur wer sich Sichtbarkeit zumutet, muss sein Vorgehen erklären.
Aufgabe der Wissenschaft ist es, Fakten zu erarbeiten. Aufgabe der Bürger ist es, diese Fakten zu interpretieren, um bei Debatten vernünftige Positionen zu finden. Dafür braucht es nicht mehr Vertrauen, sondern mehr Einblicke in den Maschinenraum der Forschung. Mehr Transparenz. Mehr Kommunikation. Mehr Aufklärung.
Le Figaro, 18 janvier, article payant
La charcuterie suspectée d’augmenter le risque de démence
Une étude qui a suivi plus de 100 000 personnes sur quatre décennies a identifié que les plus gros mangeurs de charcuterie avaient un risque de démence accru de 13 %.
Extraits :
Pour certains, c’est un plaisir incontournable de la vie. Mais il devient de plus en plus clair qu’il ne faut pas en abuser : après avoir été classée « cancérigène avéré » par l’Organisation mondiale de la Santé en 2015, voilà que la charcuterie est suspectée d’être néfaste pour le cerveau. Une nouvelle étude menée par des scientifiques de l’université de Harvard suggère en effet que les plus gros mangeurs de bacon, de salami et autres saucisses ont plus de risque de développer une démence. À l’inverse, les personnes privilégiant les fruits à coque, les légumineuses et le poisson ont un risque fortement abaissé.
(…) Au total, environ 1,2 million de personnes souffrent de démence en France, davantage de femmes que d’hommes.
Pour mener à bien ce travail publié dans la revue Neurology , les scientifiques ont utilisé deux larges cohortes américaines, l’une initiée en 1976, l’autre en 1986. En science, une étude de cohorte est un type d’enquête qui suit un grand nombre de personnes sur des années, afin d’étudier les liens entre leur mode de vie, leur environnement et la survenue de maladies. Parmi les 133 000 participants à l’étude, un peu plus de 11 000 ont reçu un diagnostic de démence au cours des dernières décennies. Des questionnaires très détaillés sur leur santé et leur alimentation leur ont régulièrement été envoyés et plusieurs entretiens téléphoniques visant à évaluer leurs fonctions cognitives ont été réalisés.
Ces résultats – qui devront être confirmés par d’autres études – montrent que les plus gros mangeurs de charcuterie ont un risque accru de 13 % de développer une démence, par rapport aux personnes n’en mangeant pas ou très peu. Un excès de risque certes faible, mais suffisamment important pour être considéré comme bien concret. (…)
Bien sûr, l’alimentation est loin d’être l’unique cause à blâmer dans la survenue de ce type de maladies. Mais il est clair pour les scientifiques qu’elle y est indirectement liée. L’âge, l’hypertension artérielle, le diabète, l’obésité, le tabagisme, un manque d’interactions sociales sur le long cours ou encore l’excès d’alcool sont autant d’autres facteurs impliqués. (…)
« Même si vous réduisez votre consommation un peu, cela apportera des bienfaits pour votre santé cognitive. Et le plus tôt est le mieux », a-t-il insisté. Pour rappel, les autorités sanitaires françaises préconisent de limiter la consommation de charcuterie à 150 g par semaine, soit environ 3 tranches de jambon blanc.
The Economist, 17 janvier, article payant
From oil to AI : Can the Gulf states become tech superpowers?
The region’s rulers want to move away from fossil fuels
Extraits :
Few middle powers have the towering technological ambitions of the rich Gulf states. As they seek to shift their economies away from fossil fuels, the Emiratis want to lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI) and the Saudis want the kingdom to become home to startups in cutting-edge areas such as robotics. Those aspirations, however, are about to collide with geopolitical reality.
The fascination with tech is not new, but the scale of the plans is. In Marchthe United Arab Emirates (UAE) created MGX, a tech-investment company with a target size of $100bn, which will invest in AI infrastructure, such as data centres and chips. It has also set up a $10bn AI venture-capital fund. In Saudi Arabia a number of different funds with a combined firepower of $240bn will splurge on AI, data centres and advanced manufacturing.
The rulers are making bets in three areas. One is model-making and applications. (…)
Gulf companies are building data centres abroad, too. (…)
A third area is chip manufacturing, which the UAE seems especially keen on. Samsung, a South Korean electronics giant, and TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, have held talks with officials to build plants in the UAE. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has convinced the UAE’s sheikhs, among other investors, to fund his chipmaking plans.
There are early signs the strategy could come together. The total capacity of all data centres currently in construction in Saudi Arabia and the uae has grown about ten-fold in the past five years. Investment has flowed in. The Gulf recorded almost $8bn of foreign direct investment in tech infrastructure and another $2bn in software in 2024, up three-fold from 2017, according to fDi Markets, a data firm. Talent is moving, too. BCG, a consultancy, says that the AI talent pool in the UAE and Saudi Arabia has grown by over one-third and almost a fifth, respectively, since 2022.
But a big risk looms over the Gulf’s ambitions: souring relations between America and China. The rulers have leaned heavily on America’s big technology firms for partnerships. At the same time, they have struckplenty of deals with large Chinese firms, including Huawei, a tech company, and China Telecom, communications firm. Saudi Arabia has invested $400m in Zhipu AI, one of China’s most prominent AI companies. Moreover, the data-centre boom relies on China: about a third of imports of servers, chips and storage devices by Saudi Arabia and the UAE come from the country.
American policymakers are clearly wary of this relationship. (…)
The Gulf’s rulers may hope their close ties to big American tech firms will help insulate them from such machinations in Washington. Google, for instance, plans to set up an AI hub in Saudi Arabia. Microsoft has invested $1.5bn in G42.
But ultimately they will face an uncomfortable choice. Geopolitical tensions are likely to intensify during Mr Trump’s second term. America’s tech giants already see themselves in a race with China. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, says that “the real key to American leadership from a long-term perspective is to put American technology around the world—and to do it faster than China does.” If the Gulf’s rulers want their tech dreams to materialise, they may eventually be forced to pick a side. ■
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/01/16/can-the-gulf-states-become-tech-superpowers
The Economist, 16 janvier, article payant
Fat and health : Is obesity a disease?
It wasn’t. But it is now
Extraits :
For years there has been a push to recognise obesity as a disease in its own right, and therefore something that needs to be treated in and of itself, rather than just as a risk factor for other things, such as diabetes, heart disease, strokes and some cancers. And there is indeed much evidence that being obese can result in exceptionally poor health. But many who are obese are not unwell in the slightest. This argues that obesity per se should not be treated as an illness.
Until two years ago, such discussion was of little practical relevance since there were few treatments for obesity between the extremes of bariatric surgery and the old-fashioned approach of eating less and exercising more. However, the arrival in 2023 of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in the form of semaglutide (known commercially as Wegovy) changed that. If these drugs are to be prescribed sensibly and fairly, then who among the fat is sick and who is not becomes an important question.
The usual current measure of obesity is body mass index (BMI). This has the advantage of being easily calculated (by dividing a person’s weight by the square of their height). Obesity is then defined as a BMI of more than 30. But some people with a high BMI show no signs of being unwell. And, absurdly, stocky and well-muscled athletes have been known to qualify as obese according to this classification. (…)
To diagnose their newly defined disease, which they call “clinical obesity”, the commissioners require two things. First, the addition of a third measure of body size (waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to-height ratio) to those used to calculate BMI—though measuring body fat directly, with sophisticated modern scanning tools is even better. Second, if this revised measurement does, indeed, proclaim an individual to be obese, some objective signs and symptoms of reduced organ function, or ability to conduct daily activities—such as bathing, eating and dressing—are also needed to declare that obesity to be clinically relevant. (…)
Francesco Rubino, a professor in metabolic and bariatric surgery at King’s College, London, who is also one of the commissioners, reckons describing obesity as an actual disease is quite a radical shift. The next task—one which others have already started, he says—is to work out who among the 1bn or so people on the planet who were classified as obese according to the old definition qualify as being clinically obese under the new one, and thus in need of treatment. Preliminary work, he says, suggests 20-40% of them.
The commission’s approach already seems popular with medical officialdom. Seventy-six of the world’s leading health organisations, including the American Heart Association, the Chinese Diabetes Society and the All Indian Association for Advancing Research in Obesity, have already endorsed it. How quickly it will percolate into medical practice and public perceptions of who is and is not dangerously obese is another matter. ■
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/01/15/is-obesity-a-disease
The Economist, 13 janvier, article payant
The fight over America’s economy : Tech is coming to Washington. Prepare for a clash of cultures
Out of Trumpian chaos and contradiction, something good might just emerge
Extraits :
Already things have turned nasty. Donald Trump has not even got to the White House, and his raucous court of advisers have rounded on each other. In recent days Elon Musk and other tech tycoons have traded insults with the MAGA crowd over highly skilled migration. What seems like a petty spat over visas is in fact a sign of a much deeper rift. For the first time, tech is coming to Washington—and its worldview is strikingly at odds with the maga movement. The ways in which these tensions are resolved, and who gains the upper hand, will profoundly affect America’s economy and its financial markets over the next four years.
As in his first term, Mr Trump has assembled an economic-policy team with disparate, sometimes contradictory goals. The maga diehards, such as Stephen Miller, Mr Trump’s choice for deputy chief of staff, are anti-trade, anti-immigration and anti-regulation, and are supported by an energetic base. The Republican mainstreamers, such as Scott Bessent, Mr Trump’s pick for treasury secretary, and Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council, are primarily low-tax, small-government enthusiasts. This time, though, there is a new faction that makes the mix more volatile still: the tech bros from Silicon Valley.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist, has been appointed Mr Trump’s crypto and artificial-intelligence tsar. He will hope to relax curbs on the crypto industry and, together with other arrivals from Silicon Valley, to loosen controls on ai to encourage faster progress. But the influence of the techies goes beyond tech policy. Mr Musk has been tasked with running the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (doge). Marc Andreessen, a renowned venture capitalist, says he has been spending about half his time at Mar-a-Lago as a “volunteer”. Scott Kupor, who worked for Mr Andreessen, will take charge of the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees public-sector hiring. Former employees of Palantir, the Thiel Foundation and Uber have been appointed to roles in the state and health departments and to the Pentagon, respectively. Once the revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury spun so fast that Goldman Sachs was nicknamed “Government Sachs”. Mr Trump, by contrast, is trying to put the tech into technocracy.
This is new for American politics. (…)
One problem is that, when tech and maga say they are signed up to America First, they mean different things. Whereas the maga movement hopes to restore a vision of the past, including an impossible return to a manufacturing heyday, tech looks forward. It wants to accelerate progress and disrupt society, leaving the world for which maga yearns ever farther in the dust.
These contrasting visions will translate into policy disputes. (…)
A combination of infighting, botched implementation and self-dealing could provoke a backlash that hobbles Mr Trump’s second term.
Yet that dismal scenario is not foreordained. Instead of fighting each other to a standstill, the factions on Mr Trump’s team could moderate each other in some ways and reinforce each other in others, perhaps with benign results for America. For example, the mainstreamers and the tech bosses could limit maga’s worst instincts on protectionism and immigration, while tech’s clever ideas for reform could be implemented in a way that is politically astute. Everyone’s agreement on America’s need to deregulate and innovate, meanwhile, could lend the programme useful momentum. (…)
That may sound far-fetched. However, the stockmarket could help steer the administration towards this compromise. Mr Trump is sensitive to share prices, and will not want to endanger the roaring rally that has followed his re-election. By providing a real-time gauge of whether investors think Trumponomics will help the economy, the stockmarket could sway his decisions. If so, the administration could feel its way towards policies that boost growth. Tech’s arrival in Washington is high-risk. It could also—conceivably—be high-reward. ■
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 janvier, article payant
Europa investiert in die falschen Technologien
Europa investiert zu wenig – und das auch noch in die falschen Technologien. Während US-Unternehmen mit Wucht in Zukunftstechnologien wie Software und KI investieren, konzentriert sich Europa seit 20 Jahren auf traditionelle Branchen wie die Autoindustrie.
Extraits :
Die Unternehmen in der EU investieren nur 1,2 Prozent des Bruttoinlandsproduktes in Forschung und Entwicklung – in den USA sind es 2,3 Prozent. Werden die Investitionen des Staates dazugerechnet, gibt die EU etwa zwei Prozent ihres Bruttoinlandsprodukts für F&E aus – vergleichbar mit Japan, aber weit unter den USA oder Südkorea. Besonders dramatisch ist der Rückstand in Zukunftstechnologien: US-Unternehmen dominieren mit einem Anteil von 75 Prozent die globale Softwareentwicklung, die EU kommt nur auf 6 Prozent und liegt damit auch hinter China. Während in den USA die großen Digitalkonzerne die größten F&E-Investoren sind, führen in Europa seit 20 Jahren die gleichen Autohersteller die Liste an.
Wo in Amerika 85 Prozent der privatwirtschaftlichen Investitionen in Hightechbranchen fließen, sind es in Europa nur 50 Prozent, mit einem Schwerpunkt auf mitteltechnologischen Sektoren. Eine neue Studie der Università Bocconi zeigt, dass diese Spezialisierung Europa nicht nur Wachstumschancen nimmt, sondern es auch geopolitisch schwächt.
Die EU müsse ihre Innovationsförderung radikal umbauen, um den Anschluss nicht zu verlieren. Die Studie spricht von einer „Mitteltechnologie-Falle“: Die EU ist auf mittelkomplexe Technologien spezialisiert, die zwar technologische Fortschritte nutzen, aber nicht selbst entwickeln. Diese Pfadabhängigkeit verstärkt sich selbst – während US-Unternehmen ihre Technologieführerschaft durch hohe F&E-Ausgaben ausbauen, fehlen in Europa die Ressourcen für den Aufbau neuer Hightechindustrien. Besonders problematisch: Die europäische Autoindustrie wurde trotz hoher F&E-Investitionen von US- und chinesischen Herstellern überholt. Sowohl bei den softwarelastigen Fahrzeugen als auch beim autonomen Fahren in den relevanten Ausbaustufen 4 und 5 spielen Europas Hersteller aktuell keine Rolle.
Das EU-Innovationsprogramm „Horizon Europe“ mit einem Jahresbudget von mehr als elf Milliarden Euro ist nach Ansicht der Autoren falsch aufgestellt. Weniger als 5 Prozent der Mittel fließen in bahnbrechende Innovationen. Der neu geschaffene European Innovation Council (EIC) konzentriere sich zu stark auf die Finanzierung reifer Technologien statt auf echte Durchbrüche. Die Entscheidungsprozesse sind zu politisch, die Zusammenarbeit wird erzwungen statt begleitet.
Die Autoren fordern eine radikale Reform nach dem Vorbild der US-Forschungsagentur DARPA. (…)
Das Zeitfenster, in dem dies möglich ist, schließt sich jedoch. Während die USA und China ihre Führungspositionen weiter ausbauen, bleibt Europa wenig Zeit, um das Ruder herumzureißen. Die „Middle Technology Trap“ ist keine unvermeidbare Sackgasse, sondern ein Hindernis, das durch entschlossenes Handeln überwunden werden kann. Die Frage sei, ob Europa den Willen dazu habe.
The Economist, 11 janvier, article payant
Meta’s makeover : Mark Zuckerberg’s U-turn on fact-checking is craven—but correct
Social-media platforms should not be in the business of defining truth
Extraits :
Apart from the million-dollar wristwatch, it had the look of a hostage video. On January 7th Mark Zuckerberg posted a clip to Facebook and Instagram in which he announced changes to his social networks’ content-moderation policies in response to what he called the “cultural tipping point” of Donald Trump’s election. There have been “too many mistakes and too much censorship”, he said, adding that Mr Trump’s return provides an “opportunity to restore free expression”. He also appointed Dana White, an ally of Mr Trump’s, to Meta’s board (as well as John Elkann, the boss of Exor, which part-owns The Economist’s parent company).
For all the talk of freedom, Mr Zuckerberg’s video was another example of the capture of American business by the bullying incoming president. Mr Trump has called Facebook an “enemy of the people” and threatened to ensure that Mr Zuckerberg “spends the rest of his life in prison”. Mr Zuckerberg is not the only executive to submit: everyone from Apple’s Tim Cook to OpenAI’s Sam Altman is said to have donated to Mr Trump’s inauguration vanity fund. This week Amazon announced a $40m biopic of the incoming First Lady.
The circumstances may be grotesque and the motives suspect. But the substance of Meta’s sweeping changes is, in fact, correct. Speech online urgently needs to become freer. Making it so will shore up America’s democracy against whatever tests it faces in the years to come.
Mr Zuckerberg was once a free-speech enthusiast, allowing content such as Holocaust denial on Facebook even as many urged him to block it. But following claims of Russian online interference in Mr Trump’s first election, in 2016, and an outbreak of misinformation around the covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, the company cracked down on a broad range of “lawful but awful” content, from quack medicine to crackpot groups such as QAnon.
What first seemed like common sense has placed a growing cost on users’ freedom of expression. Never mind the freedom to be wrong; in some cases perfectly accurate claims have been blocked, as when Facebook suppressed a New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, which turned out to be true. The definition of hate speech has expanded in a way that limits debate about subjects such as transgender rights. Automated filters are so strict that even Meta says 10-20% of the content it removes is taken down in error. Mr Zuckerberg’s promise to replace fact-checking with user-led “community notes”, and loosen the rules on what can be said about testy topics like gender, is welcome.
There are risks. Mr Zuckerberg acknowledges that moderation involves trade-offs and that his new rules will mean more “bad stuff” online. (…) On X, where Elon Musk has dismantled much of the moderation apparatus, posts inciting violence—a criminal offence—spread rapidly during a recent spate of rioting in Britain. Telegram, a libertarian network popular in Russia, has become a haven for crooks owing to its hands-off approach.
The best way to guard against these dangers is to be transparent about how rules are set. Meta’s Oversight Board, an independent standards watchdog set up in 2020, appears to have been wrongfooted by this week’s announcement, first supporting the measures and then expressing concerns. The rules on what can and cannot be said online should be explained and defended transparently, not overturned by the company’s chief executive in a pre-inauguration panic.
For all that, Meta’s moves are a step in the right direction. Social networks should stamp out illegal content. For the sake of advertisers’ business and users’ enjoyment, they will probably want to keep things civil. But it is past time that they got out of the business of ruling on what is right and wrong. Only a fool would claim that his social network was the truth.■
Articles du 27 décembre au 7 juin 2024