Babbage

LARRY PAGE, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, had plenty to crow about at the firm’s annual developer meeting on May 15th. That day the firm’s share price soared past $900 for the first time and its market capitalisation topped $300 billion. At the event, Google also unveiled a number of new and revamped offerings, including a music-streaming service and plentiful tweaks to its popular online-mapping service. After the presentations were over, some attendees were already speculating that its shares would hit $1,000 before too long.

This time last year Apple’s fans were forecasting that its shares would blast through that target too.

THE Swedish firm Memoto has built a wearable camera that will log its users' lives, snapping thousands of photographs a day

WITH many of his friends and family getting on in years, Babbage has had perforce the chance to compare how the elderly are cared for professionally in America, Britain and Japan. In all three, the private facilities he has visited have been broadly similar and their costs much the same. But one thing stands out about the places the old and infirm are cared for in Japan. Whether they be nursing homes, geriatric hospitals or hospices, all seem to suffer a dire shortage of nursing staff. Being an inventive people, though, the Japanese have come up with some nifty solutions. The rest of the ageing world would do well to take note.

E-MAIL became passé not long after it moved from exotic to commonplace in the late 1990s. Successive waves of youths switched to texting, then early social networks, then microblogging, then dedicated smartphone apps (like "What's App?"). Some newfangled communication channel (long-chain amino acids?) is sure to crop up soon. Some children in the developed world are born with an e-mail address reserved by their parents, yet e-mail appears to have become something you gradually, and perhaps reluctantly, age into, along with male-pattern baldness or grey hair and sensible shoes.

350 is a popular number among people concerned about climate change. That is because 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is the level that, in the words of James Hansen, a prominent climate scientist, is needed “to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted”. Today the ratio is nudging 400ppm, the highest since the Pliocene, 4m years ago, when Canada was a tropical jungle. This prompted some, including the UN, to suggest 450ppm, which should limit warming to 2ºC, as a more realistic goal. 

IN “SKYFALL”, the latest James Bond movie, 007 is given a gun that only he can fire. It works by recognising his palm print, rendering it impotent when it falls into a baddy’s hands. Like many of Q’s more fanciful inventions, the fiction is easier to conjure up than the fact. But there is a real-life biometric system that would have served Bond just as well: cardiac-rhythm recognition.

Anyone who has watched a medical drama can picture an electrocardiogram (ECG)—the five peaks and troughs, known as a PQRST pattern (see picture), that map each heartbeat. The shape of this pattern is affected by such things as the heart’s size, its shape and its position in the body.

CAR-SHARING services, which let people use any car in a fleet, are relatively old hat. The earliest were founded in the 1990s. Most follow the same rules: members must return the vehicle to the place where they picked it up—inconvenient if you only need to go one way. Not so car2go. Unlike competitors such as ZipCar, car2go's automobiles may be left at any unrestricted street-parking space in a given city.

Daimler, the German carmaker which owns car2go (and produces the two-seat Smart hybrids in its fleet), launched the service in Ulm in March 2009, and began its roll-out in earnest in late 2011. Car2go recently set up shop in Seattle, Babbage's haunt.