Anyone eager to view from high the cityscapes of Guangdong, a province in southern China, may soon be able to do so from the cabin of a flying taxi. On October 13th the Civil Aviation Administration of China（CAAC）awarded a"type certificate", a crucial piece of aviation paperwork, to the world's first electric vertical take-off and landing（eVTOL）taxi. And in case that does not sound futuristic enough, the small two-seater, called the EH216-s, was also cleared to fly without a pilot on board. 

The EH216-S is made by EHang, a company based in Guangdong. It looks like a scaled-up consumer drone（无人机）with a passenger bubble mounted on top. Propulsion（动力）is provided by 16 small rotors（转子）, mounted on the tips of eight arms that fold away when the vehicle is not in use, allowing it to park in small spaces. 

The CAAC gave its approval after EHang had conducted more than 40,000 test flights, including with volunteer passengers in 18 cities across China. It also subjected the EH216-S to structural analysis and crash tests, and checked its ability to keep flying if one of its rotors fails. Regulators also inspected the wireless network which EHang uses to link its flying taxis to a control centre on the ground. That allows backup pilots to land an aircraft by remote control if there is a problem. 

EHang says its pilotless eVTOLs will be quieter than helicopters, their closest cousins, and much cheaper to operate, thanks in part to the ability to swap（交换）out an expensive pilot, for a second paying passenger. Performance, though, will be limited, at least at first. The EH216-S has a range of about 30 km, and a speed of up to 130 kph. The firm thinks that doing away with pilots will make things safer too. A computer's attention never wavers（动摇）. And flying is, in many ways, much easier to automate than driving, for there are fewer obstacles and unexpected situations to navigate. 

EHang has ambitions beyond China, too. The firm's closest competitors are Volocopter, a German company, and a pair of Californian firms, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation. All three are conducting test flights of piloted eVTOLs of various designs. 

Scientific publishing has long been a license to print money. Scientists need journals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other scientists perform the specialized work of peer review also for free, because it is a central element in the acquisition of status and the production of scientific knowledge.

With the content of papers secured for free, the publisher needs only find a market for its journal. Until this century, university libraries were not very price sensitive. Scientific publishers routinely report profit margins （利润）approaching 40% on their operations, at a time when the rest of the publishing industry is in an existential crisis.

The Dutch giant Elsevier, which claims to publish 25% of the scientific papers produced in the world, made profits of more than £900m last year, while UK universities alone spent more than £210m in 2016 to enable researchers to access their own publicly funded research; both figures seem to rise unstoppably despite increasingly desperate efforts to change them.

The most drastic, and thoroughly illegal, reaction has been the emergence of Sci — Hub, a kind of global photocopier for scientific papers, set up in 2012, which now claims to offer access to every paywalled （有付费墙的）article published since 2015. The success of Sci — Hub. which relies on researchers passing on copies they have themselves legally accessed, shows the legal ecosystem has lost legitimacy （合法性）among its users and must be transformed so that it works for all participants.

In Britain the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.

Yet the new system has not worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to $5,000. A report last year pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs" had been steadily rising at a rate above inflation （通货膨胀）.In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labor is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power.

Like many of the Indigenous (土著的) communities across the Australian continent, he remote communities in north-west New South W ales are struggling. Many of the 300 or 50 residents rely on welfare. Higher electricity bills—up to $3,000 a quarter for some households—further worsen the poverty. They' re always at the end of the power line, so the service that is there is quite extraordinary in terms of cost. It' s a real problem that needs to be fixed. 

To that end, Anderson and other Indigenous leaders have formed the First Nations Renewable Energy Alliance (FREA) to push for renewable energy in Indigenous communities. They partner with private enterprise to support Indigenous communities looking to switch to renewable energy. 

" We can build a power station where the community exists," Anderson says, " so people are able to successfully live in the environment the way they want to live and have access to power which enables them to better determine their economic future. " 

Only a handful of Indigenous communities have set up renewable energy projects in Australia. The Indigenous -owned and -operated company AllGrid Energy, for instance, has installed solar panels and battery storage systems to replace diesel (柴 油) generators n the communities of Ngurrara and Kurnturlpara in the Northern Territory' s Barkly Tableland. Within two months of the system being installed in May 2016, people were moving back to their homelands, the communities growing from just two permanent residents to about 40. 

But FREA will go one step further, working with community leaders and acting as a conduit (纽带) between the communities and the businesses they are dealing with. This is essential, says Anderson, to avoid predatory (吞并) practices they have seen in the past, with companies " playing on the psychology of poverty" to gain advantage. The FREA has drafted terms of agreements that will guide how companies engage with Indigenous communities for renewable energy projects. 

One of the next steps for FREA will be to identify a community that can act as a test case for a renewables project. " Our experience is that if we can make it work for one community, it will work in every other community," Anderson says.