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March 21, 2010 Women in science: Pioneers blaze path for others By Rachel Shields The Royal Society has named its top 10 female scientists, yet many still feel marginalised They have mapped the infinity of space, developed spray-on skin for burns victims, pioneered cancer-beating therapies, created cutting-edge computer chips, discovered the first radio pulsars, and won Nobel prizes. But female science professors are still being asked to make the tea and take notes at meetings by their - often junior - male colleagues. Sexism remains all too prevalent in Britain's scientific community, according to some of its leading figures, even as The Royal Society unveils a list of the 10 greatest women scientists in British history. Women scientists this weekend called for government funding to be ring-fenced for projects headed by women, and men who are principal child carers, to help them get ahead in what remains a maledominated profession. "If you are on high-level committees, you'll be asked to make the tea," said Professor Athene Donald, the deputy head of physics at Cambridge University. "Recently, on a committee, the chairman thought I was the secretary. And I've been in committees where we've been addressed as "gentlemen", despite the fact that there are women there. It is very off-putting." Baroness Greenfield, who is suing the Royal Institution after it ousted her as its director in January, has criticised the Government for failing to provide enough financial support for women trying to make a career in the sector. "However much people support and encourage women, it has got to be backed by resources. The Government has never really delivered that," said Lady Greenfield. "I hope that the election campaign addresses this. What is needed is about £50,000 a year per woman, and then add the cost of equipment, and you are looking at £200,000 for one person. Science research is expensive." Lady Greenfield also argues that the insecure nature of science research puts women at a disadvantage: most scientists have to make do with temporary research contracts until they secure a fixed position in their thirties and forties; maternity leave provision is limited; and, for those in cutting-edge research, a career break at that stage can leave them way behind their male peers. "Many people won't have security of tenure until they are in their thirties. It is one of the few employment cultures with no security," she said.

It is thought that the subject's "nerdy" image puts girls off studying science beyond GCSE, and the sector also struggles to retain female graduates, with more than 70 per cent of women science graduates deciding on non-science related careers. One of the aims of the Government's 10-year strategy on science and technology, launched in 2004, was to encourage more women into the sectors. "The science and technology professions have been built by men, for men," said Annette Williams, the director of the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. The centre was established in 2004 to address the gender imbalance by using mentoring, training and networking. "Often, women can find the climate quite hostile. And science and technology are so male-dominated that they are behind other sectors in terms of things like flexible working," said Ms Williams. The Royal Society, which did not allow female fellows to join until 1945, is using its 350th anniversary year to highlight the work of women scientists, such as Rosalind Franklin, whose work on DNA led directly to the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, and Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel prize-winner for chemistry. Despite the negative experiences of many female scientists, some believe that the situation is improving. "The number of women science professors rose from 8 per cent of the total in 2004 to 11 per cent now. I think we had something to do with that," said Ms Williams. While women may be under-represented in science, few are in favour of "quotas" of jobs being reserved for women. "Affirmative action can be very damaging. Women don't want to be appointed because they are women, they want to be appointed because they are good," said Professor Donald. "But if you advertise a job, you should have a proper search, and encourage women to come forward, not just appoint someone you know." The Royal Society Top 10 1. Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) As an assistant to her brother, a royal astronomer, Herschel discovered eight comets and catalogued star clusters. She was the first woman scientist to receive a salary and was awarded many honours. 2. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) The Scottish scientist was only the second woman to receive recognition in the UK for her scientific experiments, which were on magnetism. Her popular renditions of the French astronomer Laplace's book Traité de Mécanique Céleste made her famous.

3. Mary Anning (1799-1847) The daughter of poor Dis- senters, the palaeontologist made a number of important finds in Lyme Regis, including the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton and the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found. She also discovered important fish fossils. 4. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917) Denied entry to medical school, Garrett Anderson instead passed the Society of Apothecaries examination to become the first English female doctor. She founded the New Hospital for Women in London and was influential in the passing of an Act permitting women to enter the medical profession in 1876. 5. Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) Working with her husband, Professor William Ayrton, Ayrton published several papers on the electric arc. In 1902 she became the first woman to be nominated as a fellow of the Royal Society, although as a married woman she could not accept. 6. Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971) A pioneer of X-ray crystallography - the study of molecule shapes - in 1945 she and Marjory Stephenson were the first women to be admitted as fellows to the Royal Society. She was the first female professor at University College London, and the first woman to be president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 7. Elsie Widdowson (1908-2000) Her work with Professor R A McCance revolutionised the way the world assessed nutritional values and how mammalian development was perceived. She worked on nutritional problems during the Second World War, and on treating the effects of starvation suffered by concentration camp victims. 8. Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994) Hodgkin discovered the structure of penicillin and of vitamin B12. She was awarded the Nobel prize for her work, and was made a member of the Order of Merit. She devoted much of her later life to championing scientists in developing countries. 9. Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

Her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA was used to formulate Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis of the structure of DNA. She led the pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses. 10. Anne McLaren (1927-2007) McLaren produced the first litter of mice grown from eggs that had been developed in tissue culture and transferred to a surrogate mother, paving the way for human in vitro fertilisation. Today's Trail Blazers 1. Susan Greenfield Professor of pharmacology, University of Oxford "People don't sell science to young people, and especially to girls, as well as they might. It takes time and resources to send people into schools. Doing that sort of thing is regarded very badly in the scientific community, it is seen as 'dumbing down'." 2. Patricia Fara Director of studies, history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University "Younger women believe there is no discrimination against women in science, but I think that is optimistic. Women are squeezed out of exciting research projects. It certainly isn't a level playing field, you just have to look at the statistics. It is tough for women." 3. Julia Higgins Professor of polymer science, Imperial College London "Even now women in science are rather invisible. It is a cultural thing. When people talk about Newton and Darwin, we want them to remember the women who did amazing things, too." 4. Uta Frith Emeritus professor of cognitive development, University of London "We still have a long way to go. Women had a late start in the profession. I'm privileged to be one of the few women recognised in science, but there are so many talented women who will do great things." 5. Sunetra Gupta Professor of theoretical epidemiology, Oxford University "It is only since I undertook to write a children's book on women scientists that I have come to know their lives in any detail - which is embarrassing, but also makes me realise how much of a need there is for the book."

6. Maggie Aderin-Pocock Royal Society university research fellow and a space scientist for Astrium Ltd "My career has been great up until now, but I'm due to give birth to my first child in three weeks time, so that might pose more of a problem. Career breaks are a problem in science, as you aren't keeping up with the cutting-edge research." 7. Athene Donald Deputy head, department of physics, Cambridge University "There is an unconscious bias. The number of women science professors is only about 11 per cent. It is improving, pathetically slowly. I think the Royal Society is working really hard over the gender issue. That they put their hands up and say 'mea culpa' is a positive message." 8. Helen Mason Solar physicist, Cambridge University "Research grants have been cut and universities are suffering financially; people are being made redundant. My fear is that the young women scientists will be hit hardest by this. Indeed, I know that this is happening, and I feel powerless to stop it." 9. Ottoline Leyser Professor of biology, University of York "The list highlights how tremendously recent it has been that we've had the equality we are now enjoying, and how frustrating it is that things are not moving faster." 10. Nancy Rothwell MRC research professor, University of Manchester "I'm often asked how I manage in a male dominated profession. I just don't recognise this description. I have experienced nothing but support from all my male colleagues."

Tech.view Mother of invention Aug 3rd 2007 From Economist.com Why is Japan the source of so many bright ideas? WHEN it comes to being awarded patents, the Japanese are world champions. Japan has more than 1,200 patents per million people— more than twice as many as Switzerland, the next most prolific country (with 500 patents per million), and more than three times as many as third-ranking America (with 350 patents per million). Does that make Japan the most innovative country in the world? Difficult to say. But something rather exceptional is at work in Japan that encourages its scientists, engineers, workers and even housewives to seek fame and fortune by patenting their brainwaves. There’s a problem, of course, with using patents as an index of national performance. Patents are awarded for something that is novel, useful and non-obvious. As such, they measure success in discovering or inventing new things. They do not measure innovation, nor the economic activity that ensues. In the grand scheme of things, inventions are the easy part. Turning inventions or discoveries into innovations—ie, products and processes that enrich our lives or improve our well-being—is a vastly more demanding business. Inventions and discoveries are made in the lab or on the kitchen table by a handful of individuals. By contrast, innovations absorb the energies and fortunes of large corporate teams and can take years to bring to fruition. An invention that cost $1,000 to conceive can easily cost $10m to turn into a successful innovation. Even so, with nothing better at hand, patents are often used as a proxy for innovation. And Japan’s high patenting performance says much about the country’s instincts for innovation. However, Japanese patents

tell a mixed story. As noted in our “At a glance” feature on inventiveness, published on Economist.com on July 30th there’s a lot of multiple-counting in Japanese patent figures. The reasons are as much cultural as historical. Although Japan is not a particularly litigious society, Japanese courts are more preoccupied with the letter than the spirit of the law, and can be extraordinarily pernickety when cases do go to trial. Until recently, when Japan’s patent standards began to converge with American and European ones, that forced Japanese patent examiners to adopt a far more atomistic view of what constitutes a patentable invention. Thus, were a bicycle to be patented in Japan, it could not be defined simply as a human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle, but would have to be considered as a family of patents covering the frame, wheels, crank, pedals, handlebars and saddle. But even after discounting for the Japan Patent Office’s multiple-counting, Japan still patents way over its weight. What was not mentioned in “At a glance” was that the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) white paper it was based on (which, in the interest of full disclosure, your columnist had a hand in writing) handicapped Japan by discarding one-third of its patents from the start. And still it came out top. Also left unsaid—and most intriguing of all—was that Japan achieves its stellar performance with rather mediocre inputs. The EIU study created four indices for each of the 82 countries examined. Apart from the innovation index based on patents granted, two further indices ranked each country’s direct drivers of innovation (national research effort, education standards, technical skills, broadband penetration, etc) as well as those indirect environmental factors considered conducive for innovation (such as rule of law, tax regime, economic stability, labour flexibility and patent protection). Finally, an aggregate enabling index was created from a 70/30 weighting of the direct and indirect drivers. Despite having one of the best-educated workforces in the world, superb IT infrastructure, a well-oiled administration, good rule of law and protection of intellectual property, Japan ranks a lowly 14th in terms of its enablers for innovation. So, why does the country perform so well on the output side of the innovation equation, despite having such feeble drivers on the input side? No one really knows. You can make educated guesses. The concentration of talent in manufacturing. The pursuit of excellence. The ferocious rivalry between Japan’s large electronics firms. The lingering relic of the country’s post-war catch-up mentality. Fears of economic isolation given the expansion of the European Union and the emergence of the North American Free-Trade Area. Anxiety about a rapidly ageing society facing a formidable pensions and health-care crisis. All this may or may not play a part. But beyond the more obvious economic imperatives lie certain social factors that appear to be at work as well. In the early 1980s the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (HILL) in Tokyo sought to capture the spirit of the times by looking at Japanese society through a prism of hitonami—a national tendency of wanting to be like others. HILL argued that the old feudal habit of watching neighbours closely to see what behaviour the local war lord condoned or forbade had served modern society well. In particular, it helped explain why Japanese consumers had traditionally been quick to embrace new products. In certain ways, the customers were being even more innovative than the suppliers. Back in Japan for his biannual pilgrimage, your columnist is beginning to feel that this tendency may explain much of the country’s natural talent for innovation. Certainly, coming up with bright ideas for future products involves a lot of informal and subjective “tacit” knowledge as well as documented “explicit” know-how. The accumulation and sharing of this tacit understanding (which is largely impossible to record) is what makes Japan tick. You only have to go into a Japanese pub in the evening to hear animated businessmen carrying on their after-hours office discussions. Perhaps it is the birru, jizake and shochu that are the real tonics for innovation.

US, EU, Japan fight China on rare earths By Leslie Hook in Beijing, Joshua Chaffin in Brussels and Alan Beattie in Washington FINANCIAL TIMES Last updated: March 13, 2012 1:33 pm

©Reuters The US, European Union and Japan have teamed up to bring a rare joint case at the World Trade Organisation against China over its export controls on rare earths. US president Barack Obama was expected to announce the action later on Tuesday. But speaking in Brussels, Karel De Gucht, the EU trade commissioner, said Chinese restrictions on exporting the metals – 17 elements used to manufacture a wide range of items, from weapons to BlackBerrys – were hurting European manufacturers and “must be removed”.

More China produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s rare earths. Its stranglehold on global supplies caused alarm in 2010 when it temporarily halted exports to Japan after a diplomatic dispute. Beijing on Tuesday rejected the claims by the US, EU and Japan, saying China would “continue to implement effective management of rare earths exports in accordance with WTO regulations”. The foreign ministry said China hoped that “other countries with rare earths will also actively develop their rare earths resources to share the burden of global rare earths supply”. In more pointed comments, Xinhua, the state press agency, said the move was “rash and unfair”, adding that it “may hurt economic relations between the world’s largest and second-largest economies”. “A better choice for the United States would be sitting down with China face to face and solve the problem through negotiations instead of making it an internationalised issue,” Xinhua said in an opinion piece. China explains its export restrictions as part of a domestic crackdown on illegal rare earths mines. To help clean up the industry, Beijing has tightened controls on domestic mining and announced a production cap, although enforcement of these measures varies from province to province. Mr De Gucht expressed frustration that China had not addressed concerns about its rare earths policy after losing a recent WTO case on raw materials. That dispute was considered a litmus test for how the trade body might approach a case over rare earths. “This leaves us no choice but to challenge China’s export regime again,” he said. Ahead of the formal announcement by Mr Obama, Ron Kirk, US trade representative, said China continued to “make its export restraints more restrictive, resulting in massive distortions and harmful disruptions in supply chains for these materials throughout the global marketplace”.

The US administration has been criticised by Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination, for being insufficiently tough on China’s trade and currency policies. The White House counters that it has brought WTO cases against Beijing at nearly twice the rate of the administration of George W. Bush. Last week, the White House unveiled a “trade enforcement unit” – a joint operation between different government agencies including the trade representative’s office and the commerce department, aimed at strengthening the US’s ability to bring and defend cases against its major trading partners. Congress, with the strong support of the Obama administration, recently passed a law to allow the US to continue to impose two kinds of defensive tariff simultaneously on imports from China and Vietnam – a practice that had been challenged by a federal court. EU officials estimate that the Chinese restrictions force European manufacturers to pay double the price of their Chinese competitors for rare earths. The trade dispute comes at an awkward time in EU-China relations. Brussels has been seeking to persuade Beijing to deploy some of its vast foreign currency reserves to help ease the eurozone’s debt crisis. So far, those pleas have brought public expressions of support, but only modest purchases of European bonds, according to EU officials. In recent years, China has lowered the export quotas for rare earths causing Tokyo, Washington and Brussels to lobby Beijing to loosen its controls on these critical elements. Last year, China’s export quota was 30,184 tonnes, down 40 per cent from 49,510 tonnes in 2009. This year’s quota will be in line with last year’s, according to the commerce ministry. The price of rare earths in China skyrocketed last year as Chinese traders started stockpiling and state-owned mining groups began building rare earths reserves, although prices have since come down due to weak global demand.

Influential modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer dies aged 104

He was a towering patriarch of modern architecture who shaped the look of contemporary Brazil Nick Clark Thursday 06 December 2012 The Independent

Oscar Niemeyer, one of the 20 century’s most influential modernist architects, has died at the age of 104. Niemeyer’s work, famous for its sweeping curves and space-age look, was inspired by the landscape of his native Brazil and the women who sunbathed on its beaches. The architect, who had been working right until the end, died on Wednesday at the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro following a respiratory infection. A memorial service was held yesterday at the presidential palace in Brasilia, while the mayor of his home city Rio de Janeiro declared three days mourning. Niemeyer won a string of awards including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) in 1998. Tony Chapman, head of awards at Riba, said the Brazilian had created “a heritage. He had a huge influence, not all of it direct.” When the Government decided to move the capital on Brazil’s central high plains from Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, Niemeyer planned a series of buildings for the city. Brasilia was declared a World Heritage Landmark by Unesco in 1987. In describing his architectural style, he wrote in his 1998 memoir The Curves of Time: “I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves.” He continued: “The curve I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire universe, the curved universe of Einstein,” he said. Chapman said Niemeyer’s influence could be seen in Zaha Hadid’s work “although she may not agree” adding there was elements of influence on David Chipperfield and Frank Gehry. Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasilia

One of Niemeyer’s best known buildings is the Cathedral, with its “Crown of Thorns” cupola. The building, whose cornerstone was laid in 1958, was not completed until 1970. It has 16 poured concrete pillars with glass in between. Inside sculptures of angels are suspended over the nave with steel cables, while the altar was donated by Pope Paul VI. The building, which won him the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize, is estimated to have close to 1 million visitors a year, the most visited tourist attraction in Brasilia. Tony Chapman, head of awards at Riba, called it an “extraordinary” building. The Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art The flying saucer-shaped museum in Rio de Janeiro, which was completed in 1996, has stunning views over Guanabara Bay and Sugarloaf Mountain. Niemeyer worked with structural engineer Bruno Contarini to make the 16m high building, with a cupola 50m in diameter. His vision for the museum, originally sketched out on a restaurant tablecloth, was one of “rising upward, like a flower, or a bird.” Mr Chapman said: “The museum does look like it was dropped from outer space.” While he does not rate the building as one of Niemeyer’s finest, he added: “It is in the most stunning location. The setting and the approach to the building are very dramatic.” Palacio da Alvorada The official residence of the president of Brazil sits by the banks of Lago Paranoa. The name Palacio da Alvorada is translated as Palace of Dawn, a quote from Juscelino Kubitschek, then president of Brazil: “What is Brasilia, if not the dawn of a new day for Brazil.” It was the first government building constructed in the city, completed in 1958. Mr Chapman hailed Niemeyer’s “origami style” and said the Palace was “quite incredible, the supports are so delicate and graceful.” The palace was restored to its original splendour in 2004, in a two year project that cost $18.4m. French Communist party building in Paris Niemeyer, who was a communist, left Brazil in 1964 following a military coup and opened an office in Paris. From his office on the Champs-Elysees, he developed the headquarters of the French Communist Party. The undulating building was constructed between 1967 and 1972 in the 19 arrondissement. Mr Chapman said: “You have to go inside to really appreciate the building. Unlike many of his buildings in Brasilia, this one is completely unchanged. It’s like stepping back in time.” The architect waived his fee for the project, and he also designed the headquarters of the communist party newspaper L’Humanite in St Denis. Ministry of Justice At the north of the Esplanada of ministries sits the Palacio da Justica, was designed in 1957 and completed in 1963. Mr Chapman picked it out as one of his favourite of Niemeyer’s buildings in Brasilia, with its “wonderful design projecting watershoots, and the novel landscaping.” Water cascades out of the façade and into the pools below. The aquatic garden at the front of the building was created by Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. The palace was named after writer and former president of the Brazilian Bar Association Jose Bonifacio in 2006.

Libraries to store all UK web content By David Sillito Arts Correspondent 5 April 2013 Last updated at 00:30 GMT BBC web site Online content on platforms such as Twitter will be stored

Millions of tweets, Facebook status updates and even a blog about a bus shelter in Shetland are to be preserved for the nation. The British Library and four other "legal deposit libraries'" have the right to collect and store everything that is published online in the UK. It is estimated around a billion pages a year will be available for research. It follows 10 years of planning and will also offer visitors access to material currently behind paywalls. The other institutions involved are the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. The archive will cover 4.8 million websites and will include magazines, books and academic journals as well as alternative sources of literature, news and comment such as Mumsnet, the Beano online, Stephen Hawking's website, and the unofficial armed forces' bulletin board, ARRSE. Ben Sanderson from the British Library said while people may think information on the web lasts forever, huge amounts of research material has already disappeared. He added the public had already "lost a lot of the material that was posted by the public during the 7/7 bombings". MP's blog sites have also been lost following a death or an election defeat. Top 100 websites Mr Sanderson explained that with much of public life having migrated to the online world, material that is now published physically gives only a part of the story and debate within modern Britain. He said: "It will be impossible to tell for instance the story of the 2015 general election without accessing what appears on the web". The new databases will cover all areas of interest, for example the website Style Scout - a fashion blog documenting London Street Fashion - will give historians a snapshot of what people were wearing in 2013. As part of the launch of the process, the British Library has commissioned a survey of the top 100 websites that ought to be preserved for historians and researchers. Among the sites recommended to keep material from are eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Tripadvisor and Rightmove. Some other lesser known ones include the Anarchist Federation, the Dracula Society and The Dreamcast Junkyard - a blog dedicated to the community of gamers who continue to play Dreamcast games online, despite the fact they were officially discontinued in 2002. The British Library is also asking for advice from the public as to which websites should be preserved to give an accurate picture to future generations.

$1bn gift of cubist art to transform New York's Met Cosmetics heir and heavy-weight philanthropist Leonard A Lauder has donated 78 pieces to the museum

David Usborne The Independent New York Wednesday 10 April 2013

Privileged residents of New York City – and the tourists who besiege it – will soon have a significant new present to unwrap, namely a billion-dollar trove of paintings from the Cubist era donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the cosmetics heir and heavy-weight philanthropist Leonard A Lauder. It might be hard to imagine an institution such as the Met, the largest art museum in the western hemisphere, being transformed by a single gift. Yet that will be the impact of the shipments that have already started to arrive from the private vaults of Mr Lauder. In all, he has promised to hand over 78 Cubist pieces to the museum, including 33 works by Pablo Picasso and 17 by Georges Braques. The collection, valued by Forbes at over $1bn, which will go on show for the first time in autumn 2014, is “unsurpassed in the number of masterpieces and iconic works critical to the development of Cubism”, the museum said. The gift is sparking particular curatorial delight because Cubism, which ushered in the wider period of abstract painting, has until now been underrepresented on the Met’s walls. “This is a gift to the people who live and work in New York, and those from around the world who come to visit our great arts institutions,” Mr Lauder, who is also funding a research institute into modern art at the Met, said in a brief news release. The acquisition is also a major catch for the director of the Met, Thomas Campbell, who is English. Mr Lauder – whose younger brother Ronald Lauder is also a renowned collector and the founder of the Neue Galerie on New

York City’s Upper East Side, devoted to Austrian and German work including some notable pieces by Gustav Klimt – had been mulling over where to send his collection for years. “This is an extraordinary gift to our museum and our city,” Mr Campbell, who lived in Cambridge before moving to America, noted. He acknowledged that the institution he took over in 2008 had “long lacked this critical dimension in the story of modernism”. With the Lauder paintings, it may now eclipse the Cubist collections of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art also in New York. “Now, Cubism will be represented with some of its greatest masterpieces, demonstrating both its role as the ground-breaking movement of the 20th century and the foundation for an artistic dialogue that continues today,” Mr Campbell said. “In one fell swoop this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art… It is an un-reproducible collection, something museum directors only dream about.” Highlights in the collection include Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair (Eva), (1913), featuring an erotic rendering of the painter’s mistress Eva Gouel, and The Oil Mill (1909). There are works also from the very beginnings of the European Cubist movement, including Trees at L’Estaque by Braque as well as Terrace at the Hotel Mistral, L’Estaque (1907) by the same painter. That Mr Lauder chose the Met over other museums is not surprising, given that New York is his home. He has long sat on a number of committees at the Met, though he is better known as the one-time chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Whenever I’ve given something to a museum, I’ve wanted it to be transformative,” Mr Lauder told The New York Times. “This wasn’t a bidding war. I went knocking, and the door opened easily.”

New documentary brings Norman Foster to the big screen Saturday 20 February 2010 The Independent

1/2 British arts consultancy Art Commissioners has premiered How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster? at the Berlin Film Festival, aiming to excite far more than "just" the design buffs. "It also speaks to the specialists and the priesthood of design, but it's not just for them," producers Elena Ochoa and Antonio Sanz said of their documentary. "It speaks to everybody who has ever been excited by a work of art, or who has understood that some spaces have special qualities that others do not share. "It's for everybody who has been excited by the daring of a bridge, jutting out into space, or by the spectacle of a skyscraper that can define the identity of a city." The film follows British architect Norman Foster, the creator of the Beijing airport, the Berlin Reichstag, the New York Hearst building and the world's tallest vehicular bridge, the Millau Viaduct in France, documenting his work in a cinematic style. "It tells the story through images. Key projects are filmed in detail, conveying the movement of sunshine across the atrium of the Hearst Tower, the exhilaration of crossing the heights over the Pont Millau through early morning mist, [...] or how the restoration of the German parliament becomes the symbol of a reunified nation. The experience of moving through each of these spaces shows what makes them special," the producers said. How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster? is the first feature film dealing with the architect and will be the beginning of a series of films on art and culture personalities by Art Commissioners. Clips of the movie can be watched at here, here, and here. http://www.artcommissioners.com

Oxford Catalysts plans waste-fed factory By Peter Marsh March 26, 2013 8:24 pm Financial Times A new manufacturing era, in which small plants produce oil and plastics from waste materials, is about to dawn in the UK, according to Oxford Catalysts, the chemicals technology group. In announcing the company’s 2012 results, chief executive Roy Lipski said he hoped to finalise at least one contract for the building of a $250m “commercial-sized” plant – capable of making up to 120,000 tonnes of oil or plastics a year from waste streams – in the next nine months. Oxford Catalysts is among the leaders in a clutch of businesses trying to find a way to convert relatively lowvalue carbon-containing materials into higher-value diesel, jet fuel or industrial chemicals. Its technology works by using such substances as rotting vegetables and household waste as source materials, or flare gas from oilfields that would normally be wasted. These ideas have already excited interest both in the energy industry, and in chemicals manufacturing. In the second of these areas, Mr Lipski said his company’s technology could assist in parts of the world that are distant from conventional chemical feedstocks. “It’s possible to envisage ways of using our technology in small distributed plants that, by forming a source of materials for other factories fairly close by, could help to shorten manufacturing supply chains,” said Mr Lipski. One of the companies evaluating such ideas is Calumet, a US maker of speciality chemicals that is trying out some of Oxford Catalysts’ technology. Calumet is among a number of possible candidates for announcing the construction of a full-scale production venture by the end of 2013. The latest news and analysis on the world’s changing climate and the political moves afoot to tackle the problem. Formed in 2006, Oxford Catalysts raised £30m this year in investments to further its technology, and has so far failed to make a profit – with Mr Lipski refusing to disclose when this might happen. He was speaking after the company announced that its losses, adjusted for depreciated, amortisation and related payments, rose 2 per cent in the year to December 31 2012 to £7.9m, after £7.7m the year before. However, the company made progress in pushing up revenues 61 per cent to £7.6m in 2012, from £4.7m in the previous 12 months. The loss per share was flat at 11.5p (11.4p). Oxford Catalysts will soon take on the name of Velocys, a subsidiary business. Between them Oxford Catalysts and Velocys – which has its headquarters in the US and was bought in 2008 – have spent about $300m on developing technical ideas over 15 years.

German ships blaze Arctic trail Two German merchant ships are sailing from Asia to Europe via Russia's Arctic coast, having negotiated the once impassable North East Passage.

This route is usually frozen but rising temperatures in the region caused by global warming have melted much of the ice allowing large ships to go through. The North East passage has tempted mariners for hundreds of years. In 1553 the British voyager Sir Hugh Willoughby died attempting to find the route. The German ships Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight arrived in the Siberian port of Yamburg, in the Ob river delta, on Monday, owner Beluga Shipping GmbH said on its website. Both ships left South Korea in late July, negotiating the passage off north-eastern Siberia behind two Russian icebreakers. "We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary North East Passage and delivered the sensitive cargo safely through this extraordinarily demanding sea area", said Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg. Retreating ice The ships have been offloading some of their cargo. Beluga spokeswoman Verena Beckhusen told AP that the Beluga Fraternity had already left to continue its journey via Murmansk to the Dutch port of Rotterdam. The Foresight's departure has been postponed until Saturday because of bad weather, she added. But the once impenetrable ice that prevented ships travelling along the northern Russian coast has been retreating rapidly because of global warming in recent decades. The passage became passable without ice breakers in 2005. By avoiding the Suez canal, the trip from Asia to Europe is shortened by almost 5,000km (3,100 miles). The company behind the enterprise says it is saving about $300,000 per vessel by using the northern route. Both the Russian authorities and the German shippers are keen to prove the safety and efficiency of the passage, believing it could be a valuable commercial alternative to the Suez canal in summer. Despite the rise in temperatures the route is still dangerous, with icebergs moving more freely in the warmer waters. Scientists estimate that the last time that the North East Passage was as ice free as it is now was between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8251914.stm Published: 2009/09/11 21:45:40 GMT © BBC MMIX

Ten questions science must answer For 350 years, the Royal Society has called on the world's biggest brains to unravel the mysteries of science. Its president, Martin Rees, considers today's big issues, while leading thinkers describe the puzzles they would love to see solved

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Martin Rees, with interviews by Alok Jha and John Crace The Guardian, Tuesday 30 November 2010

Today we celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. It signalled the emergence of a new breed of people – described by Francis Bacon as "merchants of light". They sought to understand the world by experiment and observation, rather than by reading ancient texts. They were motivated by curiosity, but also engaged with the practical problems of their time – improving navigation, cultivating forests, rebuilding London after the Great Fire, and so forth. Over the last 350 years our lives have been changed beyond recognition by the application of science. In 1660, vast areas were terra incognita; today, rapid communication and travel makes the world seem connected, even constricted. Some of the changes have been less benign: this is the first century when one species – ours – risks irreversibly degrading the entire planet's environment. We are now in a time of challenges and adversity but it is also a time for scientific opportunity. Issues relating to global health and sustainability must stay high on the agenda if we are to cope with an ageing and ever-increasing population, with growing pressure on resources, and with rising global temperatures. The risks and dangers need to be assessed and then confronted. The need to develop "clean" energy, new vaccines and better resources means science has a critical role to play over the coming years. Helping to meet the challenges of the 21st century demands technological advancement – and an optimal use of existing knowledge. From the growth of the internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore. We have learned so much over the last 350 years, but with every answer comes more questions. From a personal perspective I am disappointed that we have yet to really achieve a full understanding of the origins of life on Earth. What was the spark that, billions of years ago, kickstarted the process of evolution that has brought us life as we know it today? I hope that we will get some answers to that in my lifetime. Looking further ahead is notoriously difficult, but whatever breakthroughs are in store in the coming decades and beyond, we can be sure of one thing: there will be an ever-widening gulf between what science allows us to do, and what it is prudent or ethical actually to do. In respect of (for instance) human reproductive cloning, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology, robotics and geoengineering, regulation will be called for, on ethical as well as prudential grounds. In terms of what we should be looking to achieve, a huge priority must be to decarbonise our energy needs. Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources. Science has a huge part to play in the development, and the very survival, of humankind in both the near and distant future. Some of the challenges are obvious and some of the solutions are already being worked on by scientists. New challenges will emerge and in science we have seen again and again that some of the greatest breakthroughs are the unpredictable outcomes of pure curiosity. As we look to the next 350 years of the Royal Society we have no crystal ball that allows us to predict the detailed course of scientific discovery. However, we can be sure that today's young people will live their lives in a world where science – and the way it is applied – will play a greater role than ever before. Martin Rees is the Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society.

Hubble's over-budget successor may be delayed for years

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18:42 11 November 2010 by Sujata Gupta New Scientist

The James Webb Space Telescope, already billions of dollars over budget and several years behind schedule, will be delayed by at least another year, to 2015, and will cost $1.5 billion more than current estimates, an independent review panel says. Costs and delays could escalate even further if funding for the project does not increase substantially in 2011 and 2012. Cost estimates have risen for the ambitious mission, billed as the Hubble Space Telescope's heir, since the idea for the telescope was floated in the late 1980s. At that time, proponents estimated that the project would cost about $1 billion. In 2008, NASA officials upped that amount to $5 billion. Though Congress approved all requested funding for JWST in 2009 and 2010, NASA came back asking for an additional $95 million and $20 million in each respective year. Those escalating costs prompted Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, head of the congressional subcommittee that funds NASA, to call for an independent investigation into the project. "I am committed to space-based astronomy," said Mikulski in a written statement. But "we are not in the business of cost overruns".

Best-case scenario The seven-member review panel released its report (pdf) on Wednesday. The panel estimates that an additional $1.5 billion is needed to launch the mission, putting the project's total cost at $6.5 billion. And it says the mission could not be made ready for launch until at least September 2015, more than a year after its current target launch date of June 2014. And those estimates are best-case scenarios. To meet the 2015 launch date, the panel says $200 million to $250 million would have to be added to the project's budget in each of the next two years. That represents about a fifth of NASA's annual budget for astrophysical missions like JWST. "I doubt we're going to find $200 million [per year]," NASA Associate Administrator Chris Scolese told reporters on Wednesday. "We're in a time of fiscal [conservatism] where we have to make every dollar count."

New management It is not yet clear whether NASA will try to funnel money from other projects to JWST to make the 2015 launch date or whether the mission will get delayed even further. Panelists blamed poor management and oversight of the programme for the rising costs and delays. NASA responded by reorganising the mission's management structure and creating a new position, the JWST programme manager. Under the new design, JWST project leaders both at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, and at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will have to report directly to that programme manager who, in turn, will report to top NASA officials. But despite its criticisms of the project's management, the panel was quick to point out that the JWST mission itself will do top-notch science. The telescope will boast a 6.5-metre mirror, nearly three times as wide as Hubble's, and will peer back at distant objects that appear as they were a couple of hundred million years after the big bang. "This is a remarkable telescope and will be an outstanding facility that stands on the shoulders of Hubble," said panelist Garth Illingworth of the University of California Observatories.

Norman Borlaug Norman Borlaug, who died on September 12 aged 95, won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his achievement in promoting the use of more productive cereal strains in order to feed the world’s vast population of the starving; his efforts to introduce hybrid cereal varieties into

agricultural production in Pakistan, India, Mexico and other developing countries are estimated to have saved about a thousand million people from dying of hunger. Published: 5:48PM BST 13 Sep 2009

Borlaug, then visiting professor at Texas A&M University looking over some sorghum tests, Oct. 30, 1996, in one of A&M's teaching greenhouses, in College Station, Texas. Photo: AP Borlaug spent his life on the borders of traditional agriculture and biotechnology and stood at the centre of the greatest and most dramatic success stories in world farming — the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in subSaharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were once widely predicted. But Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” was not “green” in the modern sense. High yields demanded artificial fertiliser, chemical pesticides and new soil technology. As a result of this he was vilified by many in the environmental movement in the securely affluent West, some of whom argued that higher food production sustains more people and thus poses a threat to the natural environment. It was somewhat ironic, therefore, that his interest in plant breeding had been sparked by his own horror at the environmental devastation and dustbowls of the 1930s, when native deer and wild turkeys disappeared from the American Midwest. Many blamed the phenomenon on a combination of technological farming and dry weather conditions. But Borlaug's staunch belief that the problem was not too much technological farming but too little has proved to be the correct one. The introduction of new, drought resistant strains of crops has made dust bowl conditions rare because few crops have failed. Moreover, more productive hybrids have enabled marginal land to be taken out of production; wild areas have been reclaimed for nature and the deer and wild turkeys have returned. Borlaug believed that similar results could be achieved elsewhere. It was also largely left to Borlaug to argue the moral imperative of food for the world's malnourished – whether they "should" have been born or not, he argued, once alive they must have enough to eat. Norman Ernest Borlaug was born in the small Norwegian-American farming community of Saude, near Cresco in Iowa on March 25 1914. He grew up on his father's small grain and livestock farm and, after graduating from Cresco High School, studied at the University of Minnesota where he gained a degree in Forestry and was a member of the university's wrestling team. After graduation, he worked for a time in the forestry service in Massachusetts and Idaho, but the job fell through. He then began a graduate degree, followed by a doctorate, in plant pathology. After three years of research work at Du Pont de Nemours in Delaware, in 1943 Borlaug joined the Rockefeller Foundation co-operative project with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, set up to solve the problem of the devastation of the country's wheat harvests by stem rust. Except for brief intervals, he lived in the developing world from then on. Borlaug and his colleagues developed a drought-hardy, rust-resistant strain of wheat, then crossed it with a dwarf Japanese strain to produce a hybrid short enough to survive the wind, and channel growth into grain. Once the Rockefeller's Mexican programme was producing high-yield dwarf wheat for Mexico, Borlaug began to argue

that farmers in other areas of the world would benefit from growing similar crops. The proposition was controversial since it implied replacing indigenous Indian and African crops such as lentils and cassava with "western" crops such as wheat. In 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico established the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), as an outgrowth of their original programme, and sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, which were then descending into famine. At first Borlaug failed to persuade the state-owned seed and grain monopolies to switch to high yield crops. But by 1965 famine was so bad that the governments agreed to try his dwarf wheat. A shipment was arranged from America, but the India-Pakistan war intervened. Nevertheless Borlaug and local scientists planted the first crop of dwarf wheat, sometimes working to the sound of artillery. Sowed late, the crop germinated poorly, yet yields rose by 70 per cent. This prevented general starvation in the region, although there were riots in Kerala when local people were presented with sacks of wheat flour instead of the traditional rice. Owing to the wartime emergency, Borlaug was given the go-ahead to try again the following year. The results exceeded all expectations. By 1968 Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; India followed a few years later. Since the 1960s, food production in both countries has outpaced the rate of population growth and, in the mid 1980s, India even became a net exporter. In 1968, the administrator for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) wrote in his annual report that the phenomenal improvement in food production in the subcontinent looked like "a Green Revolution" – which was how it came to be known. In the 1980s, the "Green Revolution" spread to China, which is now the world's biggest food producer, but by the time Borlaug began to turn his energies to Africa, where Malthusian mass starvation was still a plausible threat, a backlash had set in. Notwithstanding the fact that Borlaug's initial efforts in a few African nations yielded the same rapid increases in food production as did his efforts on the Indian subcontinent, environmental lobbyists persuaded Borlaug's backers in the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation too backed away partly because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. Borlaug, once an honoured presence at international symposia, began to feel like a pariah. The opposition to Borlaug's intensive farming methods was exacerbated by the negative publicity surrounding genetic engineering. Borlaug's work was not, properly speaking, in genetic modification. He used so-called natural methods of plant breeding and was wary of the monopolistic agenda of big agribusiness. But he saw genetic modification as only a refinement of old plant breeding methods and became a strong advocate of its possibilities, both to enable more mouths to be fed and to help the environment. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argued, high-yield farming would help preserve Africa's wild habitats from further depletion by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. The battle over biotech products, he reflected bitterly, was being fought mainly in the rich West, where "governments collectively subsidise their very small farming populations to the tune of $350 billion a year and where many of the major problems of human nutrition are related to obesity". In 1984, at the age of 71, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement by the Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa who, with former American president Jimmy Carter, was working to improve African agriculture. In 1986, Borlaug became president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, and leader of the Sasakawa-Global 2000 agricultural programme in sub-Saharan Africa, which has worked with several million farmers in 15 countries to increase food production. Borlaug remained Senior Scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation and, in 1984, joined the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University as a Professor of International Agriculture. In 1985, he was the driving force behind the establishment of the World Food Prize, which is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding achievement in the fields of food production and nutrition.

Borlaug held numerous honours and awards, including the American Medal of Freedom, which he received in 1977; the Vannevar Bush Award for lifetime achievement in science (2000); and the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (2002). He held 50 honorary doctorates and belonged to the academies of science in 12 nations. He served on two Presidential Commissions: on World Hunger (1978-79) and on Science and Technology (199092). He was also a member of the American Wrestling Hall of Fame. Norman Borlaug married, in 1937, Margaret Gibson, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Case study: Getting food to disaster victims By Jayashankar Swaminatha Published: October 13 2010 20:49 | Last updated: October 13 2010 20:49 Financial Times

Unicef The story. Natural and man-made disasters have led to nutritional emergencies in many countries, and especially in the Horn of Africa. To deal with these challenges, Unicef has adopted the use of ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF). These are portable, long-lasting, single-serving foods that are rich in proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and are used in a prescribed manner to treat children with severe acute malnutrition.

The type of RUTF that has been purchased most often by Unicef is Plumpy’Nut, an oil-based paste of peanuts, sugar, milk powder, vitamins and minerals. It has a shelf life of two years and is packaged in foil sachets weighing 92 grammes, each containing 500 kilocalories. Plumpy’Nut is primarily manufactured by Nutriset, a company based in Malaunay, France. Once it has been manufactured and packaged, Kuehne and Nagel, the logistics company, delivers the product to Le Havre for export by sea or to Paris for export by air. The challenge. In spite of meticulous planning, Unicef had observed a rapid rise in supply chain costs, delivery lead time and emergency orders. Also, humanitarian supply chains present unique difficulties. First, underlying demand can vary widely because of difficult-to-predict factors such as drought, political instability or violence. Second, once the need arises, Unicef must raise money from external funding organisations to purchase humanitarian products. Finally, the combination of political instability and the underdeveloped infrastructure in many of the regions with the greatest need makes the physical distribution of products in these areas especially difficult. How was the supply chain managed and how did it work? The Unicef supply division is the department tasked with overseeing Unicef’s global procurement and logistics operations. It has staff working in 158 country and regional offices, as well as at the supply headquarters in Copenhagen. The division also oversees a supply section in New York and warehouse hubs in Dubai, Panama and Shanghai. Unicef and its partners make estimates of Plumpy’Nut need in their communities. The order planning process starts when a ministry of health or a non-governmental organisation partner identifies a specific need for Plumpy’Nut. The partner then assesses how much Plumpy’Nut is required and relays this information either directly to the Unicef country office (as in Somalia) or to the ministry of health and then Unicef (as in Kenya). Plumpy’Nut presents a unique set of difficulties. First, variable lead times make it hard to predict arrival dates for orders. The sea-freight journey from Le Havre, for example, to Mombasa, the Kenyan port where Plumpy’Nut is received, ranged from 27 to 46 days. Second, Plumpy’Nut was produced by a single, dominant world supplier. Since an increase in demand was driven by emergencies, supply was severely constrained by the company’s ability to produce more quickly enough. Third, there were a range of different methods for forecasting used by different partners, and seasonality is not factored into the process. Given that Unicef relied so heavily on partners, particularly at a local level, feedback varied depending on the implementing partner that assessed the need. Fourth, information was not shared effectively between partners. Existing systems were often standalone structures, which meant the data collected were only available to one set of actors. Reports on handover and feedback on quality was either unavailable or not transparent. What did Unicef do? It diversified the supply base beyond Nutriset and has set up several new factories in Africa under licence from Nutriset. Unicef is also considering establishing a network of warehouses closer to the regions where Plumpy’Nut is needed. Unicef has replicated the changes made to its Plumpy’Nut supply chain in its response to other crises, such in Haiti and Pakistan. The lessons. Unless you keep a close eye on the supply chain and make sure all partners are using the same systems and data collection tools, it can easily become bogged down. It is also important to diversify the supply base for critical products. And whether you are fulfilling the demands of consumers or hungry children, that is costly. The writer is the Glaxo Distinguished Professor of Global Business at the University of North Carolina’s KenanFlagler Business School

Brazil's poor schools Still a lot to learn Jun 4th 2009 | SÃO PAULO From The Economist print edition Brazil’s woeful schools, more than perhaps anything else, are what hold it back. They are improving—but too slowly Agencia Estado

GOD may be Brazilian, as citizens of South America’s largest country like to say, but he surely played no part in designing its education system. Brazil has much going for it these days—stable politics, an open and fairly harmonious society, an economy that has remembered how to grow after decades of stagnation—but when it comes to the quality of schools, it falls far short even of many other developing countries despite heavy public spending on education. In the OECD’s worldwide tests of pupils’ abilities in reading, maths and science, Brazil is near the bottom of the class (see chart). Until the 1970s South Korea was about as prosperous as Brazil but, helped by its superior school system, it has leapt ahead and now has around four times the national income per head. World domination, even the friendly and non-confrontational sort Brazil seeks, will not come to a place where 45% of the heads of poor families have less than a year’s schooling. Moisés Zacarias, who is 14, goes to school in Diadema, a poor suburb of São Paulo that sprang up when millions of people migrated from the countryside to the country’s biggest metropolis, starting in the 1960s. Most of the houses are thrown together, clinging to steep hills and set along narrow alleys. At his school, which has 2,000 pupils, there are three separate shifts of students every day to get the most out of the buildings and teachers. Last year some pupils beat up others during a lesson and posted a video of the attack on the internet. Teachers often fail to show up for work. But Moisés’s school is better than it was five years ago.

Brazil began its education late. When the country was a Portuguese colony even the elite had little access to education at home. The first printing press did not arrive until the 19th century, hundreds of years after books were first printed in the region’s Spanish-speaking countries. Before then presses were illegal. In 1930 just one in five children went to school. When Brazil did decide to build a nationwide education system, the wants of the elite came first. As in India, Brazil still spends a lot on its universities rather than on teaching children to read and write. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came to power criticising his predecessor’s achievements and promising rapid improvements. In fact, his successes have largely come from continuing and expanding the initiatives he inherited. He renamed and enlarged Fundef, the previous government’s programme to supplement local funding for teachers’ pay and schools in poor districts. Cash transfers to poor families, conditional on their children attending school, became more generous and were rolled together with other programmes under the brand name Bolsa Família. After two bad appointments, the president picked a good education minister, Fernando Haddad, who enjoys the backing of educational reformers. Thanks to these programmes 97% of children aged 7-14 now have access to schooling and attendance is good. Yet the federal government can do only so much in a country with around 50m in education. The task of improving schooling falls to state and municipal governments. They face many problems, but two stand out. First, Brazil suffers from teacher truancy. Teachers enjoy a “right” to five days’ absence a year with no warning or explanation, but some take many more. In schools run by state governments, 13% of all school days were lost owing to absent teachers in 2006. On a bad day in bad schools in bad states, teachers’ absenteeism can reach 30%. There are meant to be substitutes who can fill in for missing colleagues but this means that teaching lacks continuity—and there may not be enough stand-ins to go around. Second, too many pupils repeat whole school years over and over. And after a long time spent getting nowhere, lots of children drop out early. Just 42% complete high school. Improving the quality of schools so that more children pass would lead to a marked increase in the amount of money available for

each pupil. To accomplish this Brazil needs qualified teachers, who are in short supply. Many have two or three different jobs in different schools and complain that conditions are intimidating and the pay is low. In São Paulo, which does particularly badly for a rich state, the institutions that administer education are depressed and chaotic, says Norman Gall of the Braudel Institute of World Economics, a think-tank that runs reading circles in ten schools in poor urban districts. The São Paulo state bureaucracy tries to administer its 5,000 schools and 230,000 teachers with a thin staff on low pay. Transferring responsibility for schools to municipalities seems to help, and this has been happening across the country in recent decades. As elsewhere, teachers’ unions present a huge obstacle to improvement. Almost anything that disturbs their peace brings on strikes. At the moment São Paulo’s teachers are striking over a proposal to make new recruits take tests before they start work to ensure they are qualified; last year they were up in arms when the state government asked them to teach from standard textbooks. They opposed a plan to pay staff bonuses depending on their schools’ performance but have gone quiet on this since 70% of the state’s teachers received a bonus a few months ago.

Doing a little better Not everywhere is as bad as São Paulo, and even there you can see some signs of improvement. The state has cut the number of teaching days lost to supposed ill-health (the biggest cause of no-shows) by 60% in a year after changing the law. Reforms in the state could spread across the country if its governor, José Serra, becomes Brazil’s next president in the 2010 election, as opinion polls suggest. In Brazil’s north-east, hardly associated with enlightened public policy, a network of schools called Procentro and run by professional managers rather than unsackable political hacks, is proving successful and expanding. In other places state governments have shown a willingness to work with the private sector to improve schools. Across the country, money follows pupils to schools and children are tested—two of the ingredients for a market in public education. At Moisés’s school in Diadema a new head teacher has instilled some discipline and classes are now a bit more orderly. Jonathan Hannay, who runs Support for Children at Risk, a local charity, and has four children in public schools in the area, says things have improved in the past year, if only because teachers and pupils now work from matching sets of teaching manuals and exercise books. Such small changes can make a difference. But, if it is ever to live up to its potential, Brazil needs to keep reforming its schools, bearing down on the teaching unions and spending more on basic education.

George Best

Mercurial football genius whose flamboyant lifestyle brought a premature end to his playing career Saturday, 26 November 2005 The Independent George Best, footballer: born Belfast 22 May 1946; played for Manchester United 1963-74, Stockport County 1975, Cork Celtic 1976, Los Angeles Aztecs 1976-78, Fulham 1976-77, Hibernian 1979-80, Fort Lauderdale Strikers 1979, San Jose Earthquakes 1980-81, Golden Bay 1981, Bournemouth 1983, Tobermore 1984; capped 37 times by Northern Ireland 1964-77; married 1978 Angela Macdonald Janes (one son; marriage dissolved 1986), 1995 Alex Pursey (marriage dissolved 2004); died London 25 November 2005. 'Genius" is a term so chronically overused in conjunction with sport that it is in danger of being comprehensively devalued. It should be rationed scrupulously, reserved for the truly sublime rather than being squandered on the merely remarkable. However, there should be no hesitation in dusting down the "g" word for a rare fitting recipient, and such a man was George Best. Look beyond the lurid, fast-living image and set aside, for a moment, the alcoholism that was destined to transform his life so tragically. Like Stanley Matthews before him, Best was the symbol of footballing excellence for a whole generation. There were other magnificent players, including Bobby Charlton and Denis Law at his own club, Manchester United; but the mercurial Irishman was on a pedestal of his own. As Matt Busby, his Old Trafford mentor, put it: "George had more ways of beating a player than anyone I've ever seen. He was unique in his gifts." Unfortunately, he was singular, too, in that he was the first "pop star" footballer whose every off-field action was scrutinised by the media. Relevant advice was scant, there being no precedent to his situation, and eventually the ceaseless attention, in which he revelled at first but which he subsequently reviled, goaded him inexorably towards self-destruction. Best was born in 1946, the first of six children of an iron-turner at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. A Protestant, though not in the political sense, he was brought up on the Cregagh housing estate and was crazy for kicking a football from the age of nine months. Though his prodigious natural talent became evident early in his childhood, he was a skinny specimen, verging on the puny and embarrassed by his lack of stature, and his family considered him too small to tilt at a future in the professional game. Nevertheless Best was fanatical about football and idolised the mid-1950s Wolverhampton Wanderers side, then the epitome of sporting glamour through their exploits in a series of Continental friendlies in the days before formal European competition. An intelligent boy, he passed the 11-plus examination only to find that his grammar school majored in rugby. His reaction - and how typical this would seem, later in life - was truancy, partly because he had been split from former friends and partly to play in soccer matches. Soon he was transferred to a secondary modern which catered for his obsession and he progressed, though not enough to earn selection for Northern Ireland Schoolboys. However, Best's breathtaking ability was spotted by Bob Bishop, Manchester United's chief scout in Ulster, who rang Matt Busby and proclaimed: "I think I've found a genius." Even then, the path to stardom was to be tortuous for the seemingly frail wisp of a 15-year-old who crossed the Irish Sea to Old Trafford in 1961. Having barely left his home city before, he travelled on an overnight ferry with the similarly unworldly Eric McMordie - later to enjoy success with Middlesbrough and Northern Ireland - and was distinctly underwhelmed by his reception in Manchester. Little was done to welcome the painfully shy duo and they succumbed to homesickness, returning to Belfast and, in Best's case, to a likely future as a printer. Soon, though, he changed his mind and went back to Old Trafford where, before long, he was to stand the established order on its head in spectacular fashion. He announced his limitless potential in training sessions, sparkling against star performers such as the goalkeeper and fellow Ulsterman Harry Gregg, whom Best duped too repeatedly for beginner's luck to have been a factor. Still only 17, he tasted senior action for the first time in September 1963 and by December he was a fixture in

Busby's side, one of the final elements, and surely the most crucial, in the painstaking reconstruction process which had been under way since the Munich air disaster five years earlier. Operating alongside fellow world-class forwards in Law and Charlton, Best was incandescent, a magical manipulator of a football and an entertainer supreme. Positioned nominally on the wing but roaming at will, he was capable of going past opponent after opponent, able and frequently eager to make brutal assailants look like clumsy buffoons, and he was as clinical a finisher as any in the land. Much is made of his heavenly fusion of skill and speed, balance and timing, which made him sometimes virtually unplayable. In addition, though, Best was immensely brave and, in his early twenties, attained a resilient strength and an unshakeable self-belief which enabled him to laugh in the face of the vicious physical punishment to which he was routinely subjected. To enhance his worth still further, he was mentally acute, which allowed him to apply his instinctive flair to maximum advantage. In short, in a footballing sense he was flawless, possessing the assets to excel in any role. True, there were times when team-mates would scream in exasperation when the Irishman, having dribbled past three defenders, would teeter on the verge of losing possession to a fourth. The chances were, though, that in the next breath they would be hailing a wonder goal, created from a seemingly impossible position. Performing in this vein, Best contributed monumentally to League Championships in 1965 and 1967 and to the attainment of United's so-called holy grail, the European Cup, in 1968. Indeed it was, perhaps, during the exhilarating pursuit of that elusive prize that George Best the footballer made the quantum leap to Georgie Best the pop icon. Early in 1966, the Red Devils had defeated mighty Benfica, the Portuguese champions, by three goals to two in the first leg of a European Cup quarter-final at Old Trafford. The second leg in Lisbon's Stadium of Light was a daunting prospect and Busby, with uncharacteristic caution, had urged his men to play it safe for the first 20 minutes. Best had other ideas. Running at the Eagles' formidable rearguard with swashbuckling abandon, he scored two fabulous goals in the opening 12 minutes and inspired a scintillating 5-1 victory. His display was greeted rapturously but the impact was magnified still further when he donned a sombrero to descend from the plane's steps on his return to England. With his good looks, flowing locks and, now, his sense of the flamboyant away from the pitch, he was enshrined as "El Beatle". Duly, his life took on a different dimension. Now he was public property as never before and he delighted in the advantages thus accrued. Commercial opportunities abounded, beautiful girls prostrated themselves before him and the attraction of alcohol became gradually more insistent. For a long time, though, despite dire warnings from Busby that he was going down the wrong road, that was not a problem to a young and exceptionally fit athlete. Inklings that difficulties were brewing for Best surfaced after 1968, during which he was voted both English and European Footballer of the Year after contributing an opportunist goal to United's European Cup Final defeat of Benfica at Wembley. In the wake of that longed-for triumph, a perhaps understandable sense of complacency emanated from Old Trafford, where a 59-year-old manager with an ageing team might have been excused a little weariness after battling back from the horror of Munich. Best, though, had a different agenda. He was still young and hungry for more honours, becoming increasingly frustrated at what he saw as lack of ambition around him. Not surprisingly, a gradual decline set in at the club, and the fact that it was largely masked by Best's individual splendour - he was top scorer in five successive campaigns from 1967-68 to 1971-72 and once netted six times in an FA Cup tie against Northampton Town - did little to placate United's principal asset. Sadly, there was to be no consolation on the international front, where Best turned in occasional inspirational displays - notably in a stirring win over Scotland at Windsor Park, Belfast, in 1967 - but usually was hamstrung by the poor overall standard of the team. As a result, he would refer to his Northern Ireland efforts as "recreational football", a slight which reflected overweening gall at his unavoidable absence from the world's great tournaments rather than genuine malice.

Back in Manchester, his disillusionment was heightened when Busby refused to make him captain, citing his growing irresponsibility as the reason, and there followed a succession of disciplinary spats and absences without leave as Best turned ever more frequently towards the bottle. In addition, he fell out with Bobby Charlton, being sickened by what he perceived as the older man's holier-than-thou attitude over Best's playboy lifestyle. For his part, Charlton believed, with simple logic, that Best was letting the side down. Meanwhile the Belfast boy's sexual conquests were spread regularly across the newspapers - he admitted that he saw most attractive women as a challenge - and his goldfish-bowl existence intensified when he moved into a custom-built, ultra-modern house in Sale which became a Mecca for rubberneckers. After Busby's retirement, Best led his two successors as manager - first Wilf McGuinness and then Frank O'Farrell - a merry dance with his unscheduled absences, and by the spring of 1972 his situation was approaching crisis point. Though still playing superbly at times, and carrying an otherwise mediocre team, he could no longer shoulder the responsibility and his drinking spiralled dangerously out of control. That May, unable to cope, he announced his retirement and decamped to Marbella, only to return for the start of the new season. But more strife was in store. By December he was transfer-listed after further indiscretions, only to be lured back by yet another new manager, Tommy Docherty. It was a dubious rapprochement which ended in acrimony when the team hit the skids, quickly followed by Best himself, who played his last game for relegationdoomed Manchester United as a distinctly portly 27-year-old, on New Year's Day 1974. What followed was largely irrelevant to what made George Best special in the first place, his football career continuing for a further 10 years but playing second fiddle to drink, sex and gambling, and it constitutes a tale more edifying in summary than gruesome detail. At various junctures he ran the Slack Alice night-club in Manchester and Bestie's Bar at Hermosa Beach, California. There was a spectacular fall-out with one Miss World, Marjorie Wallace, which resulted in Best's being charged with theft before being released without a stain on his character, and a fling with another holder of that title, Mary Stavin. There were marathon benders without number, and sundry brawls; a Christmas spent in prison for drink-driving; various hospitalisations for alcoholism; divorce from Angela Macdonald Janes, the longsuffering mother of his son, Calum; and admitted guilt over the emotional neglect of his mother, who died an alcoholic at the age of 54. Post United, the pick of Best's footballing travels included three summers with Los Angeles Aztecs, during which he faced the likes of Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer and intermittently rediscovered the old flair, fitness and enthusiasm. Also there was an initially exhilarating but eventually unsatisfying brief stint with Second Division Fulham in harness with his fellow showman Rodney Marsh. Then came turbulent sojourns with Fort Lauderdale Strikers and Hibernian, and fleeting service with San Jose Earthquakes, during which he contrived one goal of divine quality, which saw him mesmerise four defenders before beating the goalkeeper. After his divorce from his first wife, there were long-term liaisons with the model Angie Lynn and with Mary Shatila, who also guided his business affairs as he earned a living through personal appearances. In 1995, still fighting alcoholism, he arranged to marry Alex Pursey, a Virgin flight attendant half his age, but failed to turn up for his own wedding because he had gone drinking with another girl. The ceremony took place a week later, but it didn't stop his drinking with other girls. They divorced after nine years. Best continued to thrive as a professional celebrity, an after-dinner speaker and soccer pundit who was engagingly witty when sober, sometimes obnoxious when not. Despite that, despite everything, the game he illuminated so brilliantly remained his defining passion to the last. "I didn't decide one day that I would drink myself to death," he announced after having a liver transplant in July 2002. "It is as a result of alcoholism. Alcoholism is a disease. It's the same with drugs. You don't decide suddenly, 'I'll be a drug addict.' " Best was addicted to alcohol - his continued drinking even after his transplant was to lose him much public sympathy - and he was addicted to women. But most of all he was addicted to football.

He leaves unanswerable questions behind him. How great might he have become but for the bottle? Had Matt Busby been younger, less scarred by past trauma, might he have imposed sufficient discipline to inspire the most naturally gifted player of modern times to scale even loftier peaks? At this distance, it doesn't matter. For seven or eight seasons George Best gave untold pleasure to countless fans all over the world, created so much that was beautiful and left a hoard of deathless memories. And that is enough. Ivan Ponting

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The remarks of President Obama, as released by The White House and prepared for delivery: Vice President Biden, Mr. Chief Justice, Members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens: Each time we gather to inaugurate a president, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. For more than two hundred years, we have. Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers. Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune. Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character. But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people. This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America's possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together. For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America's prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own. We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed. We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries — we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure — our forests and waterways; our

croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared. We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war. Our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by the flames of battle, are unmatched in skill and courage. Our citizens, seared by the memory of those we have lost, know too well the price that is paid for liberty. The knowledge of their sacrifice will keep us forever vigilant against those who would do us harm. But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well. We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully — not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice — not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice. We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm. That is our generation's task — to make these words, these rights, these values — of Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — real for every American. Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life; it does not mean we will all define liberty in exactly the same way, or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time. For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today's victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall. My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction — and we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service. But the words I spoke today are not so different from the oath that is taken each time a soldier signs up for duty, or an immigrant realizes her dream. My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride. They are the words of citizens, and they represent our greatest hope.

You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country's course. You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time — not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals. Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom. Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America.

Yuri Gagarin: The man who fell to Earth Fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. It was a wondrous achievement - so why did the Russians try to mount a major cover-up on the cosmonaut's return? By Paul Rodgers Sunday, 3 April 2011

AFP/Getty Images Gagarin with his wife Valentina and daughter Yelena in June 1960 Anna Takhtarova and her granddaughter, Rita, were weeding potatoes near the village of Smelovka on 12 April 1961 when a man in a strange orange suit and a bulging white helmet approached across the field. The forest warden's wife crossed herself but the girl was intrigued. "I'm a friend, comrades. A friend," shouted the young man, removing his headgear. Takhtarova looked at him curiously. "Can it be that you have come from outer space," she asked. "As a matter of fact, I have," replied Yuri Gagarin. This story of Gagarin's return to Earth after orbiting the planet, the most important flight since the Wright brothers' at Kitty Hawk, was widely disseminated, not least because of its symbolism – a Soviet hero being welcomed home by his fellow peasants, a wise mother and a child of the future. It is probably true in essence, though the details changed with each retelling. But some facts were hidden. One was kept secret for more than a decade, except for an extraordinary occasion when Gagarin risked everything to tell the truth to a man he held in the highest regard – a man who was a Cold War enemy: the Royal Navy's top test pilot. The first cosmonaut's remarkable accomplishment, 50 years ago this month, still reverberates around the world. Without his spur, Nasa might never have reached for the Moon, the space shuttle might fly only between the pages of sci-fi novels and the International Space Station might be just an idea among disappointed space enthusiasts.

John Zarnecki is typical of a generation inspired by Gagarin. An 11-year-old pupil at London's Highgate School in 1961, Zarnecki got a day off when the spaceman visited the nearby grave of Karl Marx. "I stood 12 feet away as he came up to the bust in his military uniform and saluted," Zarnecki recalls. "It was my eureka moment, the realisation that this bloke had been in space for 108 minutes. I had to do that." No one could accuse him of not trying. "I'm a three-times-failed astronaut," he admits. The first time, in 1978, he was in the final 30 British candidates, but was dropped for having poor eyesight. "So I did the next best thing – better in some ways," says the Open University professor of space science. "I designed instruments to be sent to Mars, Halley's comet and Saturn. I'm a space traveller by proxy." Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was the perfect poster boy for the Soviet space programme. The son of a carpenter, he was born in Klushino, Smolensk, 160km west of Moscow, in 1934. His parents worked on a collective farm and he grew up with an older brother and sister, Valentin and Zoya, and a younger brother, Boris. Deprivation under Nazi occupation, on top of Joseph Stalin's disastrous agricultural policies, might have had something to do with the fact he grew to a mere 5ft 2in – but he had a charming smile and an open, friendly demeanour. The war years were hard for the Gagarins. The Germans shipped his teenage siblings to slave labour camps and they did not return until 1945. Yuri and Boris sabotaged the German garrison in Klushino, scattering broken glass on roads, mixing chemicals in recharging tank batteries and pushing potatoes up exhaust pipes. One occupier tried to hang Boris from an apple tree with a woollen scarf, but his parents were able to rescue him. Amid the horrors, one event stood out for Yuri: a dogfight between two Soviet Yaks and a pair of Messerschmitts, ending in a one-all draw. The Soviet pilot landed near Klushino and the villagers rushed to help. Later, a rescue plane arrived to pick up the downed man and Gagarin scavenged fuel for it. The next morning, the airmen awoke to find him staring at them, entranced. He was still watching as they set fire to the wreck and took off in the rescue plane. At 16, Gagarin left for Moscow to apprentice as a foundryman. He was transferred a year later to study tractors at a technical school in Saratov, where he joined an AeroClub and flew, for the first time, in a canvas-clad Yak-18. "That flight filled me with pride and gave meaning to my whole life," Gagarin said later. At 21, he signed up at the Pilots School in Orenberg, where he learnt to sit on a cushion to get a better view for landings. In 1957, he took his first solo flight in a MiG-15 jet, a version of the plane in which he would die in mysterious circumstances 11 years later. Orenberg was also where he met Valentina, a medical technician a year younger than him. At first she couldn't figure out why she kept going out with him, though his self-confidence must have helped. "I'll see you next Friday," he would tell her at the end of each date. They married in October 1957, three weeks after the launch of Sputnik, and went on to have two daughters. On graduation, he was posted to Murmansk, close to the Norwegian border and north of the Arctic Circle. It must have come as a relief when a team of recruiters chose Lieutenant Gagarin for the new cosmonaut training programme, comfortably close to Moscow. Long before Gagarin was born, Sergei Korolev, the aircraft engineer who would send him into space, had become interested in using liquid-fuel rockets to power planes. Korolev would become so important to the Soviets by the 1950s that even his name was a state secret; he was referred to only by his initials or as the Chief Designer, and missed out on a Nobel prize because his superiors wouldn't reveal his identity. But in 1938 he faced a much worse fate – being caught up in Stalin's Great Purge. Shortly after an accidental explosion in his laboratory, Korolev was denounced to the secret police by a colleague, Valentin Glushko, for counter-revolutionary political k activities and harming the work of the institute. He was arrested, tortured (they broke his jaw) and sentenced to 10 years' hard labour. Dispatched to a Siberian gold mine, he came close to death from beatings and scurvy. His frequent letters of appeal led to his recall to Moscow for a retrial. The court found him guilty again, but sent him to a jail for intellectuals, beside his fellow prisoner Glushko. It was not until 1957 that his name was cleared.

With few teeth left after a year in a gulag, Korolev had a pessimistic outlook: he would often talk about "going bang without an obituary", but got a state funeral. Yet he, more than anyone, was to lift mankind's eyes above the horizon. He designed a string of rockets, most powered by Glushko's engines. The most notable was the R-7 "Semyorka", a two-stage rocket and the first true inter-continental ballistic missile. This rocket, recognisable by the four boosters flaring from its midsection, lifted almost all Soviet space missions. In 1961, it would lift Vostok, Gagarin's spaceship. The Soviet union in the 1950s was surrounded by America's allies, from West Germany to Japan, Canada to Iran, where nuclear-armed bombers could be based. But it had little chance of delivering a retaliatory blow. Only missiles could ensure the survival of the Motherland. But rockets had peaceful uses, too. The idea of launching an artificial satellite gained credence among scientists during the 1957 International Geophysical Year, an early attempt at global scientific co-operation. Washington was unenthusiastic. The Russians, however, saw a chance to score a propaganda coup and rushed Sputnik 1 to the launch pad. Less than a month later, Sputnik 2 carried Laika the dog into orbit. The starting gun had been fired in the space race. Gagarin was one of 20 cosmonauts sent to train in the new Star City (later renamed in his honour) outside Moscow. They were subjected to batteries of medical and psychological tests and rigorous physical training, including sessions in centrifuges to prepare them for the G-forces of launch. The score were winnowed down to six, with short men taking preference. Eventually, just two candidates remained: Gagarin and Gherman Titov. Both were smart enough to downplay their rivalry. The decision to give the history-making flight to Gagarin may have been made because the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted a farm boy, like himself, rather than the slightly bourgeois, poetry-quoting son of a school teacher. Or it could be that the programme's directors were saving the stronger Titov for a more arduous, one-day mission in Vostok 2. Titov was distraught, but before his death in 2000, he told the authors of Starman, The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, that his superiors had made the right decision: "Yuri turned out to be the man that everyone loved. Me, they couldn't love. They were right to choose Yuri." They rose at 5.30am on 12 April, though neither Gagarin nor Titov had slept. Both dressed in spacesuits, Titov just in case. They rode to the launch pad together on a bus and said goodbye beside the gantry, banging their helmets together in parody of the traditional Russian triple-cheek air kiss. The Vostok spaceship comprised a spherical descent module and a conical equipment module atop the third stage of an R-7. The ship, call sign Kedr (Cedar), was fully automatic, since the scientists were concerned the crew might lose consciousness, or even their sanity. There was no countdown, which was a purely dramatic invention of the Americans. Korolev checked with Gagarin three times in the hour leading up to the launch and, at 9.06am, the final commands were given. "Launch key to 'go' position." "Air purging." "Idle run." "Ignition." As the G-load climbed, Gagarin shouted "Poyekhali!" – Russian for "Let's go!" Later, in his autobiography, The Road to the Stars, he wrote: "I heard a whistle and an ever-growing din, and felt how the gigantic rocket trembled all over, and very slowly began to tear itself off the launching pad. The noise was no louder than you'd get in a jet plane, but it had a greater range of musical tones and timbres no composer could hope to score."

Much of Gagarin's flight was uneventful as he became the first human to see the Earth as a blue pearl set against the black expanse of space. His return was a different matter: the cables linking the descent and equipment modules did not separate properly and they entered the atmosphere like a pair of tethered conkers, banging against each other until the cable finally burned through. Another event was equally secret, but planned. When Vostok reached an altitude of 7km, Gagarin ejected and parachuted to the ground. This neatly solved the problem of how to touch down safely. But it created a new problem: the Soviets wanted to claim the altitude record, but the rules said the pilot had to land inside his craft. The truth of how Gagarin met Anna Takhtarova 2km from Vostok's crater would have been a propaganda disaster. They had to lie. Reginald Turnill, the BBC's aerospace correspondent, was interviewing Lord Brabazon, holder of Britain's first pilot's licence, when he heard about Gagarin. He left immediately for Moscow. "It went unpleasantly," he says half a century later. "They were determined to humiliate the press." The hall at the Russian Academy of Sciences was packed with officials and workers' representatives, he recalls. "We all wanted to know whether he'd come down inside the ball or ejected." The official answer? "The pilot was in his cabin, the landing proceeded successfully and demonstrated the success of the systems." As Gagarin was prepared for an international victory tour, his early experience as a steelworker re-emerged. "He received an invitation from the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers in Manchester," says Gurbir Singh, an astronomy blogger who is writing a book on the spaceman's visit, Yuri Gagarin in Britain. The trip included the union hall, Marx's Highgate grave and an audience with the Queen. But a highlight for Gagarin would surely have been the 20 minutes he spent with Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown. If Britain has anyone to match Gagarin, it's Brown. At 92, he is four inches taller than the Russian and every bit as charming. He holds the world records for the most kinds of aircraft flown, and the most carrier landings – records unlikely ever to be broken. He served on an exchange programme with John Glenn and Alan Shepard before they became astronauts, and counts Neil Armstrong as a friend. A propeller blade inherited from his father, a First World War flier, stands by the door of Brown's chalet bungalow near Gatwick. His study is packed with models of aircraft he's flown and his shelves with aviation books, more than 20 written by him. One, Wings of the Luftwaffe, tells of his post-war report on the German air force. Although the Luftwaffe destroyed their piston-driven aircraft so the Allies couldn't use them, they left their jet and rocket planes intact. "They were showing off," says Brown. The Russians had bought a bulk lot of Wings of the Luftwaffe, distributing them to technical colleges. It's not hard to imagine a young Gagarin coming across a copy, realising its importance, and later asking to meet its author; it would certainly explain the trust he put in his fellow pilot. "He wouldn't sit down but kept wandering around," says Brown. "I asked him about the landing and he hesitated for a long time. Then he said he'd bailed out. The Admiralty was a bit suspicious: it didn't match the official version." The truth was a state secret, and revealing it could have resulted in Gagarin being shot – but there is perhaps a code of honour between fliers that transcends political boundaries. Over night Gagarin went from being a pilot and cosmonaut, the jobs he loved, to being at best a diplomat, at worst a propaganda tool. Everyone wanted to join his celebration; life became one long party. The mood reached a head at the Kissely dacha, a sanitarium in Foros, Crimea, where the cosmonauts and their families went for a rowdy holiday in September 1961. Gagarin recklessly took some friends out in a motorboat on the Black Sea. As the weather worsened, his hands on the wheel became blistered and grazed from fighting to control the boat. After they were rescued by a bigger craft, he was sent to the medical centre to be patched up by one of the nurses, Anna, a pretty blonde. That evening, while his wife played cards, the intoxicated Hero of the Soviet Union slipped away to Anna's room, where Valentina found him a few minutes later. He tried to escape by jumping from the nurse's balcony, on the second floor, but his foot became tangled in vines growing up the wall and he landed face first, permanently disfiguring his left eyebrow. Gagarin's first question when he regained consciousness was: "Will I fly again?"

The discipline of the cosmonaut corps was slipping, and it worried his superiors. General Nikolai Kamanin, the head of cosmonaut training, wrote in his diary: "It seems to me he's drinking a good deal. He's at the top of his glory, carrying a great moral burden, knowing that his every step is being watched. One or two years will pass, the situation will change drastically, and he will become dissatisfied." Alcohol and women could indeed have been Gagarin's downfall. But he was determined to rise again. In 1963 he was appointed deputy head of cosmonaut training and used his position to get back on the spaceflight roster as back-up on the ill-fated Soyuz 1 mission. Politics was driving the mission to mark the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. An attempt to warn Leonid Brezhnev that the craft had 203 technical problems was quashed by an ambitious KGB apparatchik. The scheduled pilot, Vladimir Komarov, went up knowing he would likely die. Sure enough, the parachute failed. Some reports claim Gagarin later threw a drink at the Soviet leader over his friend's unnecessary death. Gagarin also insisted on getting more flying time; how else could he command respect from the cosmonauts he was training, some of whom were far more experienced than he? And so, on 27 March 1968, he and his instructor, Vladimir Serugin, climbed into a MiG-15 at Star City for a routine exercise. What happened next is the subject of conflicting theories. What is known is that the plane was level but descending when it hit the ground, 96km northeast of Moscow, as if it was pulling out of a dive. There was no alcohol in the pilot's blood and lactose levels indicate that he was alert. The only evidence of unusual circumstances in the plane is that the altimeter was not functioning properly and the canopy was shattered. The plane had been fitted with external fuel tanks, which reduced its manoeuvrability. Radar operators had detected two other planes in the vicinity, one of which has never been traced. The official report says Gagarin hit a weather balloon and crashed. A more recent hypothesis suggests an air vent was left open, causing the cabin to depressurise. Gagarin would have dived had he realised this, but because of the altimeter and poor visibility, he might not have known how close he was to the ground. Cosmonaut Alexi Leonov, who was nearby and heard two bangs, a supersonic boom followed by an explosion, thinks the mystery plane was an advanced SU-11 which broke the sound barrier just as it passed Gagarin's MiG, shattering the canopy and causing him to lose control. No one knows what Gagarin might have accomplished had he lived. Perhaps he deserved a comfortable retirement. Maybe his death saved his image from tarnish. What is undeniable is that his name will be remembered for all time. 1 The anniversary of Gagarin's flight is being marked around the world. In London, the RSC is premiering 'Little Eagles' at the Hampstead Theatre (hampstead theatre.com), while the Science Museum (sciencemuseum.org.uk), is holding a series of activities. For other events, see yurigagarin50.org Space: pushing the final frontier Sputnik 1 Earth's first artificial satellite was launched on 4 October 1957. The Soviet space probe's beeping was picked up by amateur radio operators around the world Luna 3 Launched on 4 October 1959, the USSR's Luna 3 revealed the far side of the Moon, showing it to be far more mountainous than the side facing the Earth Vostok 1 Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth on 12 April 1961. Because of the time difference, Premier Nikita Khrushchev was able to boast that "America sleeps under a Soviet moon" Soyuz 1

The first flight of the most successful series of spacecraft – 67 manned launches – ended in tragedy when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov's parachutes failed to open on 24 April 1968 Apollo 11 The first of six manned missions to successfully land on the Moon touched down on 20 July 1969 under the command of US astronaut Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin described the moonscape as "magnificent desolation" Mariner 9 Launched on 30 May 1971, America's spacecraft was the first to orbit another planet, returning detailed information and images of Mars Salyut 1 The Earth's first space station, launched by the Soviets on 19 April 1971 Pioneer 10 The primary mission of this US probe was to cross the asteroid belt and investigate Jupiter. It was last heard from in 2003 Voyager 1 The first craft designed to travel through interstellar space has flown more than 21bn km since 1977 Cassini A joint mission of Nasa and the European Space Agency, Cassini has been studying Saturn since 30 June 2004, discovering three new moons

Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother Review by Hilary Spurling Published: February 15 2010 05:42 | Last updated: February 15 2010 05:42 Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love By Xinran Translated by Nicky Harman Chatto & Windus £16.99 224 pages FT Bookshop price: £13.59 Where I come from, people talk about smothering a girl baby, or just throwing it into the stream at the edge of the village to be eaten by dogs, as if it were a joke.” This is part of a conversation with a young Chinese woman working for the state adoption agency, who sat next to the author of this book on a recent international flight. Xinran reacted with total shock and disbelief. Chinese women have traditionally been forbidden to talk, even in their own homes, which means that the kind of stories told here have rarely, if ever, been set down so plainly in print. In 1989, invited as a guest to witness the birth of a child in a north China village, Xinran found herself forcibly restrained by two local policemen from intervening when the newborn infant was thrown into a kitchen waste bucket. “It’s not a child,” the baby’s grandmother explained patiently. “If it was, we’d be looking after it, wouldn’t we? It’s a girl, and we can’t keep it.”

Such stories belong to a harsh tradition shaped over thousands of years by the struggle for survival in a countryside ravaged by flood and famine with too little land and too many mouths to feed. China’s one-child-perfamily policy, rigorously enforced in the past 30 years, works in practice by resorting to ancient solutions. One woman told Xinran she had been left alone after the birth of her daughter with a bowl of water, the “Killing Trouble Water”, which, if the child had been a male heir, would have become a “Watering the Roots Bath”. Abortion is illegal in China. So is infanticide, but girls don’t qualify for the regular grain ration allotted to other family members, nor for the official grant of land reserved for their brothers. Their weddings cost money and, once married, a woman works for her parents-in-law – not her own parents. “I was ridding the family of a calamity,” said a former midwife, describing how she disposed of unwanted girls. None of the women who told her their stories was heartless. Their lives were corroded, in many cases ruined, by suppressed feelings that poured out to Xinran, who founded and ran for seven years in the 1990s the first Chinese radio programme for women to call in and talk about their problems. Stringent economic and social sanctions governed their lives and eliminated choice. A woman who failed to produce a son brought lifelong shame on her family. (“If you can’t produce a son,” a woman told Xinran, “then even Hell’s too good for you.”) Violation of the one-child policy (recently relaxed so that affluent families may buy a permit to produce more than once) meant losing your job, your income and any means of feeding – let alone educating – illegal offspring. The alternative was to go underground. Xinran describes an overnight train journey when she watched a man playing with his little girl, who fell asleep in his arms. The child was 18 months old, bright, friendly, outgoing, with big eyes and a shy smile. The pair left the carriage at midnight, and it was only at the end of the journey that Xinran realised the father had abandoned his daughter on a station platform at a wayside halt. He had told her that this was the fourth girl born to himself and his wife in seven and a half years spent on the run, trying desperately to produce the boy who would enable them to go home and resume their lives. This is an extraordinary book told with generosity and warmth by a brilliant storyteller. It is dedicated to the tens of thousands of girl children adopted abroad (official policy in China since the early 1990s), who perhaps will find consolation in these stories of mothers whose courage and capacity for suffering have been tested almost beyond endurance. Hilary Spurling’s ‘Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck’s Life in China’ is published by Profile in April

UK charity keeps India’s young on track By Amy Kazmin in Lucknow Financial Times August 28, 2012 1:21 pm

A month ago, Madan Bahadur, 13, and two friends ran away from their impoverished village near the Indo-Nepali border and rode a train to Lucknow, the historic capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh state. “I thought Lucknow would be nice and I would find good work,” Madan explained. Had the trio arrived in the city’s bustling Charbagh station five years ago, they would likely have fallen prey to gangs and made to sell water and collect empty bottles in exchange for food and protection. They might have sniffed glue to take the edge off their hunger and perhaps turned to more serious crime and harder drugs. 

But the fate of unaccompanied children arriving at Charbagh station has changed radically, due to the work of Railway Children, a UK-based charity that seeks to prevent runaways, and other vulnerable youngsters, from being exploited and abused on the streets.

In Lucknow, Ehsaas, funded and supported by Railway Children, collaborated with railway officials, police, vendors and porters to establish a system to identify and help children turning up alone at the station.

Hours after Madan and his friends arrived, an outreach worker took them to an Ehsaas centre for food and a safe place to sleep. Trained counsellors interviewed the boys, urged them to consider their future and began the process of tracing their families in Nepal. After multiple rounds of counselling over a few weeks, the boys decided to return home and last weekend, their parents came to collect them. “I didn’t know whether he had gone to India or was no longer in this world,” Madan’s visibly emotional mother, Ashmita, said, after her reunion with her son. Railway Children is now working with partners and the Indian government to replicate the initiative at Charbagh – officially dubbed India’s first child-friendly station – across the country.

The UK-based charity’s work in India The charity was founded in 1995 by David Maidment, then British Rail’s director of railway safety. Haunted by the memory of a seven-year-old girl flagellating herself outside Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus, he researched the plight of street children. While many charities offered services for street kids, few focused on strategic intervention with runaways early in their journey. Railway Children was born. “All organisations were trying to reintegrate children who had spent a long time out on the streets,” says Terina Keene, the charity’s CEO. “There was no real focus of their time and effort on making an early intervention with a child as soon as they came to the streets.” Today, the charity works in India, East Africa and the UK, helping about 50,000 children a year on a budget of £2.8m. It focuses much of its work on transit points, finding recent runaways, trying to reunite them with their families, or providing alternative care when reunification is not appropriate, such as when children are at risk of abuse at home. In India, the charity’s work is centred on train stations, given the Indian Railway’s importance as the national mass transit system and since many of those arriving in big cities never get past the train stations. Railway Children estimates about 112,000 children live in 60 major train stations in India, surviving through small jobs, often organised by the informal gangs run by young men who themselves grew up on the streets. In most stations, authorities tend to see these youngsters as a “nuisance”, to be ignored, except when VIPs pass through and the children are briefly shooed away. But at Charbagh, officials, police and vendors have been trained to see children as vulnerable and deserving of care; while the gangs have been largely removed from the station. Since January 2010, police at Charbagh have turned over about 1,200 unaccompanied children to Ehsaas and several other child-focused local charities. Counsellors help the children consider their long-term future. It is a time-consuming process, as many are initially reluctant to tell the truth about themselves. Sanoj Kumar, 22, an Ehsaas outreach worker, grew up at Charbagh station after his parents died, and has seen at first hand the toll that drugs and violence can take on children living on the

streets. On Saturday morning, he spotted a likely runaway at the station. Wearing a dirty, creamcoloured shirt, track pants and cheap rubber slippers, Mukesh Shah, 12, had no possessions beyond a ticket to New Delhi for that night. The child said his mother was sending him to the Indian capital to join his older brother, who was supposedly going to be at the station to meet him. But he had no phone numbers and further questions were met with stony silence. Eventually, Mr Kumar persuaded the boy to visit the Ehsaas drop-in centre, promising he could leave whenever he wanted. Once there, the child suggested to a counsellor that he had parted ways with a neighbour who was taking him to Gujarat for work, but later insisted that his mother had sent him to Delhi to stay with his brother. By the evening, the truth about Mukesh was still elusive, but the boy had cancelled his ticket and decided to stay at the centre. Grinning for the first time that day, he said: “I have decided to remain here for now. I can always go and meet my brother sometime later.”

Children given way out of red-light area By Amy Kazmin in Mumbai December 10, 2012 4:45 pm Financial Times Children eat their evening snacks at the Kamathipura night care centre run by the charity Prerana Evening has descended on Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district. Soni, the pretty 12-year-old daughter of a long-time sex worker, has arrived at the care centre where she has spent nearly every night since she was a toddler, while her 38-year-old mother has entertained clients Soni and other daughters of sex workers would once have been condemned to follow in their mothers’ footsteps as pimps and a lack of education gave them few other options. But the neatly groomed Soni has different ideas about her future. “I want to be a dancer but if I can’t do that, I’d like to take up a job in computers,” she says with a bright smile. Such dreams, and the skills to realise them, are what Prerana, the charity that runs the Kamathipura night care centre has tried to nurture in the thousands of sex workers’ children who have passed through its doors since 1986. Prerana is one of the hundreds of grassroots organisations around the world that gets support from the Global Fund for Children, which is the beneficiary of this year’s FT Seasonal Appeal. GFC identifies groups such as Prerana that are working to improve the lives of children and gives them financial grants and the advice and mentoring needed to become viable and self-sufficient. Prerana’s goal is very simple: to give children options they might not otherwise have. “When we started, it was as if every girl child in the red light area was born into the sex trade, and every boy was born to be allied to the sex trade – pimping, drug peddling, and trafficking,” says Priti Patkar, who founded Prerana after graduating from Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences. “But if you are talking about a child’s rights, it should cut across all social groups,” she says. “These kids should have a right to choose a life away from the sex trade.” To learn more about the Global Fund for Children and to make a donation, click here Prerana opened its first night care centre in Kamathipura in 1988 after two years of intensive talks with sex workers. Most women in the brothels were unwilling to relinquish their children, usually the only bright spot in their lives, but they were keen to protect them from prostitution and its ills. “When we asked mothers what they wanted for their children, they all said, ‘I want them to have a life other than the hell I have gone through’,” Ms Patkar says.

In each of Prerana’s three night care centres, sex workers’ children are given dinner, a safe place to sleep while mothers work and breakfast the next morning. About 220 children regularly sleep in the centres, which are open to both girls and boys as young as two. As girls reach adolescence, and risks of exploitation increase, Prerana social workers usually try to persuade mothers to send their daughters to full-time shelters, mostly run by other groups, outside the red-light area. The charity also works with women dying of Aids to ensure that their soon to be orphaned children are put in safe shelters, rather than kept by brothel owners or pimps. But Prerana goes far beyond just meeting children’s immediate needs for physical sustenance and protection. Children sleeping in its night centres are offered counselling to help them cope with their experiences in the red-light district and programmes to inspire them to believe that they can escape. Prerana ensures the children are enrolled in government schools and provides coaching each evening to help them with their homework. There are regular talks on “life skills” and guest speakers visit monthly to talk to children about different career options. Letter from the Editor The staff of the Financial Times have chosen The Global Fund for Children, a pioneering charity helping some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children, for our 2012 seasonal appeal. Thanks to the generosity of our readers, the FT’s seasonal appeals have raised more than £9m for good causes since 2005. We aim to do even better this year. The most effective motivational speakers are Prerana’s own graduates. Of about 3,500 children who have passed through the charity’s centres over the past two decades, Ms Patkar says nearly all have normal lives, working as nurses, housekeepers in five-star hotels, or in other service industry jobs. Some have obtained college degrees, and many are married with families of their own. Mumtaz, an 18-year-old whose mother died of Aids seven years ago, is studying at Mumbai university, hoping for a job in a bank. Her childhood memories still haunt her but she feels she is moving forward in her life. “I never felt safe,” she recalls of her childhood. “I would feel men ogling me. But I vowed I would never talk about my past to anyone. Life is more peaceful that way.” Much has changed in Kamathipura since Prerana began its work. Skyrocketing property prices have prompted the razing of many decrepit brothels to make way for new apartment blocks, and the Aids epidemic has claimed the lives of many women, leaving orphans behind. But the risks to sex workers’ children remain. “I get very scared when I have to walk down the street,” says Soni. “There are young boys, and the way they look at me, and the way their hands casually touch you, I don’t like it at all. I am just waiting to grow up, get out of here, and go to see the Statue of Liberty.”

Future technology - Sky is no limit for rapid travel By Rohit Jaggi Financial Times November 16, 2009 4:33 am Supersonic aircraft projects have generated more words than speed in recent years. There is a precedent – the British and French signed an agreement in 1962 to develop a supersonic airliner but the Mach 2 Concorde did not enter commercial service until 1976.

However, a ban on supersonic flight over US territory, which industry insiders insist was prompted by protectionism and was a main reason why only the two flag-carriers operated Concorde, is still shaping the technology of rapid air travel today. Which is one reason why the route to bringing down intercontinental journey times may lie on the edge of the skies. It was two years ago, at the last Dubai airshow, that Aerion opened the order book for its supersonic business jet. Since then it has accumulated “almost 50 orders, valued at over $4bn”, says Brian Barents, vice-chairman of Aerion. “A third come from the Middle East and Asia,” he adds. Aerion, based in Reno, Nevada, is far advanced on a design for an $80m, 8–12 passenger jet capable of Mach 1.6, or twice the speed of most current business jets, and a range of 4,000 nautical miles. The original business plan envisaged building 300 aircraft over 10 years from 2015. But market research being done for the company is expected to say, according to Mr Barents, “that there will be a bigger market than we expected”. The aircraft is designed to be efficient both above and below the speed of sound – 661.5 kts, or 761.2 mph, or 1.225.1 km/h at sea level on a standard day – in order to navigate around existing speed rules. They include the supersonic ban above the US and a Mach 1.15 limit over most other land masses. However, despite orders that have held up during the downturn, and despite planning to use “proven, robust and available” technology,Aerion has still not found an aircraft maker to build it. Other projects, such as the Quiet Supersonic Transport designed by the Lockheed-Martin Skunk Works, concentrated on minimising the sound of the sonic boom. In Europe an EC-mandated €27m ($40m) project led by Dassault Aviation of France has, since 2005, been looking into the feasibility of an 8–16-passenger high-speed aircraft (Hisac) with a transatlantic-plus range, a Mach 1.8 capability and a reduced sonic boom. The aim is for the aircraft to cut journey times by 20 to 50 per cent over current aircraft, operate from small airports, and equal or better current standards on noise and emissions. The research programme is due to be completed by the end of this year. But by the time supersonic jets of this type finally get to the runway they may well have missed their take-off slot. An alternative may come from work done on travel to the edge of space. According to Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic which has signed up 300 people for its planned $200,000-a-ticket suborbital space flights, technology being developed to take tourists and payloads into space “could eventually be a transportation system to take people around the planet”. Earlier this year Reaction Engines, based in Oxfordshire in the UK, announced a £6m ($10m) research programme into its Sabre engine technology intended to power a reusable spaceship that would take off and land on ordinary runways. The project, which has won a €1m grant from the European Space Agency, will develop an engine that works both within and outside earth’s atmosphere, combining characteristics of jet and rocket engines. The engines hold the key to hypersonic flight, says Mr Whitehorn. “The theory is well understood. Engines could be coming off the stocks in 2014 to 2016.” Reaction Engines has laid down plans, as part of the EU “Lapcat” programme, for a 300-seat aircraft using a derivative of the Sabre engine that would cruise at Mach 5 at an altitude of 82,000 ft, or 25 km – either a half or a quarter of the way to space, depending on which definition you believe. An Aerion’s comparatively modest Mach 1.6 would cut the New York–London journey time from seven and a half hours by conventional jet to just four and a quarter. Hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 would zoom passengers to Sydney from Brussels in four and a half hours. “The output of the exhaust is just water,” says Mark Hempsell, future programmes director at Reaction Engines. “It’s much, much better on emissions than current airliners.” Proving the Sabre engine technology could also would also, if it is engineered to last the thousands of cycles that airliner use demands, open up the prospect of using suborbital trajectories for intercontinental passenger travel. “It is feasible to do suborbital,” says Mr Hempsell. “And it would be a whole lot more environmentally friendly.”

Which could mean space moves from being the final frontier, to being a gateway to the other side of our own world.

Peugeot's Hybrid Air - the car of the future that runs on air It will be cheaper than a Toyota Prius, do more than 80 miles to the gallon and could completely shake up the car industry. The Peugeot engineers behind the Hybrid Air reveal that they couldn't even tell their families about the top-secret project  

Tim Lewis The Observer, Sunday 24 March 2013 The Peugeot Hybrid Air, with the blue ‘scuba tank’ clearly visible.

There was a sense, when I arrived in Paris a couple of weeks ago, that France was if not quite in meltdown then certainly enduring a profound existential crisis. Unemployment had metastasised to 10.6%, and the country's credit rating was in the dumps. President François Hollande's maligned plans for a 75% "supertax" had sent some of the most famous French citizens scuttling to Belgium. In November, a cover of the Economist showed seven baguettes tied with a tricolour, a lit fuse poking out of the middle. The article warned: "Mr Hollande does not have long to defuse the time-bomb at the heart of Europe." French manufacturing, in particular, was on its knees. Worldwide sales at carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën were down 8.8% in 2012, the sixth successive year they had decreased. Three of its biggest markets – Spain, Italy, Portugal – were even less interested in new cars than France. The company had announced plans to shrink its French workforce by 8,000, almost one-fifth, over the next two years. Workers responded with violent protests, burning tyres and cutting power cables. In these desperate times, however, there was one solitary flower growing up through the concrete. In January, Peugeot announced that it had developed a car that ran on air. It officially launched the Hybrid Air vehicle to the world at the Geneva motor show this month, and revealed that it would be in production by 2016. The car did not solely run on air, of course; the new technology was twinned with a petrol engine. But Peugeot believed that it had significant advantages over battery-powered electric hybrids, such as a Toyota Prius. Their cars would be cheaper to buy, for a start, and extra savings would come from a fuel economy of around 81 miles per gallon. If Peugeot could back this up, Hybrid Air would shake up the whole car industry. The ailing French giant could certainly do with it being a success – its long-term survival might just depend on it. At a Peugeot technical centre in Carrières-sous-Poissy, a few miles west of Paris, two engineers – project leaders Karim Mokaddem and Andrés Yarce – show me a Hybrid Air vehicle. From one side, the car looks no different from the compact hatchbacks that Peugeot and Citroën are famous for, but it has been sawn in half to better illustrate the new technology. Most visibly, running down the middle of the undercarriage, there is a blue, four-foot-long accumulator – what Mokaddem calls, with a wry smile, "the scuba tank". The pressurised steel tank is filled with around 20 litres of nitrogen, plus some hydraulic fluid. Much like a Prius, Hybrid Air vehicles recover energy every time the driver brakes or decelerates. But instead of using this kinetic energy to charge a battery – as electric hybrids do – the Hybrid Air system has a reversible hydraulic pump that compresses the nitrogen in the tank and then unleashes it the next time the driver pumps the accelerator. "It's mainly a …" Yarce searches for the word, "a syringe. The nitrogen compresses or decompresses and actually pushes the oil and the hydraulic components to transform this energy into a force that makes the vehicle move forwards. It's as simple as that." The system does not produce vast amounts of energy – in fact you would struggle to drive even a mile before the petrol engine was forced to kick in – but if you are stop-starting around the city all day then the savings in fuel could be significant. "We named the prototype cars Kiwi One, Kiwi Two, etc, because the amount of energy stored within the scuba tank is exactly the same amount you'd find in a kiwi fruit," explains Mokaddem. Another advantage over hybrids already on the market is that Peugeot's new cars do not require an expensive lithium-ion battery or electric motor, meaning that they will start from around £17,000. That's almost £5,000 less than a Prius. The parts are simple and easily serviced, a fact that would be attractive in the emerging markets of China, India and Russia. For all the interest that Hybrid Air has inspired – both positive and sceptical – the Peugeot engineers are keen to downplay the idea that it is a radical solution. They acknowledge that the idea of hybrid hydraulics has been around for years. UPS has run a fleet of delivery vans since 2009 that use pressurised hydraulic fluid – rather than nitrogen – that converts braking energy into forward momentum. It has clear benefits for any vehicle that needs to make regular stops, such as street cleaners or a school bus. "I'm not going to say this is a real innovation, for sure not," says Mokaddem, as we stand underneath another Hybrid Air vehicle, its conspicuous blue tank reminiscent of the air ducts of the Pompidou Centre. "We have made a new gearbox, sure, but the components are known components, and the innovation is how we have put them together to make the most efficient car." "It's putting them together in the right way," agrees Yarce. "It's mainly like Lego." Of course, if the idea of running a car on nitrogen was so obvious, then someone would have developed it fully before. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the new technology is that it has been unveiled by Peugeot, a company that celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2010, and has not been known, in recent times certainly, for pioneering R&D. "It's true that today the market is dominated – on the hybrid side, for sure – by Asian technology, that's reality," accepts Mokaddem. "So it was a little bit unexpected for a European car maker to develop such a new approach. Why? I don't know." The development of Hybrid Air required Peugeot to overhaul entirely its approach to product development. The project, which was started in 2010, was worked on by a team of around 100 entirely in secrecy. They took this last part very seriously: Mokaddem could

not reveal any details, even to his wife and children. "They thought I had become a spy," he jokes. With a small number of employees working on the project, and little hierarchy, the intention was to create – within the second-biggest carmaker in Europe – a unit with the energy and enterprise of a startup. From the start, the team was encouraged to think of a "disruptive innovation". The term comes from Harvard professor Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, and describes a technology that does not just alter the market but creates an entirely new one. An incremental innovation, for example, would evolve a two-blade razor into a three-bladed one; a disruptive innovation would jump from compact discs to the iPod, or from volumes of encyclopaedias to Wikipedia. When they had decided to focus on fuel economy, Mokaddem encouraged his fellow engineers to re-consider a car from first principles. They were pushed to think outrageously. The original prototype for Hybrid Air borrowed the hydraulic parts from an Airbus jet. The noise it made was excruciating, but when the car edged forward a few metres, the team knew they were on to something interesting. Ultimately, they adapted parts more commonly found in elevators and tractors. Since its launch, the Hybrid Air project has provoked extreme and sometimes hysterical reactions. A comment on one online forum worried that the presence of the accumulator was like driving around under "a compressed air bomb". Both Mokaddem and Yarce explode into laughter when I put this to them. "We took into account gunshots, fire, lots of strange situations – the system will not explode and we have tested that," says Yarce. "We are completely confident today that there are no safety risks." Another concern was a misunderstanding that the car could "run out of air". "The air is isolated inside, it's a closed circuit, so we always have air inside," explains Yarce. "It's just a question of whether it's compressed or not. Clearly the system is based on a petrol combustion engine, so you need petrol to compress the air the first time. And, well, if you don't have any fuel, you clearly won't be able to move – that's the same as a standard car." It will be a couple of years before we find out if Peugeot can fully realise the promise of Hybrid Air. The engineers need to do more work on the brakes and the hydraulics and they ultimately believe they can achieve 117mpg by 2020. Whether it can take down an established hybrid supplier such as Toyota remains to be seen. But, for now, the project has at least provided some much needed hope for a beleaguered company and its precarious workforce. "PSA Peugeot Citroën needs to stand up and show we are still alive," says Mokaddem. "That we have ideas and we can differentiate ourselves. We are part of a new generation that is saying, 'We are a company with 200 years of history, but we are still young.' We are not going to die." • This article was amended on 24 March 2013 to correct two mentions of hydrogen to nitrogen

Vann Nath aged 65

Vann Nath, a Cambodian who painted to stay alive, died on September 5th,

Sep 17th 2011 | from the print edition The Economist

WHEN he was 52, with a hand that still trembled, Vann Nath produced a painting of a young man lying under a blossoming tree. He was playing a pipe while, in the background, cattle grazed by green palms in some bucolic corner of Cambodia. It was meant to be a self-portrait, he said, a beautiful memory from his childhood. He wanted only to paint idyllic landscapes now, in the style of temple murals or the French Impressionists who had first inspired him to take up art. That was because, in 1978-79, he had been made to paint quite different pictures. In those months he was interned in S-21 prison, a former French lycée in Phnom Penh which had been converted into a torturecompound for alleged enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime. Perhaps 14,000 people were sent to S-21 for a daily routine of electrocution, water-boarding and flagellation before being carted off for execution—a shovel or spade to the head—at the nearby “killing fields”. Mr Vann Nath was one of only six or seven prisoners to make it out alive. He never expected to. Like almost all the others, he had no idea why he had been sent there. He was not an intellectual; his family was poor and provincial, and he just a painter in a small business making signs and billboards. In 1975, obedient to the Khmers Rouges, he had joined a peasant commune and worked hard there. When he first saw the wasted prisoners in S-21, he thought it was all over for him. But after withering away for a month, fed so sparely on rice gruel that he felt an urge to consume the flesh of the dead, he was asked to paint portraits of the regime’s leader, Pol Pot. At first he thought he could not do it. The shocks and beatings meant that he could barely stand. Besides, he had no idea what Pol Pot looked like, and only a black-and-white photograph to copy. All the time he painted, day and night, the screams of the tortured echoed from other rooms. He hoped, with every brush-stroke, that his jailers would like his work and let him live. He focused by thinking how much he would like to kill the man he drew. Nonetheless, he carried out the task to the satisfaction of Duch, the prison commandant, the one—and still only—former cadre now being held to account for his role in the revolution. For his flattering portraits, giving Pol Pot a fresh-faced girl’s rosy cheeks, Mr Vann Nath’s name in the prison ledger was tagged “Keep for use”. But for that “keeping”, he often said, he would be dead. When a Vietnamese invasion swept the Khmers Rouges from power, in January 1979, his portrait-painting ended. But in 1980-81 an even more harrowing spell of art began. The fleeing warders of S-21 left behind troves of documents outlining the prison’s work, but it was Mr Vann Nath, painting his memories in sombre oils, who showed most vividly what had happened there. Blindfolded men, women and children trucked into the compound in the middle of the night. Men carried, trussed like pigs, on bamboo poles. Babies torn from their mothers’ arms—to be smashed against walls, he learned later. Prisoners prodded, whipped and steered by

stone-faced cadres into holding cells to be crammed side by side, like decaying logs. For many years after the Khmers Rouges fell from power, the upper echelons of the regime denied S-21’s existence. Mr Vann Nath caught its reality in furtive glances, as he moved from cell to workshop. He painted by stilling his mind, in a process both painful and therapeutic. But painting still made no sense of what he had seen. It seemed to him that Cambodia could not cleanse itself of such an evil, and that his works were not good enough to do such horror justice. He only hoped the souls of those who had died would get some ease from them. When S-21 was turned into a museum of the national self-genocide he had witnessed, some of his pictures hung on the walls. One day, for the first time since 1979, he saw one of his former jailers there, a “tiger” he had dreaded. Having puffed a few cigarettes to steel himself—for he was always a man of poise, despite his tormented past—he approached him affably and guided him by the shoulder to his paintings hanging there. “Is this accurate?” he asked. It was, the jailer conceded. The international media, whose questions about S-21 he patiently answered time after time, called him Cambodia’s Goya. He brushed it off. His principal fear was that young Cambodians would not learn about—or, worse still, would not believe—what he had witnessed. He painted, he said, so that Cambodia would never turn on itself so monstrously again. Silent witness Two years ago Mr Vann Nath took the stand as a witness against Duch, his former master, who is now appealing a 35-year jail sentence handed down by a UN-backed war-crimes court in Cambodia. A second trial, of four senior leaders of the regime, is not expected to start until next year. The defendants say they are too ill to stand trial. They are attended, however, by a world-class team of doctors; Mr Vann Nath, who suffered years of kidney disease, struggled to afford even basic care. His testimony will be missing from subsequent proceedings. His paintings, however, speak for him.



BBC to put one million hours of its past online

Corporation wants its entire archive to be available for free  

James Robinson, media correspondent The Observer, Sunday 15 April 2007

Thousands of hours of broadcasting history are to be made available to the public online as part of a plan to open up the BBC's entire archive to licence-fee payers free of charge. The radio and TV material, some of which has never been repeated, includes an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and another with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the former Beatle talks candidly about the impact their relationship had on the band. Other programmes include a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time. The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project, headed by the BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield. The BBC wants to put nearly one million hours of material on the internet for viewers to watch, listen to and download and has already begun the long process of retrieving and transferring programmes. A trial involving 20,000 users will begin next month, and the service could be available nationally in a year's time. Highfield will announce details of the scheme in a speech this week. Other shows the BBC hopes to make available include a 1981 performance of Othello, starring Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Bob Hoskins as Iago. A 1968 Woman's Hour radio programme marking the 50th anniversary of women gaining the vote features interviews with suffragettes who campaigned alongside the Pankhursts. Other material includes a dramatic government appeal, transmitted in May 1940, asking for volunteers to sail to Dunkirk to help rescue the 330,000 French and British troops stranded there. Most of the programmes have never been repeated because the BBC does not own the rights to part of the material used in each broadcast. The corporation is currently trying to clear the material so it can place it online, although the negotiations are proving more complicated than expected. Although it owns the copyright to most shows, it does not have the right to repeat many of them. Actors, agents, composers and presenters have to be contacted and the process is proving time-consuming. Ultimately, however, it wants to make every programme available, no matter how trivial or obscure. 'Lots of it might not be of wider interest, but if your mum was on a daytime quiz show, it will still be of interest to you,' Highfield says. The BBC also plans to make a huge amount of supporting material available, including scripts, programme notes and letters relating to shows. If it can secure permission to use them, they will make up a huge database of documents that viewers can search easily and quickly. Paperwork the BBC hopes to place online includes a signed expenses form Attenborough sent when he was filming in Indonesia: dated 10 August 1954, it requests tropical clothing. The BBC also has letters from Attenborough, sent care of the British embassy in Jakarta, telling BBC bosses about his first impressions of the country.

The corporation has been planning to exploit its valuable archive for some time. New technology means it is far cheaper to store and distribute video and audio streams, and the growth of broadband has boosted demand for high-quality content. The BBC is also searching for more ways to make money after receiving a below-inflation licence fee settlement last year. If the pilot scheme is a success, it could charge overseas users to access the programmes. Although the archive would be free in the UK, it may carry advertising, which would prove controversial. The plan will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, which replaced the Board of Governors at the start of the year. Caught on tape · Doubts and Certainties: Martin Luther King In a poignant interview, broadcast on the day he was assassinated in April 1968, the civil rights leader says: 'The important thing isn't how long you live, but how well you live.' · The Lennon Tapes John Lennon and Yoko Ono talked to Andy Peebles in an interview transmitted in January 1981, two days before the ex-Beatle was killed, and never repeated. They talk candidly about the motivation for their famous 'bed-in' protests. · Zoo Quest: Dragons of Komodo David Attenborough travels to Indonesia to capture images of the komodo dragon for the first time, in an early film that delighted BBC viewers, according to 'audience reaction' notes also unearthed by the BBC. · Woman's Hour: Militant Suffragettes Antonia Raeburn talks to Grace Roe and Eleanor Higginson, two suffragettes from the Pankhurst era, about their campaign to win the vote. Roe explains how she dealt with police raids, and avoided arrest for a year.

Voyage to the most isolated base on Earth 27 January 2012 Alexander Kumar, the next ESA-sponsored crewmember to stay in Concordia, has arrived safely at the research base in Antarctica. The voyage to one of the remotest places on Earth takes even longer than the voyage to the International Space Station. The international outpost’s programme of research includes glaciology, human biology and the atmosphere. ESA uses the base to prepare for future long-duration missions beyond Earth. Concordia is an ideal place to study the effects on small, multicultural teams isolated for long periods in an extreme, hostile environment.

Astrolabe Alexander left the port of Hobart in Tasmania on 7 January aboard the vessel Astrolabe. The ship is used by the French Polar Institute to supply Concordia and the French coastal Antarctic station Dumont D’Urville. Alexander’s work started before reaching the base: he had to tend to routine medical problems as the only qualified physician on the ship. After a week-long journey across the Southern Ocean, the Astrolabe arrived at Dumont d’Urville.

The 1200 km second leg of the voyage called for a twin-propeller plane. The aircraft has to be maintained meticulously because it flies at altitudes where the air pressure is a third less than at sea level, in extreme cold weather. After a five-hour flight, Alexander arrived at Concordia, a staggering 3200 m above sea level, and one of the coldest places on Earth. Alexander is replacing Eoin Macdonald-Nethercott, who has been at Concordia for over a year. Once the Antarctic winter sets in next month, it will be impossible to access the outpost because temperatures can drop to –84°C. Concordia’s 14 inhabitants have to learn to live and work together without help from the outside world. Only after the Antarctic summer warms the frigid surroundings will fresh supplies and personnel be able to reach the site.

Alexander will perform a comprehensive programme of research during his year-long stay. A variety of tests will investigate how the Concordia team adapt to the station. Areas of special interest are sleep patterns, individual and team performance, and exercise. Alex will also test software tools that could help crews on future missions.

The long road to ruin for the Amazon forest $350m plan to pave 600 miles of Brazilian track exacerbates the conflict between settlers and environmentalists Alex Bellos in Novo Progresso, Brazil 

The Observer, Sunday 15 April 2007

Taking a bus along the BR-163 is an adventure sport. When it is dry, the ride is an exhilarating slalom between gigantic potholes. When it is wet, the bus gets stuck in the mud and the passengers are expected to pull it out by rope. The 1,100-mile road is the main north-south artery of the Amazon rainforest. It is also the most controversial road in Brazil, built in the 1970s to open up the jungle to colonisation - forgetting, of course, that many indigenous Indians lived there already. It has become a frontier of deforestation. Now President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has announced that one of the major projects of his second term, at a cost of $350m, will be to pave the 600 miles of the road that is still a dirt track. Roads bring human activity, which has always meant a plundering of natural resources. Yet Lula believes he can develop the region without increasing destruction. The stakes are high, since the area of influence of the BR163 is a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon. 'The problem in the past is that the government has not had presence in the area,' says Muriel Saragossi, the government's coordinator for the Amazon region. 'We now have an integrated vision.' The 'Sustainable BR-163 Plan' involves 20 ministries and is Brazil's most ambitious attempt ever to reconcile growth and conservation. The road stretches from Cuiaba, near the Bolivian border, to Santarem on the banks of the Amazon. On the first 450-mile paved section the rainforest has been transformed into rolling fields as far as the eye can see. The main crop is soya. Soya - half of it exported to the EU - is the economic force behind the road project. If the BR-163 is paved to Santarem, with its deep water port, farmers could export soya along it. 'This will cut the road journey to the market by 600 miles as well as a similar distance by sea,' says farmer Nelson Piccoli in Sorriso. Piccoli, like other farmers, resents the suggestion that soya is responsible for razing the Amazon: 'We did not destroy this region. We transformed this region from native vegetation to agricultural production. What you are seeing here is how we are supporting humanity. You cannot survive without eating food.'

As I travelled along the BR-163 I was surprised by how much the environmental message seemed to have got through to the timber industry. In Sinop, a lumber town, a building was emblazoned with the words Green Party. Paulo Fiuza, the local Green leader, is a former logger. 'Just because you work in the timber industry it doesn't mean you can't be an environmentalist,' he says. If they carry on destroying the way they have been, he said, they will destroy the land that has brought them wealth. For almost two-thirds of its length the BR-163, however, is a track. Even though the road is barely passable for several months of the year, settlers came here in their tens of thousands. Here much less of the rainforest is destroyed - but the social problems are much worse. It is not just because buses get stuck in mud; it is that the region is lawless. 'We are completely abandoned here,' says small farmer Irineu Matthes, in Castelo dos Sonhos, a town of about 6,000. 'The government is not present at all. Here we are at the hands of fate.' A week after I left, two local people were assassinated. Most murders are over land. The government encouraged settlers, but only gave a small minority title. Those who were the most violent kept the largest plots. The largest town on the unpaved section is Novo Progresso (pop. 40,000). The cattle herd here has boomed from 50,000 a decade ago to a million. 'No one put a sign at the beginning of the BR-163 when we came here saying that it was forbidden to destroy the rainforest,' argues Rancher Jose dos Santos. 'Why do we have to pay such a high price because the rest of Brazil and certainly England - has already destroyed its forests? We just want a little space where we can live and work with diginity.' For the lorry drivers of the BR-163, the paving will make their lives easier, but at a high cost. 'You used to see tapirs, capybaras - even jaguars - by the side of the road. Now you hardly see anything,' says lorry driver Gustavo Hering. 'When the paving comes, you'll be able to get everything out - and you will finish off the forest completely. · Alex Bellos's film on the BR-163 will be broadcast tomorrow on Newsnight, BBC2, 10.30pm

Sinking Pacific island Kiribati considers moving to a man-made alternative By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent Thursday, 8 September 2011 The Independent The future for Kiribati, one of the low-lying Pacific nations threatened by rising seas, is so dire that the government is contemplating relocating the entire population to man-made islands resembling giant oil rigs. "We're considering everything... because we are running out of options," the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, said yesterday in Auckland, where he is attending the Pacific Islands Forum. He said that his small, impoverished country – where the highest land is no more than two metres above sea level – urgently needed the world to take action on climate change. Vulnerable Pacific nations have acquired a powerful new ally, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who visited Kiribati on his way to the Auckland conference. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr Ban warned: "For those who believe climate change is about some distant future, I invite them to Kiribati. Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet – quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere." Beachside villages in Kiribati – which consists of 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million square miles of ocean – have already had to move to escape the encroaching waves. Water supplies have been contaminated by salt water, and crops destroyed. Erosion, caused partly by storms and flooding, is increasingly serious. Mr Tong said he had seen models of a man-made floating island, similar to an offshore oil platform and costing US$2bn (£1.25bn). While it sounded "like something from science fiction", he said radical ideas had to be considered. "If you're faced with the option of being submerged with your family, what would you do?" he asked. "Would you jump on the rig... on a floating island or not? I think the answer is yes." Other ideas included building a series of sea walls, at a cost of nearly $1bn. But Mr Tong said it would

be up to the international community to fund such projects, and he complained that Kiribati had received little financial aid despite pledges from wealthier nations. A former British colony called the Gilbert Islands, Kiribati is home to 103,000 people, most of them crammed into the main atoll, Tarawa, a horseshoeshaped chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Like other pancake-flat Pacific nations such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, and Indian Ocean nations such as the Maldives, it faces oblivion as a result of global warming-induced rising sea levels. Mr Tong said that for i-Kiribati, as his countrymen are known, it was no longer a case of adapting to a changing environment, but of survival. He said Kiribati desperately needed the world to act to reduce carbon emissions. Mr Ban said his visit to Kiribati had strengthened his view that "something is seriously wrong with our current model of economic development". He said: "We will not succeed in reducing emissions without sustainable energy solutions."

Charts, maps and infographics Daily chart

Correction: We mistakenly said that the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 girls

Gender inequality

Space for improvement

Death and the maiden

6 April 2011 | By Stuart Nathan The Engineer

Sep 19th 2011, 15:08 by The Economist online

We’re getting a statue of Yuri Gagarin not far from The Engineer’s offices. To mark the 50th anniversary of the first Cosmonaut’s flight, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is donating a copy of a statue that stands in Gagarin’s home town to the UK, where the 3.5m high chunk of SocialistRealist zinc will take up its position near Admiralty Arch, spacesuit-clad and arm outstretched towards the statue of another great explorer, James Cook.

Women and girls die prematurely in greater numbers than men OVER a quarter of all excess female deaths occur in China at birth, says the World Bank's annual World Development Report, published on September 19th. The number has risen since 1990 from 890,000 to 1.1m. These are the numbers of extra girls who would have been born if the normal sex ratio at birth (105 boys to 100 girls) had prevailed in China. It does not do so because of the practice of sexselective abortion. Aborted girls account for the largest single share of excess female deaths worldwide, but other sorts of death have been growing faster, notably those of women of childbearing age in Africa. The excess deaths of African women aged 15 to 49 (when compared with female death rates in rich countries) rose by 150% between 1990 and 2008. The number of excess deaths in African countries with high rates of HIV-AIDS increased by 760%. Excess female mortality is shifting from birth in East Asia to adulthood in Africa.

Read also: "Growth is not enough"

to 100 boys when it is, of course, 105 boys to 100 girls. This was corrected on September 19th.

I’m never quite sure about such statues; Gagarin was undoubtedly a significant figure but the UK’s involvement in his achievement (and that of the engineers who put him into orbit) was non-existent. But then, I always wonder about the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square as well. However, the event does have some resonance in the first week of the UK Space Agency’s existence as a full executive agency of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. Its launch was accompanied by an announcement of a £10million grant to start a national space technology programme, a reduction in regulations on satellite operators, and a study of the regulations that might be needed for space tourism operators to launch from the UK. Of course, the modest government support of the UKSA pales into pathetic insignificance next to the munificent French government’s €500million (£440million) handout for space research, which will secure France’s place in the lead of the project to develop a successor to the Ariane 5 rocket. The developers of Britain’s own proposed spaceplane, Reaction Engine’s Skylon, must surely be envying their colleagues across the Channel right now. However, it is an acknowledgement of the importance of the space sector to the UK economy, both as a source of employment and a generator of technology and income — the sector is worth some £7.5billion per year to the economy — and when so many organisations are being deprived of public funds at the moment, it doesn’t do to complain. Not if you’re British, anyway.

The UK point of view is that the new European rockets will carry British instruments to provide lucrative services in telecommunications and valuable insights in scientific discovery. But it doesn’t exactly capture the imagination. In our current issue, we’re featuring another space-related project which is all about enthusing people: the rocket-propelled land speed record contenderBloodhound SSC, whose project director, Richard Noble, talks about the uplift in numbers of physics and engineering graduates inspired by the Apollo programme. The clever satellites and probes designed by UK firms might be inspiring to people already studying for degrees — and we wouldn’t for a moment belittle their contribution — but they’re unlikely to get many 13-year-olds excited.

wouldn’t it? And it’d be a better site for a statue of Yuri Gagarin, as well. As it happens, The Engineer did mention Gagarin at the time of his orbit. Digging back through our archive, I found this short item at the front of the 14 April, 1961 issue: MAN IN ORBIT As we go to press we learn that the Russians have achieved another remarkable ’first’ in space. Last Wednesday morning, Mr Tovarich Gagarin was launched in a sealed capsule by rocket into an orbit that took him around the world in 108 minutes. The capsule was brought safely back to the earth’s surface. We look forward to learning in the next few days about the capsule and its launching rocket. Congratulations to the Russians! You can tell the editors of the day were in a rush. Tovarich isn’t a previously-unknown name for Major Gagarin; it’s Russian for Comrade. We did make up for it with an exhaustive feature in the following issue, containing the following passage, unusually lyrical for The Engineer at the time: In a pitch-black sky, the stars looked brighter and clearer than from the earth. The earth had a very beautiful pale-blue halo. On the horizon the colours changed from a delicate light blue through ultramarine, dark blue and violet, and finally to a black sky. When emerging from the shadow, a vivid orange flash, which then passed through all the colours of the rainbow, could be observed on the horizon.

High flyer: the Skylon spaceplane, being developed in the UK, could b e a next-generation satellite launcher Seeing the statue of Gagarin, and the spirit of exploration, adventure and risk he embodied, it’s difficult not to get a little wistful about the UK’s space industry. The moves to open up the UK for space tourism give us a little glimpse into what could be. It’s been suggested that RAF Lossiemouth could form a perfect spaceport for space planes, providing a long flightpath over the North Sea (although the BBC thought that was so unlikely it mistook the story for an April Fool); imagine, for a moment, the graceful power of a Skylon space plane streaking along the runway with the majestic peaks of the Cairngorms as a backdrop. Now that’d get the kids lining up for engineering courses,

Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin died when an aircraft he was piloting crashed in March 1968. As deputy training director of the Soviet Union’s cosmonaut programme, he was in the process of requalifying as a jet pilot.

See Also 

Government investment funds spacetechnology programme 24 Mar 2011

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Skylon spaceplane gathers momentum 6 September 2010

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UK to lead commercial space travel

New life forms

27 Oct 2009

When I asked one leading scientist where this could lead, he replied impatiently: "That's like wondering what a computer could do back in the 1960s - who can tell?"

July 1969. Apollo 11 October 2009 Online

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Space Ltd

But the concept of synthetic biology does take some getting used to - not just the very idea of creating new life-forms and the scale of the economic potential but also of course the implications, which are profound and, to some, very worrying.

15 Jul 2009

Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/opinion/comment/spa ce-for-improvement/1008161.article#ixzz1l2xasnul

The strange new craft of making life from scratch David Shukman explains how synthetic biology works BBC Web site Enter a set of labs at Imperial College in London and at first sight there is nothing exceptional: pale grey work surfaces, collections of bottles, racks of test-tubes. But amid the bustle of white coats and the bright flames of Bunsen burners, a very modern version of alchemy is under way - the design and creation of forms of life that have never existed in nature. This is the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, a hothouse for an endeavour unprecedented in human history and billed by its promoters as offering the next industrial revolution. A report for the Royal Academy of Engineering concluded that this new science was of "critical importance to building the nation's wealth". Imagine bacteria, fitted with artificial DNA, harnessed to churn out an anti-malaria vaccine - that is happening already in California. Or imagine bacteria with synthetic genes that make them light up when parasites are detected in drinking water that has been proven to work at Imperial. Or imagine organisms transformed into factories to make us fuel or materials, or engineered to gobble up oil spills and industrial pollution, or crafted to provide the power and wiring for the next generation of computers. Some of this happening now, but much more may also be possible in the future.

If the 19th Century was all about the revolution of harnessing energy from fossil fuels, and the 20th Century was about exploiting the power of data, this century will be about controlling biology” Ultimately, this is about taking control of nature, redesigning it and rebuilding it to perform some task. No wonder the phrase "playing God" comes up in almost every conversation. With it comes a grand historical vision. If the 19th Century was all about the revolution of harnessing energy from fossil fuels, and the 20th Century was about exploiting the power of data, this century will be about controlling biology. So how does one understand this brave new world? The starting point is GM or genetic modification, the technology, with us for several decades, in which the genes of one organism are inserted into another. Over recent years, GM has led to crops that are resistant to weed killers or insecticides. Most recently, researchers have been shuffling genes to give ordinary oranges the health benefits of blood oranges or white rice the same nutritional value as whole rice. Most startling are the goats that carry the spider gene that produces silk, as featured by Adam Rutherford in his recent Horizon. Hostile response In Europe, this kind of work has often been regarded with suspicion, even hostility. Trial crops have been attacked and the major supermarket chains in Britain, fearful of public nervousness, do not stock GM food. What makes this possible is a rather sobering fact: that DNA, the twisting strands that hold the genes of every living thing on Earth, essentially comes down to four basic molecules.”

But what is coming next with synthetic biology takes this research into an entirely different league, and only now is it entering the public consciousness. The basic principle is that nature is treated like engineering. It is just a set of building blocks, and genes are mere components. And just as with building a car or a plane, the different parts can be designed and assembled any way you want. So instead of taking the genes of one organism and adding them to another, scientists dream up new genes, select their characteristics, get them made up artificially and then put them to use. What makes this possible is a rather sobering fact: that DNA, the twisting strands that hold the genes of every living thing on Earth, essentially comes down to four basic molecules. These are adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, better known by their first letters A, C, G and T.

The likeliest of its products will be sensors, halfelectronic half-biological devices that harness engineered bacteria to light up when parasites or infections are detected. Others are pursuing different paths. Jim Haseloff at Cambridge University is thinking about taking control of cells to get them to build new tissue and materials. Ali Tavassoli at Southampton University is working towards a wristwatch device in which syntheticallyequipped bacteria detect blood sugar levels and then release insulin. Jason Chin at Cambridge's famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology has inserted an artificial amino acid into nematode worms, as reported by my colleague Roland Pease. A faint glow from the tiny creatures indicates that their synthetic ingredient is happily incorporated. The talk is of "accelerating evolution". Concern over risks

And because these molecules are well understood, they can be manufactured synthetically.

So where does this lead?

Here is how it works. A scientist wants to get an organism to do a particular function. They sit down at their computer and manipulate the patterns of the four molecules to design the genes that will make that function happen. They then send off an order to a specialist "gene synthesiser"- yes, such companies now exist. Imperial College uses a firm in Germany. Imperial scientists are at the cutting edge They make up the new genes and send them back in the post - a tiny vial containing an artificially-made code for life.

The UK government has commissioned a group of industrialists and academics to draw up a road map to explore the industrial potential.

Surge of new thinking The synthetic genes are then inserted into a bacterium which has had its own original DNA stripped out.

America is spending billions in this area and China is thought to be investing heavily as well, though less transparently.

The organism will do exactly what the scientist intended: a living thing, but under the control of Man.

Meanwhile environmental groups have raised serious concerns about the risks.

That makes it sound too easy. This science is in its earliest days. But it is fostering a surge of new thinking and new approaches.

One ethics specialist describes synthetic biology as "exciting, but terrifying".

I wonder if the dawn of the nuclear age had the same kind of feel, with science taking us to the brink of an unparalleled new power”

I wonder if the dawn of the nuclear age had the same kind of feel, with science taking us to the brink of an unparalleled new power. I'll be exploring the implications in a post tomorrow.

The largest of the synthetic biology labs in Britain is at Imperial College.

Rewritable DNA memory shown off 22 May 2012 Last updated at 13:01 GMT BBC web site

The researchers say that biological systems are "one of the coolest places for computing"

Related Stories  

IBM makes 12-atom magnetic memory Evolution seen in 'synthetic DNA'

Researchers in the US have demonstrated a means to use short sections of DNA as rewritable data "bits" in living cells. The technique uses two proteins adapted from viruses to "flip" the DNA bits.

The trick was to balance the effects of two competing proteins - integrase and excisionase The two proteins, integrase and excisionase, were taken from a bacteriophage - a virus that infects bacteria. They are involved in the DNA modification process by which the DNA from a virus is incorporated into that of its host. The trick was striking a balance between the two counteracting proteins in order to reliably switch the direction of the DNA section that acted as a bit.

Though it is at an early stage, the advance could help pave the way for computing and memory storage within biological systems.

After some 750 trials, the team struck on the right recipe of proteins, and now have their sights set on creating a full "byte" - eight bits - of DNA information that can be similarly manipulated.

A team reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say the tiny information storehouses may also be used to study cancer and aging.

The work is at the frontier of biological engineering, and senior author of the research Drew Endy said that applications of the approach are yet to come.

The team, from Stanford University's bioengineering department, has been trying for three years to fine-tune the biological recipe they use to change the bits' value.

"I'm not even really concerned with the ways genetic data storage might be useful down the road, only in creating scalable and reliable biological bits as soon as possible," Dr Endy said.

The bits comprise short sections of DNA that can, under the influence of two different proteins, be made to point in one of two directions within the chromosomes of the bacterium E. coli.

"Then we'll put them in the hands of other scientists to show the world how they might be used."

The data are then "read out" as the sections were designed to glow green or red when under illumination, depending on their orientation.

As the DNA sections maintained their logical value even as the bacteria doubled 90 times, one clear application would be in using the DNA bits as "reporter" bits on the proliferation of cells, for example in cancerous tissue. But longer-term integrations of these computational components to achieve computing within biological systems are also on the researchers' minds.

"One of the coolest places for computing is within biological systems," Dr Endy said.

Scientists look to DNA for data storage By Clive Cookson, Science Editor January 23, 2013 6:47 pm Financial Times Genetics may offer the best option for archiving vast amounts of man-made data, according to scientists who have demonstrated a working DNA storage and retrieval system. A team at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge developed the new method to meet the huge challenge of storing the deluge of electronic data produced in the digital age. Current technology such as hard drives is expensive and requires an electricity supply, while alternative storage mechanisms, such as magnetic tape and disks, deteriorate over time. Conceived by scientists Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney over beers in a Hamburg pub, EBI’s DNA alternative is both durable and extremely compact. The EBI team used the chemical letters of a DNA sample – G, A, T and C – to encode the 1s and 0s of several digital recordings. These amounted to almost a megabyte of data, including sound, pictures and text.

The DNA code was emailed to Agilent, a biotechnology company in California, which turned it into physical DNA molecules and posted the resulting freeze-dried powder back to Cambridge. “The result looks like a tiny piece of dust,” said Emily Leproust of Agilent. Using a DNA reading machine, EBI was able to reconstruct the original digital data with 100 per cent accuracy. The data included Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, a photo of EBI’s lab, the text of all Shakespeare’s sonnets and Watson and Crick’s famous research paper on DNA’s “double helix” structure. Other researchers have previously used DNA to store digital data, including a Harvard University team that encoded a book last year. But Dr Goldman said EBI’s system was the first to correct translation errors between the digital and DNA codes, and can also be scaled up for real archival storage. The results were published in the journal Nature. Dr Birney and Dr Goldman plan to work towards a commercially viable repository in which a gram of DNA could safely store as much data as a million CDs for more than 10,000 years. Although the practical details are still to be worked out, an archive might store large amounts of data in vials of DNA dust, each with an indexing system encoded in the DNA to help retrieve individual files.

The scientists estimate that a cup of DNA, which has evolved over 3bn years to hold genetic information, could store 100m hours of high-definition video. “We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it,” said Dr Goldman. “It’s also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy.”

Nissan to build plug-in car in UK By John Reed and Chris Tighe Financial Times Published: March 18 2010 01:30 | Last updated: March 18 2010 08:56 Nissan has announced plans to build its much-awaited Leaf electric car in Sunderland, backed by a £20.7m grant from Britain.

The government also announced on Thursday it would provide £360m in aid to Ford for the development of environmentally friendly technologies as it seeks to become a world leader in ultra low-carbon vehicles. The loan guarantees will come from the government’s Automotive Assistance Programme to support Ford’s development of environmentally friendly technologies across its UK sites. Nissan’s production of the Leaf cars, as well as its batteries, will help safeguard and create over 550 highly skilled jobs at the Sunderland plant, the government said. The Japanese company plans to produce the batterypowered car in Europe from mid-2012. Sunderland will be its sole production site in Europe for the vehicle, although the company has also confirmed plans to build the battery-powered car in Oppama, Japan, and Smyrna, Tennessee. The north-east plant – Nissan's largest in Europe – had been tipped as the front-runner to build the car after the Japanese company last year said it intended to invest more than £200m to build lithium-ion batteries to supply electric cars there. However, its plant in Barcelona had also been a candidate, and Nissan is also building a €200m (£179m) battery plant in Portugal. A decision by the London 2012 Olympics Organising Committee to award to BMW a tender for about 4,000 mostly electric vehicles over a rival offer from Nissan had angered the Japanese carmaker. Nissan's decision to build the car in Britain will be a boost to the government's intention to make the country a hub for low-carbon vehicle technology. The government’s support for Nissan and Ford follows last week’s announcement of a £270m loan guarantee for General Motors’ European arm to secure the company’s operations in Britain and the rest of Europe. ”The automotive sector is of key importance to the UK. It supports R&D, technological innovation, skills and a supply chain that’s a mainstay of the wider manufacturing sector,” Lord Mandelson, business secretary, said. Ford’s plans to invest £1.5bn over five years to develop low carbon emission diesel and petrol emissions will protect around 2,800 jobs across its UK sites, the government said. The government has also spoken to General Motors about producing its planned Vauxhall Ampera electric car at its plant in Ellesmere Port. In addition, India's Tata Motors plans to make an electric version of its Indica Vista car somewhere in the UK.

Nissan's Sunderland plant makes its Qashqai and recently launched Juke small sports utility vehicles, but will not be producing the new model of the Micra small car, which the carmaker now intends to make at plants in Mexico, India, China and Thailand. Nissan and its French alliance partner Renault plan to launch eight electric vehicles during the next four years, more than is scheduled by any other important carmaking group. Carlos Ghosn, the two companies' chief executive, thinks zero-emission cars will make up 10 per cent of the world market by 2020. Nissan’s Sunderland plant, a £2.7bn investment, has consistently been rated Europe’s most efficient car producer. The plant employs 4,100 people. Thursday’s news is in stark contrast to just a year ago when the plant, hit by recession, had to shed 1,200 jobs. Agriculture: a growing investment By Mike Scott Financial Times Published: March 14 2010 10:24 | Last updated: March 14 2010 10:24 In spite of its central importance to society, agriculture is a sector that has long been misunderstood or ignored by investors, but this may be set to change. “It is amazing how much agriculture has been overlooked,” says Bruce Kahn, director and senior investment analyst at DB Climate Change Advisors, part of Deutsche Asset Management. “There is not a lot of understanding of the complexities and the local and regional differences in agriculture.” Ruud Nijs, head of corporate social responsibility at Rabobank, the Dutch bank which started as a cooperative offering finance to farmers, adds: “When people think about agriculture, they think about commodities. Commodities is a market that is fairly well understood and many people think that is where the opportunity lies to invest in agriculture, and really it is not.” One reason is that for a long time in the developed world at least, food prices have been relatively stable and the ability of the system to feed the population has been taken for granted. Food productivity is a function of its inputs, Mr Kahn asserts, and many people have also taken for granted the availability of the key inputs for food production; land, water and fertiliser. However, a number of factors have combined to bring into question the ability of the global agricultural sector to feed the world. World population is projected to rise to 9bn by 2050, and large swathes of that population are set to become wealthier and to demand more meat and dairy products, which require a huge amount of water and produce huge amounts of methane.

Meanwhile, the availability of fresh water and land is set to decline. The amount of arable land available per person is set to fall from 0.38 hectares per person to 0.15ha per person, says Rob Wylie, director of WHEB Ventures, which has several agriculture-related investments. Climate change will have a big impact on the incidence of crop diseases, soil erosion and rainfall patterns. Up to 40 per cent of arable land will be affected by drought as the climate warms, says Mr Wylie. There is now competition for land from biofuels to contend with, too. Arable farming, while less damaging than meat production, also plays an important part in increasing emissions through deforestation and the use of fossil fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides. According to Trucost, the use of traditional pesticides to produce rice results in emissions of 18.38kg of CO2 for every kg of rice. Finally, many commentators predict that oil prices will head back towards the record levels of 2008, when a barrel of oil hit $147 and the price of many foods rose as a consequence. In future, says Mr Kahn, “we believe prices will go up, there is no getting around it”. The need for the agricultural sector to address such serious issues creates opportunities, “from the seed to the supermarket”, says Mr Wylie. Many of these are linked by the need to do more with less and to eliminate waste in the supply chain. At the most basic level, this starts with the development of more robust, higher-yielding seeds that are more resistant to disease, pests or drought. Despite continued controversy over their use, there are likely to be more genetically modified (GM) crops. In a sign that Europe, the region most resistant to GM, may be coming around to the idea, the European Commission recently approved a GM potato for cultivation in Europe – only the second organism it has approved. With 70 per cent of all the world’s fresh water consumption being used for agriculture and more than 200bn tonnes of fertiliser used a year – causing about 2 per cent of CO2 emissions and creating land and water pollution – there is great potential to reduce the amount of water and fertiliser used in cultivation through more precise agricultural practices, and a number of companies have emerged in these areas. These include water efficiency companies such as Aquaspy, which offers “intelligent water control” to enable farmers to cut water consumption. Israel has carved out a niche as the global leader in drip irrigation technology, with companies such as Netafim and Queengil leading the way. The Carbon War Room, a non-governmental organisation founded by Sir Richard Branson and other

entrepreneurs, has identified a low-carbon fertiliser that it thinks could save 1 gigatonne of CO2 emissions every year: a product called biochar, a carbon-sequestering fertiliser. The process takes agricultural residues ranging from chicken manure to sugar cane leftovers and, using a process called pyrolysis, turns them into biochar. As well as removing carbon from the atmosphere, it also increases the water absorbency of soil, which prevents flooding and increases the amount of nutrients available to plants, says Peter Boyd, director of operations. The need to cut emissions and mounting consumer concern over pesticides has created a niche that Exosect, a UK-based company, has moved into with products that can control insects without pesticide. Deutsche Bank says that combining the food and potential fuel needs of 9bn people will require a 50 per cent increase in productivity – a challenge “that provides very large investment opportunities across the agribusiness complex”.

Arctic vault to safeguard world’s seeds By Fiona Harvey in Svalbard Financial Times Published: February 26 2008 01:36 | Last updated: February 26 2008 01:36 The door will open on Tuesday on an Arctic “doomsday” vault that will safeguard seed samples from the world’s most important food crops against possible disaster, in scenarios from drastic climate change to nuclear war. The first seeds – of rice plants – are to be delivered this morning to the Svalbard global seed vault, dug out of a snow-covered island 800 miles (1,280km) from the North Pole. They will be kept at 18°C below freezing. The intention is to preserve hundreds of millions of seeds from varieties of nearly 100 of the world’s main crops. “It’s an insurance policy,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which built the vault with $8m (€5.4m, £4.1m) from the Norwegian government. In the event of a sudden disaster such as a nuclear attack or an asteroid strike, the seed bank would hold the means to restock the Earth’s agriculture. It would also protect against the much more likely – some scientists would even say inevitable – effects of global warming by providing seeds for researchers to breed new crops that can to cope with a changing climate.

Mr Fowler explained: “We are losing crop varieties and crop diversity all over the place ... [even as] climate change is affecting the way some crops grow.” He pointed to varieties of rice sensitive to temperature rises much smaller than those forecasted by climatologists as the result of global warming: if exposed to a temperature rise of 1°C during a crucial period of growth, the crop’s yield is cut by one-tenth. If agricultural scientists could find strains of rice that were able to withstand higher temperatures, they could breed varieties to maintain yields. At present, there is no single seed repository. Collections are maintained haphazardly worldwide, meaning samples are lost. Sometimes samples of potentially important varieties of plants, along with the genes that could have conferred benefits on new plants, become extinct. Seeds from the 1.5m crop varieties known to be in the world’s collections will be sent to Svalbard, which will form the repository of last resort, dispensing seeds for crop varieties to be regrown only when all other known examples are gone. Tuesday’s delivery of seeds will be attended by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, and Jens Stoltenberg, the prime minister of Norway. The Global Crop Diversity Trust has raised $100m of the endowment of about $300m needed for the upkeep of the vault and the process of collecting and experimenting on seeds. Samples will be kept in watertight foil packets behind blastproof doors and concrete walls a metre thick. The vault’s remote location – 60m under the permafrost of the island of Spitsbergen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, one of the most northerly points of land on Earth – is intended to keep the seeds at the low temperatures required while also safe from intruders.

Indian doctor jailed over sex tests on foetuses By Nirmala George, AP Published: 29 March 2006 The Independent

An Indian court sentenced a doctor to two years in prison for using ultrasound tests to determine the sex of foetuses information the mothers could use to abort baby girls. Anil Sabsani, a radiologist who officials say told an undercover investigator she was carrying a female fetus but that her pregnancy could be "taken care of," is reportedly the first doctor convicted under a law designed to prevent genderselective abortions — a widespread problem in India, where many regard daughters as a liability. Sabsani and his assistant were sentenced to two years in prison and fined 5,000 rupees (US$125) each, said Sushma Saini, an information officer for the Haryana state government. They were tried in Palwal, a Haryana city about 95 miles south of New Delhi where Sabsani had his practice. Hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are believed aborted every year in India in sex-selective procedures. In 2001, authorities responsible for monitoring physicians sent an undercover team to Sabsani's office to see if he would reveal the gender of a fetus, said R.C. Aggarwal, Haryana's chief medical officer. Sabsani told the undercover team he would reveal the sex if he was paid an additional 1,500 rupees (US$35). After being paid, he told the woman the fetus was female, adding: "But that can be taken care of," Aggarwal said. It was not clear how many sex-determination tests Sabsani had conducted, Aggarwal said. "However, we had received complaints about him, which is why we set up the appointment," he said. Aggarwal, who was part of the team monitoring the state's doctors, said there were cases pending against three other doctors on similar charges in Haryana courts. He was not certain when those cases would go to trial. Cases can take years to make it through India's severely overburdened judicial system. While abortions are legal in India, revealing the sex of the baby and aborting on grounds of gender are not. In 1994, the government outlawed prenatal sex-determination tests, but the law is widely flouted — especially among better-off Indians — despite pledges by officials of a crackdown. There has long been a preference for boys among parents in India, where a bride's family traditionally gives cash and gifts to the groom's relatives. A study published January in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal, reported that up to 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades following prenatal gender checks. The researchers studied data on female fertility from a continuing Indian national survey, analyzing information on 133,738 births.

Based on the natural gender ratio from other countries, they estimated that 13.6 million to 13.8 million girls should have been born in 1997 in India. However, only 13.1 million were reported, the study said. Thus, they concluded that 500,000 girls were "missing" annually — most likely the result of abortions — giving them the figure of 10 million over 20 years. The researchers called the estimate conservative. India's census in part backs up the finding. The number of girls per 1,000 boys declined in the country from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001, according to census figures.

New foot-and-mouth vaccine developed By Clive Cookson, Science Editor March 27, 2013 11:09 pm (foot and mouth disease = la fièvre aphteuse) British scientists have developed a new vaccine against foot-and-mouth disease that they say could turn the tide against a virus which is the scourge of livestock farmers. The breakthrough is the result of a seven-year, £6m collaboration between between publicly funded researchers at the Pirbright Institute, Diamond Light Source and Oxford and Reading universities. The Wellcome Trust and Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs funded most of the work. The new “synthetic” vaccine uses the empty protein shell of a foot-and-mouth virus to trigger a strong immune response in animals but lacks the infectious genetic material inside the real virus. The old vaccine is made from live virus. Early trials in cattle show the new vaccine works as well as the conventional one while being far safer and easier to store and use. A particular advantage is that it does not require the expensive cold chain that limits use in poor countries where foot and mouth is rampant. Tests can distinguish between animals given the new vaccine and those that have been infected with foot and mouth. This distinction cannot be made when the older vaccine is used – a serious disincentive for farmers to vaccinate their animals in regions such as Europe, where foot and mouthfree status is critical.

Bryan Charleston, head of livestock viral diseases at the Pirbright Institute, said the trigger for the research was the 2001 UK foot-and-mouth epidemic, which cost an estimated £8bn in control measures, compensation and lost rural activity. “Using our detailed knowledge of the immune responses to foot-and-mouth virus in cattle, we were able to define the characteristics that needed to be incorporated into the new vaccine platform to induce protection,” he said. “What we have achieved here is close to the holy grail of foot-and-mouth vaccines,” added David Stuart, professor of structural biology at Oxford university. “Unlike the traditional vaccines, there is no chance that the empty shell vaccine could revert to an infectious form.” Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire played a crucial role in the project. The scientists used its Xray technology to determine the structure of the vaccine, ensuring it matched the outer shell of the virus as closely as possible. In collaboration with MSD Animal Health, a subsidiary of the US pharmaceutical giroup Merck, the team has produced a trial batch of the vaccine in a pilot plant. However, Ted Bianco, acting director of the Wellcome Trust, said the commercial arrangements for further development were still under discussion. Before the vaccine can be licensed for use by farmers, extensive clinical trials are needed to prove safety and efficacy, a process that could take six to eight years, according to Mr Charleston. The scientists are also considering applying the technology to other diseases. “This work will have a broad and enduring impact on vaccine development, and the technology should be transferable to other viruses from the same family, such as polio and hand, foot and mouth disease, a human virus currently endemic in southeast Asia,” said Prof Stuart.

'We need slaves to build monuments' It is already home to the world's glitziest buildings, man-made

islands and mega-malls - now Dubai plans to build the tallest tower. But behind the dizzying construction boom is an army of migrant labourers lured into a life of squalor and exploitation. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports o

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad The Guardian, Wednesday October 8 2008

heart of Mousafah, a ghetto-like neighbourhood of camps hidden away from the eyes of tourists. It is just one of many areas around the Gulf set aside for an army of labourers building the icons of architecture that are mushrooming all over the region. Behind the showers, in a yard paved with metal sheets, a line of men stands silently in front of grease-blackened pans, preparing their dinner. Sweat rolls down their heads and necks, their soaked shirts stuck to their backs. A heavy smell of spices and body odour fills the air. Next to a heap of rubbish, a man holds a plate containing his meal: a few chillies, an onion and three tomatoes, to be fried with spices and eaten with a piece of bread. In a neighbouring camp, a group of Pakistani workers from north and south Waziristan sit exhaustedly sipping tea while one of them cooks outside. In the middle of the cramped room in which 10 men sleep, one worker in a filthy robe sits on the floor grinding garlic and onions with a mortar and pestle while staring into the void.

Workers sleep on the street in Dubai. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul Ahad The sun is setting and its dying rays cast triangles of light on to the bodies of the Indian workers. Two are washing themselves, scooping water from tubs in a small yard next to the labour camp's toilets. Others queue for their turn. One man stands stamping his feet in a bucket, turned into a human washing machine. The heat is suffocating and the sandy wind whips our faces. The sprinkles of water from men drying their clothes fall like welcome summer rain. All around, a city of labour camps stretches out in the middle of the Arabian desert, a jumble of low, concrete barracks, corrugated iron, chicken-mesh walls, barbed wire, scrap metal, empty paint cans, rusted machinery and thousands of men with tired and gloomy faces. I have left Dubai's spiralling towers, man-made islands and mega-malls behind and driven through the desert to the outskirts of the neighbouring city of Abu Dhabi. Turn right before the Zaha Hadid bridge, and a few hundred metres takes you to the

Hamidullah, a thin Afghan from Maydan, a village on the outskirts of Kabul, tells me: "I spent five years in Iran and one year here, and one year here feels like 10 years. When I left Afghanistan I thought I would be back in a few months, but now I don't know when I will be back." Another worker on a bunk bed next to him adds: "He called his home yesterday and they told him that three people from his village were killed in fighting. This is why we are here." Hamidullah earns around 450 dirhams (£70) a month as a construction worker. How is life, I ask. "What life? We have no life here. We are prisoners. We wake up at five, arrive to work at seven and are back at the camp at nine in the evening, day in and day out." Outside in the yard, another man sits on a chair made of salvaged wood, in front of a broken mirror, a plastic sheet wrapped around his neck, while the camp barber trims his thick beard. Despite the air of misery, tonight is a night of celebration. One of the men is back from a two-week break in his home village in Pakistan, bringing with him a big sack of rice, and is cooking pilau rice with meat. Rice is

affordable at weekends only: already wretched incomes have been eroded by the weak dollar and rising food prices. "Life is worse now," one worker told me. "Before, we could get by on 140 dirhams [£22] a month; now we need 320 to 350."

A steel worker says he doesn't know who is supposed to pay for his ticket back home. At the recruiting agency they told him it would be the construction company - but he didn't get anything in writing.

The dozen or so men sit on newspapers advertising luxury watches, mobile phones and high-rise towers. When three plastic trays arrive, filled with yellowish rice and tiny cubes of meat, each offers the rare shreds of meat to his neighbours.

One experienced worker with spectacles and a prayer cap on his head tells me that things are much better than they used to be. Five years ago, when he first came, the company gave him nothing. There was no air conditioning in the room and sometimes no electricity. "Now, they give AC to each room and a mattress for each worker."

All of these men are part of a huge scam that is helping the construction boom in the Gulf. Like hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, they each paid more than £1,000 to employment agents in India and Pakistan. They were promised double the wages they are actually getting, plus plane tickets to visit their families once a year, but none of the men in the room had actually read their contract. Only two of them knew how to read. "They lied to us," a worker with a long beard says. "They told us lies to bring us here. Some of us sold their land; others took big loans to come and work here."

Immigrant workers have no right to form unions, but that didn't stop strikes and riots spreading across the region recently - something unheard of few years ago. Elsewhere in Mousafah, I encounter one of the very few illegal unions, where workers have established a form of underground insurance scheme, based on the tribal structure back home. "When we come here," one member of the scheme tells me, "we register with our tribal elders, and when one of us is injured and is sent home, or dies, the elders collect 30 dirhams from each of us and send the money home to his family."

Once they arrive in the United Arab Emirates, migrant workers are treated little better than cattle, with no access to healthcare and many other basic rights. The company that sponsors them holds on to their passports - and often a month or two of their wages to make sure that they keep working. And for this some will earn just 400 dirhams (£62) a month.

In a way, the men at Mousafah are the lucky ones. Down in the Diera quarter of old Dubai, where many of the city's illegal workers live, 20 men are often crammed into one small room.

A group of construction engineers told me, with no apparent shame, that if a worker becomes too ill to work he will be sent home after a few days. "They are the cheapest commodity here. Steel, concrete, everything is up, but workers are the same."

On another hot evening, hundreds of men congregate in filthy alleyways at the end of a day's work, sipping tea and sitting on broken chairs. One man rests his back on the handles of his pushcart, silently eating his dinner next to a huge pile of garbage.

As they eat, the men talk more about their lives. "My shift is eight hours and two overtime, but in reality we work 18 hours," one says. "The supervisors treat us like animals. I don't know if the owners [of the company] know." "There is no war, and the police treat us well," another chips in, "but the salary is not good." "That man hasn't been home for four years," says Ahmad, the chef for the night, pointing at a wellbuilt young man. "He has no money to pay for the flight."

UN agencies estimate that there are up to 300,000 illegal workers in the emirates.

In one of the houses, a man is hanging his laundry over the kitchen sink, a reeking smell coming from a nearby toilet. Next door, men lie on the floor. They tell me they are all illegal and they are scared and that I have to leave. Outside, a fistfight breaks out between Pakistani workers and Sri Lankans. The alleyways are dotted with sweatshops, where Indian men stay until late at night, bending over small tables sewing on beads.

A couple of miles away, the slave market becomes more ugly. Outside a glitzy hotel, with a marble and glass facade, dozens of prostitutes congregate according to their ethnic groups: Asians to the right, next to them Africans, and, on the left, blondes from the former Soviet Union. There are some Arab women. Iranians, I am told, are in great demand. They charge much higher prices and are found only in luxury hotels. Like the rest of the Gulf region, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are being built by expat workers. They are strictly segregated, and a hierarchy worthy of previous centuries prevails. At the top, floating around in their black or white robes, are the locals with their oil money. Immaculate and pampered, they own everything. Outside the "free zones", where the rules are looser, no one can start a business in the UAE without a partner from the emirates, who often does nothing apart from lending his name. No one can get a work permit without a local sponsor. Under the locals come the western foreigners, the experts and advisers, making double the salaries they make back home, all tax free. Beneath them are the Arabs - Lebanese and Palestinians, Egyptians and Syrians. What unites these groups is a mixture of pretension and racism. "Unrealistic things happen to your mind when you come here," a Lebanese woman who frequently visits Dubai tells me as she drives her new black SUV. "Suddenly, you can make $5,000 [£2,800] a month. You can get credit so easy, you buy the car of your dreams, you shop and you think it's a great bargain; when you go to dinner, you go to a hotel ... nowhere else can you live like this." Down at the base of the pyramid are the labourers, waiters, hotel employees and unskilled workers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, the Philippines and beyond. They move deferentially around the huge malls, cafes, bars and restaurants, bowing down and calling people sir and madam. In the middle of the day, during the hottest hours, you can see them sleeping in public gardens under trees, or on the marble floors of the Dubai Mosque, on benches or pieces of cardboard on side streets. These are the victims of the racism that is not only flourishing in the UAE but is increasingly being exported to the rest of the Middle East. Sometimes it reminds you of the American south in the 1930s.

One evening in Abu Dhabi, I have dinner with my friend Ali, a charming Iraqi engineer whom I have known for two decades. After the meal, as his wife serves saffron-flavoured tea, he pushes back his chair and lights a cigar. We talk about stock markets, investment and the Middle East, and then the issue of race comes up. "We will never use the new metro if it's not segregated," he tells me, referring to the state-ofthe-art underground system being built in neighbouring Dubai. "We will never sit next to Indians and Pakistanis with their smell," his wife explains. Not for the first time, I am told that while the immigrant workers are living in appalling conditions, they would be even worse off back home - as if poverty in one place can justify exploitation in the other. "We need slaves," my friend says. "We need slaves to build monuments. Look who built the pyramids they were slaves." Sharla Musabih, a human rights campaigner who runs the City of Hope shelter for abused women, is familiar with such sentiments. "Once you get rich on the back of the poor," she says, "it's not easy to let go of that lifestyle. They are devaluing human beings," she says. "The workers might eat once a day back home, but they have their family around them, they have respect. They are not asking for a room in a hotel - all they are asking for is respect for their humanity." Towards the end of another day, on a fabulous sandy beach near the Dubai marina, the waves wash calmly over the beautiful sand. A couple are paragliding over the blue sea; on the new islands, gigantic concrete structures stand like spaceships. As tourists laze on the beach, Filipino, Indian and Pakistani workers, stand silently watching from a dune, cut off from the holidaymakers by an invisible wall. Behind them rise more brand-new towers. "It's a Green Zone mentality," a young Arab working in IT tells me. "People come to make money. They live in bubbles. They all want to make as much money as possible and leave." Back at the Mousafah camps, a Pakistani worker walks me through his neighbourhood. On both sides of the dusty lane stand concrete barracks and the

familiar detritus: raw sewage, garbage, scrap metal. A man washes his car, and in a cage chickens flutter up and down. We enter one of the rooms, flip-flops piled by the door. Inside, a steelworker gets a pile of papers from a plastic envelope and shoves them into my lap. He is suing the company that employed him for unpaid wages. "I've been going to court for three months, and every time I go they tell me to come in two weeks." His friends nod their heads. "Last time the [company] lawyer told me, 'I am in the law here you will not get anything." Economically, Dubai has progressed a lot in the past 10 years, but socially it has stayed behind," says Musabih. "Labour conditions are like America in the 19th century - but that's not acceptable in the 21st century.

The masterpiece that killed George Orwell In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book. o

Robert McCrum The Observer, Sunday 10 May 2009

o

George Orwell. Photograph: Public Domain

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition. Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature. "Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s. The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran. Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The

closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language. There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation. Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer. Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response. In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage". It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again." On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane." From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity. At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn." Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was." Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off." Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster. Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool. Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant. The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely". He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with

"inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB. A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US. Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works." As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible." Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive." This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-inprogress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably

bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB." And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all. It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone. By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done. Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms". The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot". By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once

again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic. As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary". Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone. The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46. David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.

Why '1984'? Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984. In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues

that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.

Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world. Thought Police

Freedom of speech: How '1984' has entrusted our culture The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien. It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation. Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain. Orwellian George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government. Big Brother (is watching you) A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit realityTV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell. Room 101

An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade. Thoughtcrime See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom. Newspeak For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power. Doublethink Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre 

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Oxford scientist calls for research on technology 'mind change' Brain researcher Susan Greenfield claims 'mind change' as a result of using modern technology is one of humanity's greatest threats

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Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 September 2010 20.07 BST

climate change, I think the quality of our existence is threatened and the kind of people we might be in the future." Lady Greenfield was talking at the British Science Festival in Birmingham before a speech at the Tory party conference next month. She said possible benefits of modern technology included higher IQ and faster processing of information, but using internet search engines to find facts may affect people's ability to learn. Computer games in which characters get multiple lives might even foster recklessness, she said.

Scientists believe it is too early to know whether modern technology's effect on the brain is a cause for concern. Photograph: Science Photo Library Lady Greenfield reignited the debate over modern technology and its impact on the brain today by claiming the issue could pose the greatest threat to humanity after climate change. The Oxford University researcher called on the government and private companies to join forces and thoroughly investigate the effects that computer games, the internet and social networking sites such as Twitter may have on the brain. Lady Greenfield has coined the term "mind change" to describe differences that arise in the brain as a result of spending long periods of time on a computer. Many scientists believe it is too early to know whether these changes are a cause for concern. "We need to recognise this is an issue rather than sweeping it under the carpet," Greenfield said. "We should acknowledge that it is bringing an unprecedented change in our lives and we have to work out whether it is for good or bad." Everything we do causes changes in the brain and the things we do a lot are most likely to cause long term changes. What is unclear is how modern technology influences the brain and the consequences this has. "For me, this is almost as important as climate change," said Greenfield. "Whilst of course it doesn't threaten the existence of the planet like

"We have got to be very careful about what price we are paying, that the things that are being lost don't outweigh the things gained," Greenfield said. "Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned. I have yet to find a parent who says 'I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer'." Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London and co-author of the book The Learning Brain, agreed that more research was needed to know whether technology was causing significant changes in the brain. "We know nothing at all about how the developing brain is being influenced by video games or social networking and so on. "We can only really know how seriously to take this issue once the research starts to produce data. So far, most of the research on how video games affect the brain has been done with adult participants and, perhaps surprisingly, has mostly shown positive effects of gaming on many cognitive abilities," she said. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of Proust and the Squid, said that brain circuits honed by reading books and thinking about their content could be lost as people spend more time on computers. "It takes time to think deeply about information and we are becoming accustomed to moving on to the next distraction. I worry that the circuits that give us deep reading abilities will atrophy in adults and not be properly formed in the young," she said.

Fears over computers’ impact on lives

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor Financial Times Published: September 14 2010 18:55 | Last updated: September 14 2010 18:55 The potential transformation of our brains caused by intensive use of computers and the internet is a threat to our quality of life on the same scale as risks to the planet from climate change, according to an eminent neuroscientist. Lady Greenfield of Oxford university has stepped up her campaign for an inquiry into “mind change” caused by computers and the internet. Lady Greenfield, former director of the Royal Institution, called on the government and private sector to set up a joint research programme to look at the effects of modern technology on the brain. “For me this is almost as important as climate change,” she said, ahead of a speech on Tuesday night at the British Science Festival in Birmingham. “While it doesn’t threaten the existence of the planet like climate change, I think the quality of our existence is threatened – and the kind of people we might be in the future.” Lady Greenfield said the possible benefits of modern technology included a higher IQ, better memory and quicker processing of information. But she is more worried about the potential negative side. For example, social networking sites might reduce the empathy that young people felt towards others; using search engines to find facts might hinder the ability to learn; and computer games in which it was possible to start from the beginning, no matter how many mistakes were made, might make us more reckless in our day-to-day lives, she said. Dismissing charges of scaremongering, Lady Greenfield said: “Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned. I have yet to find a parent who says: ‘I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer.’” She acknowledged that information technology was bringing huge benefits to society, but added: “We should be the masters and not the slaves of technology – and harnessing it in ways that we could do exciting and fulfilling things with.”

WORKSHEET ON AN IMMIGRANT’S STORY Village voice Man born under a good star rejects ill-fortune In his column from a poor Ganges village in the shadow of the Himalayas VICTOR ZORZA, the distinguished journalist, writes about the joys and sorrows of Indian village life. Here he relates one man’s dream of emigration and riches. A bicycle would cost a fortune, but the young man who yearned for the marvellous shiny machine had it all worked out. He would borrow the money, ride the bicycle into town every day carrying two churns of milk, and would soon be on his way to becoming the richest man in the village. The moneylender demanded interest at 60 per cent, so Surat Singh kept borrowing small sums from friends until he had collected what he needed. But his first milk delivery almost ended in disaster. The jungle track connecting the village to the road had been flooded during the monsoon. His front wheel struck an unseen stone, the bicycle overturned, and one churn

spilled its precious contents into the water. But since it was the smaller of the two, he regarded it as a good omen. Surat Singh always looked on the bright side. He had another stroke of luck just outside town, at the checkpost where officials inspect the milk. The inspector wasn’t there , so he didn’t have to pay a bribe. He knew his good fortune couldn’t last, because in the end everybody had to pay up, but he got away with it for the whole of the first week. Another favourable omen. The neighbours from whom Surat Singh collected the milk always diluted it, adding a quart of water to every two quarts of milk. When the inspector did stop him later to take a sample, Surat Singh slipped him the 200 rupees (about £13) he had borrowed from the moneylender for this contingency. It would take him a fortnight to earn that much, but it was a good investment : he would not be bothered again for some time. The money Surat Singh earned from milk deliveries would finance his dream of emigration for that was how he was going to make his fortune. His first attempt to emigrate ended in disaster when the confidence trickster who had promised to smuggle him to a foreign country left him high and dry after taking him to Bombay and relieving him of his savings. This time, Surat Singh told me, he would be more careful : he would rely on me to get him to the promised land. Once abroad, he would work hard for a couple of years – « very hard, » he told me – and return with 100,000 rupees (more than £6,500). « Here it takes a lifetime to earn that much, » he said, « even as a milkman. »

The milk inspector had never promised complete immunity to milkmen, claiming that he had to do his duty « sometimes ». It kept them jumpy and compliant. But he always warned Surat Singh when he was going to take a sample – and demanded a new bribe. Sometimes he would say that his own chief was coming to inspect him, explain that he had to share his bribe with his superior – and extort a bigger payment. Another

milkman, slow with his bribes, was caught and fined the equivalent of several months’ earnings. Surat Singh, frightened, again borrowed from the moneylender to pay the inspector. Diluting the milk to repay a loan In the torrid summers, by the time Surat Singh reached town, the milk would often go off in the heat. He bought ice on the outskirts and put it into the churns, diluting the milk even further. His customers knew that the milk had been watered down –everybody did it – but protested when it was too thin. He put in arrow root to thicken it and soda to keep it from going bad. Desperate for money to repay the moneylender, he added more water. His custom began to fall off. The rainy season was worse than the heat. The jungle track was difficult enough to negotiate ; the highway to town – wet and slippery, with huge lorries rushing past, their drivers heedless of cyclists – was a more serious hazard. Cyclists had been maimed and killed. A speeding truck knocked him off his bicycle. The driver didn’t stop, but passers-by pulled him out of the mud, put him on a bullock cart, and took him to hospital. His broken arm, first in plaster and then in a sling, took months to mend. He lost his remaining customers to other milkmen, but he has now resumed deliveries and is trying to build up his trade again. The bone hasn’t set properly. It will have to be broken and re-set. He rides with one hand resting on the handlebars – a difficult and risky feat, with his heavy load. But he is saving again – to repay the loan for medical expenses, also at 60 per cent, and the earlier borrowings. « Then, » he says, « I’ll buy an air ticket to go abroad. » « I’m lucky, » he explains. « If I’d been in the middle of the road when I was hit, I would have been killed. » But he was born under a good star, he insists, and will find his way abroad and return rich. « If it has to happen, it will, » he says. Victor Zorza Victor Zorza thanks the readers who have sent money for needy villagers, and requests that any future donations should not be sent to him but to the Village Voice Fund, Oxfam, 274 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 7D2.

Solar-powered flight Its moment in the sun An

attempt to fly around the world in a solar-powered plane Mar 2nd 2013 | PAYERNE |From the print edition of The Economist

A REVOLUTIONARY solar-powered aircraft touched down recently at Moffett Airfield, in the heart of Silicon Valley. No champagne corks were popped, however, for it arrived disassembled in the belly of a 747 cargo jet. The aircraft will be reassembled by the end of March and then begin flight tests. If all goes well, by May it should be ready to fly across America, stopping in four cities before landing in New York. However, this aircraft is just an experimental prototype for a much bigger exploit. The team behind the project, called Solar Impulse, are using their prototype to learn what will be required to build a second aircraft capable of circumnavigating the globe using only the power of the sun. After carrying out a number of successful test flights of the prototype from their base at an airfield in Payerne, Switzerland, construction of their second aircraft began. But last July the Solar Impulse project suffered a big setback. The second aircraft failed a critical safety check. Its main wing spar, the backbone of any aeroplane, broke during structural tests. There is always a risk of pushing technology too far when doing something new. Bertrand Piccard, one of Solar Impulse’s founders, had been in the same situation before and knew that success comes by learning from mistakes and moving on. In 1999 he co-piloted Orbiter 3, the first balloon to circumnavigate the globe (the other two Orbiters failed to complete the trip). It was when he landed in the Egyptian desert with just 40kg of propane left from the 3.7 tonnes he had taken off with 20 days earlier that Mr Piccard decided his next challenge would be to repeat the flight using no fuel at all. He teamed up with André Borschberg, a fighter pilot and engineer, to form the Solar Impulse project. Mr Piccard comes from a line of adventurers. His grandfather, Auguste, was the first to fly a balloon into the stratosphere. His father, Jacques, plunged to record depths in a deep-sea submersible. Making the most of it The problem with the wing spar has set back the team a year. Making a new one, completing the second aircraft and waiting for suitable weather means that the round-the-world flight is now scheduled for 2015. In the meantime, the team decided to make the best of their enforced delay by flying their prototype across America. This will provide more valuable operating experience and help with the development of the technologies they will need. Plus, if anything goes wrong, it is easier to land on dry land than the ocean. Solar-powered aircraft are not new. One of the earliest, Solar Challenger, flew across the English Channel in 1981. It was built by the late Paul MacCready, an American aeronautical engineer. Its 14.3-metre wing was covered in photovoltaic cells. These powered two electric motors, which in turn drove a single propeller.

The Solar Impulse project is a very different beast. The prototype aircraft (pictured above) which will fly across America has a wingspan of 63.4 metres, which is as big as a jumbo jet’s. Yet its fuselage is as slender as a glider’s and its single-person cockpit is cramped. The wings are covered in almost 12,000 photovoltaic cells, which can simultaneously run its four electrically driven propellers while charging four packs of lithium-polymer batteries. The batteries are needed because the aircraft has to be able to fly through the night. The second aircraft (the one being built to circumnavigate the globe) will have to do that non-stop for fiveto-six days at a time. The plan is to take off in an easterly direction and land on every continent that touches the Tropic of Cancer. This will involve long flights across oceans. With only as much power as a motor scooter, the planned aircraft will cruise at just 70kph (43mph). Its ultimate range will be limited by the physical ability of the pilot to remain alert, with little room to move or to store much food and water. With current technology, the team reckon, a two-person solar plane would be too heavy. To give Mr Piccard and Mr Borschberg (who take turns as pilot) room to exercise and lie down, the next aircraft will be about 15% bigger than the prototype, which tips the scales at just 1,600kg (3,527lb). Weight is the critical factor. The wing spar that broke had been redesigned with an ultralight carbon-fibre process to shed the grams. “But we went too close to the limits,” confesses Mr Borschberg. There is little scope for a full autopilot system, and it would weigh too much. However, Altran, an engineering consultancy based in France and one of the project’s supporters, is developing a partial system. In calm weather, it will keep the aircraft pointing in the right direction. And if turbulence causes a wing to dip by more than five degrees, a cuff on the pilot’s right or left arm will vibrate to tell him which way to correct course. He must react quickly to keep control. This system will be tried out on the prototype flight in America. The ground crew can monitor both the flight and the pilot with telemetry. When circumnavigating the globe the pilot will be able to lower a seat (which also doubles as a toilet) to lie down and take catnaps of up to 20 minutes. That is enough, the team calculate, to ward off some of the effects of sleep deprivation. The pilot must not be too groggy if he has to swing suddenly into action. This procedure has been tested in a flight simulator for 72 hours non-stop, and seems to work. A typical flight involves taking off in the early morning, when winds are light, and ascending to 10,000 metres to stay above any stormclouds. At this altitude, though, the air is thin and an oxygen supply is needed. The pilot has to wear an oxygen mask because pressurising the cockpit, as an airliner does with air from its jet engines, is not possible. Nor do the team want to carry heavy oxygen cylinders. As an alternative Air Liquide, an industrial-gases firm, is developing a solar-powered system to generate oxygen. At night the pilot descends slowly, carefully using up the power until dawn. Once the sun returns the batteries can recharge in three hours as the plane ascends again. Landings are also left until the early evening, when winds are light. The flight across America will give the team’s meteorologists an opportunity to see how their weather models stand up. Sometimes it is necessary for the pilot to delay a landing to wait for optimum conditions. Mr Piccard and Mr Borschberg have learned an interesting technique to do that. Flying slowly, they turn the nose into a headwind, which can make the aircraft fly backwards. It is not the sort of thing to try in a jumbo jet.

Slum growth 'shames the world' By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent The number of people living out their days in the squalor of a slum is almost one billion, the United Nations says - one-sixth of the world's population.

Without radical changes, it believes, that number could double in 30 years. By 2050, the UN says, there may be 3.5 billion slumdwellers, out of a total urban population of about six billion. The head of its human settlements programme says the persistence of slums should shame the entire world. The programme, UN-Habitat, has compiled what it says is the most comprehensive report ever on slums, based on studies of 37 cities across the globe. Self-help The report, The Challenge Of Slums: Global Report On Human Settlements 2003, is published on 6 October, World Habitat Day. We have to recognise that the poor are an asset, hardworking and decent people Dr Anna Tibaijuka, UN-Habitat In 2001, it says, 924 million people, 31.6% of the world's urban population, lived in slums, most of them in developing countries. The report says the number of slumdwellers almost certainly increased substantially during the 1990s. But it says national approaches have generally moved away from "negative policies such as forced eviction, benign neglect and involuntary resettlement". Instead, it says, the emphasis is increasingly on self-help, upgrading existing slums rather than resettling their inhabitants, nurturing the abilities of the people who live in them, and respecting their rights. The report treads some familiar ground in its prescriptions for change. Policies, it says, "should more vigorously address the issue of the livelihoods of slumdwellers and urban poverty in general". They should be as inclusive and accountable as possible, and should involve slumdwellers themselves in identifying their problems and implementing the solutions. 'Political will' The report stresses the importance of providing security of tenure (though not necessarily outright ownership) to persuade people to invest in their communities. ESTIMATED SLUM POPULATIONS World 31.6% Europe 6.2% Sub-Saharan Africa 71.9% The executive director of UN-Habitat is Dr Anna Tibaijuka. She told BBC News Online: "On policy, our first solution is to reiterate the need for political will. "We should all be ashamed to have these unplanned neighbourhoods in our cities. "One of the UN's millennium development goals committed world leaders to achieving 'significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 m slum dwellers by the year 2020'. "Once we accept the principle that underlies that goal, I'm convinced we shall achieve it. "And we have to recognise that the poor are an asset, hardworking and decent people. But with policies that discourage them, how do we expect them to improve their lot?" The report expresses concern about globalisation, saying current evidence suggests in its present form it "has not always worked in favour of the urban poor". Dr Tibaijuka told BBC News Online: "Globalisation is a work in progress, and it needs to be regulated. We have to try to maximise its benefits - it would be naive to say there's nothing we can do to control its downside." Speaking at the report's London launch, Professor Patrick Wakely of University College London said: "I was in a slum recently in Surabaya, in Indonesia. "Someone pointed out the shoes I was wearing had probably been made in that slum itself. Globalisation can offer opportunities that weren't available in the past." Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/3161812.stm Published: 2003/10/06 02:36:49 GMT © BBC MMIII

'Everybody is happy now'

A world of genetically modified babies, boundless consumption, casual sex and drugs ... How does Aldous Huxley's vision of a totalitarian future stand up 75 years after Brave New World was first published, asks Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood Saturday November 17, 2007 Guardian "O brave new world, that has such people in't!" - Miranda, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, on first sighting the shipwrecked courtiers In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered. During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race. That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in 2001. Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former iron curtain: the west has its own versions now. On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality. Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist at the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like? Surely it's time to look again at Brave New World and to examine its arguments for and against the totally planned society it describes, in which "everybody is happy now". What sort of happiness is on offer, and what is the price we might pay to achieve it? I first read Brave New World in the early 1950s, when I was 14. It made a deep impression on me, though I didn't fully understand some of what I was reading. It's a tribute to Huxley's writing skills that although I didn't know what knickers were, or camisoles - nor did I know that zippers, when they first appeared, had been denounced from pulpits as lures of the devil because they made clothes so easy to take off - I none the less had a vivid picture of "zippicamiknicks", that female undergarment with a single zipper down the front that could be shucked so easily: "Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor." I myself was living in the era of "elasticised panty girdles" that could not be got out of or indeed into without an epic struggle, so this was heady stuff indeed. The girl shedding the zippicamiknicks is Lenina Crowne, a blue-eyed beauty both strangely innocent and alluringly voluptuous - or "pneumatic", as her many male admirers call her. Lenina doesn't see why she shouldn't have sex with anyone she likes whenever the occasion offers, as to do so is merely polite behaviour and not to do so is selfish. The man she's trying to seduce by shedding her undergarment is John "the Savage", who's been raised far outside the "civilised" pale on a diet of Shakespeare's chastity/whore speeches, and Zuni cults, and self-flagellation, and who believes in religion and romance, and in suffering to be worthy of one's beloved, and who idolises Lenina until she doffs her zippicamiknicks in such a casual and shameless fashion.

Never were two sets of desiring genitalia so thoroughly at odds. And thereon hangs Huxley's tale. Brave New World is either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable. "Utopia" is sometimes said to mean "no place", from the Greek ou-topos; others derive it from eu, as in "eugenics", in which case it would mean "healthy place" or "good place". Sir Thomas More, in his own 16th-century Utopia, may have been punning: utopia is the good place that doesn't exist. As a literary construct, Brave New World thus has a long list of literary ancestors. Plato's Republic and the Bible's book of Revelations and the myth of Atlantis are the great-great-grandparents of the form; nearer in time are More's Utopia, and the land of the talking-horse, totally rational Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and HG Wells's The Time Machine, in which the brainless, pretty "upper classes" play in the sunshine during the day, and the ugly "lower classes" run the underground machinery and emerge at night to eat the social butterflies. In the 19th century - when improvements in sewage systems, medicine, communication technologies and transportation were opening new doors - many earnest utopias were thrown up by the prevailing mood of optimism, with William Morris's News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward foremost among them. Insofar as they are critical of society as it presently exists, but nevertheless take a dim view of the prospects of the human race, utopias may verge on satire, as do Swift's and More's and Wells's; but insofar as they endorse the view that humanity is perfectible, or can at least be vastly improved, they will resemble idealising romances, as do Bellamy's and Morris's. The first world war marked the end of the romantic-idealistic utopian dream in literature, just as several real-life utopian plans were about to be launched with disastrous effects. The Communist regime in Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany both began as utopian visions. But as had already been discovered in literary utopias, perfectibility breaks on the rock of dissent. What do you do with people who don't endorse your views or fit in with your plans? Nathaniel Hawthorne, a disillusioned graduate of the real-life Brooke Farm utopian scheme, pointed out that the Puritan founders of New England - who intended to build the New Jerusalem - began with a prison and a gibbet. Forced re-education, exile and execution are the usual choices on offer in utopias for any who oppose the powers that be. It's rats in the eyes for you - as in Nineteen Eighty-Four - if you won't love Big Brother. Brave New World has its own gentler punishments: for non-conformists, it's exile to Iceland, where Man's Final End can be discussed among like-minded intellects, without pestering "normal" people - in a sort of university, as it were. Utopias and dystopias from Plato's Republic on have had to cover the same basic ground that real societies do. All must answer the same questions: where do people live, what do they eat, what do they wear, what do they do about sex and child-rearing? Who has the power, who does the work, how do citizens relate to nature, and how does the economy function? Romantic utopias such as Morris's News from Nowhere and WH Hudson's A Crystal Age present a pre-Raphaelite picture, with the inhabitants going in for flowing robes, natural settings in abodes that sound like English country houses with extra stained glass and lots of arts and crafts. Everything would be fine, we're told, if we could only do away with industrialism and get back in tune with nature, and deal with overpopulation. (Hudson solves this last problem by simply eliminating sex, except for one unhappy couple per country house who are doomed to procreate.) But when Huxley was writing Brave New World at the beginning of the 1930s, he was, in his own words, an "amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete", a member of that group of bright young upstarts that swirled around the Bloomsbury Group and delighted in attacking anything Victorian or Edwardian. So Brave New World tosses out the flowing robes, the crafts, and the tree-hugging. Its architecture is futuristic - electrically lighted towers and softly glowing pink glass - and everything in its cityscape is relentlessly unnatural and just as relentlessly industrialised. Viscose and acetate and imitation leather are its fabrics of choice; apartment buildings, complete with artificial music and taps that flow with perfume, are its dwellings; transportation is by private helicopter. Babies are no longer born, they're grown in hatcheries, their bottles moving along assembly lines, in various types and batches according to the needs of "the hive", and fed on "external secretion" rather than "milk". The word "mother" - so thoroughly worshipped by the Victorians - has become a shocking obscenity; and indiscriminate sex, which was a shocking obscenity for the Victorians, is now de rigueur. "He patted me on the behind this afternoon," said Lenina. "There, you see!" Fanny was triumphant. "That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality." Many of Brave New World's nervous jokes turn on these kinds of inversions - more startling to its first audience, perhaps, than to us, but still wry enough. Victorian thrift turns to the obligation to spend, Victorian till-death-do-us-part monogamy has been replaced with "everyone belongs to everyone else", Victorian religiosity has been channelled into the worship of an invented deity - "Our Ford", named after the American car-czar Henry Ford, god of the assembly line

- via communal orgies. Even the "Our Ford" chant of "orgy-porgy" is an inversion of the familiar nursery rhyme, in which kissing the girls makes them cry. Now, it's if you refuse to kiss them - as "the Savage" does - that the tears will flow. Sex is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias - who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom, being one of humanity's main preoccupations. Because sex and procreation have been separated and women no longer give birth - the very idea is yuck-making to them - sex has become a recreation. Little naked children carry on "erotic play" in the shrubberies, so as to get a hand in early. Some women are sterile - "freemartins" - and perfectly nice girls, though a little whiskery. The others practise "Malthusian drill" - a form of birth control - and take "pregnancy surrogate" hormone treatments if they feel broody, and sport sweet little faux-leather fashionista cartridge belts crammed with contraceptives. If they slip up on their Malthusian drill, there's always the lovely pink-glass Abortion Centre. Huxley wrote before the pill, but its advent brought his imagined sexual free-for-all a few steps closer. (What about gays? Does "everyone belongs to everyone else" really mean everyone? We aren't told.) Huxley himself still had one foot in the 19th century: he could not have dreamed his upside-down morality unless he himself also found it threatening. At the time he was writing Brave New World he was still in shock from a visit to the United States, where he was particularly frightened by mass consumerism, its group mentality and its vulgarities. I use the word "dreamed" advisedly, because Brave New World - gulped down whole - achieves an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination. All is surface; there is no depth. As you might expect from an author with impaired eyesight, the visual sense predominates: colours are intense, light and darkness vividly described. Sound is next in importance, especially during group ceremonies and orgies, and the viewing of "feelies" - movies in which you feel the sensations of those onscreen, "The Gorillas' Wedding" and "Sperm Whale's Love-Life" being sample titles. Scents are third perfume wafts everywhere, and is dabbed here and there; one of the most poignant encounters between John the Savage and the lovely Lenina is the one in which he buries his worshipping face in her divinely scented undergarments while she herself is innocently sleeping, zonked out on a strong dose of soma, partly because she can't stand the awful real-life smells of the "reservation" where the new world has not been implemented. Many utopias and dystopias emphasise food (delicious or awful; or, in the case of Swift's Houyhnhnms, oats), but in Brave New World the menus are not presented. Lenina and her lay-of-the-month, Henry, eat "an excellent meal", but we aren't told what it is. (Beef would be my guess, in view of the huge barns full of cows that provide the external secretions.) Despite the dollops of sex-on-demand, the bodies in Brave New World are oddly disembodied, which serves to underscore one of Huxley's points: in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning. Meaning has in fact been eliminated, as far as possible. All books except works of technology have been banned - cf Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451; museum-goers have been slaughtered, cf Henry Ford's "History is bunk". As for God, he is present "as an absence; as though he weren't there at all" - except, of course, for the deeply religious John the Savage, who has been raised on the Zuni "reservation", where archaic life carries on, replete with "meaning" of the most intense kinds. John is the only character in the book who has a real body, but he knows it through pain, not through pleasure. "Nothing costs enough here," he says of the perfumed new world, to where he's been brought as an "experiment". The "comfort" offered by Mustapha Mond - one of the 10 "controllers" of this world, direct descendants of Plato's guardians - is not enough for John. He wants the old world back - dirt, diseases, free will, fear, anguish, blood, sweat, tears and all. He believes he has a soul, and like many an early 20th-century literary possessor of such a thing - think of the missionary in Somerset Maugham's 1921 story, Miss Thompson, who hangs himself after sinning with a prostitute - he is made to pay the price for this belief. In a foreword to a new edition of Brave New World published in 1946, after the horrors of the second world war and Hitler's "final solution", Huxley criticises himself for having provided only two choices in his 1932 utopia/dystopia - an "insane life in Utopia" or "the life of a primitive in an Indian village, more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal". (He does, in fact, provide a third sort of life - that of the intellectual community of misfits in Iceland - but poor John the Savage isn't allowed to go there, and he wouldn't have liked it anyway, as there are no public flagellations available.) The Huxley of 1946 comes up with another sort of utopia, one in which "sanity" is possible. By this, he means a kind of "high utilitarianism" dedicated to a "conscious and rational" pursuit of man's "final end", which is a kind of union with the immanent "Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahmin". No wonder Huxley subsequently got heavily into the mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, thus inspiring a generation of 1960s dopeheads and pop musicians to seek God in altered brain chemistry. His interest in soma, it appears, didn't spring out of nowhere. Meanwhile, those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, 75 years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?

The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well. It's still as vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it. The answer to the second question rests with you. Look in the mirror: do you see Lenina Crowne looking back at you, or do you see John the Savage? Chances are, you'll see something of both, because we've always wanted things both ways. We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough. It was Huxley's genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to our uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It's these double-sided imaginative abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World To quote The Tempest, source of Huxley's title: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on." He might well have added: "and nightmares". · Aldous Huxley's Brave New World will be reissued as a Vintage Classic on December 6 (£7.99) Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe, Africa’s greatest storyteller, died on March 21st, aged 82 Mar 30th 2013 |From the print edition of The Economist

AS A boy Chinua Achebe so loved reading that his friends called him “Dictionary”. He lived in the library at Government College in Umuahia, in south-eastern Nigeria, devouring Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats. “They were not about us or people like us,” he would say later in his soft, measured voice. But even John Buchan’s stories, in which heroic white men battled and worsted repulsive natives, excited rather than troubled him. It was all “wonderful preparation” for the day when he would start reading between the lines and asking questions.

That day came quickly. His first novel, “Things Fall Apart”, published in 1958 when he was 28, told the story of European colonialism in Nigeria from the African point of view. Its hero, Okonkwo, was a man who came, like him, from the Ibo south-east: a warrior and wrestler, a man of wisdom. The book was rich with the proverbs and parables Mr Achebe, too, remembered, all rendered in stately English. Poor boy Okonkwo grew up to have three wives, eight children and two barns full of yams. Yet the book ended with the discovery of his body, a suicide, showing how completely Ibo culture had been destroyed by the arrival of Christian missionaries and the district commissioner. “Things Fall Apart” sold more than 12m copies and has never been out of print. Because of it, said Mr Achebe’s best-known literary protegé, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “I realised that people like me, girls with skin the colour of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.” Young authors like her sought him out, leaning in close when he talked about Africa and writing. A small man with an impish smile under his floppy berets, he teased and spoke in riddles, in part to mask a growing rage. Then, in his mid-40s, he let rip, with an essay about Conrad in the Massachusetts Review that shocked American academics. “The real question”, he wrote, “is the dehumanisation of Africa and Africans which [an] age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world.” Re-reading “Heart of Darkness”, he explained, it became clear that he would never be on Marlow’s boat steaming up the Congo. He was one of the Africans Conrad described jumping up and down on the river bank, pulling faces. He realised how wrong it was—“terribly, terribly wrong”— to portray his people, any people, from that superior floating-past point of view. His essay changed Conrad’s place in English literature. Henceforth they were often taught, European and African, side by side. Mr Achebe began writing stories at university, but went to work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in the late 1950s. His fourth novel, “A Man of the People”, about a military coup, was prophetic: it was published just days before the Nigerian army seized control of the country in 1966, as the Ibos threatened to secede in their own republic of Biafra. In the years that followed he became increasingly politicised, joining the Biafran war effort. When the conflict ended he returned to teaching, much of it in America. From afar, he watched Nigeria succumb to military rule. “Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass,” he wrote in his 1987 novel, “Anthills of the Savannah”, a comic satire (written partly in Nigerian pidgin) about three friends living under a military strongman. To such rulers, storytellers like him were an active danger. “They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university…” Literature, he liked to say, was his weapon. His exile became permanent after a car accident in 1990 left him paralysed from the waist down. He settled in America and taught there. For more than a quarter-century, until he won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007, he stopped publishing. The award seemed to spur him on, and he brought out two books in quick succession: one a collection of essays, the other, in 2012, a memoir of the Biafran war. Both books reinforced his protest against dehumanising Africa. As a novelist, though, he saw himself as part of the great Western canon. The titles of his books saluted his heroes: “Things Fall Apart”, from Yeats, and “No Longer at Ease”, in homage to T.S. Eliot. At school he had once been punished for asking a boy, in Ibo, to pass the soap. Despite that humiliation, he liked writing in English. “I feel the English language will be able to carry the weight of my Africa experience,” he declared in 1965. It would have to be a different English, though, “still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” The hunter and the lions One measure of his influence is that contemporary African literature is now taught throughout America, where it was once thought marginal. Another is that modern African writers now sell their books worldwide. Mr Achebe was widely hailed as the father of African literature; but, smiling over his heavy bifocals, he

rejected that. Instead, he repeated his favourite proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Small though he was, he turned out to be the African lions’ earliest and most important historian.

First-look reviews from the Berlin film festival

Cave of Forgotten Dreams delves deep into cinema's foundations Perhaps the human link is missing, but Werner Herzog's 3D documentary about prehistoric cave art asks new things of film Andrew Pulver guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 February 2011 17.57 GMT Frames of mind ... Werner Herzog, here on location in the Ardèche, has returned to introspective documentaries with Cave of Forgotten Dreams A few hours after Wim Wenders's somewhat unforgiving film about Pina Bausch unspooled in Berlin, so too did another 3D documentary – this one directed by Wenders's contemporary and sometime rival in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s, Werner Herzog. Though all his work tends to blur the line between fiction and reality, Herzog has been focusing on making documentaries for the last two decades – roughly parallelling the collapse in quality of his "acted" films (though the recent Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done may have arrested the decline). Cave of Forgotten Dreams is fully worthy to stand alongside Herzog's non-fiction masterworks, such as Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend and Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Its ostensible subject is the recently discovered Chauvet cave paintings, located in an underground chamber in the Ardèche in southern France. Hermetically sealed for millennia after a landslide buried the entrance, they are in preternaturally perfect condition, and all the more spectacular for being encased in staggeringly beautiful rock formations. Herzog and his crew have a strictly limited time-frame to get their footage, are heavily restricted in terms of lighting, and are in any case confined to a narrow metal walkway constructed to link the numerous cave chambers. But Herzog is nothing if not used to adversity, and makes something of a virtue of all this in his gravelly voiceover, pointing up the difficulty with which the footage is obtained. Moreover, the bobbing torch-beams and minimal battery-lights are in fact perfect for illuminating the underground images, giving some sense of how the originals would have been seen when they were first made and helping the horses, lions and rhinoceroses almost surge off the cave wall. But more than anything else, the restrictive conditions have a most unexpected result: they energise the 3D photography far beyond anything I've seen before. So far, film-makers have tended to go deep-focus and widescreen, packing the frame with oddities and angles or popping things into the viewers' eyeline. By necessity Herzog has to take the opposite position, and the effect is simply stunning. Rock deposits jump out as if they are filmed in extreme close-up, details of paintings are almost tangible as they trace the lines of jagged stones, and the labyrinthine caves stretch away from the camera with dizzying depth. All that's missing from Cave of Forgotten Dreams is what you might call the human dimension. Herzog likes to grapple with the extremes of consciousness and experience and, despite that fantastic title, he fails to make much headway here. Not that he doesn't try: in his voiceover he offers some wonderfully Teutonic observations about the 30,000-year-old paintings – "Are we crocodiles who look back into an abyss of time?" – but perhaps the living material, the scientists and archaeologists, aren't as responsive as he'd like. His pitch is to infer that dreams infect us all, and are the link that spans the 30,000 years to the original cave-painters. Only one paleontologist, swathed in reindeer hide, seems to take it on board – but then you realise he's simply modelling how ice-agers would have dressed, nothing that Tony Robinson wouldn't have done. Be that as it may, Herzog has conjured up something magical here, perhaps able to speak for itself in a way that makes his customary philosophising unnecessary. It's almost like watching the reinvention of the cinematic medium. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Saudi Arabian society still objects to women working with men. So when director Haifaa Al Mansour was shooting her debut feature, she had to hide in a van, she tells Geoffrey Macnab Wednesday 12 September 2012 The Independent Film Review

There were sandstorms. The budget was stretched. The child actress lost a tooth during shooting, wreaking havoc with the continuity. Haifaa Al Mansour's tales from the battlefield of her debut feature film sound familiar. No one said making movies was easy. Then, there was the small matter that she was the first female director making the first ever feature film in Saudi Arabia, a country where cinemas are still illegal. Wadjda, which received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, is groundbreaking on many levels. It is surely one of the only films in which the director had to hide while shooting. On location, she was obliged to sit in the back of a van. "It's such a segregated country. People don't like to see women out there, working with men," the diminutive director observes. "It was difficult because you really want to be with your actors. This relationship between a director and an actor is something mystic. You don't want something to interrupt you. I have to tell you, I jumped a lot out of that van!" In Saudi Arabia itself, Wadjda has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, it's a forbidden movie. On the other, it was made with the blessing (and financial backing) of Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. The film wasn't strictly illegal; this wasn't guerrilla film-making. However, the director makes it very clear that it simply wouldn't have been tolerated for a woman to be seen in a busy public place, controlling a film crew and calling the shots.

"You're not allowed to mix in the streets," she declares. "In some neighbourhoods, there was no question – I couldn't get out of the van. It is so conservative." There is one sequence set in a shopping centre. Yes, Mansour had permission to shoot there but she also knew not to press her luck by staying too long. "We had to be careful and finish very quickly before people got annoyed. If a conservative person gets annoyed, he might cause problems." The film tells the story of a 10-year-old girl desperate to buy a shiny new bicycle. That may sound whimsical and maudlin but to get hold of the bike, Wadjda must defy the religious authorities and her school teachers. In a deeply patriarchal society like Saudi Arabia where women (as Mansour pointedly puts it) don't have an identity, young girls aren't expected to be seen riding bikes. Wadjda's struggle mirrors that of Mansour herself to get her movie made. Mansour is the eighth of 12 children ("seven girls and five boys") and grew up in a small town near Riyadh. Her parents were liberal and encouraged her film-making aspirations. "They are very traditional small-town people but they believed in giving their daughters the space to be what they wanted to be. They believed in the power of education and training. They taught us how to work hard." Before she became a film-maker, Mansour worked in an oil company. No, it wasn't fulfilling. "In the meetings, they would never listen to me. I felt I didn't have a voice. It is such a male-dominated culture. It's not like they were bad or anything. It is just that I was young – and I am little! Nobody would listen." Desperate to express herself and passionate about film, Mansour took the leap and made a short film. "It was really for me. I just wanted to have a voice." To her amazement, her film, which she shot on a small digital camera, was picked up by several film festivals. "It was called Who? It is about a serial killer who dresses exactly like a woman and kills women. It was a little bit about how half the (Saudi) society is absent because they have no identity." Early in Mansour's media career, her father received "a lot of emails and letters telling him 'how dare you let your daughter appear on TV and direct films and do unhonourable stuff'! He never listened to the social pressure. Social pressure is very difficult in Saudi Arabia, especially on men. They are supposed to be the guardians, and they are the protectors and have to control their women." For British viewers, Wadjda, for all its charm and its eventually upbeat ending, can't help but seem like a piece of dystopian sci-fi. Mansour is depicting a society that we can't even begin to understand: a place where women don't drive and aren't even allowed to eat with their menfolk. In one striking scene, the young girls learning sacred texts are told that "during their time of the month" they aren't permitted to touch the Koran. Mansour's affection for her homeland is self-evident. She is at pains to point out that her film isn't intended as a polemical assault on patriarchy in Saudi Arabia. Rather, it was crafted to be both enjoyable and uplifting. "I want to do stories that are touching and inspiring. I really want to work within the system in Saudi Arabia. I don't want to be an outcast. Saudi Arabia is a very conservative place. I want to do films that make them (the authorities) more relaxed, more tolerant and make them respect women more." Another point she is keen to stress is that men are victims of the patriarchal system as well as women. They are locked into a pattern of thought and behaviour that leads to the kind of domestic dysfunction that Wadjda depicts. Like the presence of the Saudi female athletes at the London Olympics, Mansour's film is surely a harbinger of social change. A crowdpleaser, lyrical, tender and funny by turns, Wadjda won over audiences in Venice and looks bound to do the same in Saudi Arabia, too. Even if the film can't be shown in Saudi cinemas, Mansour is confident it will eventually be seen on DVD and TV.

"It is a great moment," the director reflects. "It's very conservative still; it's very difficult. I am not saying that Saudi Arabia is heaven for a woman but I am saying now that people want to hear from Saudi women. So Saudi women need to believe in themselves and break the tradition."

Cities on the edge of chaos It is one of the most seismic changes the world has ever seen. Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities. But what kind of lives are we creating? And will citizens - and cities - cope with the fierce pressures of this new urban age? Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and author of a major new report, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living? Deyan Sudjic Sunday March 9, 2008 Observer The world is changing faster now than ever before. The dispossessed, and the ambitious are flooding into cities swollen out of all recognition. Poor cities are struggling to cope. Rich cities are reconfiguring themselves at breakneck speed. China has created an industrial power house from what were fishing villages in the 1970s. Lagos and Dhaka attract a thousand new arrivals every day. In Britain, central London's population has started to grow again after 50 years of decline. We have more big cities now than at any time in our history. In 1900, only 16 had a population of one million; now it's more than 400. Not only are there more of them, they are larger than ever. In 1851, London had two million people. It was the largest city in the world by a long way, twice the size of Paris, its nearest rival. That version of London would seem like a village now. By the official definition, London has getting on for eight million people, but in practical terms, it's a city of 18 million, straggling most of the way from Ipswich to Bournemouth in an unforgiving tide of business parks and designer outlets, gated housing and logistics depots. There might be fields between them, but they are linked in a single transport system and a single economy. Those villages in Suffolk that are close enough to a railway station to deliver you to Liverpool Street in under 90 minutes are effectively as much a part of London as Croydon or Ealing and they have the house prices to prove it. The other big conurbations - from Birmingham to Manchester and Glasgow, names for cities that spread far beyond the bounds of political city limits can be understood in the same way. Having invented the modern city, Britain promptly reeled back in horror at what it had done. To William Morris and John Ruskin, or the Salvation Army exploring the cholera-ridden back alleys of London's East End, the city was a hideous tumour sucking the life out of the countryside and creating in its place a vast, polluted landscape of squalor, disease and crime. In their eyes, the city was a place to be feared, controlled and, if possible, eliminated. In William Blake's bitterly ironic words, Jerusalem had been overwhelmed by dark, satanic mills. Morris dreamt of a London abandoned by its population in favour of communal country life, leaving behind a dung heap in Parliament Square and empty streets enlivened by fluttering, worthless banknotes. Such attitudes continue to shape thinking about the city and not only in Britain. In America, the Republicans have concluded that there are no votes to be had in cities. And wealthy suburbanites refuse to pay the property taxes that will support the downtown areas they fear and despise. Yet whether we like it or not, at some point in 2008, the city will have finally swallowed the world. The number of people living in cities is about to overtake those left behind in the fields. It's a statistic that seems to suggest some sort of fundamental species change, like the moment when mankind stopped being hunter gatherers and took up agriculture. It has been the trigger for a wave of task forces, academic disaster tourism and feverish speculation, from Forbes magazine and National Geographic to the United Nations' habitat programme. When Forbes went to Lagos last year, drawn by what it called the 'Malthusian nightmare' of a city that had grown from 300,000 people in 1950 to 10 million today, in an unconscious echo of those Victorians horrified by the spectacle of

the new industrial cities of the 19th century, it invited us to think of the future of Lagos in terms of the lawless chaos of Baghdad's Sadr City, multiplied by 100. The future of the city has suddenly become the only subject in town. It ranges from tough topics such as managing water resources, economic policy, transport planning and law enforcement to what is usually presented as the fluffier end of the scale, such as making public spaces people want to spend time in. It's about racial tolerance and civilised airports, the colour of the buses and the cost of the fares on them. Unless you have some kind of framework to make sense of all that, the city can seem to be about so many diverse things that it is about everything and nothing. And that is how I found myself swept up in Urban Age, a mobile think-tank set up by the London School of Economics Cities programme, with the Alfred Herrhausen Society, a well-funded charitable arm of Deutsche Bank. The starting point of the Urban Age project, originated by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett of the LSE, was that a successful city has to be based on an understanding that it is shaped both by politics and by ideas about space and architecture. Their idea was to bring together a diverse selection of people, not only those who spend their time thinking about cities, but also those who have to try to do something about them. There were a couple of mayors - of Washington and Bogotá - and a formidable American sociologist in the shape of Saskia Sassen. They were joined from time to time by Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. On one occasion, Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, turned up. There were Gerry Frug, a Harvard lawyer who writes constitutions for cities, a criminologist from the Sorbonne and an Austrian transport planner desperately worried about the impact of cars on the sustainability of cities. These are not the kind of people you usually find in the same room. Over two years, the group toured six of the world's key cities - New York, London, Shanghai, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin - in a series of conferences. At each stop, they met their local peers. In New York I listened to Rem Koolhaas behaving badly and blaming our inability to face up to the realities of the contemporary city on our sentimental attachment to Jane Jacobs and the rose-tinted views on street life she expounds in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Ever since the 60s, Jacobs ideas about protecting traditional neighbourhoods from planners trying to carve urban motorway through them have made her a heroine to generations of urban activists. Later, I was in Johannesburg and saw Richard Sennett offend a roomful of South Africans as he attempted to put the ANC deputy mayor on the spot by asking her exactly what she intended to do about making life better in a city in which taking a journey on a suburban train is too dangerous for all but the desperate to contemplate. And in Berlin I asked Ian Blair how he defined the boundaries of London. His answer included Jamaica and Baghdad. The results of all this have been boiled down to The Endless City, a 500-page doorstep of a book I edited with Ricky Burdett and which is published this week. It has a lot of messages about reducing the reliance of cities on the car, on high-density cities being more sociable places in which to live, as well as more sustainable environmentally, about the importance of a coherent form of city government. Though it doesn't shrink from the darker aspects of city life, it is also a powerful affirmation of the city as mankind's greatest single invention. The nature of cities has already changed irrevocably and in The Endless City, there is plenty of evidence to show that they are changing us. In 1950, they were predominantly a Western phenomenon, with the developed world accounting for 60 per cent of the urban population. Now, 70 per cent of city dwellers are from the developing world. In China in 1970, one in five people lived in cities. In 30 years, that number has risen to two in five. The fastest-growing cities are all well outside the comfort zone of the Western world. Lagos, the fastest growing of them all, is adding 58 people every hour; Mumbai is growing by 42 every hour. A score of cities including Los Angeles, Shanghai and Mexico City, which were still tiny in the 19th century, have all passed the once unimaginable 18 million mark. That puts them well ahead of all but eight of the 27 nations of the European Union. This is a dizzying rate of transformation and it's still accelerating. In 1900, 10 per cent of the world's population lived in cities; by 2050, it is going to be 75 per cent. And the biggest question is if such places can survive as coherent cities at all. Cities bring out a lurking paranoia in some people. They see this explosive growth as a tide of slums engulfing the world. Certainly there is plenty to be worried about. Half of the 12 million people in Mumbai live in illegal shacks, 200,000 of them on the pavement. Every day, at least two people are killed falling off overcrowded suburban trains. In Mexico City, fewer than four workers in 10 have formal jobs, public transport is largely in the form of mafia-controlled minibuses, and taxis. The last mayor's response was to build a second tier on the elevated motorway, to allow the rich to speed up their commuting time.

Johannesburg, with its horrifying levels of violent crime, has seen the affluent quit the city centre for fortified enclaves on its boundaries. As a result, South Africa is leading the world in developing new security techniques for gated housing, built appropriately enough in the style of Tuscan hill towns. Private security is also a divisive a topic in north London where I live where the clatter of police helicopters has become routine. My neighbourhood divides between those who want to install barriers and gates to cut us off from the world outside and those who see such measures as the ultimate negation of what life in a city should be. Despite our anxieties, London is a safe city by world standards. The murder rate is 2.1 for every 100,000 inhabitants. In Johannesburg, it is nine times that figure and you are eight times as likely to be killed in a car crash there. Even in the traditionally more successful cities, there is plenty to fuel the anxieties of those who worry about such an uncontrollable surge of urban change. In the last 20 years, the percentage of people with manufacturing jobs in New York has fallen from 20 per cent to just 4 per cent. In London's central seven boroughs, more than 70 per cent of births last year were to mothers not born in Britain. In 1992, 38 per cent of newcomers to London were foreign-born. Five years later, it was 40 per cent and in 2001 it was 56 per cent. Cities look different, too. Shanghai had just 121 buildings over eight storeys high in 1980. Twenty years later, it was 3,500, and just five years after that it was a staggering 10,000. But for all their agonies, cities must also be counted as a positive force. They are an engine of growth, a machine for putting the rural poor onto the first rung of urban prosperity and freedom. Look at London, a city that existed for several centuries before anything approximating England had been thought of. It has a far stronger sense of itself and its identity than Britain as a whole or England. It has grown, layer on layer, for 2,000 years, sustaining generation after generation of newcomers. You see their traces in Spitalfields, where a Huguenot chapel became, successively, a synagogue and a mosque, tracking the movement of waves of migrants from poverty to suburban comfort. It is a history of migration marked by place names like Lombard Street, Hindu shrines and mosques. It's a place without an apparent structure that has proved extraordinarily successful at growing and changing. Its old residential core, sheltering in the approaches to its fortress, has made the transition into the world's busiest banking centre. Its market halls and power stations have become art galleries and piazzas. The simple terraced streets built for the clerks of the Great Western Railway in Southall have become home to the largest Sikh community outside India. The failed speculation of 19th-century housebuilders in Holland Park has provided the base for the international financiers. Hoxton's nonconformist chapels and Camden's wharves provide fertile territory for hipsters interested in tattoos, unnecessary facial hair and the internet. And all of these worlds overlap in space and time. London is different for all its people. They make the most of the elements in it that have meaning for them and ignore the rest. A city is an a la carte menu. That is what makes it different from a village, which has little room for tolerance and difference. And a great city is one in which as many people as possible can make the widest of choices from its menu. Ever since I began writing about cities, London's structure has fascinated me. It manages to be both monumental and intimate. I have lived in many cities: Edinburgh was spectacularly beautiful; Glasgow has the grim magnificence of its stone built core and its American style grid of streets. Milan has its glittering centre and its endless sprawl of factories and workshopts that make it a world capital of design. But it is London which has left me with a mental map to interpret every other city in which I have found myself. Which is the east end, which is south of the river? It is partly that phenomenon that made the experience of the Urban Age conferences so compelling. It was a chance to sample in quick succession a sequence of very different urban menus. The South African leg of the programme took me to the top of the country's tallest skyscraper. Once it housed Johannesburg's only four-star hotel. It is shuttered now, trapped in the midst of a dystopia that could have been the product of JG Ballard's imagination. Nigerian squatters occupy brutalist concrete towers. Stalls selling bush meat and magic have taken over the streets. A particularly fearless band of yuppies is attempting to turn the Art Deco office blocks left behind by the gold rush years of the 1930s into city-centre lofts. When the Urban Age got to Mexico, I found myself touring illegal squatter camps in Mexico City, in the company of armed guards courtesy of the Herrhausen Society, not so surprising, perhaps, since it was established by Deutsche Bank in memory of a chairman assassinated by terrorists. These settlements are called informal, yet they are planned with remarkable precision. A whole community from the rural south of the country arrives in a single co-ordinated movement to establish an instant suburb. Mexico is a place in which globalisation works in unexpected ways. While America might be worrying about losing car plant jobs to Mexico, the street traders who crowd the heart of Mexico City are the tip of another global supply chain. The T-shirts and the plastic flip-flops they sell are from China.

In Berlin, Angela Merkel talked about the challenge that migration poses to the big cities, while Lord Foster discussed designing a symbol for the capital of a reunited Germany in the form of the Reichstag, and Berlin's mayor offered a model for the future of his city as 'poor but sexy'. In Shanghai, the city had been hit by a rash of graffiti. There had been nothing like it on my first visit in the early 1990s, when the main road into the city was a two-lane blacktop. Now it's an eight-lane highway, amid a forest of skyscrapers. It turns out that the ubiquitous sequences of spray-painted numbers, with the occasional Chinese character thrown in, have nothing to do with tagging or politics - they are mobile phone numbers of migrants looking for work. In the turmoil that is modern China, it's the only way to show they are available for hire. It is chastening, but valuable for a critic to be confronted with how little you really know. Before the Urban Age conference in Shanghai, I hadn't understood that the city has three million illegal immigrants from inland China with fewer rights than Mexicans in Los Angeles, or that the city had levels of inequality of an order close to Manhattan's. In the context of a state based on an ideology-free version of Marxism, it's hard to know if that is to be understood as a success or a failure. I knew that huge areas of the city centre had been bulldozed, but I had not understood that this relentless tide of construction had doubled the living space, which is still far from generous, of its most crowded inhabitants. I knew that Johannesburg was a city shaped by apartheid, but I hadn't understood what it would mean to try to deal not just with social inequalities, but structural ones too. Johannesburg was built as a white city surrounded not by suburbs but by invisible black labour camps. It's not enough to open the city to the majority; the edges are still hugely dispossessed. I could not have imagined what it is like for the city's transport officials to work on its suburban rail system until I heard at first hand of the effects of a security-guard strike that involved scores of murders. Six dead bodies were found on one particularly bloody day. The Urban Age did make me understand exactly how the Victorians felt about the city, and how threatening a place it seemed to them. It also forced me to think not just as a critic, but to look at things from the point of view of a politician. What is to be done about the city? It's clear that every city is in desperate need of answers, and that events like the Urban Age act like hot spots for the transmission of avian flu. Ideas spread from them like epidemics. Culture-led renewal, congestion charging, elected mayors have all been strategies for the future of cities that have ricocheted around the world. What may be surprising is that, for once, many of these ideas are coming from London. Ken Livingstone's electorate may be focusing on allegations of misdemeanours at City Hall, but in New York and Barcelona, they are taking his policies on planning, transport and housing with the utmost seriousness. Nobody knows what effect his insistence on making the builders of luxury flats include a percentage of affordable housing will have on land prices in the long term, but it looks like an experiment worth trying. We do not belong to a generation that has the shared faith that the pioneer architectural modernists had when they chartered a liner to cruise the Mediterranean and drew up their vision of what the modern city ought to be, the Charter of Athens (1933). They divided their ideal city into functional zones, shaped by slabs arranged to maximise the sunlight falling on the ground between them. Theirs was a generation that was freed from the luxury of self-doubt. Ours is not and that is why we struggle now when we try to think what cities should be. We have seen too many soured urban utopias that were invented by the architects on that liner, and propagated by a political system that measured success in the number of new buildings that it could deliver each month. Politicians love cranes; they need solutions within the time frames of elections and cranes deliver them. But there are only a limited number of problems that are susceptible to this kind of time scale. The result is a constant cycle of demolition and reconstruction that is seen as the substitute for thinking about how to address the deeper issues of the city. Visions for cities tend to be the creation of the boosters rather than the theorists or the policy-makers. City builders have always had to be pathological optimists, if not out-and-out fantasists. They belong to a tradition that connects the map-makers who parcel up packages of swamp land to sell to gullible purchasers, and the showapartment builders who sell off-plan to investors in Shanghai, who are banking on a rising market, making them a paper profit before they have even had to make good on their deposits. Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators. They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary. The cities that work best are those that keep their options open, that allow the possibility of change.

The ones that are stuck, overwhelmed by rigid, state-owned social housing, or by economic systems that offer the poor no way out of the slums are in trouble. A successful city is one that makes room for surprises. A city that has been trapped by too much gentrification, or too many shopping malls, will have trouble generating the spark that is essential to making a city that works. The pattern of the Victorian terraces of London has proved to be remarkably adaptable. A four-storey house 18ft wide can be used for almost anything and it supports a population dense enough for pedestrian life on the pavement that makes cafes and small shops flourish; a system-built tower block marooned in Tarmac is not so adaptable. Similarly, giant out-of-town sheds, the predominant form of so many new cities now, are not designed for flexible use or even for the long term. They are built with a maximum of 20 years of life in mind and then trashed. Successful cities are the ones that allow people to be what they want; unsuccessful ones try to force them to be what others want them to be. A city of freeways like Houston or Los Angeles forces people to be car drivers or else traps them in poverty. A successful city has a public transport system that is easy to use; an unsuccessful city tries to ban cars. Later this year the Urban Age programme moves to Sao Paolo, shifting its focus from the bigger picture to the fine grain of life in a city in which the rich commute by helicopter, the prisons are a state within a state, and in which the mayor is able to ban outdoor street advertising overnight in a bid to beautify his city. A successful city has room for more than the obvious ideas about city life, because, in the end, a city is about the unexpected, it's about a life shared with strangers and open to new ideas. An unsuccessful city has closed its mind to the future. Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, is published by Phaidon next week at £35. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

What lies beneath - Sinai’s hidden texts

By Clive Cookson September 21, 2012 8:19 pm Financial Times A scientific effort is under way to reveal and record palimpsests at the world’s oldest continuously operating library

©St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai Spectral imaging reveals the hidden text on the medieval palimpsests. Copyright St Catherine’s monastery of the Sinai. Used with permission The Greek Orthodox monks of St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai have been accumulating manuscripts and books since the sixth century, making their library the world’s greatest repository of early medieval writing after the Vatican. The collection is even richer than it first appears, because many of the 3,300 ancient manuscripts contain hidden text and illustrations older than their visible contents – and a large scientific effort is under way to reveal and record them. The concealed texts are in palimpsests, manuscripts on which the original writing was erased so that scribes could reuse the precious parchment. Faint signs of the original text remain, as traces of pigment or indentation, which can be enhanced visually through modern techniques of spectral imaging at different wavelengths. “We may think now of St Catherine’s as a remote place isolated in the middle of the Sinai desert, but in medieval times it was a major destination for pilgrims from around the Christian world, who would have used the library and brought manuscripts to it,” says Michael Phelps, president of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Los Angeles. “We already know of nine languages in the palimpsests.” As a place of pilgrimage since its foundation by the Emperor Justinian in around 550 – it includes both the relics of St Catherine and the site where Moses saw God in the burning bush – the monastery has always had an outgoing attitude. A 21st-century manifestation of this openness is the desire of Archbishop Damianos of Sinai and his monks, especially the librarian Father Justin, to digitise their collection of manuscripts, including palimpsests, and make them available for study by scholars worldwide.

Arcadia, a British charity set up by Lisbet Rausing, the Tetra Pak heiress, is funding the five-year programme to image the St Catherine’s palimpsests with a $2.1m grant. “This hugely exciting project fits perfectly into Arcadia’s mission to save endangered cultural materials through modern technology,” says Anthea Case, the fund’s principal adviser. Phelps leads a team of 10 US-based scientists and technical staff working on the project. The team has made two preparatory visits to Sinai this year, and will set off for the monastery again next week – unless security concerns force a postponement. Data will start flowing in earnest in 2013. “Operating our advanced digitisation technology in such an austere desert location challenges our planning and logistics,” says Michael Toth, the programme manager. “Digital post-processing of the manuscript images to reveal hidden text isn’t like CSI – you don’t just push a button and suddenly see it appear in a couple of minutes,” he adds.

St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai Preliminary data will be released this autumn for analysis by 18 scholars who have particular expertise in the range of ancient languages found in the palimpsests. Many of the erased texts are in Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a language used between the third and eighth centuries, which then died out. “These texts were erased because they were in a dead language for which the medieval scribes had no use,” Phelps says. “We can help to recover its voice.” Preparing new parchment was an elaborate process of flaying, soaking, curing, dehairing and splitting animal hides, so recycling redundant manuscripts by scraping off the old text made good sense. “Many of the manuscripts dating from the seventh to the ninth century are palimpsests,” says Father Justin, who is originally from Texas. “During those centuries, especially, it was often difficult to obtain new parchment.” There are known to be 130 palimpsests at St Catherine’s – though research is likely to find more. Most are religious texts such as scriptures, homilies and services. An important exception awaiting further study is a

medical treatise that may date back to the late classical period and seems to be the oldest known Hippocratic text. “Scholars have been able to decipher occasional words visible in the margins, but these texts, often of the greatest importance, have thus far eluded attempts to read them. The prospect of recovering these texts is a very exciting development,” adds Father Justin, who had been running a sophisticated digital-imaging operation at St Catherine’s for several years before the project started. “Any western university would be proud of the digitisation facility that Father Justin has put together,” comments Phelps.

Father Justin prepares a manuscript for digitisation The technical heart of the project involves spectral imaging across a wide range of wavelengths from the ultraviolet through visible light to the near infrared, says Keith Knox, a key member of the scientific team who has been involved in manuscript research for 20 years in his spare time (his main job involves detecting objects in space from multispectral images of the sky). The equipment is designed both to transmit light through the parchment and to shine light on to the surface and image its reflection. But the biggest single source of data is ultraviolet irradiation, which makes traces of ancient ink fluoresce blue. Computer programs combine all the spectral data, using special algorithms to make the overt top text disappear as far as possible while enhancing the appearance of the undertext. False colour is used to make it stand out. The palimpsest work has a lot in common with image analysis in other fields such as astronomy. “The task is to extract information out of noisy data,” Knox says. “It is a detective story, trying to find out what’s there.” What makes the detectives’ job more difficult is that medieval scribes did not necessarily reuse pages from which text had been erased in the same order or even orientation as the original manuscript. And a further complication is that some texts were erased and reused twice, leading to “double palimpsests”. Although no one has tried before to access so many palimpsests in such a remote location as Sinai, multispectral imaging has already shown what it can do on individual manuscripts. The best example is the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 13th century Byzantine prayer book containing erased texts from the 10th century.

These include seven treatises by Archimedes, two of which (The Method and Stomachion) cannot be found anywhere else. A US collector bought the manuscript for $2m in 1998 and deposited it with The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation, imaging and scholarship. The project, which featured several of the scientists now working on the Sinai manuscripts, has shed light on Archimedes and revealed texts from the ancient world, including speeches by Hyperides, an Athenian orator of the fourth century BC, and a third century AD commentary on Aristotle’s “Categories”. It remains to be seen whether new treasures to match the Archimedes Palimpsest are revealed at the Holy Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai (to give St Catherine’s its official name). But with such expertise focused on the world’s oldest continuously operating library, some remarkable discoveries are likely.

Space agency flies in to save the rainforest Financial Times Clive Cookson April 28th 2012 When people think about space science, they usually imagine researchers looking out into the cosmos. But an important role of space agencies is to look down on Earth – and Earth observation is the primary mission of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Inpe (as the institute is known from its Portuguese initials) has developed one of the world’s most advanced environmental monitoring systems. It tracks what is happening on the ground – and, above all, in the Amazon rainforest – as this huge country expands its population, economy and agricultural production. Using its own satellites – and remote sensing data bought in from bodies such as Nasa and the European Space Agency – Inpe monitors Amazon deforestation on a daily basis. A supercomputer processes the raw satellite data, looking for evidence of illegal logging, burning or forest clearance. And when Inpe detects something suspicious it alerts local law enforcement agencies.

Heated debate The latest climate prediction modelling shows that the Amazon basin may not suffer a catastrophic drought later this century due to global warming, despite recent fears Although Brazil’s environmental policing has many imperfections, Gilberto Câmara, Inpe’s directorgeneral, insists that the alerts have led to a substantial reduction in Amazonian deforestation in recent years. In 2011, 6,238 sq km of forest were lost – the smallest area since satellite monitoring started in 1988. As recently as 2005, the annual deforestation rate was more than 25,000 sq km. Inpe does not send the satellite observations only to its own government and law enforcement agencies – all the data are made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. “We used to sell remote sensing data, like other space agencies,” says Câmara, “but in 2004 we opened it all up for free. We used to sell 1,000 images a year; now we distribute 500,000 images freely around the world. Full and open access to space-based information is indispensable for global sustainable development.” Câmara is critical of agencies elsewhere that restrict public access to environmental monitoring data. Satellite monitoring shows not only how much forest is lost, but also what the cleared land is used for – most becomes pasture for low-intensity cattle ranching. “Of the 720,000 sq km of Amazon forest lost so far, about 65 per cent is used for cattle,” Câmara says. “This means that Brazil has lost an enormous amount of biodiversity just to graze cattle at about one head per hectare.” Just 5 per cent of former forest land is devoted to growing commercial crops – mainly soya beans.

Such information can be commercially, as well as environmentally, valuable. For instance, Inpe provides the data to enforce a soya moratorium. In place since 2006, and endorsed by Greenpeace, this agreement commits all of Brazil’s big soya traders to buy only from farmers who can prove that their land did not come from illegal deforestation. So, soya grown on uncertified land is worth less on the market. Câmara says that most space agencies around the world exist at least partly “for geopolitical and military reasons”, such as supporting a domestic aerospace industry. Inpe is different, he claims: “Our aim is to support the development of a peaceful, green economy in Brazil.”

October 7, 2011 10:09 pm

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Review by Clive Cookson Financial Times Despite appearances, the human race is losing its appetite for violence

Fratricide 'Cain murdering Abel' by Bartolomo Manfredi (c1610) Readers, rejoice: we are living at a time that is not only the healthiest, wealthiest and best-educated in history but also by far the least violent. That is the message from Steven Pinker, Harvard psychology professor and one of the world’s most celebrated science writers. He expects it to be controversial, given our constant exposure to stories in the media about contemporary violence and horrific images of mass carnage in the recent past. To demonstrate that people have become progressively more peaceful since Neolithic times – and that the trend is continuing into the 21st century – Pinker devotes much of The Better Angels of Our Nature to a historical and statistical analysis of violence at all scales and of many types, from warfare between tribes and nations to individual murders, from torture and rape to slavery and cruelty to animals. This takes up about two-thirds of the book, before Pinker the historian hands over to the more familiar figure of Pinker the

psychologist, who analyses why the “inner demons” behind violent behaviour are giving way to the “better angels” of co-operation and altruism. Unlike the sceptical reader set up by Pinker in his introduction, who laments the growing violence of the modern world and refuses to believe that things are getting better, I felt that I knew enough about the past to accept his basic thesis before I started the book. Even so, I was astonished by the extent to which violence has declined in every shape, form and scale. In his statistical argument Pinker rightly focuses on the rate of violence relative to the size of population, rather than the number of violent acts. What matters to an individual living at a particular time and place is their risk of becoming a victim of violence. In moral terms too, Pinker believes the experience of those who enjoy full lives should be included in any reckoning. The second world war was the worst episode in human history in terms of absolute numbers killed on the battlefield and indirect deaths of non-combatants. But when adjusted for population size, the death toll of 55m makes it only the ninth most deadly event over the past 1,200 years. The worst of all, according to Pinker’s interpretation of figures from the “atrocitologist” Matthew White, was the eighth-century An Lushan revolt and civil war that killed 36m in and around China (equivalent to 429m deaths in the mid-20th century). Second worst was the 13th-century Mongol conquests (40m deaths, equivalent to 278m in the mid-20th century). Although statistics for ancient atrocities are far from reliable, they are good enough – combined with contemporary accounts – to demonstrate the astonishing bloodlust of past warlords. Pinker begins his pacification story thousands of years ago with the transition from the hunting, gathering and gardening societies of prehistory to more settled agricultural civilisations with cities and governments. Anyone who has read recent forensic archaeology reports about bodies and skeletons excavated from stone and bronze-age European burial sites will be struck by the frequent evidence of violence. Pinker estimates that the end of raiding and feuding between prehistoric tribes led to a fivefold decrease in violent death rates. But, by today’s standards, life remained nasty, brutish and short. The next stage, according to Pinker, was the “civilisation process” after the Middle Ages, in which a patchwork of feudal territories was consolidated into large nations with an infrastructure of commerce and the authority to enforce law and order. While nations still went to war, the advent of centralised government greatly reduced the violence between individuals and small groups. Analysis of court records and official documents shows an astonishing decline in murder across western Europe between the 13th and 20th centuries. Murder rates fell between tenfold and a hundredfold. For example, the murder rate per 100,000 people was 110 in 14th-century Oxford and less than one in 20thcentury London. “The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present,” Pinker says. When he surveyed public perceptions in an internet questionnaire, the average guess was that 20th-century England was about 14 per cent more violent than 14th-century England; in fact it was 95 per cent less violent. Pinker proposes several historical forces that have promoted peaceful behaviour by suppressing the “inner demons” of human psychology and stimulating our “better angels”. Besides government and commerce, they include feminisation and cosmopolitanism. Since violence is largely a male pastime, the increasing respect for the interests and values of women has led society away from the glorification of violence. A more cosmopolitan culture – resulting from growing literacy, mobility and the mass media – can prompt people to understand the perspective of those unlike themselves and expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.

Finally, Pinker says, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs, “the escalator of reason”, can force people to recognise the futility of violence and reframe it as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. Less than a century ago, many Europeans were positively looking forward to what became the first world war – it is unthinkable that anyone besides a deranged eccentric would look forward to war today. The Better Angels of Our Nature is written in Pinker’s distinctively entertaining and clear personal style, which will be recognised and welcomed by many who enjoyed previous books such as The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. At 830 pages, the book might be too long. Although Pinker says he needed the length to make his argument and convince the sceptics, I found some passages repetitive. Readers of a squeamish disposition might feel that he has included too many detailed accounts of murder and excruciating torture through the ages, in his effort to illustrate how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Overall, however, this is a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling, demonstrating how fortunate the vast majority of us are today to experience serious violence only through the mass media. Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor Photography with the FT, featuring Stephen Pinker, see FT magazine The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, by Steven Pinker, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 830 pages

China scientists lead world in research growth By Clive Cookson Published: January 25 2010 18:06 | Last updated: January 25 2010 18:06 FINANCIAL TIMES China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing. Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020. Thomson Reuters, which indexes scientific papers from 10,500 journals worldwide, analysed the performance of four emerging markets countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China, over the past 30 years. China far outperformed every other nation, with a 64-fold increase in peer-reviewed scientific papers since 1981, with particular strength in chemistry and materials science. “China is out on its own, far ahead of the pack,” said James Wilsdon, science policy director at the Royal Society in London. “If anything, China’s recent research performance has exceeded even the high expectations of four or five years ago, while India has not moved as fast as expected and may have missed an opportunity.” Although its quality remains mixed, Chinese research has also become more collaborative, with almost 9 per cent of papers originating in China having at least one US-based co-author.

Brazil has also been building up a formidable research effort, particularly in agricultural and life sciences. In 1981 its output of scientific papers was one-seventh that of India; by 2008 it had almost caught up with India. At the opposite extreme is Russia, which produced fewer research papers than Brazil or India in 2008. Just 20 years ago, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Russia was a scientific superpower, carrying out more research than China, India and Brazil combined. Since then it has been left behind. The Thomson Reuters figures show not only the “awe-inspiring” expansion of Chinese science but also a very powerful performance by Brazil, much slower growth in India and relative decline in Russia. According to James Wilsdon, science policy director at the Royal Society in London, three main factors are driving Chinese research. First is the government’s enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation, at all levels of the system from schools to postgraduate research. Second is the organised flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications. Third is the efficient and flexible way in which China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in north America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the west and part in China. Although the statistics measure papers in peer-reviewed journals that pass a threshold of respectability, “the quality [in China] is still rather mixed,” says Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters. But it is improving, he adds: “They have some pretty good incentives to produce higher quality research in future.” Like China, India has a large diaspora – and many scientifically trained NRIs (nonresident Indians) are returning but they go mainly into business rather research. “In India there is a very poor connection between high-tech companies and the local research base,” says Mr Wilsdon. “Even the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the highest level institutions in the system, find it difficult to recruit top faculty.” A symptom of this is the poor performance of India in international comparisons of university standards. The 2009 Asian University Rankings, prepared by the higher education consultancy QS, shows the top Indian institution to be IIT Bombay at number 30; 10 universities in China and Hong Kong are higher in the table. Part of India’s academic problem may be the way red tape ties up its universities, says Ben Sowter, head of the QS intelligence unit. Another issue is that the best institutions are so overwhelmed with applications from would-be students and faculty within India

that they do not cultivate the international outlook essential for world-class universities. This looks set to change as India’s human resource minister has stepped up efforts to build links with US and UK institutions. In contrast to China, India and Russia, whose research strengths tend to be in the physical sciences, chemistry and engineering, Brazil stands out in health, life sciences, agriculture and environmental research. It is a world leader in using biofuels in auto and aero engines. Russia produced fewer research papers than Brazil or India in 2008. “The issue is the huge reduction in funding for research and development in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Mr Adams. “Although there has been an exodus of many of the rising stars of Russian research, there is still a great pool of talent there. It is not in the interests of the rest of the world for the exodus to continue, and we need more co-funding arrangements to help Russian research get back up to speed.” Modern hope for ancient scripts By Clive Cookson in York Published: Sep 13, 2007 Financial Times Britain's biggest scientific instrument, the new £380m Diamond x-ray source, will help historians to save the world's ancient documents written on parchment, many of which are suffering chemical disintegration that could turn them to jelly. It will also enable researchers for the first time to read inside folded and rolled-up documents that are too fragile to open, the BA Festival of Science in York heard on Wednesday. Diamond is a giant synchrotron "super-microscope " coming into operation near Didcot in the Oxfordshire countryside. It emits x-rays 100bn times more intense than a hospital x-ray machine. Scientists in many fields will use it to probe the inner structure of materials. Tim Wess, head of Cardiff University's Institute of Vision, who specialises in the scientific study of ancient documents, will be using Diamond to analyse parchment from several sources, from fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls to 18th-century Scottish legal documents. For millennia parchment, made from dried animal skins, has been the material of choice for writing important documents. Prof Wess said the problem was that collagen, the main material in parchment, slowly changed into gelatine - which is brittle when dry and jelly-like when wet. "The progressive degeneration ... leaves written history at risk in both iconic individual documents and extensive archives, " he said. Using x-rays from Diamond, Prof Wess is analysing the reaction that converts collagen to gelatine. "This has aided our understanding of the deterioration process and allows us to advise on the way in which parchment can be preserved for future generations, " he said. "In cases where precious parchments may be too damaged or at risk, we have developed techniques to image written work without unrolling the fragile documents. " Prof Wess hopes that, within three or four years, it will be possible to read writing through as many as 20 unopened sheets of parchment. Early tests show that intense x-rays do not damage the documents, he said, but "we will not look at the most valuable documents such as whole Dead Sea Scrolls until we have validated the technique ". For the validation process, Prof Wess's team is using small fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls in the collection of Manchester University's Rylands Library, together with large 18th-century legal documents weeded out by the National Archives of Scotland because they are of little value. The research shows that documents written with "iron gall ink ", the traditional ink for parchment, contain the seeds of their own destruction. The natural ingredients in the ink - tannin from oak galls and iron sulphate catalyse the chemical deterioration of parchment. "In addition to identifying ways in which we might be able to prevent the loss of important records, our research aims to understand how we might recover documents damaged in natural disasters across the ages,

such as the fire at the Library of Alexandria or more recent flooding in Europe, " Prof Wess added. Cocaine found on all banknotes Every banknote circulating in every part of Britain is tainted with cocaine residues, according to a comprehensive geographical study released on Wednesday at the BA Festival of Science in York. The survey, carried out by Bristol University and Mass Spec Analytical, a Bristol company, extends the results of smaller studies that show universal contamination of banknotes with illegal drugs to be reality rather than an urban myth. There is no difference in the average level of contamination between quiet rural areas and urban drugdealing hotspots. Defendants sometimes claim in court that banknotes seized by the police have very high levels of drug residues because they were circulating in drug hotspots. The Bristol research shows that this defence is invalid, because "innocent " banknotes in such hotspots carry no more contamination than notes elsewhere in the country. Cocaine contamination is so pervasive that even new notes issued by ATMs contain traces of the drug (measurable in nanograms or billionths of a gram) that have been picked up in banks' sorting systems. Traces of heroin and cannabis are detectable on one banknote in 20.

By Clive Cookson Financial Times March 29, 2013 6:21 pm Research in the Panama Canal watershed is part of a growing effort to give the environment a realistic financial value

©Christian Ziegler The Panama Canal watershed, where scientists are measuring the economic benefits of nature conservation Under the wide green umbrella of the Panamanian rainforest, the only signs of human intrusion are yellow, orange and blue marks painted around some of the tree trunks. Those marks help measure the plants’ water efficiency, as trees are believed to steady the flow of rivers. “We are trying to understand the services provided by forests,” says Jefferson Hall, a Yale-educated forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. For the past five years Hall has been working on the Panama Canal watershed, on forest regeneration and measuring the effects of different land uses on water flows, as well as carbon sequestration and biodiversity. At the same time he is assessing the potential economic return from investment in environmental protection.

His research, in one of the most bio-diverse countries in a region at the forefront of carbon negotiations, is part of a growing effort to give the environment a realistic financial value. According to recent findings by the Inter-American Development Bank or IDB, Latin America and the Caribbean are home to half of the earth’s tropical forests. The region hosts 40 per cent of global biodiversity, which in turn supports 15 per cent of its GDP and 50 per cent of its exports. In a novel initiative, the IDB believes this “wild wealth” could be turned into a spur for growth and innovation by including the value of biodiversity in key economic sectors. The wealth of biodiversity generates some critical benefits, such as food, shelter, clean water and air, flood and drought mitigation, disease and pest control. These “ecosystem services” directly support important economic sectors – mostly agriculture, fisheries, forestry and tourism – which together employ 17 per cent of the region’s labour force. The list of current “services” is long. To name a few, eco-tourism generates $60bn annually in the region; coral reefs in the Caribbean protect the shores and allow the generation of $15bn in revenues; the global economic value of bee pollination is estimated at $200bn. “Investing in nature is one of the smartest investments you can make,” says Mark Tercek, a former Goldman Sachs banker currently heading The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation with more than $5bn in assets.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Boldly gone

Thirty-five years after launch, and 11 billion miles from the sun, Nasa’s Voyager 1 probe has become the first man-made object to leave the solar system, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The author of Nature’s Fortune, to be published next month, Tercek is a champion of the idea of “natural capital” – putting an asset value on nature. His controversial approach is to work alongside some of the world’s biggest polluters to jointly preserve the environment, because “business objectives and those of environmentalists can overlap”. This is starting to happen with biotechnology research. Marcelo Cardoso, vice-president of Natura, a cosmetics producer in Brazil, says: “Brazilian biodiversity will become our Silicon Valley.” Pursuing that idea, the Brazilian government is starting to finance laboratories to study biotech applications in various different biomes. “Once biodiversity services are … incorporated in the value chain it will be natural for companies to invest in preservation of those services,” says Alexandre Meira da Rosa, who heads IDB’s infrastructure and environment division.

Some larger companies such as Femsa, the Mexico-based beverage group, are already investing in water projects in two of the world’s most biodiverse countries, Ecuador and Colombia, while HSBC funded part of Hall’s rainforest research in Panama. Back in the green, misty hills along the eastern watershed of the Panama Canal, Hall keeps testing trees for their ability to act as “sponges”, hoping that his work can be replicated elsewhere. “Agriculture needs clean water, cities need clean water, Coca-Cola needs clean water, a brewery needs clean water,” he says. “And that, certainly, has economic value.” – Andres Schipani ------------------------------------------Not all roads lead to ruin

©William Laurence Building roads to save the planet Environmentalists generally react with horror to road-building – and often their fears are well founded. The estimated 100,000km of road criss-crossing the Amazon basin have caused catastrophic damage. But in a paper in the journal Nature two professors of conservation science, Andrew Balmford at Cambridge university and William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia, put in a plea for more roads – as long as they are in the right place. “Roads are like real estate,” says Laurance. “It’s ‘location, location, location’. In the right places roads can actually help protect nature.” That means careful planning, keeping roads out of wilderness areas and concentrating them in places best suited for farming and development. “In such areas roads can improve farming, making it much easier to move crops to market and import fertiliser,” says Balmford. “This can increase farm profits, improve the livelihoods of rural residents, enhance food security and draw migrants away from vulnerable wilderness areas.” The pair call for a global mapping programme to advise governments and conservation organisations on where to put roads, where to avoid them and even where to shut down existing roads. “By working together,” says Laurance, “development experts, agriculturalists and ecologists could provide badly needed guidelines on where to build good roads rather than bad roads.” -------------------------------------------

©Getty Toll of Pacific bird species stands at 1,000 Ecologists have long known that the human colonisation of remote Pacific islands over the past 3,500 years led to a catastrophic extinction of large flightless birds, but estimates of the number of species lost have varied widely. An international study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to pin down the toll by using statistical modelling to fill in the large gaps in the fossil record. Most extinct species remain undiscovered because fossil hunting across several hundred Pacific islands has been patchy and incomplete. The researchers, led by Richard Duncan at the University of Canberra, conclude that human settlement of Pacific islands wiped out about 1,000 species of “nonpasserine landbirds” – birds other than songbirds and seabirds – many of which had become flightless because land predators were absent. That compares with a current global total of about 10,000 avian species of all types. The scientists started from 41 islands where there is good evidence of extinction from fossil and other sources; two-thirds of the bird populations here became extinct between human arrival and first European contact. Reasons for extinction include hunting, habitat loss and the introduction of vermin. Extrapolating these results to all 269 Pacific islands that were large and isolated enough to have supported at least one “endemic” species (a bird that lives nowhere else) brings the total close to 1,000 extinctions, ranging from flightless waterfowl to pigeons.

Ghanaian women take to the skies to fight waterborne disease

Lydia Wetsi is one of three young women trained as pilots and community health professionals Rosie Collyer Report: Ghana Article published Wednesday 02 May 2012 - Latest update : Wednesday 02 May 2012 Radio France Internationale RFI

By Rosie Collyer in Kpong Women around Ghana's Lake Volta are being trained as pilots and primary healthcare workers in an attempt to fight the water-borne disease schistosomiasis. The women have begun delivering health-related materials to isolated communities around Lake Volta. They drop specially designed aerodynamic packages containing information on how to prevent schistosomiasis, which is classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a neglected tropical disease. “The disease is particularly prevalent around the lake due to poor sanitation,” Lester Chihitsulo, a WHO expert, told RFI. “The communities that are worst affected lack access to potable water and hygiene education.” Humans become infected with schistosomiasis through contact with snails that live in stagnant water. Symptoms include fever and passing blood in the urine and faeces. Children are particularly at risk because of their play habits. Infected children suffer from stunted cognitive growth due to the parasite eating away at their internal organs. Although the WHO strategy for combating the disease is increased access to the drug praziquantel, Chihitsulo says, “We also encourage organisations to collaborate with the ministry of health in a given country to assist in delivering hygiene education.” Medicine on the Move, a local NGO, does just that. So far they have assisted one woman in obtaining her pilot's licence and three others are currently being taught to fly so they too can reach isolated communities in affected areas.

Many of the villages around Lake Volta are several hours from a tarmac road and others are completely cut off during the rainy season. So the easiest way for communities to be reached is by air. The trainees are not only being taught to build, maintain and fly light aircraft, the four-year training course also includes modules in community health care. While schistosomiasis prevention is the organisation’s main focus, it also hopes that, once the women graduate, they will be able to fly to villages and give basic healthcare. “We are convinced that by training women, as opposed to men, they will be compelled to serve their communities,” Jonathan Porter, Medicine On The Move's founder told RFI. “Men tend to leave rural areas and go to the city or abroad when they obtain these kinds of skills.” Earlier this month Patricia Malwali - who is one of only a handful of Ghanaian women to hold her pilot’s license - with the assistance of a co-pilot dropped information on how to prevent schistosomiasis to more than thirty villages. “The packages are dropped above school playgrounds to ensure they are picked up by teachers who can read,” Malwali explains. For now Medicine On The Move’s contribution to the eradication of schistosomiasis in Ghana may only represent a drop in the ocean. Access to medication in the form of praziquantel has a much bigger impact with more than 33.5 million people being treated with the drug in 2010 as opposed to 12.4 million in 2006. But praziquantel doesn’t prevent reinfection, which is why education remains a key component in the complete eradication of the disease. tags: Airplane - Disease - Ghana - Health - Report

Love and the Enlightenment The woman behind the man May 18th 2006 From The Economist print edition Emilie du Châtelet was a lot cleverer than her great lover, Voltaire

Bridgeman EVERYONE, just about, has heard something about Voltaire, and most of it is flattering. Freethinker, dramatist, poet, scientist, economist, spy, politician and successful speculator to boot, he embodies the intellectual breakthrough of the Enlightenment—the single biggest leap in mankind's understanding of itself and the world. Almost nobody has heard of the woman with whom he shared most of his life, Emilie du Châtelet. But you can make a good case that she was a more rigorous thinker, a better writer, a more systematic scientist, a formidable mathematician, a wizard gambler, a more faithful lover and a much kinder and deeper person. And she did all this despite being born a woman in a society where female education was both scant and flimsy. Her mother feared that anything more academic than etiquette lessons would make her daughter unmarriageable. David Bodanis's new biography of Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet, is a belated treatment of a startlingly neglected story. One reason was male chauvinism. Her best work was done at a time when women simply did not feature in the scientific mainstream: Immanuel Kant said that counting Emilie as a great thinker was as preposterous as imagining a bearded woman. Biographers were much more interested in Voltaire himself; his sexy mistress was just a sidekick. Most writers who did research Emilie were too scientifically illiterate to understand her significance. Nancy Mitford's 1957 novel, “Voltaire in Love”, is a prime example. “Mitford knew as much about science as a shrub,” notes the author scornfully. Mr Bodanis, a former academic whose previous book, “Electric Universe” has just won the 2006 Aventis prize for science writing, is well placed to appreciate the extraordinary scope and scale of her work, and leaves the reader in no doubt of it. Born in 1706, Emilie had three pieces of great good fortune in her life. The first was to be born with a remarkable brain. Her greatest work was to translate the “Principia”, the path-breaking work on physics by the secretive Cambridge

brainbox, Isaac Newton, who died when Emilie was 20. She did not just translate his writing from Latin to French; she also expressed Newton's obscure geometric proofs using the more accessible language of calculus. And she teased out of his convoluted web of theorems the crucial implications for the study of gravity and energy. That laid the foundation for the next century's discoveries in theoretical physics. The use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work. Emilie's second piece of luck was that her father allowed her to use her brain: not much, admittedly, but certainly far more than most bright girls of her time and country. She was not sent to a convent. He was wealthy and liberal-minded enough to buy her books and talk to her about astronomy. He married her to Florent-Claude, Marquis du Châtelet-Lomont, who was a touch dull but decent—and unbothered by his brainy wife's intellectual and amorous adventures. Indeed, he liked and admired Voltaire. Her third great good fortune was her array of mind-expanding, appreciative lovers. They may have been unsatisfactory mates by today's standards, but they were rarities in an age when few men looked for intellectual companionship from women. Emilie started by bedding the Duc de Richelieu, the “most sought-after man in France”. He bolstered her intellectual confidence, dented by an isolated childhood and early marriage. Even when she dumped him, they remained friends. Then came Voltaire, needy, self-indulgent, unreliable and self-centred— but still the love of her life and its great intellectual and cultural stimulus. Even when passion cooled, they remained great companions. Finally, she fell in love with Jean-François, Marquis de Saint-Lambert, a much younger poet. He filled the emotional and physical gap left by Voltaire. But he also proved careless in what passed for contraception in those days. That led to pregnancy and the infection that killed Emilie when she was only 42. It is tempting to speculate what heights of discovery Emilie might have achieved in a healthier and more open-minded age. But that would be to miss the point. The remarkable thing is that she managed so much, and with such good humour and reflective selfknowledge. It is her biographer's good fortune that there is a great deal of accessible material about her life. Voltaire was spied on energetically; a thicket of secret police reports remains. So too do many of her letters, both sent and received. The book may strike some readers as slightly lubricious in its attention to Emilie's sexual habits and predilections. A more serious shortcoming, explicable only by authorial laziness (unlikely) or publisher's stinginess (all too probable) is the startling and inconvenient lack of an index. That is just the sort of slap-happy approach to which Voltaire was prone, and which so pained Emilie.

Obituary: Dr Georges Charpak, physicist Published Date: 04 October 2010 The Scotsman Dr Georges Charpak, physicist. Born: 8 March, 1924, in Ukraine. Died: 29 September, 2010, in Paris, aged 86. Georges Charpak won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing a device to sift through the billions of hurtling sub-atomic particles liberated by collisions in atom smashers, opening the way for discoveries on the nature of matter. Particle accelerators, popularly known as atom smashers, whip sub-nuclear particles like protons and electrons to high speeds and then force them to collide. The collisions generate a storm of particles flying in many directions. Some of these short-lived particles have not existed since the Big Bang created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago, and identifying them and charting their behaviour have been principal goals of modern high-energy physics. With his invention, the multiwire proportional tracking chamber, Charpak vastly improved the ability of physicists to measure and record what goes on inside particle accelerators. Earlier detectors, like the cloud chamber and bubble chamber (which also earned Nobels for their inventors) depended on taking photographs of the tracks left by particles as they emerged from collisions. Charpak's chamber, by contrast, used many minuscule wires to capture electric pulses, thus generating vastly more information. The data was instantaneously fed into a computer for interpretation. No longer did scientists have to scan thousands of photographs. The invention meant that hundreds of millions of particles a second could be sensed, evaluated and recorded. It allowed scientists testing theories to search out the one particle in a billion for which they were hunting. Two Nobel Prizes were awarded for identifying sub-atomic phenomena using Charpak's device before he received his. Variants of the device now contribute to the Large Hadron Collider put into operation this year at Cern, in Geneva, where Charpak worked for decades. That project aims to explain the origins of the universe. Leon Lederman, Charpak's former boss at Cern and a winner of the Nobel physics award himself, said in 1992 that Charpak's instrument worked by very indirect means. "No one's ever seen an atom, really," he said. Accordingly, he said, Charpak measured the infinitesimal electric impulses that particles leave as they race through one of his devices. Dr Lederman compared the phenomenon to hearing a noise in the sky and looking up to see a vapour trail, then reasoning that an aeroplane had passed. Charpak was born in a village in Poland that is now in Ukraine. The family moved to Paris in 1932 when he was seven. After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, his family

refused to wear the yellow star the Nazis demanded Jews wear. They obtained false identity papers under the name Charpentier. As a teenager, Charpak became active in the French Resistance and was imprisoned by the pro-Nazi French government in 1943. In 1944, he was transferred to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. In an article he wrote in 1994, he said that at the first camp, in France, prisoners took two spoonfuls of the thin broth they received to give to "the weakest and sickest among us". He wrote: "It was a gesture that gave us a sense of great dignity." After the war, Charpak became a French citizen and got a degree in mining engineering from the École des Mines, then a PhD from the Collège de France. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He joined Cern in 1959 and stayed until his retirement in 1991. He was part of a team that in 1961 determined that a particle known as the muon was not a separate particle of the nucleus, but just a heavy electron. In an interview in 2009, he called this his proudest accomplishment. In 1968, he invented the multiwire proportional tracking chamber. After winning the Nobel Prize, Charpak tried to apply its principles in biology and medicine. One of his first projects was to study electrical impulses in rats' brains. His research led to the development of a camera used by Nasa to monitor astronauts' hearts. He developed an X-ray machine that uses one-tenth the radiation of a conventional X-ray. He also worked on ways to reprogramme cancerous cells so they would no longer be malignant. Charpak, who had earlier investigated using radiation to find subterranean minerals, recently developed a radon detector to help predict earthquakes. He was a strong advocate of nuclear power, which provides more than three-quarters of France's electricity. When he became alarmed that only 3 per cent of French primary schools introduced their students to science, he started a programme in 1996 to encourage students to learn by doing their own scientific experiments. It spread to 12 other countries. In 2004, Charpak and Henri Broch wrote a jaunty, sardonic book titled Debunked, deriding ESP, telekinesis, Ouija boards and other phenomena they regarded as pseudoscience. They said astrology was inaccurate because the earth's axis shifts, making heavenly signs inherently imprecise. Asked what he planned to do with his prize money in 1992, Charpak absentmindedly replied that he had hoped to buy a pair of shoes that afternoon, but guessed he would not have time. He soon received gifts of shoes from all over the globe.

The CNRS pays tribute to Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak CNRS is deeply saddened to learn that Georges Charpak, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in physics, has passed away. This exceptional physicist, a pioneer of major advances in his field, began his career at the CNRS in 1948. "Georges Charpak was an innovative, humanist thinker. He made an immense contribution to research in France and worldwide," comments CNRS president Alain Fuchs. "His work revolutionized subatomic physics and opened the way to the digital age. His invention of multiwire chambers, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1992, was the precursor of the detectors used today in fundamental physics, without which many discoveries would not have been possible. It also paved the way for the development of a number of major applications and advances, particularly in the field of medical imaging." For Jacques Martino, director of CNRS's National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3), "Georges Charpak led a prodigious life. He became a Resistance fighter and studied with Frédéric Joliot-Curie. His loss means a page of history is turned. On behalf of the IN2P3 and CNRS, I wish to pay my respects to this enlightened, creative mind, who inspired and will continue to inspire many generations of researchers." Georges Charpak was born in Dabrovika, Poland on March 8, 1924. He arrived in France in 1931 and joined the Resistance in 1942 but he was arrested and deported to Dachau. He returned to France after the war and became a French citizen in 1946. After graduating from the École des Mines engineering school in Paris, he joined CNRS in 1948 to work at the Collège de France nuclear physics laboratory, headed by his former professor Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Charpak earned his Ph.D. in 1954. In 1959, he went to work for CERN in Geneva, where he focused on the development of new techniques for particle physics detectors. This led him to invent, in 1968, the "multiwire proportional chamber", an instrument that would revolutionize particle detection, bringing it into the electronic age. In 1992, he won the Nobel Prize in physics for this invention, which is now widely used as the basis for modern-day particle detectors. His discovery found many important applications, especially in medicine. Charpak's work led to significant improvements in medical radiography, making it possible to reduce patients' exposure to radiation. Georges Charpak was also a tireless teacher. Co-founder of the "La Main à la Pâte" ("Hands On") movement, an educational program to promote experimental sciences in elementary schools, he was always deeply committed to education, sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm with the younger generations.

Voyager - the space explorers that are still boldly going to the stars

Nasa's two Voyager ships have reached the edge of the solar system – and their incredible 35-year journey is far from over  

Dallas Campbell and Christopher Riley The Observer, Sunday 21 October 2012

Voyager 2 passed Jupiter in 1979. Ten years later, after observing Neptune, it began its journey out of the solar system. Composite: BBC2 The year 1977 was an important one for music. Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks were released. Elvis left the building for the last time, dying at the age of only 42. But amid all this rock'n'roll history another less celebrated but far more significant album was quietly being made. Fashioned from copper rather than vinyl, and plated with gold for longevity, The Sounds Of Earth was compiled by the American astronomer Carl Sagan. It was a broader range of music than most of the other albums released that year, aiming to encapsulate 5,000 years of human culture; from an Australian Aborigine song and an Indian raga to Azerbaijani bagpipes, bamboo flutes, Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. Like any compilation album, each piece was carefully selected and its merit, to make the cut, hotly debated. But unlike most other records, only two copies were made. They were placed inside their aluminium album covers, complete with artwork in the form of a "clear", universally understandable, pictorial depiction of what they were and instructions for how to play them. A stylus was also included, to help any creatures that might chance upon them in the future to hear the music and other recordings. In a scene that would not have been out of place in Ridley Scott's recent Prometheus, they were then carefully bolted to the outside of the two Voyager spacecraft, by the last human beings ever to touch them. The records sit on one face of each craft's 10-sided "chassis" or bus, above which sits the large, white 3.7metre wide communications dish, which dominates the structure. Protruding, insect-like, from the craft are "limbs" and antennae. The radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which power the Voyagers in the darkest reaches of the outer solar system, stretch out to on one side, just below a proboscis-like, 13m-long magnetometer boom. Across the other side of the craft, another broad arm juts out. It carries Voyager's "eyes" – an array of cameras, spectrometers, particle detectors and other equipment. The challenge for Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab, which designed and constructed the Voyagers, was to build a craft that could survive in space for years. In the early 1970s, when the JPL team began the project, they'd never built a craft rated for longer than a few months of interplanetary travel. It was a big jump to create something that would reach the outer planets, and perhaps even farther.

"At that point in time, that was a mind-blowing thought," says Voyager systems engineer John Casani. "How you build a spacecraft that can survive failures and still keep on chugging. We thought we could do it. Nobody else did!" Half a decade of back-breaking building and testing followed, to create a craft which was up to the job. As the build was nearing completion Casani decided to do something unique, to celebrate the sacrifices of his 2,000-strong engineering team and their families had made. During an open house party held to mark the end of Voyager's design phase, he invited everyone there to sign their names on large sheets of paper. He then had these papers reduced and reproduced onto six small metal plaques, still large enough to read the individual names. These were then stitched into the thermal blankets inside the main spacecraft bus, as a memorial to those whose ingenuity, skill and support had made these unique machines possible. With these signatures and their golden records on board, the twin spacecraft were launched in late summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral and placed on a "grand tour" trajectory that would carry them on fleeting, but historic fly-bys of Jupiter and its moons, and then on to Saturn and its rings. Deflected towards Saturn's moon Titan, Voyager 1 would head out of the plane of the solar system and off in the direction of the northern constellation of Camelopardalis. Voyager 2 would carry on towards an encounter with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, which would accelerate it to more than 50,000mph and hurl it in the direction of the brightest star in our sky – Sirius. On the course of this journey past the giant planets, the craft returned more than 67,000 photographs – among them stunning images of worlds we hadn't even dreamt of. As Voyager's chief scientist Ed Stone put it as they flew past Saturn: "Our imaginations were not nearly up to what nature provided." The pictures have challenged our understanding of meteorology and geology – redefining our understanding of the solar system and of planetary science as a discipline. These were places that we had only known as fuzzy pinpricks of light seen through telescopes from Earth before Voyager. These two spacecraft on the grandest of grand tours have taught us more about the outer solar system in the last 35 years than in all of human history. It was, and still is mankind's greatest voyage of discovery. But it is perhaps appropriate that the final image captured by Voyager, the image for which the mission is best remembered, was of ourselves. On Valentine's Day 1990 Voyager 1 was instructed to turn its cameras around to snap a final family portrait of as many of the planets as possible, seen uniquely from 6bn km above the solar system. The imaging team knew that, from this distance, each planet would occupy less than a pixel. It would be the farthest picture ever taken of home, capturing us as a single speck – an almost invisible point in the black ocean of space. At first when the photograph was printed, Earth was mistaken as a speck of dust which Voyager scientists initially tried to brush off the glossy print! But this visually underwhelming image of Earth – a "pale blue dot" as Sagan described it – was as profound as the spectacular whole Earth images captured by the Apollo astronauts some 20 years before. Not long after taking this final picture, Voyager 1 passed the orbit of Pluto, and by the end of 2004 had entered the realm of the Kuiper belt – a band of dark, Pluto-like worlds of rock and ice orbiting the Sun, almost imperceptibly far away. Voyager 2 reached this domain shortly afterwards. Today the two spacecraft still continue to hurtle away from us at 16km per second. Thirty five years after leaving Earth, and now 18bn km from home, Voyager 1 is entering the "bow shock" a region of space marking the boundary between the solar and the galactic winds – the edge of the Sun's influence. Voyager 2 has also encountered this frontier, as each craft prepares to enter the region astronomers call "interstellar space".

Five instruments on each craft are still functioning, reporting back the nature of this new environment into which we have extended our senses; characterising the new magnetic fields and galactic particles they are now in contact with. Their public voice also continues to reach us from this distance. Despite being technologically frozen in the 1970s, the Voyagers have managed to embrace the digital age – now harnessing Twitter to communicate their story. When a Twitter follower asked 'what could Voyager 2 see?' it replied in fitting Sagan-esque prose: "I can sense stars and their whispers amid the roaring of our own sun". Although they don't tweet every day, both craft still maintain daily contact with the Earth. Even travelling at the speed of light their messages take quite a long time to reach home. "The journey time is now about 15 hours each way," says Voyager's current manager Suzanne Dodd. "We sent a command Saturday morning and it came back Sunday afternoon." Dodd has been with Voyager since the mid-1980s, and likens keeping in touch with the spacecraft to the nurturing of an elderly senior citizen. "Sometimes they need a bit of tuning on their hearing!" It's not just the Voyagers that are ageing. Everyone on the team has lived out their lives against the backdrop of their mission. "When I started on Voyager my two daughters were young," says Ed Stone, who has been on board since day one. "By the time they were in college we had passed Saturn and were on our way to Uranus. They got married and the Voyagers just kept going, and we had grandchildren and Voyager just kept going and our grandchildren are now aware of what's happening to the Voyagers just like our children were." Barring any serious engineering failures, the Voyagers will both continue to report from interstellar space until around 2025, when declining power and propellant required to point their communication dishes towards Earth will gradually prevent them from calling home. Were it not for these diminishing consumables, and the risk of losing their lock on the increasingly dim and distant Sun, Nasa could track them for another century or two. But even without power the two Voyagers will continue to serve us. In the largely empty, benign environment of interstellar space, these craft are likely to last for millions of years. They will outlive the pyramids, they're likely to outlive us, and perhaps even the Earth itself; the only record of our existence, circling the galaxy for ever. If other intelligent, technological creatures ever find them, as they drift for eons in deep space, the craft will reveal something about the beings that built them. Our size and dexterity can be inferred from their scale. Their engineering sophistication will tell these creatures something about our technological and mathematical abilities, at least as they were in the 1970s. But the Voyagers' design alone will tell them nothing about what kind of creatures we really were. So while the team at the Jet Propulsion Lab put the finishing touches to the Voyagers in early 1977, spacecraft engineer John Casani suggested to Carl Sagan that they include something on board each craft that would address this. Sagan reasoned that music might be the best way of communicating to other creatures something more about us. "Could the meaning of music be understood by something else," Sagan wondered. "The soaring emotions from music might be a mystery to them, but if we were to convey something of what humans were about then music has to be a part of it," he later recalled in an interview with BBC Radio 4. Sagan quickly pitched the idea for the golden records, estimating it would cost $25,000 to make them. Casani agreed and Sagan and team member Ann Druyan set about choosing the music. They had just six weeks to assemble the album, the most symbolic music compilation project in history. It was an almost impossible task, by Sagan's own admission. A frantic consultation with musicologists around the world ensued, as Druyan, who later became Sagan's wife, battled to track down 26 specific recordings, which reflected something of the emergence and evolution of music on Earth.

When the physician and biology writer Lewis Thomas was asked which tracks he would send he quickly replied 'the complete works of JS Bach …" before adding, after a pause " … But that would be boasting!" But The Sounds of Earth does carry more from Bach than any other single composer, with three pieces chosen to reflect the evolution of his style. As with any mixtape project, particularly one intended to represent something of our diversity as a species and what it means to be a human, there are going to be some obvious omissions; not least the Beatles. Druyan was hoping for Here Comes the Sun but the request was turned down by the band's record company, as they presumably couldn't agree to clearance for the rights "in perpetuity, across the known Universe". But the most striking story from this effort to compile the golden record concerns the closing piece for the album; Beethoven's Cavatina from the String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Op 130. Whilst researching an article about the project for the New York Times, Druyan had looked at Beethoven's diaries, and: "in his own hand he'd written: 'will they like my music on Venus? What will they think of it on Uranus…" At last, a way to respond to that impulse, that question that Beethoven asked so long ago, she felt. Despite its ambition, and the epic time scales over which the Voyagers are likely to survive, given the vastness of space, these two tiny craft and their golden records are unlikely ever to be found. But Sagan was clever enough to realise this. For him it wasn't so much what the records said to other civilisations that mattered, but more significant was what they said about our own. Like the pale blue dot photograph captured by Voyager 1, the compilation record was a mirror to hold up to ourselves. "Here is a moment when we have to suddenly think what is it about our culture we'd want others to know about, that we'd be proud of," Sagan reflected in a 1982 interview. "The record should represent the human species as an entirety. We are a single species on the planet Earth. The unity of the species seen down here is a fact that is essential for the human future." As our first interstellar ambassadors set sail on this new sea, it's worth reflecting once more on this unique vantage point which such exploration, far beyond our "pale blue dot" offers us. From such a perspective national boundaries melt away and ethnic, religious or ideological differences seem an irrelevant way to define our identity. In the summer of 1977 the launching of our collective message in a bottle into the cosmic ocean was a highly optimistic gesture, which briefly put all our tribal differences aside. This optimism is perhaps best summed up by one of the voice recordings it carries. "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours." Campbell and Riley's documentary, Voyager – to the Final Frontier, is on BBC4 at 9pm on 24 October. Hear the Voyager golden discs' playlist at goldenrecord.org.

The future and futurology The way we are going Oct 9th 2003 From The Economist print edition

IN HER preface, Susan Greenfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, admits that she Tomorrow's People: How 21sthad really wanted to write a novel, a story, seen “through the eyes of a brilliant and Century Technology is Changing beautiful heroine, a female neuroscientist”, about the kind of lives we will be living the Way We Think and Feel towards the end of this century. Although she dropped the idea in favour of a work By Susan Greenfield of non-fiction, “Tomorrow's People” is set firmly in the dystopian tradition of Huxley and Orwell. Baroness Greenfield's purpose is to issue a warning: that the coming integration of IT and biotechnology will have such a profound effect on the Penguin/Allen Lane; 288 pages; way we think and live that “we are standing on the brink of a mind makeover more £20 cataclysmic that anything in our history.” Baroness Greenfield is acutely aware of the perils of futurology. Visions from the 1950s of a world in which robots performed the domestic chores, meals were taken as pills and we zoomed around in personal helicopters were touchingly wide of the mark. Critically, nobody from that era foresaw the rise and ubiquity of the computer. Thomas Watson, the legendary boss of IBM, once famously predicted that there might turn out to be a world market for just five computers. In Baroness Greenfield's vision of the future there is no dividing line between the real and the virtual, and most of our experiences are shaped either by a souped-up version of the internet or by smart drugs. We will rarely have to leave our homes, which will become an extension of our minds and bodies. Entertainment will be on tap to match our moods, while our physical environment, from the view through our windows to the shape of our rooms and the furniture inside them, will have the protean ability to adapt itself to our desires and needs. There will be no cancer or baldness or obesity. Nano-machines inside our bodies will change our appearance at will. Our bodily functions will be monitored and any incipient malfunctions dealt with by clothes that both dispense drugs and have the happy knack of cleaning themselves. Relationships with other human beings will increasingly become too troublesome and unrewarding compared with the more immediate satisfactions to be had from the ever-present networked screens. We will be able to have sex virtually with anyone, while reproduction will be possible at any stage of our lives and regardless of our sexuality. Knowledge of any skills other than those of the technological elite will become a redundant concept because all the information we will ever need will be instantly available to us all, and because intelligent machines will be able to undertake almost any task better and more quickly that we can ourselves. Reading and writing will be redundant. As for privacy—what was that? What makes this at least semi-believable is that the technology probably will soon be available to render much of this possible. Moore's Law alone, which decrees that computer-processing power will double every 18 months and has at least another ten years to run, will soon allow computers to do things that are almost unimaginable. After that should come quantum computing—an advance comparable to the replacement of the vacuum tube by the transistor. As professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, Baroness Greenfield is well-placed to understand the impact of the next generation of mind-altering drugs, while the applications for nanotechnologies seem almost limitless. The author is, thank goodness, horrified by the vision of the future she depicts: “The private ego is the most precious thing we have and it is far more vulnerable than ever before.” That ego, our individualism, is not, she argues, the automatic corollary of having been born human, but instead depends on the availability of an appropriate environment—an environment which, for the first time, we can no longer take for granted. What frightens her is the possibility that we will become so immobilised by dreams and shadows, so free of pain, mentally standardised by the cyber-world that is our principal habitat and rendered oblivious by chemicals, that we will have lost the ability to choose. Scary stuff indeed. That said, she surely makes insufficient allowance for the “yuck” factor. Human beings are a stubborn lot. If we don't like something, we're quite good at avoiding doing it. Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel. By Susan Greenfield. Penguin/Allen Lane; 288 pages; £20

March 21, 2010 Women in science: Pioneers blaze path for others By Rachel Shields The Royal Society has named its top 10 female scientists, yet many still feel marginalised They have mapped the infinity of space, developed spray-on skin for burns victims, pioneered cancer-beating therapies, created cutting-edge computer chips, discovered the first radio pulsars, and won Nobel prizes. But female science professors are still being asked to make the tea and take notes at meetings by their - often junior - male colleagues. Sexism remains all too prevalent in Britain's scientific community, according to some of its leading figures, even as The Royal Society unveils a list of the 10 greatest women scientists in British history. Women scientists this weekend called for government funding to be ring-fenced for projects headed by women, and men who are principal child carers, to help them get ahead in what remains a male-dominated profession. "If you are on high-level committees, you'll be asked to make the tea," said Professor Athene Donald, the deputy head of physics at Cambridge University. "Recently, on a committee, the chairman thought I was the secretary. And I've been in committees where we've been addressed as "gentlemen", despite the fact that there are women there. It is very off-putting." Baroness Greenfield, who is suing the Royal Institution after it ousted her as its director in January, has criticised the Government for failing to provide enough financial support for women trying to make a career in the sector. "However much people support and encourage women, it has got to be backed by resources. The Government has never really delivered that," said Lady Greenfield. "I hope that the election campaign addresses this. What is needed is about £50,000 a year per woman, and then add the cost of equipment, and you are looking at £200,000 for one person. Science research is expensive." Lady Greenfield also argues that the insecure nature of science research puts women at a disadvantage: most scientists have to make do with temporary research contracts until they secure a fixed position in their thirties and forties; maternity leave provision is limited; and, for those in cutting-edge research, a career break at that stage can leave them way behind their male peers. "Many people won't have security of tenure until they are in their thirties. It is one of the few employment cultures with no security," she said.

It is thought that the subject's "nerdy" image puts girls off studying science beyond GCSE, and the sector also struggles to retain female graduates, with more than 70 per cent of women science graduates deciding on non-science related careers. One of the aims of the Government's 10-year strategy on science and technology, launched in 2004, was to encourage more women into the sectors. "The science and technology professions have been built by men, for men," said Annette Williams, the director of the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. The centre was established in 2004 to address the gender imbalance by using mentoring, training and networking. "Often, women can find the climate quite hostile. And science and technology are so male-dominated that they are behind other sectors in terms of things like flexible working," said Ms Williams. The Royal Society, which did not allow female fellows to join until 1945, is using its 350th anniversary year to highlight the work of women scientists, such as Rosalind Franklin, whose work on DNA led directly to the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, and Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel prize-winner for chemistry. Despite the negative experiences of many female scientists, some believe that the situation is improving. "The number of women science professors rose from 8 per cent of the total in 2004 to 11 per cent now. I think we had something to do with that," said Ms Williams. While women may be underrepresented in science, few are in favour of "quotas" of jobs being reserved for women. "Affirmative action can be very damaging. Women don't want to be appointed because they are women, they want to be appointed because they are good," said Professor Donald. "But if you advertise a job, you should have a proper search, and encourage women to come forward, not just appoint someone you know."

The Royal Society Top 10 1. Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) As an assistant to her brother, a royal astronomer, Herschel discovered eight comets and catalogued star clusters. She was the first woman scientist to receive a salary and was awarded many honours.

2. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) The Scottish scientist was only the second woman to receive recognition in the UK for her scientific experiments, which were on magnetism. Her popular renditions of the French astronomer Laplace's book Traité de Mécanique Céleste made her famous. 3. Mary Anning (1799-1847) The daughter of poor Dis- senters, the palaeontologist made a number of important finds in Lyme Regis, including the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton and the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found. She also discovered important fish fossils. 4. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917) Denied entry to medical school, Garrett Anderson instead passed the Society of Apothecaries examination to become the first English female doctor. She founded the New Hospital for Women in London and was influential in the passing of an Act permitting women to enter the medical profession in 1876. 5. Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) Working with her husband, Professor William Ayrton, Ayrton published several papers on the electric arc. In 1902 she became the first woman to be nominated as a fellow of the Royal Society, although as a married woman she could not accept. 6. Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971) A pioneer of X-ray crystallography - the study of molecule shapes - in 1945 she and Marjory Stephenson were the first women to be admitted as fellows to the Royal Society. She was the first female professor at University College London, and the first woman to be president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 7. Elsie Widdowson (1908-2000) Her work with Professor R A McCance revolutionised the way the world assessed nutritional values and how mammalian development was perceived. She worked on nutritional problems during the Second World War, and on treating the effects of starvation suffered by concentration camp victims.

8. Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994) Hodgkin discovered the structure of penicillin and of vitamin B12. She was awarded the Nobel prize for her work, and was made a member of the Order of Merit. She devoted much of her later life to championing scientists in developing countries. 9. Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) Her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA was used to formulate Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis of the structure of DNA. She led the pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses. 10. Anne McLaren (1927-2007) McLaren produced the first litter of mice grown from eggs that had been developed in tissue culture and transferred to a surrogate mother, paving the way for human in vitro fertilisation. Today's Trail Blazers 1. Susan Greenfield Professor of pharmacology, University of Oxford "People don't sell science to young people, and especially to girls, as well as they might. It takes time and resources to send people into schools. Doing that sort of thing is regarded very badly in the scientific community, it is seen as 'dumbing down'." 2. Patricia Fara Director of studies, history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University "Younger women believe there is no discrimination against women in science, but I think that is optimistic. Women are squeezed out of exciting research projects. It certainly isn't a level playing field, you just have to look at the statistics. It is tough for women." 3. Julia Higgins Professor of polymer science, Imperial College London "Even now women in science are rather invisible. It is a cultural thing. When people talk about Newton and Darwin, we want them to remember the women who did amazing things, too." 4. Uta Frith Emeritus professor of cognitive development, University of London

"We still have a long way to go. Women had a late start in the profession. I'm privileged to be one of the few women recognised in science, but there are so many talented women who will do great things." 5. Sunetra Gupta Professor of theoretical epidemiology, Oxford University "It is only since I undertook to write a children's book on women scientists that I have come to know their lives in any detail - which is embarrassing, but also makes me realise how much of a need there is for the book." 6. Maggie Aderin-Pocock Royal Society university research fellow and a space scientist for Astrium Ltd "My career has been great up until now, but I'm due to give birth to my first child in three weeks time, so that might pose more of a problem. Career breaks are a problem in science, as you aren't keeping up with the cutting-edge research." 7. Athene Donald Deputy head, department of physics, Cambridge University "There is an unconscious bias. The number of women science professors is only about 11 per cent. It is improving, pathetically slowly. I think the Royal Society is working really hard over the gender issue. That they put their hands up and say 'mea culpa' is a positive message." 8. Helen Mason Solar physicist, Cambridge University "Research grants have been cut and universities are suffering financially; people are being made redundant. My fear is that the young women scientists will be hit hardest by this. Indeed, I know that this is happening, and I feel powerless to stop it." 9. Ottoline Leyser Professor of biology, University of York "The list highlights how tremendously recent it has been that we've had the equality we are now enjoying, and how frustrating it is that things are not moving faster." 10. Nancy Rothwell MRC research professor, University of Manchester "I'm often asked how I manage in a male dominated profession. I just don't recognise this description. I have experienced nothing but support from all my male colleagues."

The moment it all went wrong for Kodak The world's biggest film company filed for bankruptcy yesterday, beaten by the digital revolution. The only problem is, the enemy started within David Usborne

Friday 20 January 2012 The Independent

When companies go bust, we, the customers, rarely pay much heed. It's all about judges, restructuring and then, if they are lucky, their re-emerging in some shrunken form to carry on as if nothing had happened. Not so in the case of Kodak, which is now taking the walk of ignominy to the bankruptcy courts. For this is a company we care about – at least if we were born before 1986 or so, when Kodak was at the peak of its commercial powers. A hundred years earlier George Eastman, the company's founder, had invented roll film, which replaced photographic plates and allowed photography to become a hobby of the masses. Kodak did not quite own the 20th century, but it did become the curator of our memories. "One of the interesting parts of this bankruptcy story is everyone's saddened by it," notes Robert Burley, professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto. "There's a kind of emotional connection to Kodak for many people. You could find that name inside every American household and, in the last five years, it's disappeared." But 1986 was arguably also the year when Kodak, a company that for so long was the emblem of American industrial innovation, began to be eaten by others, notably from Japan, who learnt to innovate too – and more quickly. Kodak was the great inventor. In 1900, it unveiled the Box Brownie camera. "You push the button, we do the rest," ran the advertising campaign. Kodachrome film, the standard for movie-makers as well as generations of still photographers because of its incredible definition and archival longevity, was introduced in 1936 and only went out of production 2009. Nor should we forget the Instamatic, the camera with the little cartridges of film that spared us the fumbling of trying to get film to spool properly. Between 1963 and 1970 the company sold 50 million of those. The trouble began 20 years ago, with the decline of film photography. In the 1990s, Kodak poured billions into developing technology for taking pictures using mobile phones and other digital devices. But it held back from developing digital cameras for the mass market for fear of killing its all-important film business. Others, such as the Japanese firm Canon, rushed in. So who invented the digital camera? Ironically, Kodak did – or, rather, a company engineer called Steve Sasson, who put together a toaster-sized contraption that could save images

using electronic circuits. The images were transferred onto a tape cassette and were viewable by attaching the camera to a TV screen, a process that took 23 seconds. It was an astonishing achievement. And it happened in 1975, long before the digital age. Mr Sasson and his colleagues were met with blank faces when they unveiled their device to Kodak's bosses. Even he didn't full see its potential. "It is funny now to look back on this project and realise that we were not really thinking of this as the world's first digital camera," Mr Sasson was later to write on a company blog. "We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best: 'The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.' But in reality, we had no idea." For Kodak's leaders, going digital meant killing film, smashing the company's golden egg to make way for the new. Mr Sasson saw in hindsight that he had not exactly won them over when he unveiled his toy: "In what has got to be one of the most insensitive choices of demonstration titles ever, we called it 'Film-less Photography'. Talk about warming up your audience!" Even before film began to fade, other manufacturers, notably Fuji, were nibbling at the company's dominance: at the 1984 Olympics it was Fuji that supplied the official film, after Kodak declined the opportunity. In recent years the company has been weighed down by its pension responsibilities, born of a paternalistic culture introduced by Mr Eastman himself. And its efforts in the last 10 years to shift its focus to consumer and industrial printers have faltered: the company has posted losses in six of the last seven years. In 1976, Kodak sold 90 per cent of the photographic film in the US and 85 per cent of the cameras; 10 years later it still employed 145,000 people worldwide compared with a global payroll today of 18,000. Historians may one day conclude that most of the company's slow unravelling can be traced to the failure of its leaders to recognise the huge potential of Mr Sasson's invention. Don Strickland, a former vice-president, who left the company in 1993 because even then he couldn't persuade it to manufacture and market a digital camera, put it this way: "We developed the world's first consumer digital camera but we could not get approval to launch or sell it because of fear of the effects on the film market." Financial future of 15,500 UK staff at risk Kodak's decision to file for bankruptcy protection in the US puts the financial futures of 15,500 UK staff at risk. The firm has a significant manufacturing plant in Harrow, north London, which at its peak employed 6,000 staff and still has over 1,000 today. Kodak last year agreed to inject $800m into the UK pension fund over the next decade to fill a massive shortfall. But now the company's ability to meet that promise is in doubt after lawyers warned that the Chapter 11

protection means it will be able to shut unprofitable operations and cut back on its pension obligations. The UK Pension Regulator has been given aggressive legal powers to put pensioners at the top of the list of creditors of collapsed foreign companies. But in practice it has never succeeded in doing so in the US. Helena Berman, a litigation lawyer at Maurice Turnor Gardner, said: "The pensions regulator has been given the teeth to go after pension schemes in other jurisdictions such as the US, but every time it's tried to so, it has been challenged. For the Kodak pensions, it's a case of wait and see." The Kodak UK pension trustees may attempt to claim priority over other creditors' claims in the US. Lucy Tobin Exposed: Firms that took eye off the ball Barbie Mattel, whose Barbie dolls have been adored by girls for 53 years, saw sales handbagged by the arrival of the sassy rival Bratz. Sales of Barbie, according to The Wall Street Journal, have been flat or negative for most of the 2000s. Psion The PalmPilot gadget had what seemed an amazing power of organising your diary and phone book electronically. Sadly, Psion failed to spot early enough that mobile phones would soon incorporate all that – and more. Western Union It was to Western Union that Alexander Graham Bell and his co-inventors took their patent for the telephone first. But its chairman balked at the $100,000 they asked him for, describing the contraption as "nothing but a toy". Nokia As the brick phones of the 1980s became smaller and smaller, Nokia quickly became synonymous with small, practical mobiles. Sadly for the Finnish company, it failed to see the growing importance of internet-enabled smartphones. Timeline: 128 years of Kodak 1884 American inventor George Eastman, who later becomes founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, patents photographic film stored in a roll. 1888 The Kodak name is trademarked. The first Eastman Kodak camera is released and costs around $25 (about £400 in today's money). 1891 The company opens its first international manufacturing site in the London suburb of Harrow, taking advantage of Europe's booming photography market. 1900 Kodak launches the Brownie camera, priced at $1, which is credited with bringing photography to the masses. 1922 Kodak produces 147,000 miles of motion picture film a year, using one-twelfth of the silver mined annually in the US.

1925 George Eastman, now 71, hands over presidency of the company to William Stuber. 1969 The film used on the Apollo 11 Moon landing is manufactured by Kodak. 1975 Kodak becomes the first company to make a digital camera. It took 23 seconds to expose each image. 1976 More than 90 per cent of photographic film and more than 85 per cent of cameras sold in the US are made by Kodak. 1994 One of the first consumer digital cameras, the QuickTake, is launched by Apple. It is made by Kodak. 2004 As the popularity of digital cameras grows, Kodak finally abandons the film camera. 2005 Kodak is the largest digital camera retailer in the US, raking in up to $5.7bn in sales. 2007 Kodak falls to fourth biggest digital camera retailer. By 2010, it is the seventh biggest. 2009 After 74 years of production, Kodak stops selling 35mm colour film.2011 Kodak shares fall by more than 80 per cent, partly because the company struggles to meet pension costs for its employees. 2012 Kodak files for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Royal Mail stamps celebrate Britain's contribution to space exploration The Royal Mail's latest stamps feature close-up views of alien worlds captured during European Space Agency missions

Seeing the stamp images together made me appreciate that they represent more than scientific value. They are also works of art. Photograph: David Parry/PA

Royal Mail celebrates Britain's contribution to space exploration with its latest set of commemorative stamps. Due to be issued on 16 October, the six stamps all feature images from European Space Agency missions. From skimming Saturn's rings to keeping a watchful eye on the sun, from visiting our neighbouring worlds to flying by the "failed planet" of asteroid Lutetia, Britain now performs most of its space exploration through Esa. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Britain's space exploration effort. On 26 April 1962, its first satellite, Ariel 1, was launched by Nasa. It carried scientific experiments designed by British universities and turned Britain into the world's third spacefaring nation, after Russia and America. Now, space projects contribute £9.1bn to this country's economy every year. They employ nearly 30,000 people and according to figures from the UK Space Agency the space sector is growing at a rate of 7.5% per year. I was approached earlier this year by Royal Mail to write the presentation packs to be issued with these stamps. Seeing the images together made me appreciate that they represent more than just scientific value. They are also works of art. No longer do we

peer at grainy pictures of remote planets trying to make sense of them. Now we see them as different worlds in vibrant colour, each unique and each with a story to tell. Royal Mail is no stranger to issuing stamps based upon astronomy. Yet in the past, the stamps have often featured art inspired by the theme of space, such as the Astronomy set in 1990, or 1991's Europe in Space. Only since the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, have full sets been comprised of actual astronomical images, mostly of distant nebulae. This latest is the first set to feature a full complement of planetary images. If you imagine the cost of these missions divided by the number of amazing images they take, each of these views is worth the same as a great work of art hanging in a gallery. Nowhere, however, does Royal Mail say how much it costs to post a parcel to these worlds; surely a missed chance to extend business? Stuart Clark is the author of Voyager: 101 Wonders Between Earth and the Edge of the Cosmos

Charles Dickens stamps for 2012 Royal Mail will commemorate 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens with new stamps featuring The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby.

Image 1 of 2 Royal Mail stamps featuring Mr Pickwick from the Pickwick Papers (left) and Nicholas Nickleby - to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth - will go on sale on June 19. 6:00AM GMT 07 Feb 2012 The Daily Telegraph The Royal Mail has given a preview today of two new stamps featuring illustrations from the works of Charles Dickens which are being released to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. The Victorian novelist was born on February 7 1812, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and events are being held today at his birthplace and at Westminster Abbey where he was buried in Poets' Corner in 1870. The stamps feature illustrations from his first novel The Pickwick Papers and his 1838 novel Nicholas Nickleby. The character of Mr Pickwick forms a set of six stamps featuring original illustrations adapted from Character Sketches From Charles Dickens, by Joseph Clayton Clarke (otherwise known as Kyd) and originally published around 1890. The Nicholas Nickleby stamp will be part of a special miniature sheet of four stamps of illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, (known as Phiz), who illustrated 10 books by the author. Philip Parker, Royal Mail stamps spokesman, said: "Charles Dickens was one of the truly great British novelists, a man born into poor circumstances who went on to change the world in which he lived thanks not just to his novels, but his campaigning journalism and philanthropy." The full set of 10 new stamps will be issued on June 19 and will feature iconic characters from some of his most famous novels, including Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and A Tale Of Two Cities. For more information and stories on Charles Dickens see the Telegraph Charles Dickens page

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SpaceX Dragon capsule - First commercial cargo ship sent to International Space Station Marcia Dunn Monday 08 October 2012 The Independent A commercial cargo ship rocketed into orbit in pursuit of the International Space Station, the first of a dozen supply runs under a mega-contract with Nasa. It was the second launch of a Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab by the California-based SpaceX company. The first was last spring. This time was no test flight, however, and the spacecraft carried 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms) of key science experiments and other precious gear on this truly operational mission. There was also a personal touch: chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream tucked in a freezer for the three station residents. The company's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight. Officials declared the launch a success, despite a problem with one of the nine first-stage engines. The rocket put Dragon in its intended orbit, said the billionaire founder and chief executive officer of SpaceX, Elon Musk. "It's driving its way to station, so that's just awesome," noted SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission. NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions. Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts' blood and urine samples. The samples — nearly 500 of them — have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011. The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six. None of the Russian, European or Japanese cargo ships can bring anything back; they're destroyed during reentry. The Russian Soyuz crew capsules have limited room for anything besides people. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX — owned by PayPal co-founder Musk — is working to convert its unmanned Dragon capsules into vessels that could carry astronauts to the space station in three years. Other U.S. companies also are vying to carry crews. Americans must ride Russian rockets to orbit in the meantime, for a steep price. Musk, who monitored the launch from SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, called the capsules Dragon after the magical Puff to get back at critics who, a decade ago, considered his effort a fantasy. The name Falcon comes from the Millennium Falcon starship of "Star Wars" fame. An estimated 2,400 guests jammed the launching center to see the Falcon, with its Dragon, come to life for SpaceX's first official, operational supply mission.

Across the country at SpaceX headquarters, about 1,000 employees watched via TV and webcast. It was no apparition. "Just over a year after the retirement of the space shuttle, we have returned space station cargo resupply missions to U.S. soil," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr. SpaceX is shooting for its next supply run in January. Another company looking to haul space station cargo, Virginia's Orbital Sciences Corp., hopes to launch a solo test flight in December and a demo mission to the station early next year. Every time SpaceX or a competitor flies successfully, Bolden told reporters, "that gives the nonbelievers one more opportunity to get on board and root for us" and help enable commercial launches for space station astronauts. This will further free NASA up to aim for points beyond low-Earth orbit, like Mars. "This was a big night," Bolden concluded.

Serge Haroche and David Wineland awarded Nobel Prize in Physics Steve Connor Tuesday 09 October 2012 The Independent Two scientists who independently discovered how to manipulate individual atoms and particles of light have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their research into the weird world of quantum mechanics, where something can exist in two different states at the same time. Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland have each helped to pioneer an esoteric field of physics that has already produced the most accurate clocks as well as promising to develop super-fast and intelligent machines known as quantum computers. Dr Haroche, of the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, invented a way of trapping particles of light, called photons, by sending atoms through a microwave trap that keeps a photon reflecting off two mirrors for more for than a tenth of a second – equivalent to the photon travelling once around the Earth. Dr Wineland, of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, used the opposite approach and devised a way of trapping electrically charged atoms or ions and controlling and measuring them with beams of laser light. In both cases, the scientists were able to use their equipment to observe the highly unusual properties of single atoms and photons when the rules of classical physics break down and the weird laws of the quantum world operate. “Through their ingenious laboratory methods they have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, enabling their field of research to take the very first steps toward building a new type of super-fast computer, based on quantum physics,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which governs the prize. “These methods have also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundred-fold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks,” it said. Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey, said: “Until the last decade or two, some of these results were nothing more than ideas in science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum

physicists. Wineland and Haroche have shown just how strange the quantum world really is and opened up the potential for new technologies undreamt of not so long ago.” The weirdness of the quantum world, which operates at the levels of atoms and sub-atomic particles, is reflected in the thought experiment of Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrian physicist who won a Nobel prize in 1933. He proposed that particles can exist in two states or places at the same time, which could in theory mean that a cat trapped in a box with a radioactive poison and isolated from the rest of the world could be both dead or alive at the same time.

Private rocket blasts off for ISS Tuesday 09 October 2012 The Independent A commercial cargo craft has been blasted into orbit bound for the International Space Station, the first of a dozen supply runs under a mega-contract with Nasa. SpaceX's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky late on Sunday, putting the company on track to reach the space station tomorrow. It was the second launch of a Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab by the California-based SpaceX company, but this time was no test flight. The spacecraft carried 450kg of science experiments and other precious gear, along with ice cream tucked in a freezer for the three station residents.

Science prizes - what are they for? The Nobel prizes recognise outstanding achievements but, in a model reminiscent of the 18th century, science and technology prizes are increasingly being offered to encourage solutions to particular challenges

Prizes can recognise achievements (like the Nobels) or induce researchers to focus on particular problems. John Harrison's 1759 sea watch was a result of the latter approach. Photograph: National Maritime Museum On Tuesday, the Nobel prize for physics was announced. Like all the Nobels, it will attract considerable interest, publicity and debate. But what are the roles of prizes – as rewards or as incentives – in science? Because of the large amount of money involved, and the international remit, the Nobels have become hugely prestigious, if often controversial. Yet they are an oddity, founded on an individual's whim, with no consultation with governments or institutions, and resting, as the Guardian's Ian Sample puts it, "on the words of a secretive bunch of Scandinavians". Despite this, the Nobels are typical of the many prizes established

within science that reward success, mark approval, consolidate a sense of community and, often, create public interest. Although numerous, the very notion of prizes in science can be controversial. Making choices about winners and losers is bound to encourage dissent, but prizes also seem to undermine some of the basic assumptions about how science works. They stimulate competition in an endeavour that is often celebrated as collaborative. Sometimes they act to focus minds on particular problems, implying that serendipitous discovery through "blue skies" research is insufficient in meeting society's needs. Finally, offering money suggests that financial success through the market may be elusive, or that the joy of intellectual discovery is not necessarily sufficient reward. The way that prizes have been awarded and publicised can offer clues about the status of science through history. The Royal Society, which now offers a huge number of prizes and honours, first awarded its Copley Medal in 1731. The list of winners is wonderfully eclectic, and shows that in the early days the "most important scientific discovery" was often judged to relate to a practical problem. It shows a Society that was keen to demonstrate the public utility of science. This was typical of the period. The Society of Arts, for example, offered premiums for specific challenges, such as improvements to machines or techniques in agriculture and navigation. Similarly, in 1796, the American Philosophical Society announced rewards for "the best performances, inventions, or improvements" in ships' pumps, calculating longitude by lunar distance, stoves, preventing decay in peach trees, studying native American vegetable diets, and street lighting. Famously, Napoleon offered a prize for the invention of a method of food preservation that would facilitate the feeding of his armies. Such challenge prizes did not disappear, although, in the following centuries, the most high-profile were offered by individuals and companies and focused on exciting and popular areas of innovation like railways and flight. The X Prize, for commercial space flight, is clearly of the same lineage as the Orteig Prize for flying non-stop between Paris and New York. Increasingly, though, as science began to offer careers rather than haphazard opportunities, institutional and governmental rewards for science recognised outstanding achievements, rather than attempting to push people and teams into working on particular problems. In part this resulted from the rise of the notion that science benefits mankind as the unpredictable (but nevertheless ultimately assured) result of undirected, curiositydriven research. Recently, however, we seem to have stepped back into the 18th century. Nesta, which has set up a Centre for Challenge Prizes with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, sets the tone in this overview of the history and recent rise of challenge prizes. It points to the findings of a recent report that "before 1991, 97% of the prize money offered took the form of recognition prizes for past achievements. Since then, 78% of new prize money has been offered for the future solution of problems." Inducement prizes are proliferating, and the UK and the US governments are showing increasing interest. They are a particularly good way of getting attention from both public and STEM community, while being seen to be making positive noises about important problems or opportunities, all at a cost greatly lower than that of fully supporting and investing in the required R&D. The winners of the X-Prize put in far more money than they got back and, adding in the amount invested by other competitors for this or, for example, the Saltire Prize, we might see this is a bargain. But is this really how things work? Nearly every time such prizes are mentioned, as if in proof of their effectiveness, the great granddaddy of them all – the so-called Longitude Prize – is alluded to. In 1714 the British government offered a great deal of money to anyone who could find a practical and more accurate means of finding longitude (i.e. east-west position) at sea. The sum specified, £20,000, was ultimately given to John Harrison for his sea watch. Bingo! Significant issue resolved as the result of a one-off inducement prize. Well, yes and no. As I have written before, the story is more complicated and the Commissioners of Longitude and Admiralty had to be considerably more flexible in their approach. As far as the development of Harrison's clocks goes, long-term financial support, in the form of a series of smaller rewards between 1737 and 1764, was

probably more important than the distant carrot of the ultimate reward. Likewise, it was subsequently necessary to invest in further product development and basic infrastructure to make the use of timekeepers and the (necessary and complementary) astronomical techniques a practical possibility. If the Longitude Act of 1714 is to be an inspiration for current initiatives, then prize-givers should recall these facts and be in a position to offer a mixed funding model. Unless backed by grants, profitable companies or other institutions, researchers will not have time and leisure to develop new ideas. And those ideas are nothing without further investment. Without these other elements, challenge prizes will reward the already-successful, just as Nobels and other recognition prizes do. Rebekah Higgitt is working on a project on the history of the Board of Longitude, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the University of Cambridge and National Maritime Museum

Germany - Lines of contention By Gerrit Wiesmann Financial Times October 9, 2012 8:36 pm Angela Merkel’s plan to shift from nuclear to renewables has won plaudits – but will she do it?

©Bloomberg Transmission creep: power lines in a field near Berlin. Germany must expand its electricity network if it is to meet Angela Merkel's target to abandon nuclear within 10 years Peer Schulze holds his arm aloft to trace the path of the high-voltage power line that one day might cut through the green fringes of the town of Stadtilm in central Germany. “It’ll run over this barn, across that field and come within 100 metres of those houses,” says the 48-year-old construction engineer, a member of a local action group. “If, that is, the power line ever gets built.” The 380-kilovolt transmission line, more than 100km long, is meant to join the hilly, wooded state of Thuringia, in the south-western corner of what was East Germany, with Bavaria. It is running five years late, and Mr Schulze and other local opponents have asked a federal court to rule whether construction permission, awarded in May, is legal. A decision in their favour would deal a blow to Angela Merkel and her ambitious green energy policy, which is being watched closely by governments and power companies around the world. 

ALast year, after the meltdown at the Fukushima reactor in Japan, Ms Merkel declared that Germany would replace nuclear power with renewables by 2022 – a bold move that caught the attention of policy makers in other nations and sent shockwaves through the energy industry. The big bet on green energy

thrilled environmentalists, who saw one of the world’s most technologically savvy economies setting a global standard on harnessing wind and solar power. But realising this grand vision will depend on overcoming obstacles such as public opposition to the power line at Stadtilm. It is one of 22 projects dating back to 2005 that should have been completed but have stalled by a combination of cumbersome bureaucracy and public protests. And they raise the question of whether a further 50 upgrades and new lines, announced this year, will fare better. The four transmission companies involved say all 72 are needed to meet the chancellor’s goal. Missing the 2022 target would leave industry in Europe’s biggest economy short of power, or force it to extend the life of its last reactors – a choice between economic and political disaster. Germany adopted a nuclear phase-out policy more than a decade ago in response to long-held public opposition, but Ms Merkel postponed this on starting her second term in 2009, bowing to industry’s preference for a reliable, cheap energy source. Amid the outcry that followed the Fukushima disaster, however, she brought forward the closure of the last plants from 2036, and shut eight out of 17 in 2011. That first step alone removed about a 10th of installed electricity generating capacity. Ms Merkel will want to show progress on her Energiewende, or “energy switch”, because it will be one of the central issues – along with the eurozone crisis – in next year’s federal elections. She has told voters repeatedly “there will be no energy switch without new networks” to pipe wind-generated electricity from the northern coast to the industrial south. But though they are in favour of the nuclear phase-out, they have not got the message. A poll for the environment ministry in August showed that while 87 per cent of those asked liked offshore wind parks, only 42 per cent could accept new power lines.

Public utilities: Market reforms move power to the people When the citizens of the small south German town of Schönau took over the local power grid in 1997, few outsiders believed it would work. Yet today, the co-operative sells its renewable energy mix all over the country. Last year’s profits were €1.3m. More than a decade after the liberalisation of the sector, the number of such public utilities continues to rise – and they are likely to take on more significance as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Energiewende, or “energy transition” away from nuclear, advances. The lack of public acceptance makes a big task bigger. Germany’s nuclear plants were built near the industrial centres in the south, and electricity flowed locally or regionally. Replacing them with offshore wind parks will require hundreds of kilometres of high-voltage lines to be built – 3,800km by 2022, plus 1,600km of lines such as those mapped out around Stadtilm but not yet built. The only way to avoid the extension, which many opponents say will expose more people to harmful magnetic fields, will be to build more carbon dioxideemitting gas and coal-fired power stations. The danger of a crisis of public confidence is compounded by other aspects of energy policy. In mid-October, for example, the government will almost certainly have to raise the renewable-energy surcharge, used to pay producers a guaranteed price, from 3.5 cents to about 5.3 cents per kWh. This would raise household electricity bills by about 7 per cent. Fears are growing in the ruling centre-right coalition that the levy, combined with opposition to the networks, could provoke a backlash against the energy switch in the run-up to the election. Although Ms Merkel last year pledged to keep the surcharge at 3.5 cents, pushing through reform would involve Germany’s often fractious states. Indeed, she has signalled that she is happy to leave the complex talks to the next legislative period. But she has no such luxury when it comes to new transmission lines: her cabinet has to sign off plans by the end of the year to allow construction to begin on the first projects between 2015 and 2017. The man Ms Merkel hopes will persuade the likes of Mr Schulze – or prove him wrong – is Jochen Homann, the head of the federal networks agency that oversees the upkeep and expansion of electricity lines. Last year, Mr Homann acquired powers to speed the planning process and make it more transparent and democratic.

If he thinks those are contradictory tasks, Mr Homann does not show it. His agency is in the midst of an eightweek consultation process, which allows the public to critique the initial plans of the network companies – Tennet of the Netherlands, and Germany’s Amprion, 50Hertz, and TransnetBW. Based on a national “energy scenario” agreed last year, they have sketched what they think the country needs without pinpointing exactly where lines might go. Four direct-current “electricity motorways”, each up to 600km long, dominate the scheme. In the past, the agency would have reviewed the plans behind closed doors, with the public being given a voice only as detailed transmission line corridors were being fixed in land-use decisions – a process that starts in 12 months. Now, the agency wants early input to help determine the need for each project and to compile an earlystage environmental impact study. The results will provide the basis of a national networks law. “This kind of lengthy and early participation is unique,” says Mr Homann, standing on the fringes of the first “citizens’ dialogue” in Bonn in September. “I’m working on the premise that there will be public acceptance for the energy switch – and this will help.” The intention is to halve the planning, approval and litigating phases from the current 10-12 years. “If we can’t start building some of these lines in five years, we’ll have a problem in 2022.” The all-day town hall meeting looks into the way the agency reviews the transmission companies’ proposals and compiles the environmental impact study. Many visitors are impressed. “I’d say this is exemplary,” says Elke Weingärtner, who has travelled from Berlin, where she works for an environmental consultancy. “People can make themselves heard – early and continuously.” But, she adds, electricity is a complicated subject and not everyone will be able to follow the discussions. “The draft environmental study is 500 pages long. Who will make time to read that – especially as the networks agency wants to speed the process up?” Only about 120 people attend the first of the six conferences spanning a country of about 80m. Some are pensioners; the rest are local and state bureaucrats, energy sector professionals or, like Mr Schulze, members of local protest groups. The networks agency does not seem surprised. “Participation picks up as the planning process gets less abstract, when it’s about specific projects,” says Mr Homann. His officials stress the agency’s independence from the transmission companies and its keenness to “hear about any one new project that could make three others irrelevant”. They also say “we shouldn’t kid ourselves” about the direct-current motorways: they will be overhead cables. Asked why they dismiss underground cables, officials note that these, too, emit magnetic waves and cost a lot more – and that this question has been dealt with at a public “technology workshop”. When local protest groups challenge aspects of the lines they are fighting, they are reminded they are here to discuss future projects. “It could have been better organised,” says Helmut Klein, representing a local forest owner. “Much of what the agency said was very abstract, and many participants wanted to discuss older projects on their doorsteps. That’s why 90 per cent of the questions missed the point of the event.” Then again, as the networks agency stresses, the town hall meetings are just one part of the public consultation process. Citizens can also propose changes by email or phone. When the transmission companies asked for public input last year, they received about 2,000 suggestions. One group that says it has made “a great effort” to put pen to paper is Bund, the German arm of Friends of the Earth, the environmental lobby group. But Thorben Becker, Bund’s energy expert, says there is no sign that external contributors have had any impact on the national networks law. “You have to question the process if many qualified suggestions change nothing in the transmission companies’ plans.” Such doubts could prove corrosive to the consultation process. One of the best ways the agency could prove its independence is to make big changes as it drafts a final network development plan for submission to the government. It has already signalled that it will make minor changes, and is considering shortening the westernmost direct-current transmission line.

But Mr Schulze is having none of it. In a written submission on behalf of the protest campaign called Danger: High Voltage, which he says speaks for 10,000 citizens in the area around Stadtilm, he laments the overt influence of the transmission companies. Given that the agency guarantees them a 9 per cent return on their investments, the companies have a natural bias towards building “as many lines as possible” and not “as many lines as necessary”, he says. Six years of fighting to have other lines upgraded rather than a new one built have left Mr Schulze cynical about the planning process. Even before the final court review of the construction permission that has already been granted, expected in the next few weeks, the first pylons are – quite legally – being built around Stadtilm. The construction of the 380kv line seems likely, he says – which could in turn lead to the national authorities trying to run the easternmost of the new direct-current lines alongside. Ms Merkel and the state governments have already agreed that the federal networks agency will have the power to decide land use for such projects. Berlin also hopes to wrest power to grant final construction approval from the 16 state governments. That means Mr Schulze and Mr Homann, or probably his officials, could meet in court in three or four years. “And then they’ll say we already had every opportunity to make our voice heard – beginning with this public consultation period,” says Mr Schulze.

Manipulators of quantum world win physics Nobel  

15:26 09 October 2012 by Jacob Aron For similar stories, visit the Quantum World Topic Guide The New Scientist

When quantum theory was born, practical applications such as quantum computers and super-accurate atomic clocks would have seemed virtually impossible. This year's Nobel prize in physics, announced this morning, rewards two pioneers who made today's quantum technology possible. Serge Haroche at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and David Wineland at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder, who share the 2012 physics Nobel, both invented ways to measure and control tiny quantum objects without destroying their fragile states. This bodes well for quantum computers, devices that exploit the weird properties of quantum systems to solve problems that stymie ordinary computers. Wineland's work has already helped him build the world's most precise clock for studying Einstein's theory of relativity. Haroche was awarded the prize for his work on optical cavities, small superconducting mirrors placed just a few centimetres apart and cooled to just above absolute zero. A photon entering the cavity can bounce between the mirrors for more than a tenth of a second, long enough to travel 40,000 kilometres.

Atomic drive-by Caging photons in this way lets you investigate their quantum behaviour. Haroche fires rubidium atoms one by one into the cavity, where they interact with the photon before passing out the other side. This atomic drive-by shifts the atom's quantum state but, crucially, does not destroy the photon. In this way Haroche can measure the atom and learn about the detailed evolution of the photon's state over time. Wineland's work takes the opposite approach: he traps charged atoms or ions within electric fields and fires lasers at them to force the ions into a particular quantum state. The lasers cool the ions by suppressing random motion due to heat, forcing them into their lowest energy state. Precise laser pulses can then boost the energy of the ions by a tiny amount, creating a quantum superposition in which the ion has an equal chance of occupying both the lowest energy state and the next one up.

"Until the last decade or two, some of these results were nothing more than ideas in science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists," says Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. "Wineland and Haroche and their teams have shown just how strange the quantum world really is and opened up the potential for new technologies undreamt of not so long ago."

Aluminium clock Those technologies include a quantum computer. In 1995, Wineland's group demonstrated the first quantum logic gate , an essential precursor to quantum computing. His technique is also key to the world's most precise clock, which keeps time via the regular oscillations of a trapped aluminium ion. The clock is so precise that, had it started ticking at the dawn of the universe, it would have only lost about 4 seconds by now. Such clocks are precise enough to measure the slowing of time caused by changes in gravity, as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. Neither laureate appeared in a list of predictions released ahead of the Nobel announcement, but Haroche got a warning of a sort. Speaking via phone line at the Nobel Prize press conference, he said he was out walking with his wife when his phone rang. The country code displayed, 46, alerted him that the call was from Sweden. "I was in the street and passing near a bench. I was able to sit down immediately," he says.

TranshumanTech This blog is an experiment in automated filtering. It consists of posts from the public TranshumanTech mailing list, automatically filtered for relevance to humanity-transforming technology. Expect the filtering to get better as I work on the algorithms.

Thursday, June 16, 2011 [tt] NS 2817: Tribal wars: DNA testing divides American Indians I could tick off a long list of the legal issues, just barely skirted upon here. The basic idea is that the feds cheated the Indians and have been making amends, like giving tribes special privileges, like operating casinos. This creates incentives to declare one belongs to a specific tribe and for the tribe to resist diluting its advantage by questioning the applicants. But the fact is, historically, tribes augmented their members by accepting those with loose connections, sometimes more than other times. (Same with the Jews.) So one big legal issue is whether to make amends to those who belonged to the tribe a long time ago. And what about those trying to join. (I don't know the extent to which the amends are proportionate to the claimants.) In any case the taxpayers are being socked for injustices neither they nor their ancestors committed. It seems that, as far as paying up goes, the non-Indians are collectively responsible. I could continue. NS 2817: Tribal wars: DNA testing divides American Indians http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028173.900-tribal-wars-dna-testing-divides-american-indians.html

* 15 June 2011 by Linda Geddes, Coarsegold, California [Editorial, "DNA and the need to belong," added.] When American Indian identity is based on culture as much as blood, gene tests can tear tribes apart BLASTED from arid, rocky land where rattlesnakes once thrived, the Chukchansi Gold Resort and Casino stands like a modern castle in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Saturday night and the car park is heaving with gleaming pick-ups lured from the small towns of central California. Though business is booming, the casino has opened up wounds in the community of American Indians that build it on their land. The tribe has resorted to desperate measures to stem the deluge of claims from people hoping to be granted membership of the Chukchansi and consequently a share of the casino's profits--which can amount to several thousand dollars per person each year. This month, they will vote on whether all new applicants should undergo a paternity test to prove they are related to who they say they are. Would-be members include many children and adolescents brought up within the tribe for whom a negative result could be devastating. Membership disputes are nothing new in Indian country. The Chukchansi tribe has already expelled more than 500 members through non-genetic means. Earlier this month ex-members of the Chukchansi and several other tribes gathered at the Pechanga Resort and Casino in Temecula, California, to protest against the culling of California tribes: "There are tribes across our country that have terminated a significant portion of their citizens. In California alone, nearly 2500 Indian people have been stripped of their tribal citizenship since the approval and expansion of Indian gaming, stripping them of the right to vote, representation for their allotted tribal lands and healthcare," said a statement issued by the organisers of the protest. Introducing genetics to solve enrolment disputes is a new twist in the drama. Regardless of the result of this month's vote, Indian communities are turning to DNA testing more and more. "Since we started a casino a few years ago, all of a sudden we had Chukchansis coming out of the woodwork," says Reggie Lewis, chairman of the Chukchansi tribe. "We thought DNA would be a way to make sure that we only get people who are qualified to be in the tribe in the tribe." Those fighting expulsion suspect the proposed Chukchansi paternity test is an attempt to purge yet more members from the rolls. Some believe that DNA testing could create new problems for tribe members, such as false paternity issues. Others worry that if tribes base membership on genetics, the door might open for other racial groups to claim tribal authority based on DNA. Currently, there are 565 federally recognised tribes representing around 1.9 million people in the US. Each operates as a sovereign nation, with its own government and courts. The majority of tribes admit new members by setting a minimum "blood quantum". For example,

if your mother is ¼ tribe x and your father is ¼ tribe x, that makes you ¼ tribe x too. With tribal membership comes a cultural identity, educational grants, healthcare, housing and assistance with childcare. That American Indian tribes have embraced DNA technology may seem surprising. "Culturally, it may seem a little weird that tribes are using DNA testing, but tribes are not immune to what goes on in the larger society," says James Mills, founder of Creating Stronger Nations, which advises tribes on issues including membership. The Chukchansi aren't alone. Other tribes, such as the Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina, also require DNA tests for new members. To date, the only genetic tests tribes routinely use are those to confirm parentage. But tribes say they have been approached by people with no direct relative in the tribe wanting to enrol on the basis of ancestry tests that suggest American Indian heritage. The concept of finding such markers is highly controversial because no one has ever found genetic markers that can reliably distinguish between culturally defined races. Alex Sinelnikov of Genetica Laboratories in Cincinnati, Ohio, says such tests are not accurate enough to place an individual in a tribe with any degree of certainty. "It's a fairy tale," he says. Those tribes already using DNA testing say it is perfectly reasonable to require proof that people are related to who they say they are. "DNA testing has helped to settle membership disputes and is a very scientific and clear-cut way to do so," says Sheila Corbine, Attorney General for the Ho-Chunk tribe in Wisconsin Dells. Potential problems can creep in, however, when existing members of a tribe are ordered to undergo paternity testing (see "Not Indian enough"). At the Creating Stronger Nations conference in Las Vegas last month, the issue of DNA testing polarised opinion--particularly where retrospective testing was concerned. "We use DNA for new members, but we don't go backwards," says Janis Contraro of the Suquamish tribe in Washington. "If you start paternity testing [existing members] you open up a whole can of worms." The Chukchansi tribal council, which also attended the conference, disagrees. Since 2003, they have had a moratorium on new members after their numbers swelled from around 30 in the early 1980s, to more than 1000. A vote for DNA testing would involve amending their constitution so that all potential members would have to undergo a test--including children who have not been able to enrol since the moratorium. A paternity test typically costs $200 to $400--no small sum for the many American Indians who live on or below the poverty line. "We know that at first there will be an emotional issue between families," says Jennifer Stanley, secretary for the Chukchansi tribe, "but in the end what we're hoping through DNA is a unified tribe that actually knows who they are."

Few members are willing to discuss the matter openly, though internet forums are providing one means for people to vent their concerns. Many say that DNA testing could undermine centuries of cultural values. Traditionally, culture and upbringing were often considered as important as blood ties, if not more so, and many tribes adopted non-Indians into their membership. One famous example is the Cherokee-Freedmen--former black slaves of Cherokee Indians. "DNA testing undermines the notion of what it is to be tribal," says Kimberly TallBear of the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the impact of science on American Indians and is an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe in South Dakota. Cathy Corey, who was expelled from the Chukchansi tribe in 2005, agrees. "Nothing within the Indian culture has ever been based on DNA. Many adopted people into the tribe that had no blood or DNA connection." TallBear also cautions that focusing too narrowly on DNA could ultimately undermine the very identities and sovereignty that tribal councils are seeking to protect. "As DNA testing occurs more frequently in Indian country, the legal and historical foundations of tribal sovereignty may fade from view." She says anti-tribal interests may argue that tribal benefits are race-based rights rather than the result of historical treaties which could lead to the dissolution of tribes or to other racial groups trying to claim benefits. "Tribes have to create new traditions, but we should be mindful of the type of traditions and culture we are creating," she says. Not Indian Enough for the Ho-chunk Daria Powless, 20, was brought up by her grandmother within the Ho-Chunk tribe in Wisconsin. So when her right to belong to the tribe was challenged by three other members, she thought nothing of volunteering a DNA sample to prove that she was related to her father, making her ¼ Ho-Chunk blood and eligible for membership. Her DNA told a different story, revealing that her father was not in fact her father. On top of the emotional trauma this revelation caused, the Ho-Chunk tribe proceeded to try and expel her, as she no longer met the blood quantum for membership. This scenario is being repeated across the US (see main story), but using DNA as a tool for confirming membership of a tribe is relatively new. In 2009 the Ho-Chunk Nation inserted a requirement for the DNA testing of new applicants into its written constitution. The tribe can also ask an existing member to take a paternity test--if at least three members testify under oath that the person can't be a member of the tribe. "Ho-Chunk Nation has the authority to determine who shall be eligible for membership and the methods for how membership will be determined," says Sheila Corbine, Attorney General for the Ho-Chunk Nation. "The tribal membership often has

information about children that were claimed as biological children when they were not." This is what happened in the Powless case. "There is no implication that Ms Powless deliberately misled the tribe," says Corbine, "but that still does not negate the fact that she does not contain the requisite blood quantum, since the person she had always assumed to be her father was the parent with Ho-Chunk ancestry." Powless is waiting for the tribe to put her expulsion to a ballot, and a handful of other members are awaiting hearings following DNA tests. If two-thirds of general council members vote in favour, Powless will lose her membership and the benefits that go with it, including healthcare, eligibility for housing, education scholarships, voting rights and per capita payments of several thousand dollars per year. While Powless declined to comment on the matter, Cathy Corey, who was expelled from the Chukchansi tribe in 2005, says the emotional effects can cut far deeper than material benefits. "It's like having your heart torn out," she says. "The emotional pain that it causes never goes away." --DNA and the need to belong http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028172.800-dna-and-the-need-to-belong.html Genetics should be kept out of discussions on race and tribe HOW would you feel if your government declared that you had to emigrate if your father wasn't your biological parent? This unpalatable scenario is already playing out within some American Indian tribes. Once upon a time they were groups of indigenous people united by both blood and culture. Today they are often political entities, a product of historic treaties. If they are lucky, they possess a sense of community too. Deluged with applications for membership, governments of some tribes are turning to genetics to define who is a member (see "Tribal wars: DNA testing divides American Indians"). They say that they merely want to ensure that their grandchildren enjoy the benefits of membership without opening the floodgates to everyone else. Leaving aside the emotional turmoil caused when paternity testing shows the father isn't the father, DNA testing puts biological relationships before upbringing. Some worry that genetics will be increasingly used to define tribal membership. At first glance, it may seem reasonable to rely on genetic rather than social factors. But what does the idea of "American Indian blood" actually mean in the wake of generations of intermarriage? Indeed, a study published last year showed that 28 members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe possessed genetic markers associated with African and western European heritage, but few American Indian markers. Similarly, it is a fair bet that some non-American Indians

possess more American Indian blood than some members of federally recognised tribes. As has been seen with warring factions elsewhere, from the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, to the Serbs and Croats in the Balkans, there's little difference between us in terms of our genes. What next? What if tribes demanded genetic markers associated with American Indian ancestry for membership? What if the US government required genetic proof of indigenous heritage for tribes to be recognised? These moves should be resisted. The notion of a tribe is a social and political construct. If American Indians wish to retain their sovereignty, they would be well advised to keep it that way.

Curiosity finds ancient riverbed on Mars Latest images from Nasa's rover show trail of pebbles that were once dragged by water from crater rim to base of mountain 

Ian Sample, science correspondent The Guardian, Friday 28 September 2012 13.58 BST

The rover's landing site was once awash in water, a key ingredient for life, scientists say Link to this video A shallow river once coursed through a great crater on Mars according to the latest images from the surface that suggest the dusty planet was a more hospitable world in ancient times. Photographs from Nasa's Curiosity rover revealed clear signs of an ancient waterway winding from the northern edge of the Gale crater towards the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain that rises 3.1 miles (5km) from the crater floor. The dried-up riverbed left a trail of pebbles and sand grains that over time became weathered and locked in rock. Their size and shape point to a river somewhere between ankle and waist deep that flowed through the landscape at a speedy metre a second. The $2.5bn (£1.6bn) trundling science lab began its mission on Mars after a dramatic arrival last month in which the rover was winched to the surface from a spacecraft hovering overhead on rocket thrusters. Powered by radioactive plutonium and lithium-ion batteries, the rover will spend one Martian year, or 687 Earth days, exploring the Gale crater and its central mountain. For much of the mission, the rover will sample rocks on the gentle flanks of Mount Sharp, following a path worked out from pictures snapped by orbiters overhead. Curiosity is searching not for signs of life past or present, but for evidence that Mars was once habitable. Scores of earlier missions have found evidence for water. Spacecraft orbiting Mars have beamed back images of ancient lakes and gullies, though none that still flows today. The north and south poles are largely frozen water. The latest pictures are the first to show stones and gravel that have been dragged along the Martian surface by a river in the planet's distance past. Nasa geologists said the rounder shape of some of the pebbles suggested they had travelled long distances from above the crater rim. The rover took the images with a telephoto camera on its central mast, downhill from a pattern of sediments called an alluvial fan created by several water streams perhaps billions of years ago. The stones vary from angular to smooth and range from golf ball-sized to grains of sand. "The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow," said Rebecca Williams, who works on the Curiosity mission at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona.

The rover's prime destination is the slope of Mount Sharp where regions rich in clays and sulphates have been mapped from orbit. These minerals can preserve organic material that is thought to be crucial for life to thrive. "We have gravels of different sizes cemented into rock and at some points we can see they are weathered out and rounded, and that tells us this was a stream bed with violently flowing water," said Susanne Schwenzer, a postdoctoral researcher at Open University. "It's the first time we've really had this from Mars. This is basically the same as we would see in a terrestrial flow, with violently flowing and transporting these gravels," There is not enough information yet to date the ancient riverbed, she added. Some of the earliest evidence for water on Mars was beamed back to Earth from Nasa's Mariner 9 orbiter in the 1970s. The probe arrived amid a spectacular month-long storm that obscured the whole planet. But as the dust settled, the spacecraft's cameras looked down on a landscape carved by ancient river systems. More recent evidence for water on Mars came from Nasa's Phoenix lander which explored the geology and chemistry of the planet's Arctic region. Instruments onboard the lander scanned clouds that formed several kilometres high in the Martian sky and even noticed a gentle fall of snow. As Curiosity climbs Mount Sharp the layers of rock it encounters will become younger and younger, from perhaps 3.5bn years old at the base, to modern times at the summit. Through analysing rocks along the way, the rover can build up a picture of the planet's geological history, and when water that may have sustained life was there. "A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment. It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though," said John Grotzinger, a project scientist and geologist on the mission at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."

Planète

Bill Gates : "Taxer les transactions financières servirait l'aide au développement" Le Monde.fr | 11.10.2012 à 11h55 • Mis à jour le 12.10.2012 à 09h50 Partager facebook twitter google + linkedin

Depuis sa création en 1994, la Fondation Bill et Melinda Gates est devenue le principal acteur privé de l'aide au développement. Deuxième homme le plus riche de la planète, Bill Gates était de passage à Paris, mercredi 10 octobre. Il a répondu aux questions du Monde. Quel est l'état actuel de l'aide au développement dans le monde ? Bill Gates : L'aide au développement marche plutôt bien. Quelle que soit l'ampleur de la période considérée, l'aide au développement a joué un rôle central. Même les pays les plus pauvres sont dans une meilleure situation que par le passé. L'un des indicateurs les plus pertinents est la mortalité chez les enfants de moins de cinq ans. Il y a cinquante ans, elle dépassait les 20 millions de morts annuels. Il y a dix ans, elle atteignait 12 millions et elle est descendue récemment à 7 millions de décès par an. Compte tenu de l'augmentation de la population, cela représente une spectaculaire diminution de deux tiers de ce taux de mortalité. A quoi attribuez-vous ces progrès ?

Les vaccins sont probablement responsables pour moitié de cette réduction, avec l'amélioration générale des conditions de vie et de l'alimentation. La variole et la rougeole provoquaient 3 millions des 20 millions de décès annuels. La variole a disparu depuis 1979 et la rougeole, elle aussi, a beaucoup chuté, elle provoque autour de 400 000 morts par an.

L'amélioration a été particulièrement bonne ces dix dernières années avec la réponse à la crise due au sida, qui a joué un rôle central. Nous avons encore énormément à faire dans ce domaine, mais nous avons créé le Fonds mondial contre le sida, la tuberculose et le paludisme, et l'Alliance mondiale pour les vaccins et la vaccination (GAVI). L'aide au développement souffre-t-elle plutôt d'un manque de ressources ou de problèmes dans l'utilisation de l'argent ? On pourrait poser la même question pour les gouvernements des pays riches... D'une manière générale, les gouvernements ne sont pas parfaitement efficaces et l'aide au développement non plus. Il y a quelques triomphes, comme les deux nouveaux vaccins, l'un contre le pneumocoque, responsable de pneumonies, et l'autre contre le rotavirus, qui provoque des diarrhées. Grâce à des engagements importants et l'obtention de prix spéciaux, GAVI peut les acheter et, dans les années qui viennent, nous les mettrons à la disposition de tous les pays. Ces vaccins sauvent plus de 300 000 vies supplémentaires par an. Une fois que l'on a des indicateurs, on peut vraiment mesurer l'efficacité de nos actions: en affaires, on appelle ça le profit; dans le monde de l'aide au développement, c'est le nombre de morts d'enfant évitées. Quel rôle voyez-vous la Chine et d'autres pays émergents jouer ? Le montant de l'aide que la Chine donne à l'Afrique est relativement modeste. Les Chinois ont fait des choses inhabituelles : au moment où Pékin et Taïwan se livraient une compétition pour devenir membres des Nations unies, la Chine a construit des stades de football dans des pays d'Afrique pour s'attacher leurs votes à l'ONU. Les Etats-Unis pendant la guerre froide, la France avec ses anciennes colonies ont aussi instrumentalisé l'aide au développement. Il faut préciser l'objectif visé quand on donne de l'argent. Si c'est pour réduire le nombre de morts, alors il faut en mesurer l'impact cinq ans plus tard. Si c'est juste pour qu'on vous aime... En novembre 2011, vous avez présenté au G20 le rapport "Mettre à profit l'impact de l'innovation pour financer le développement du XXIe siècle". Quelles sont les meilleures pistes ? Ce qui rend assez unique le travail de notre fondation est ce que j'appelle la recherche et développement d'amont : créer un vaccin contre le paludisme, la tuberculose ou le sida... Il y a des progrès mais pas de percée significative pour l'instant. Malgré les bouleversements dans l'économie, l'investissement dans la recherche et développement s'est maintenu. Parallèlement, nous nous battons pour le maintien des ressources du Fonds mondial. Les traitements contre le sida devant être pris à vie, l'inclusion de nouveaux malades fait grimper les coûts. Il faut saluer les pays comme la France, les Etats-Unis, le Royaume-Uni ou la Suède qui maintiennent, voire augmentent leur contribution au Fonds mondial ou leur aide au développement. Que pensez-vous de l'initiative française de taxe sur les transactions financières ? La plupart des systèmes fiscaux taxent le travail, car le travail ne se déplace pas aussi facilement que les profits. Certaines manières de prélever une taxe peuvent avoir des effets dissuasifs. J'ai toujours pensé qu'une taxe sur les transactions financières (TTF), à un taux raisonnable, permettrait de collecter des sommes significatives et servirait l'aide au développement. Ceux qui disaient que cela ne marcherait pas avaient tort. La TTF que la France a mise en place depuis août est une manière parfaite de se servir d'une taxe. La France a montré le chemin et j'espère que d'autres pays s'y mettront, car plus le groupe de pays participants est grand et moins il sera possible d'esquiver la taxation. Je souhaite qu'une part suffisante soit allouée au maintien à son niveau de l'aide publique au développement de la France. Où en est votre initiative Giving Pledge ("promesse de donation") ?

Pour l'instant, elle est limitée aux Etats-Unis où 92 milliardaires sont prêts à donner la majorité de leur fortune. Nous discutons d'une extension à d'autres régions du monde. En Chine, il n'existe qu'une première génération de riches. C'est très bien, car la première génération qui fait fortune a davantage tendance à la philanthropie que les générations qui en héritent. Le gouvernement chinois doit faciliter et encourager cela. En Inde également, il devrait y avoir des engagements. La famille Tata y a créé un fonds d'assistance aux pauvres dès 1908, avant Rockefeller et Carnegie. Il y aura encore plus de philanthropie et moins de gens pourront "pourrir" leurs enfants avec de l'argent. Votre fondation veut favoriser l'accès à des toilettes dans les pays pauvres. Qu'est-ce qui vous a motivé ? Les toilettes sont un bon exemple de biens dont les habitants des pays riches s'indigneraient d'être privés. Si vous êtes pauvres, vous êtes privé d'accès aux installations sanitaires, comme on le voyait dans le film Slumdog Millionaire. Dans les discours on se réfère généralement à la question de l'eau potable, mais sans accès à des sanitaires, les maladies diarrhéiques persisteront, aussi pure que soit l'eau qui arrive dans les tuyaux. Dans le modèle des pays développés, les eau usées sont retraitées à grand frais. On peut penser à d'autres approches.

Nous avons donc lancé un défi aux chercheurs de vingt universités : trouvez un moyen peu coûteux de se débarrasser de l'odeur et de ce facteur de transmission de maladies. Ils nous ont présenté des idées ingénieuses pour des toilettes collectives, ce qui est déjà mieux que rien, en trouvant des solutions pour supprimer les odeurs. Le véritable défi que nous devons relever est le problème de toilettes domestiques dans les foyers.

Propos recueillis par Paul Benkimoun et Serge Michel

A Bhopal, l'impossible décontamination LE MONDE | 01.10.2012 à 14h05 • Mis à jour le 02.10.2012 à 10h08 Par Julien Bouissou (New Delhi, correspondance)

Qui pourra décontaminer Bhopal ? Dans la nuit du 2 au 3 décembre 1984, l'explosion d'une usine de produits chimiques d'Union Carbide libérait un nuage toxique faisant entre 15 000 et 30 000 morts dans cette ville du nord de l'Inde. Près de vingt-huit ans après ce qui reste l'une des plus graves catastrophes industrielles de l'histoire, des déchets entreposés sur le site contaminent toujours les nappes phréatiques et continuent de faire des victimes. Après avoir entrepris des négociations au début de l'année avec le gouvernement indien, l'agence allemande de développement GIZ a annoncé, le 17 septembre, qu'elle refusait finalement d'enlever 347 tonnes de déchets du site pour les incinérer en Europe. Motif avancé : l'Etat indien aurait refusé d'engager sa responsabilité en cas d'accident dans le transport et la manipulation de ces substances toxiques. GIZ a également évoqué l'opposition d'associations écologistes au transport des déchets en Allemagne. "Nous ne voulons pas que des substances hautement toxiques parcourent la moitié de la planète", a justifié Manfred Santen, de Greenpeace, au site d'information Deutsche Welle. MORT BRUTALE DE PLUSIEURS VACHES La décontamination du site est un chantier titanesque. Entre 4 000 et 12 000 tonnes de produits toxiques seraient dispersées dans le sol. L'évacuation des 347 tonnes de déchets déjà stockés dans l'ancienne usine ne constitue qu'une première étape. Or aucun centre, en Inde, n'est capable de les incinérer en toute sécurité. Si l'Europe refuse de les traiter, ils devront être enterrés en Inde. Les déchets et produits toxiques utilisés pour fabriquer des pesticides se sont infiltrés dans les sols bien avant l'explosion de l'usine. En 1982, deux ans avant la catastrophe, des notes internes de Union Carbide révèlent l'existence de fuites dans 23 hectares de bassins servant à entreposer des déchets chimiques. "Le bassin d'évaporation continue de fuir, ce qui est très préoccupant", peut-on lire dans un télex envoyé au siège américain du groupe, en 1982, auquel Le Monde a eu accès. La même année, des agriculteurs se plaignent de la mort brutale de plusieurs vaches pâturant aux alentours de l'usine. Sept ans plus tard, Union Carbide prélève des échantillons sur les terrains de l'usine et dans les réservoirs de traitement de déchets. L'analyse révèle des concentrations élevées en naphtol et naphtalène. Lors de tests, des poissons exposés aux substances toxiques prélevées, même diluées, meurent instantanément ou dans les deux jours qui suivent. Combien d'habitants, à Bhopal, ont été et sont encore contaminés par ces déchets toxiques ? Combien d'entre eux en sont morts ? Difficile de le savoir. Aucune étude indépendante n'a évalué l'étendue de la contamination des nappes phréatiques ni les effets de ces produits sur la santé. Plus inquiétant, ces effets se conjuguent à ceux des gaz libérés par l'explosion de l'usine et se transmettent sur plusieurs générations. Le Centre d'études pour les réhabilitations, qui dépend du gouvernement du Madhya Pradesh, l'Etat dont Bhopal est la capitale, affirmait, en 2005, que "la contamination des sols et des nappes phréatiques avait augmenté de manière évidente la charge de morbidité parmi la population vivant aux alentours de l'usine". Les résultats d'une expertise demandée par la Cour suprême devraient être connus cet automne. POLLUEUR-PAYEUR Autour du site contaminé, des enfants continuent de naître mal formés, et les habitants sont nombreux à souffrir d'anémie, de maladies de la peau et de cancer. Rien n'a jamais été fait pour dépolluer le site. Union Carbide a vendu sa filiale indienne, en 1994, à un acquéreur qui céda le terrain quatre ans plus tard à l'Etat du Madhya Pradesh.

Au gré des transactions, la question de la contamination des sols a été passée sous silence. En 2009, le gouvernement du Madhya Pradesh soutenait que le terrain n'était pas contaminé. Le ministre régional en charge des victimes de Bhopal annonçait même le projet d'ouvrir le site aux touristes ! Il a fallu que la Cour suprême donne l'ordre, en 2005, aux autorités locales de fournir l'eau potable aux habitants pour que ces derniers cessent de s'approvisionner dans les puits. Mais les réservoirs installés ne sont pas tous raccordés aux foyers, et en août, 47 % de la population à risque ne pouvait pas s'y alimenter, selon une étude menée par les associations de défense des victimes de Bhopal. Dow Chemical, qui n'a pas donné suite à nos demandes d'entretien, s'estime dégagée de toute responsabilité puisque la société n'a racheté Union Carbide, qui s'était déjà délestée de sa filiale indienne, qu'en 2001. "C'est pourtant le principe de pollueur payeur qui devrait s'appliquer", avance Karuna Nundy, l'avocate des associations de victimes de Bhopal. "Il faut bien distinguer les deux tragédies, poursuit-elle. C'est comme si des cambrioleurs étaient arrêtés après avoir braqué une banque et qu'ensuite la police découvrait un cadavre dans le coffre de leur voiture. Dow Chemical est responsable à la fois de l'explosion de l'usine qui a tué des milliers d'habitants, et de la pollution des nappes phréatiques qui continue de faire d'autres victimes." Dow Chemical dépense des millions de dollars pour vanter son image d'entreprise "intègre", "respectueuse des individus" et "protégeant la planète". L'entreprise a ainsi déboursé 82 millions d'euros pour devenir partenaire des Jeux olympiques (JO) de Londres. Un soutien sans lequel "il n'y aurait pas de chair de poule, de coeurs battant la chamade (...) ni d'union de la planète tout entière", a remercié le Comité d'organisation des JO. Julien Bouissou (New Delhi, correspondance) La pollution du site exclue de l'accord d'indemnités Indemnisation Au terme d'un accord signé avec l'Etat indien en 1989, le groupe Union Carbide a versé 470 millions de dollars (366 millions d'euros) d'indemnités aux victimes de l'accident de Bhopal. La question de la contamination du site, qui a débuté avant la tragédie, n'est pas abordée par cet accord. Contamination Les nappes phréatiques seraient polluées dans un rayon de 3 à 5 km. Des concentrations élevées de naphtol, de naphtalène, de chlorobenzène, de mercure, de plomb et d'endosulfan ont été décelées. Ces substances provoquent la dégénérescence du système nerveux et des complications respiratoires.

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La vie et la mort d'un photon captif suivies en direct LE MONDE | 15.03.2007 à 15h37 • Mis à jour le 09.10.2012 à 20h13 Par Jérôme Fenoglio Prix Nobel de physique 2012, Serge Haroche faisait partie de l'équipe française qui avait réussi, pour la première fois en 2007, à capturer ces grains élémentaires de lumière et, sans les détruire, à en prendre de nombreuses mesures. Nous republions un article retraçant cette première.

Capturer un insaisissable photon, observer cet infime grain de lumière durant tout le cours de son existence alors qu'un simple regard suffit à l'annihiler. Ce rêve de physicien semblait si inaccessible qu'Albert Einstein en avait fait une "expérience de pensée", une de ces hypothèses où l'imagination du génie éprouvait la validité des théories. Une équipe française du laboratoire KastlerBrossel (Ecole normale supérieure, Collège de France, CNRS, université Paris-VI) vient de la rendre réelle grâce à un "chef-

d'oeuvre expérimental", selon un commentaire indépendant des travaux publiés dans Nature du jeudi 15 mars 2007. Son dispositif permet, pour la première fois, d'étudier un photon sans que cela revienne à autopsier un cadavre. Messager de la lumière jusqu'au sacrifice, le corpuscule disparaît en effet en livrant son information. Nos yeux, comme les détecteurs des scientifiques, l'absorbent irréversiblement en l'enregistrant. Nous ne voyons un objet dans la durée que parce que des photons toujours nouveaux portent son image vers notre oeil. A la différence des particules élémentaires de la matière, ces grains de lumière ne peuvent donc supporter la répétition des mesures scientifiques, la première d'entre elles les détruisant. "Ils sont faciles à détecter, mais nous ne pouvions que les décrire au passé, explique Jean-Michel Raimond, coauteur de l'article dont les premiers signataires sont Sébastien Gleyzes et Stéphane Kuhr. C'est ce qui fait tout l'intérêt de notre expérience, qui permet une analyse in vivo." "Nous réfléchissions à ce dispositif de mesures non destructrices depuis plus de quinze ans, dit Serge Haroche, qui cosigne également l'étude. Nous n'avons réussi qu'aujourd'hui, grâce à une conjonction d'avancées techniques." La supraconductivité, qui se manifeste à des températures très proches du zéro absolu (- 273,15 °C) a permis aux chercheurs d'accomplir le premier pas. Grâce à ce phénomène, ils ont pu réaliser une boîte, une "cavité" formée de deux miroirs en niobium, ultra-réfléchissants et refroidis à quelques dixièmes de degrés du zéro absolu. "Si la température pouvait y être nulle, il ne se passerait plus rien dans la boîte, explique Michel Brune, coauteur. Mais ce froid presque parfait n'a pas éliminé un rayonnement thermique résiduel qui subit des fluctuations." Selon les calculs précis de la physique quantique, ces fluctuations ont 5 % de chances de conduire, à chaque instant, à la formation d'un photon unique. Apparu dans la boîte grâce à ce "saut quantique", ce corpuscule, qui correspond à une quantité minimale d'énergie (un quantum, selon le terme qui a donné son nom à la théorie), s'y retrouve piégé. A la vitesse de la lumière, il rebondit plus d'un milliard de fois entre les deux miroirs, pendant une durée de vie moyenne de 0,13 seconde, qui lui permet de parcourir l'équivalent de la circonférence de la Terre (40 000 km). Puis il disparaît dans un nouveau saut quantique, la plupart du temps absorbé par les imperfections des miroirs. Comment vérifier, de l'extérieur, que ce qui se passe dans la boîte correspond bien aux prédictions théoriques ? Pour y parvenir, les physiciens ont eu recours aux vertus du rubidium. La régularité du battement des électrons, au sein des atomes de ce métal, les pose en élément central des horloges atomiques. Les chercheurs leur ont trouvé une autre qualité : ils peuvent croiser un photon sans l'absorber. La seule modification pour les électrons du rubidium sera un infime retard dans leur battement de métronomes. Dès lors, l'idée a été de faire traverser le piège glacial par un flux d'atomes de rubidium, à la queue leu leu. "Nous les mesurons à l'entrée et à la sortie, explique M. Brune. Tant qu'un photon n'est pas apparu, ils restent en état 0. Dès qu'il est là, ils passent en état 1, jusqu'au retour à la normale qui signale la disparition du photon." L'expérience a ainsi pu confirmer, en temps réel, les hasards des sauts quantiques qui conduisent à la naissance puis à la mort d'un photon unique. Celui-ci a pu être mesuré des centaines de fois sans destruction. Conformément aux prévisions, certains captifs ont dépassé leur espérance de vie moyenne. L'un d'eux, baptisé Mathusalem au sein de l'équipe, a même tenu une demi-seconde. Les chercheurs ont également expérimenté avec succès une technique qui permet de ne pas avoir à patienter et de déposer d'emblée un photon dans sa cage, grâce à un premier atome, chef de file spécialement préparé pour cette tâche. A l'avenir, en faisant apparaître davantage de grains de lumière dans le piège, ils espèrent aussi pouvoir mieux étudier une des vieilles douleurs d'Einstein, après avoir réalisé son rêve. Ils pourront explorer la frontière, pour l'heure encore floue, entre les phénomènes quantiques, si déroutants pour le sens commun, et ceux, plus classiques, qui prévalent à nos échelles. Jérôme Fenoglio

Serge Haroche : "Il y a une contradiction entre le temps des politiques et le temps de la recherche" Le Monde.fr | 11.10.2012 à 17h11 • Mis à jour le 11.10.2012 à 17h12 Par Audrey Garric et Pierre Le Hir (Chat modéré par )

Dans un chat au Monde.fr, le Français Serge Haroche, nouveau Prix Nobel de physique, professeur au Collège de France et chercheur à l'Ecole normale supérieure, insiste sur l'importance de développer la recherche, tant sur le plan financier que sur le plan de la réforme des structures et l'amélioration des conditions faites aux jeunes chercheurs. Il appelle par ailleurs à maintenir, aux côtés de la recherche appliquée, le champ de la recherche fondamentale, "qui constitue le socle sur lequel tout le reste est possible" et "doit être motivée par la curiosité intellectuelle pure". Isabelle : Pouvez-vous nous expliquer quel est l'objet de vos recherches ? Serge Haroche : Ce que je fais, c'est essayer de manipuler et d'étudier le comportement d'atomes isolés ou de grains de lumière isolés, les photons. On prend la matière et la lumière au niveau le plus microscopique possible, et on les met ensemble pour voir comment ils se comportent. On étudie ainsi l'interaction entre la matière et la lumière. A ce niveau microscopique, ces systèmes obéissent aux lois de la physique quantique. Ce sont des lois contreintuitives qu'il est difficile de visionner avec notre approche macroscopique du monde. En faisant ces expériences, on révèle les lois de la nature à l'échelle microscopique. Photon : Souvent, les journalistes ou le public demandent aux chercheurs : à quoi servent vos recherches ? Que leur répondez-vous ?

Ce que je fais, c'est de la recherche fondamentale, donc a priori, elle ne sert à rien d'immédiat. Elle est fondée sur de la curiosité pure, il s'agit de comprendre le monde qui nous entoure, et par là-même, on acquiert les moyens de diagnostic, de mesure et d'action de plus en plus précises. Les applications viennent ensuite.

Très souvent, lorsqu'une recherche fondamentale est menée, on ne sait pas quelles sont les applications qui vont en résulter. Mais ce qui est sûr, c'est que si la recherche fondamentale n'a pas été faite en amont, le terreau nécessaire aux applications ne sera pas là. Rousseau : Quelles ont été les applications pratiques de vos travaux ? Pour l'instant, il n'y a eu aucune application pratique. Mais on peut entrevoir le développement d'appareils plus précis, plus sensibles pour mesurer de petits effets physiques. Un exemple, issu des travaux de David Wineland [co-lauréat du prix Nobel de physique 2012] : la mise au point d'horloges atomiques qui sont déjà 100 fois plus précises que les horloges atomiques actuelles. Ces horloges seront des détecteurs de petites variations du champ de gravitation, avec des applications à la sismologie et à la géophysique en général. Boson : Au cours de votre carrière avez-vous ressenti une évolution de la posture des pouvoirs publics vis-à-vis de la science fondamentale versus la science appliquée ? Il y a effectivement une tendance qui s'est développée à essayer de pousser le curseur plus vers les applications que dans la recherche fondamentale. On a demandé à une certaine période de plus en plus aux chercheurs de motiver leurs recherches par des applications potentielles. Il ne faut pas pousser cette dérive trop loin, car cela se fait au détriment de l'esprit de la recherche fondamentale, qui doit être motivée par la curiosité intellectuelle pure. Il faut donc trouver un équilibre entre le support que l'on donne à la recherche fondamentale désintéressée et les crédits donnés à la recherche appliquée. Positionner le curseur entre ces deux aspects de la recherche est essentiel. Il faut toujours garder à l'esprit l'importance de la recherche fondamentale, qui constitue le socle sur lequel tout le reste est possible. Photon : Avez-vous dû souvent justifier l'intérêt de vos recherches auprès des décideurs, pour obtenir des budgets ? En ce qui me concerne, j'ai eu la chance de travailler dans un milieu relativement protégé de cela à l'Ecole normale supérieure, où l'intérêt de la recherche fondamentale a toujours été bien compris. Néanmoins, on sent, lorsqu'on demande des crédits, en particulier aux agences européennes qui financent la recherche, la tentation qu'elles ont d'exiger, de façon que je trouve trop contraignante, ce qu'on appelle des projets définissant des étapes pour la recherche. La recherche conduit par définition à des découvertes imprévues, et demander aux chercheurs de trop la planifier est à mon avis un contresens. Boson : Si vous aviez fait vos recherches à l'étranger, les choses auraient-elles été plus simples pour vous ? Pour moi, je ne pense pas, car j'ai travaillé dans un laboratoire qui a toujours été bien traité par le CNRS et dans lequel la recherche fondamentale a été bien comprise. Ce qui est peut-être plus difficile pour des chercheurs en France, c'est la complexité des structures, le fait que les différentes agences qui financent la recherche sont imbriquées les unes dans les autres, l'existence côte à côte de structures parallèles qui viennent compliquer les démarches lorsqu'il s'agit de demander les crédits, qui rendent la bureaucratie un peu trop envahissante. Je pense que l'heure est actuellement à la simplification de ces structures, qui est l'un des objets des Assises pour la recherche qui se déroulent actuellement. Boson2 : Que ferez-vous de la somme [930 000 euros] qui vous a été alouée avec le prix Nobel ? La reverserez-vous à votre laboratoire ? La question est prématurée, mais elle m'a déjà été posée par mon banquier... Je n'y ai pas encore réfléchi. Mais en général, cette somme n'est pas réinvestie. A l'échelle des laboratoires, c'est une somme modeste.

Dominique Dehareng : Je suis chercheuse scientifique à l'université de Liège. Depuis déjà plusieurs années, il y a un malaise lié à l'évolution de plus en plus productiviste et mercantile que les universités doivent prendre pour se conformer aux attentes socio-politico-économiques. Les chercheurs sont notamment de plus en plus sous le joug de l'obligation de résultats utilisables à court ou moyens termes. En réaction, on voit se former des mouvements tels que Slow Science ou le mouvement des désexcellents. Partagez-vous la position de réaction de ces mouvements ? Je suis d'accord avec vous pour dire que la recherche scientifique est une démarche sur le long terme. Un groupe de recherche sur une thématique donnée ne devient productif et n'obtient des résultats intéressants qu'après un long développement. Il faut lui laisser, à partir du moment où on a reconnu la qualité des personnes, le temps de faire mûrir son projet. Cela est en contradiction avec les structures politiques de la société, qui demandent des résultats au court terme. Il y a une contradiction entre le temps des politiques, et le temps de la recherche. Ce problème se pose aussi pour les grands problèmes de la société. Il faut essayer de faire comprendre aux politiques la nécessité des constantes de temps longues pour la recherche. Krypton : La place de la France dans les pays leaders en recherche fondamentale est-elle menacée ? La place de la France est relativement bonne au niveau européen et mondial. Elle est soumise à une concurrence importante, en particulier des pays émergents - l'Asie du Sud-Est, la Corée, la Chine... qui développent des efforts très importants. Ils le font dans un cadre administratif souple et simple, surtout à Singapour. Il va donc falloir bien garder sa place dans ce contexte très compétitif. Mais la France a des atouts, en particulier celui de la tradition scientifique profondément ancrée, et l'humanisme qui fait qu'en France on s'intéresse non seulement aux sciences exactes, mais aussi aux sciences humaines, et que le progrès de la connaissance est un tout. Il faut un équilibre entre ces deux sciences, équilibre qui a été traditionnellement recherché en France dans les milieux universitaires. Il faut maintenir cette tradition et en même temps lui donner les moyens de se développer en développant des structures simplifiées et bien sûr en y accordant les crédits nécessaires. Rémi : La recherche est-elle encore un domaine attractif pour les étudiants ? Younes : Quand on voit que de brillants étudiants en grandes écoles d'ingénieurs se tournent souvent vers des carrières plus lucratives comme la finance ou le conseil, on se demande si l'Etat ne devrait pas faire un effort pour les inciter à se tourner vers la recherche. Qu'en pensez-vous ? Sur le plan intellectuel, je suis sûr que la recherche intéresse les esprits des jeunes, car ils sont naturellement curieux. Le problème est d'arriver à canaliser cette curiosité naturelle vers des études et des carrières scientifiques. Des efforts ont été accomplis en ce sens, je pense en particulier à l'opération "La main à la pâte" qui a été initiée par Georges Charpak, Prix Nobel de physique il y a une vingtaine d'années, qui a canalisé la notoriété que lui avait apportée le prix pour lancer et développer cette opération, qui consistait à initier des enfants de classe primaire à la science de façon concrète, en leur faisant mettre littéralement la main à la pâte. Je pense que cet effort devrait être amplifié et développé au niveau des études secondaires également. La recherche en sciences demande une formation approfondie, l'acquisition de connaissances très poussées. Cela demande beaucoup de temps, ce qui est contradictoire avec les possibilités offertes par l'immédiateté des moyens de communication actuels. Google et l'Internet sont très utiles pour trier des connaissances une fois qu'on les a acquises, ils ne peuvent pas à eux seuls constituer un moyen d'acquisition des connaissances. La formation doit donc trouver un équilibre entre ce qui nécessite le long terme et l'effort individuel et ce qui peut être accessible immédiatement par les moyens rapides de communication. On est à une période de transition où il faut trouver de nouvelles manières de former les jeunes, mais je suis sûr qu'on peut y arriver, car la recherche, le besoin de connaissance sont des choses passionnantes. Neutrino : Peut-on devenir physicien à tout âge ?

On peut s'intéresser à la physique à tout âge, mais la recherche est un métier, et ce métier ne peut être acquis que sur la base de connaissances accumulées. La meilleure période pour acquérir ces connaissances, c'est la jeunesse et la période des études. Il me semble donc difficile de devenir un physicien si on n'a pas au départ la formation nécessaire. MMG : Quels sont les principaux traits de caractère et qualités que vous jugez importants en tant que chercheur ? La première qualité, c'est la curiosité. Il faut avoir, chevillés à l'âme, la curiosité, le besoin de comprendre et de savoir. La deuxième, c'est l'imagination, être capable à partir de situations connues d'en imaginer de nouvelles qui peuvent être sources de résultats inattendus. Ensuite l'intuition : savoir associer des idées apparemment différentes, voir leurs points communs et voir à quoi cela peut conduire. Et il faut aussi avoir de la chance, même si celle-ci n'est pas suffisante. Pour conclure, je dirai que certaines de ces qualités sont les mêmes qui sont nécessaires à un bon artiste. MMG : Quels conseils donnez-vous aux jeunes chercheurs qui travaillent avec vous ? Ou qui rêvent de le faire ? C'est une question essentielle : il ne suffit pas d'avoir les qualités intellectuelles, il faut avoir la possibilité de travailler dans des conditions matérielles décentes, pouvoir consacrer son esprit aux choses qui vous passionnent sans avoir à lutter pour avoir des moyens. Il faut des salaires décents au départ, et des perspectives de carrière et de promotion décentes. Un grand nombre d'étudiants brillants vont vers la finance ou l'économie, c'est humain, car ces carrières sont plus lucratives. Il faut rendre les carrières scientifiques plus compétitives par rapport à ces carrières. Olivier ertzscheid : Beaucoup de vos travaux sont disponibles en "open access". C'est important pour vous ? Bien sûr. Il est important que la communication des résultats de la science soit accessible de la façon la plus vaste, simple et économique possible. Pierre : Il y a beaucoup de domaines dans lesquels faire de la recherche. Pour vous, faire de la recherche fondamentale était-il une évidence dès le début ? Dès les études en secondaire, j'ai été passionné par les mathématiques et par le lien entre maths et physiques. Donc j'ai tout de suite pensé que c'est ce que je voulais faire. J'ai eu une vocation pour ça, effectivement. Devaux : Quels sont les goûts littéraires d'un scientifique accompli comme vous ? Trouvez-vous dans vos passions culturelles certaines sources d'inspiration à vos recherches ? J'aime beaucoup la peinture, l'art en général, et je suis un fan des musées. Je suis amené à voyager beaucoup dans le monde pour des raisons professionnelles, et lorsque je fais ces voyages, j'en profite pour visiter les musées. Je suis très sensible aux parallèles qui existent entre la science et l'art : une belle expérience scientifique a une qualité comparable à celle qu'on peut trouver à une œuvre d'art. Très souvent, un projet artistique est un projet sur le long terme, et il y a là aussi un parallèle avec les projets scientifiques. Je pense en particulier à l'exposition sur le tableau de Vinci, représentant Sainte-Anne et le Christ, qui montre que pendant 25 ans Vinci avait été obsédé par ce tableau. MMG : Quels sont les scientifiques qui sont vos héros ? Bien sûr, des gens comme Newton et Galilée. Au XXe siècle : Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger. Ce sont eux qui ont révolutionné notre compréhension du monde il y a moins de cent ans.

Bob : Quel avenir voyez-vous aux grandes machines (LHC, ISS, Genopole, ITER) ? On a pu voir récemment Georges Charpak critiquer le projet ITER... Je pense qu'une grande machine comme le LHC [Grand collisionneur de hadrons1 en français, un accélérateur de particules] est un projet ambitieux, remarquable. Ce projet est basé sur une recherche qui répond à des questions liées à la simple curiosité : comment fonctionne la nature, quelles sont les blocs fondamentaux qui permettent de comprendre la nature ? La découverte du boson de Higgs au CERN, en particulier, est un résultat fondamental dont on ne voit pas d'application pratique. Cette recherche a coûté beaucoup d'argent, mais cela est parfaitement justifié dans la mesure où la société et la civilisation doivent avoir comme un de leurs buts essentiels la satisfaction de la curiosité fondamentale : qui sommes-nous ? où allons-nous ? Hamza : Pensez-vous qu'on aura un jour des ordinateurs "quantiques" ? Si oui, serait-ce un bond géant ou juste une petite évolution ? Les expériences que nous faisons, ainsi que d'autres chercheurs, nous montrent qu'il est possible de maîtriser la logique quantique, et sans doute de l'utiliser pour fabriquer des machines ayant des capacités plus puissantes que les machines existant actuellement. C'est ce qu'on appelle l'ordinateur quantique. Il reste cependant des obstacles technologiques très importants avant de réaliser un dispositif pratique. Il n'est pas sûr que ces obstacles pourront être surmontés, et on ne sait pas encore quelle sera la forme que prendra un éventuel ordinateur quantique. Donc je ne peux pas répondre avec certitude à cette question. Ce que je peux dire, c'est qu'en développant des efforts dans cette direction, on aura des surprises et on réalisera des dispositifs qui serviront à quelque chose, même si on ne sait pas encore exactement à quoi. Leo scagliarini : Pensez vous que l'on peut attendre encore de la physique de révolutions comme celles de Newton et Einstein ? Je pense qu'il y a des choses qu'on ne comprend pas encore et qui peuvent conduire à des révolutions, en particulier la théorie de la relativité générale d'Einstein n'est toujours pas comprise dans le cadre de la physique quantique. Mais comme toujours, le futur est difficile à prédire. Aosia : Votre compréhension du monde du très petit vous fait-elle comprendre celui du très grand, notamment pour l'origine de notre univers ? Qu'en avez-vous retiré comme conviction ou voie possible ? C'est une bonne question dans la mesure où il y a effectivement un lien étroit entre la compréhension du monde microscopique et celle de l'univers dans son ensemble. La cosmologie nous apprend qu'à l'origine de l'univers, au moment du big-bang, les lois quantiques jouaient un rôle essentiel. Donc comprendre l'infiniment petit, ce qui se fait au CERN par exemple, et comprendre l'infiniment grand, ce qui se fait dans les observatoires, c'est finalement faire la même physique à des échelles très différentes. MMG : Vos travaux en physique seraient-ils transposables dans le domaine de la biologie ? En d'autre termes, la cellule ou certains de ses constituants (ADN, organelles) pourraient-ils servir de champs d'expérimentation en utilisant certains de vos outils expérimentaux ? En ce qui concerne mes recherches personnelles, je ne crois pas, car nous travaillons avec des systèmes très froids et protégés de leur environnement, alors que la vie se développe dans un milieu tiède, dans lequel le couplage à l'environnement joue un rôle essentiel. Donc les conditions de notre physique sont très différentes des conditions de la vie. Néanmoins, certains de mes collègues ont développé, grâce à la physique, des outils qui permettent d'étudier la cellule et le vivant. Je pense en particulier à Steve Chu, qui a partagé le prix Nobel avec mon collègue Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. Il a montré que des lasers pouvaient servir à piéger et à manipuler les atomes, et il a ensuite

étendu ses expériences à la manipulation de cellules et de brins d'ADN, montrant ainsi que des outils issus de la physique pouvaient servir à la biologie. Bruno Gayral : Souhaitez-vous profiter de votre prix Nobel pour intervenir davantage dans le débat public et politique sur des questions précises, notamment la place de la recherche fondamentale en France, et l'articulation entre la formation par la recherche et l'innovation industrielle ? Casimir : Utiliserez-vous l'influence que vous confère le prix Nobel pour que l'Etat investisse davantage dans la recherche, car nous sommes loin des 3 % du budget promis il y a des années ? Oui, je vais essayer d'utiliser cette notoriété pour insister sur l'importance de la recherche et la nécessité de la développer davantage, tant sur le plan financier que sur le plan de la réforme des structures et l'amélioration des conditions faites aux jeunes chercheurs. Etienne : Imaginez-vous consacrer une grosse part des années à venir à une action vers le grand public ? Je voudrais conserver une liberté personnelle pour continuer à faire de la recherche et à m'occuper du Collège de France, dont je viens d'être nommé administrateur. Cela va limiter évidemment mes interventions devant le grand public. Je ne voudrais pas devenir un homme public, ça ne m'intéresse pas. Audrey Garric et Pierre Le Hir (Chat modéré par )

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High-resolution electromechanical model of a heart; courtesy of N. Trayanova The more we learn about cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s, the more vexingly complex they seem—and the more elusive their cures. Even with cutting-edge imaging technology, biomarker tests and genetic data, we are still far from understanding the multifaceted causes and varied developmental stages of these illnesses. With the advent of powerful computing, better modeling programs and a flood of raw biomedical data, researchers have been anticipating a leap forward in their abilities to decipher the intricate dynamics involved human disease. Now, these computational capabilities are starting to arrive, according to a new analysis published online this week in Science Translational Medicine. In fact, “the field has exploded,” Raymond Winslow, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine, and co-author of the review, said in a prepared statement. Medicine and medical research largely have been focused on small specialties and narrow studies. But the body is a whole system—not isolated organ groups—and it is in constant interaction with the wider environment, including pollutants, toxins and other stressors. The resulting interactions do not only work in a single direction; instead, we have learned that there are feed-forward and feedback loops and crosstalk on cellular, molecular and genetic levels. This nexus is where advances in computational medicine are poised to make a large contribution. “Computational medicine can help you see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together to give a more holistic picture,” Winslow said. “We may never have all of the missing pieces, but will wind up with a much clearer view of what causes disease and how to treat it.” Models comparing gene expression in different patients have already successfully helped to determine different grades of prostate cancer, predict how different patients will respond to breast cancer treatment and find different types of stomach cancer. Scientists are also taking advantage of more advanced anatomical data to model whole organs and their function—and dysfunction. Using, for example, diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging, researchers can collect detailed information about heart anatomy, fiber and structure. This macro structure can be combined with more cellular-based models for “unprecedented structural and biophysical detail, including cardiac electromechanics,” the researchers noted in their paper. With this information, scientists are learning more about blood-flow dynamics, arrhythmia and heart attacks. These new models are now starting to be translated back to individual patients, to help find better treatments. Computational-medicine algorithms from detailed brain maps have already been used to develop an iPad app that is being used clinically to help doctors decide on deep brain stimulation locations and strengths. These models, however, also need to be checked frequently against real-world data and adjusted accordingly. But researchers who are armed to deal with this once unusual cross-discipline endeavor are growing more common. “There is a whole new community of people being trained in mathematics, computer science and

engineering, and they are being cross-trained in biology,” Winslow said. “This allows them to bring a whole new perspective to medical diagnosis and treatment.” The myriad applications for computational medicine approaches are only beginning to be explored, the researchers noted. “As we gain confidence in the ability of computational models to predict human biological processes, they will help guide us through the complex landscape of disease, ultimately leading to more effective and reliable methods for disease diagnosis, risk stratification and therapy,” the researchers wrote. “We are poised at an exciting moment in medicine.” Video of electromechanical heart model courtesy of N. Trayanova

About the Author: Katherine Harmon is an associate editor for Scientific American covering health, medicine and life sciences. Follow on Twitter @katherineharmon. More »

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Tags: brain, cancer, computational medicine, health, heart, medicine, mri, technology November 2012 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Hacking the President’s DNA The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-toodistant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace. By Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman and Steven Kotler

Miles Donovan

This is how the future arrived. It began innocuously, in the early 2000s, when businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more efficiently be crowdsourced to a larger group of people via the Internet. Initially, we crowd-sourced the design of T-shirts (Threadless.com) and the writing of encyclopedias (Wikipedia.com), but before long the trend started making inroads into the harder sciences. Pretty soon, the hunt for extraterrestrial life, the development of self-driving cars, and the folding of enzymes into novel proteins were being done this way. With the fundamental tools of genetic manipulation—tools that had cost millions of dollars not 10 years earlier—dropping precipitously in price, the crowd-sourced design of biological agents was just the next logical step. In 2008, casual DNA-design competitions with small prizes arose; then in 2011, with the launch of GE’s $100 million breast-cancer challenge, the field moved on to serious contests. By early 2015, as personalized gene therapies for end-stage cancer became medicine’s cutting edge, virus-design Web sites began appearing, where people could upload information about their disease and virologists could post designs for a customized cure. Medically speaking, it all made perfect sense: Nature had done eons of excellent design work on viruses. With some retooling, they were ideal vehicles for gene delivery. Soon enough, these sites were flooded with requests that went far beyond cancer. Diagnostic agents, vaccines, antimicrobials, even designer psychoactive drugs—all appeared on the menu. What people did with these biodesigns was anybody’s guess. No international body had yet been created to watch over them. So, in November of 2016, when a first-time visitor with the handle Cap’n Capsid posted a challenge on the viral-design site 99Virions, no alarms sounded; his was just one of the 100 or so design requests submitted that day. Cap’n Capsid might have been some consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and his challenge just another attempt to understand the radically shifting R&D landscape—really, he could have been anyone—but the problem was interesting nonetheless. Plus, Capsid was offering $500 for the winning design, not a bad sum for a few hours’ work. Later, 99Virions’ log files would show that Cap’n Capsid’s IP address originated in Panama, although this was likely a fake. The design specification itself raised no red flags. Written in SBOL, an open-source language popular with the synthetic-biology crowd, it seemed like a standard vaccine request. So people just got to work, as did the automated computer programs that had been written to “auto-evolve” new designs. These algorithms were getting quite good, now winning nearly a third of the challenges. Within 12 hours, 243 designs were submitted, most by these computerized expert systems. But this time the winner, GeneGenie27, was actually human—a 20-year-old Columbia University undergrad with a knack for virology. His design was quickly forwarded to a thriving Shanghai-based online bio-marketplace. Less than a minute later, an Icelandic synthesis start-up won the contract to turn the 5,984-base-pair blueprint into actual genetic material. Three days after that, a package of 10-milligram, fast-dissolving microtablets was dropped in a FedEx envelope and handed to a courier. Two days later, Samantha, a sophomore majoring in government at Harvard University, received the package. Thinking it contained a new synthetic psychedelic she had ordered online, she slipped a tablet into her left nostril that evening, then walked over to her closet. By the time Samantha finished dressing, the tab had started to dissolve, and a few strands of foreign genetic material had entered the cells of her nasal mucosa. Some party drug—all she got, it seemed, was the flu. Later that night, Samantha had a slight fever and was shedding billions of virus particles. These particles would spread around campus in an exponentially growing chain reaction that was—other than the mild fever and some sneezing—absolutely harmless. This would change when the virus crossed paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, a sequence that would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that were not so benign. This secondary sequence would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produced memory loss and, eventually, death. The only person in the world with this DNA sequence was the president of the United States, who was scheduled to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government later that week. Sure, thousands of people on campus would be sniffling, but the Secret Service probably wouldn’t think anything was amiss. It was December, after all—cold-and-flu season.

The scenario we’ve just sketched may sound like nothing but science fiction—and, indeed, it does contain a few futuristic leaps. Many members of the scientific community would say our time line is too fast. But consider that since the beginning of this century, rapidly accelerating technology has shown a distinct tendency to turn the impossible into the everyday in no time at all. Last year, IBM’s Watson, an artificial intelligence, understood natural language well enough to whip the human champion Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. As we write this, soldiers with bionic limbs are returning to active duty, and autonomous cars are driving down our streets. Yet most of these advances are small in comparison with the great leap forward currently under way in the biosciences—a leap with consequences we’ve only begun to imagine. Personalized bioweapons are a subtler and less catastrophic threat than accidental plagues or WMDs. Yet they will likely be unleashed much more readily. More to the point, consider that the DNA of world leaders is already a subject of intrigue. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service would neither confirm nor deny this practice, nor would it comment on any other aspect of this article.) And according to a 2010 release of secret cables by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the U.S. sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same. While no use of an advanced, genetically targeted bio-weapon has been reported, the authors of this piece— including an expert in genetics and microbiology (Andrew Hessel) and one in global security and law enforcement (Marc Goodman)—are convinced we are drawing close to this possibility. Most of the enabling technologies are in place, already serving the needs of academic R&D groups and commercial biotech organizations. And these technologies are becoming exponentially more powerful, particularly those that allow for the easy manipulation of DNA. The evolution of cancer treatment provides one window into what’s happening. Most cancer drugs kill cells. Today’s chemotherapies are offshoots of chemical-warfare agents: we’ve turned weapons into cancer medicines, albeit crude ones—and as with carpet bombing, collateral damage is a given. But now, thanks to advances in genetics, we know that each cancer is unique, and research is shifting to the development of personalized medicines—designer therapies that can exterminate specific cancerous cells in a specific way, in a specific person; therapies focused like lasers. To be sure, around the turn of the millennium, significant fanfare surrounded personalized medicine, especially in the field of genetics. A lot of that is now gone. The prevailing wisdom is that the tech has not lived up to the talk, but this isn’t surprising. Gartner, an information-technology research-and-advisory firm, has coined the term hype cycle to describe exactly this sort of phenomenon: a new technology is introduced with enthusiasm, only to be followed by an emotional low when it fails to immediately deliver on its promise. But Gartner also discovered that the cycle doesn’t typically end in what the firm calls “the trough of disillusionment.” Rising from those ashes is a “slope of enlightenment”—meaning that when viewed from a longer-term historical perspective, the majority of these much-hyped groundbreaking developments do, eventually, break plenty of new ground. As George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, explains, this is what is now happening in personalized medicine. “The fields of gene therapies, viral delivery, and other personalized therapies are progressing rapidly,” Church says, “with several clinical trials succeeding into Phase 2 and 3,” when the therapies are tried on progressively larger numbers of test subjects. “Many of these treatments target cells that differ in only one—rare—genetic variation relative to surrounding cells or individuals.” The Finnish start-up Oncos Therapeutics has already treated close to 300 cancer patients using a scaled-down form of this kind of targeted technology. These developments are, for the most part, positive—promising better treatment, new cures, and, eventually, longer life. But it wouldn’t take much to subvert such therapies and come full circle, turning personalized medicines into personalized bioweapons. “Right now,” says Jimmy Lin, a genomics researcher at Washington

University in St. Louis and the founder of Rare Genomics, a nonprofit organization that designs treatments for rare childhood diseases based on individual genetic analysis, “we have drugs that target specific cancer mutations. Examples include Gleevec, Zelboraf, and Xalkori. Vertex,” a pharmaceutical company based in Massachusetts, “has famously made a drug for cystic-fibrosis patients with a particular mutation. The genetic targeting of individuals is a little farther out. But a state-sponsored program of the Stuxnet variety might be able to accomplish this in a few years. Of course, this work isn’t very well known, so if you tell most people about this, they say that the time frame sounds like science fiction. But when you’re familiar with the research, it’s really feasible that a well-funded group could pull this off.” We would do well to begin planning for that possibility sooner rather than later. If you really want to understand what’s happening in the biosciences, then you need to understand the rate at which information technology is accelerating. In 1965, Gordon Moore famously realized that the number of integrated-circuit components on a computer chip had been doubling roughly every year since the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s. Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that the trend would continue “for at least 10 years.” He was right. The trend did continue for 10 years, and 10 more after that. All told, his observation has remained accurate for five decades, becoming so durable that it’s now known as “Moore’s Law” and used by the semi-conductor industry as a guide for future planning. Moore’s Law originally stated that every 12 months (it is now 24 months), the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double—an example of a pattern known as “exponential growth.” While linear growth is a slow, sequential proposition (1 becomes 2 becomes 3 becomes 4, etc.), exponential growth is an explosive doubling (1 becomes 2 becomes 4 becomes 8, etc.) with a transformational effect. In the 1970s, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was a Cray. It required a small room to hold it and cost roughly $8 million. Today, the iPhone in your pocket is more than 100 times faster and more than 12,000 times cheaper than a Cray. This is exponential growth at work. In the years since Moore’s observation, scientists have discovered that the pattern of exponential growth occurs in many other industries and technologies. The amount of Internet data traffic in a year, the number of bytes of computer data storage available per dollar, the number of digital-camera pixels per dollar, and the amount of data transferable over optical fiber are among the dozens of measures of technological progress that follow this pattern. In fact, so prevalent is exponential growth that researchers now suspect it is found in all informationbased technology—that is, any technology used to input, store, process, retrieve, or transmit digital information. Over the past few decades, scientists have also come to see that the four letters of the genetic alphabet—A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine)—can be transformed into the ones and zeroes of binary code, allowing for the easy, electronic manipulation of genetic information. With this development, biology has turned a corner, morphing into an information-based science and advancing exponentially. As a result, the fundamental tools of genetic engineering, tools designed for the manipulation of life—tools that could easily be co-opted for destructive purposes—are now radically falling in cost and rising in power. Today, anyone with a knack for science, a decent Internet connection, and enough cash to buy a used car has what it takes to try his hand at bio-hacking. These developments greatly increase several dangers. The most nightmarish involve bad actors creating weapons of mass destruction, or careless scientists unleashing accidental plagues—very real concerns that urgently need more attention. Personalized bioweapons, the focus of this story, are a subtler and less catastrophic threat, and perhaps for that reason, society has barely begun to consider them. Yet once available, they will, we believe, be put into use much more readily than bioweapons of mass destruction. For starters, while most criminals might think twice about mass slaughter, murder is downright commonplace. In the future, politicians, celebrities, leaders of industry—just about anyone, really—could be vulnerable to attack-bydisease. Even if fatal, many such attacks could go undetected, mistaken for death by natural causes; many others would be difficult to pin on a suspect, especially given the passage of time between exposure and the appearance of symptoms. Moreover—as we’ll explore in greater detail—these same scientific developments will pave the way, eventually, for an entirely new kind of personal warfare. Imagine inducing extreme paranoia in the CEO of a

large corporation so as to gain a business advantage, for example; or—further out in the future—infecting shoppers with the urge to impulse-buy. We have chosen to focus this investigation mostly on the president’s bio-security, because the president’s personal welfare is paramount to national security—and because a discussion of the challenges faced by those charged with his protection will illuminate just how difficult (and different) “security” will be, as biotechnology continues to advance. A direct assault against the president’s genome requires first being able to decode genomes. Until recently, this was no simple matter. In 1990, when the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health announced their intention to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome over the next 15 years, it was considered the most ambitious life-sciences project ever undertaken. Despite a budget of $3 billion, progress did not come quickly. Even after years of hard work, many experts doubted that the time and money budgeted would be enough to complete the job. This started to change in 1998, when the entrepreneurial biologist J. Craig Venter and his company, Celera, got into the race. Taking advantage of the exponential growth in biotechnology, Venter relied on a new generation of gene sequencers and a novel, computer-intensive approach called shotgun sequencing to deliver a draft human genome (his own) in less than two years, for $300 million. Venter’s achievement was stunning; it was also just the beginning. By 2007, just seven years later, a human genome could be sequenced for less than $1 million. In 2008, some labs would do it for $60,000, and in 2009, $5,000. This year, the $1,000 barrier looks likely to fall. At the current rate of decline, within five years, the cost will be less than $100. In the history of the world, perhaps no other technology has dropped in price and increased in performance so dramatically. Still, it would take more than just a gene sequencer to build a personally targeted bioweapon. To begin with, prospective attackers would have to collect and grow live cells from the target (more on this later), so cellculturing tools would be a necessity. Next, a molecular profile of the cells would need to be generated, involving gene sequencers, micro-array scanners, mass spectrometers, and more. Once a detailed genetic blueprint had been built, the attacker could begin to design, build, and test a pathogen, which starts with genetic databases and software and ends with virus and cell-culture work. Gathering the equipment required to do all of this isn’t trivial, and yet, as researchers have upgraded to new tools, as large companies have merged and consolidated operations, and as smaller shops have run out of money and failed, plenty of used lab equipment has been dumped onto the resale market. New, the requisite gear would cost well over $1 million. On eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. Strip out the analysis equipment—since those processes can now be outsourced—and a basic cell-culture rig can be cobbled together for less than $1,000. Chemicals and lab supplies have never been easier to buy; hundreds of Web resellers take credit cards and ship almost anywhere. Biological knowledge, too, is becoming increasingly democratized. Web sites like JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) provide thousands of how-to videos on the techniques of bioscience. MIT offers online courses. Many journals are going open-access, making the latest research, complete with detailed sections on materials and methods, freely available. If you wanted a more hands-on approach to learning, you could just immerse yourself in any of the dozens of do-it-yourself-biology organizations, such as Genspace and BioCurious, that have lately sprung up to make genetic engineering into something of a hobbyist’s pursuit. Bill Gates, in a recent interview, told a reporter that if he were a kid today, forget about hacking computers: he’d be hacking biology. And for those with neither the lab nor the learning, dozens of Contract Research and Manufacturing Services (known as CRAMS) are willing to do much of the serious science for a fee. From the invention of genetic engineering in 1972 until very recently, the high cost of equipment, and the high cost of education to use that equipment effectively, kept most people with ill intentions away from these technologies. Those barriers to entry are now almost gone. “Unfortunately,” Secretary Clinton said in a December 7, 2011, speech to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Review Conference, “the ability of terrorists and other non-state actors to develop and use these weapons is growing. And therefore, this must be a renewed focus of our efforts … because there are warning signs, and they are too serious to ignore.”

The radical expansion of biology’s frontier raises an uncomfortable question: How do you guard against threats that don’t yet exist? Genetic engineering sits at the edge of a new era. The old era belonged to DNA sequencing, which is simply the act of reading genetic code—identifying and extracting meaning from the ordering of the four chemicals that make up DNA. But now we’re learning how to write DNA, and this creates possibilities both grand and terrifying. Again, Craig Venter helped to usher in this shift. In the mid-1990s, just before he began his work to read the human genome, he began wondering what it would take to write one. He wanted to know what the minimal genome required for life looked like. It was a good question. Back then, DNA-synthesis technology was too crude and expensive for anyone to consider writing a minimal genome for life or, more to our point, constructing a sophisticated bioweapon. And gene-splicing techniques, which involve the tricky work of using enzymes to cut up existing DNA from one or more organisms and stitch it back together, were too unwieldy for the task. Exponential advances in biotechnology have greatly diminished these problems. The latest technology—known as synthetic biology, or “synbio”—moves the work from the molecular to the digital. Genetic code is manipulated using the equivalent of a word processor. With the press of a button, code representing DNA can be cut and pasted, effortlessly imported from one species into another. It can be reused and repurposed. DNA bases can be swapped in and out with precision. And once the code looks right? Simply hit Send. A dozen different DNA print shops can now turn these bits into biology. In May 2010, with the help of these new tools, Venter answered his own question by creating the world’s first synthetic self-replicating chromosome. To pull this off, he used a computer to design a novel bacterial genome (of more than 1 million base pairs in total). Once the design was complete, the code was e-mailed to Blue Heron Biotechnology, a Seattle-area company that specializes in synthesizing DNA from digital blueprints. Blue Heron took Venter’s A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s and returned multiple vials filled with frozen plasmid DNA. Just as one might load an operating system into a computer, Venter then inserted the synthetic DNA into a host bacterial cell that had been emptied of its own DNA. The cell soon began generating proteins, or, to use the computer term popular with today’s biologists, it “booted up”: it started to metabolize, grow, and, most important, divide, based entirely on the code of the injected DNA. One cell became two, two became four, four became eight. And each new cell carried only Venter’s synthetic instructions. For all practical purposes, it was an altogether new life form, created virtually from scratch. Venter called it “the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” But Venter merely grazed the surface. Plummeting costs and increasing technical simplicity are allowing synthetic biologists to tinker with life in ways never before feasible. In 2006, for example, Jay D. Keasling, a biochemical engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, stitched together 10 synthetic genes made from the genetic blueprints of three different organisms to create a novel yeast that can manufacture the precursor to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, artemisinic acid, natural supplies of which fluctuate greatly. Meanwhile, Venter’s company Synthetic Genomics is working in partnership with ExxonMobil on a designer algae that consumes carbon dioxide and excretes biofuel; his spin-off company Synthetic Genomics Vaccines is trying to develop flu-fighting vaccines that can be made in hours or days instead of the six-plus months now required. Solazyme, a synbio company based in San Francisco, is making biodiesel with engineered microalgae. Material scientists are also getting in on the action: DuPont and Tate & Lyle, for instance, have jointly designed a highly efficient and environmentally friendly organism that ingests corn sugar and excretes propanediol, a substance used in a wide range of consumer goods, from cosmetics to cleaning products. Bill Gates, in a recent interview, told a reporter that if he were a kid today, forget about hacking computers: he’d be hacking biology. Other synthetic biologists are playing with more-fundamental cellular mechanisms. The Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution has added two bases (Z and P) to DNA’s traditional four, augmenting the old genetic alphabet. At Harvard, George Church has supercharged evolution with his Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering process, which randomly swaps multiple genes at once. Instead of creating novel genomes one at a time, MAGE creates billions of variants in a matter of days.

Finally, because synbio makes DNA design, synthesis, and assembly easier, we’re already moving from the tweaking of existing genetic designs to the construction of new organisms—species that have never before been seen on Earth, species birthed entirely by our imagination. Since we can control the environments these organisms will live in—adjusting things like temperature, pressure, and food sources while eliminating competitors and other stresses—we could soon be generating creatures capable of feats impossible in the “natural” world. Imagine organisms that can thrive on the surface of Mars, or enzymes able to change simple carbon into diamonds or nanotubes. The ultimate limits to synthetic biology are hard to discern. All of this means that our interactions with biology, already complicated, are about to get a lot more troublesome. Mixing together code from multiple species or creating novel organisms could have unintended consequences. And even in labs with high safety standards, accidents happen. If those accidents involve a containment breach, what is today a harmless laboratory bacterium could tomorrow become an ecological catastrophe. A 2010 synbio report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues said as much: “Unmanaged release could, in theory, lead to undesired cross-breeding with other organisms, uncontrolled proliferation, crowding out of existing species, and threats to biodiversity.” Just as worrisome as bio-error is the threat of bioterror. Although the bacterium Venter created is essentially harmless to humans, the same techniques could be used to construct a known pathogenic virus or bacterium or, worse, to engineer a much deadlier version of one. Viruses are particularly easy to synthetically engineer, a fact made apparent in 2002, when Eckard Wimmer, a Stony Brook University virologist, chemically synthesized the polio genome using mail-order DNA. At the time, the 7,500-nucleotide synthesis cost about $300,000 and took several years to complete. Today, a similar synthesis would take just weeks and cost a few thousand dollars. By 2020, if trends continue, it will take a few minutes and cost roughly $3. Governments the world over have spent billions trying to eradicate polio; imagine the damage terrorists could do with a $3 pathogen. During the 1990s, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for its deadly 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, maintained an active and extremely well-funded bioweapons program, which included anthrax in its arsenal. When police officers eventually raided its facilities, they found proof of a years-long research effort costing an estimated $30 million—demonstrating, among other things, that terrorists clearly see value in pursuing bioweaponry. Although Aum did manage to cause considerable harm, it failed in its attempts to unleash a bioweapon of mass destruction. In a 2001 article for Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, William Rosenau, a terrorism expert then at the Rand Corporation, explained: Aum’s failure suggests that it may, in fact, be far more difficult to carry out a deadly bioterrorism attack than has sometimes been portrayed by government officials and the press. Despite its significant financial resources, dedicated personnel, motivation, and freedom from the scrutiny of the Japanese authorities, Aum was unable to achieve its objectives. That was then; this is now. Today, two trends are changing the game. The first began in 2004, when the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition was launched at MIT. In this competition, teams of high-school and college students build simple biological systems from standardized, interchangeable parts. These standardized parts, now known as BioBricks, are chunks of DNA code, with clearly defined structures and functions, that can be easily linked together in new combinations, a little like a set of genetic Lego bricks. iGEM collects these designs in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, an open-source database of downloadable BioBricks accessible to anyone. Viruses are particularly easy to synthetically engineer. In 2002, Eckard Wimmer synthesized the polio genome from mail-order DNA. Over the years, iGEM teams have pushed not only technical barriers but creative ones as well. By 2008, students were designing organisms with real-world applications; the contest that year was won by a team from Slovenia for its designer vaccine against Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium responsible for most ulcers. The 2011 grand-prize winner, a team from the University of Washington, completed three separate projects, each one rivaling the outputs of world-class academics and the biopharmaceutical industry. Teams have turned bacterial cells into everything from photographic film to hemoglobin-producing blood substitutes to miniature hard drives, complete with data encryption.

As the sophistication of iGEM research has risen, so has the level of participation. In 2004, five teams submitted 50 potential BioBricks to the registry. Two years later, 32 teams submitted 724 parts. By 2010, iGEM had mushroomed to 130 teams submitting 1,863 parts—and the registry database was more than 5,000 components strong. As The New York Times pointed out: iGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision—without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started. (igem itself does require students to be mindful of any ethical or safety issues, and encourages public discourse on these questions.) The second trend to consider is the progress that terrorist and criminal organizations have made with just about every other information technology. Since the birth of the digital revolution, some early adopters have turned out to be rogue actors. Phone phreakers like John Draper (a k a “Captain Crunch”) discovered back in the 1970s that AT&T’s telephone network could be fooled into allowing free calls with the help of a plastic whistle given away in cereal boxes (thus Draper’s moniker). In the 1980s, early desktop computers were subverted by a sophisticated array of computer viruses for malicious fun—then, in the 1990s, for information theft and financial gain. The 2000s saw purportedly uncrackable credit-card cryptographic algorithms reverse-engineered and smartphones repeatedly infected with malware. On a larger scale, denial-of-service attacks have grown increasingly destructive, crippling everything from individual Web sites to massive financial networks. In 2000, “Mafiaboy,” a Canadian high-school student acting alone, managed to freeze or slow down the Web sites of Yahoo, eBay, CNN, Amazon, and Dell. In 2007, Russian hackers swamped Estonian Web sites, disrupting financial institutions, broadcasting networks, government ministries, and the Estonian parliament. A year later, the nation of Georgia, before the Russian invasion, saw a massive cyberattack paralyze its banking system and disrupt cellphone networks. Iraqi insurgents subsequently repurposed SkyGrabber—cheap Russian software frequently used to steal satellite television—to intercept the video feeds of U.S. Predator drones in order to monitor and evade American military operations. Lately, organized crime has taken up crowd-sourcing parts of its illegal operations—printing up fake credit cards, money laundering—to people or groups with specialized skills. (In Japan, the yakuza has even begun to outsource murder, to Chinese gangs.) Given the anonymous nature of the online crowd, it is all but impossible for law enforcement to track these efforts. The historical trend is clear: Whenever novel technologies enter the market, illegitimate uses quickly follow legitimate ones. A black market soon appears. Thus, just as criminals and terrorists have exploited many other forms of technology, they will surely soon turn to synthetic biology, the latest digital frontier. In 2005, as part of its preparation for this threat, the FBI hired Edward You, a cancer researcher at Amgen and formerly a gene therapist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. You, now a supervisory special agent in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate within the FBI’s Biological Countermeasures Unit, knew that biotechnology had been expanding too quickly for the bureau to keep pace, so he decided the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to develop partnerships with those at the leading edge. “When I got involved,” You says, “it was pretty clear the FBI wasn’t about to start playing Big Brother to the life sciences. It’s not our mandate, and it’s not possible. All the expertise lies in the scientific community. Our job has to be outreach education. We need to create a culture of security in the synbio community, of responsible science, so the researchers themselves understand that they are the guardians of the future.” Toward that end, the FBI started hosting free bio-security conferences, stationed WMD outreach coordinators in 56 field offices to network with the synbio community (among other responsibilities), and became an iGEM partner. In 2006, after reporters at The Guardian successfully mail-ordered a crippled fragment of the genome for the smallpox virus, suppliers of genetic materials decided to develop self-policing guidelines. According to You, the FBI sees the organic emergence of these guidelines as proof that its community-based policing

approach is working. However, we are not so sure these new rules do much besides guarantee that a pathogen isn’t sent to a P.O. box. In any case, much more is necessary. An October 2011 report by the WMD Center, a nonprofit organization led by former Senators Bob Graham (a Democrat) and Jim Talent (a Republican), said a terrorist-sponsored WMD strike somewhere in the world was probable by the end of 2013—and that the weapon would most likely be biological. The report specifically highlighted the dangers of synthetic biology: As DNA synthesis technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, it will soon become feasible to synthesize nearly any virus whose DNA sequence has been decoded … as well as artificial microbes that do not exist in nature. This growing ability to engineer life at the molecular level carries with it the risk of facilitating the development of new and more deadly biological weapons. Malevolent non-state actors are not the only danger to consider. Forty nations now host synbio research, China among them. The Beijing Genomics Institute, founded in 1999, is the largest genomic-research organization in the world, sequencing the equivalent of roughly 700,000 human genomes a year. (In a recent Science article, BGI claimed to have more sequencing capacity than all U.S. labs combined.) Last year, during a German E. coli outbreak, when concerns were raised that the disease was a new, particularly deadly strain, BGI sequenced the culprit in just three days. To put that in perspective, SARS—the deadly pneumonia variant that panicked the world in 2003—was sequenced in 31 days. And BGI appears poised to move beyond DNA sequencing and become one of the foremost DNA synthesizers as well. BGI hires thousands of bright young researchers each year. The training is great, but the wages are reportedly low. This means that many of its talented synthetic biologists may well be searching for better pay and greener pastures each year, too. Some of those jobs will undoubtedly appear in countries not yet on the synbio radar. Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan will almost certainly be hiring. In the run-up to Barack Obama’s inauguration, threats against the incoming president rose markedly. Each of those threats had to be thoroughly investigated. In his book on the Secret Service, Ronald Kessler writes that in January 2009, for example, when intelligence emerged that the Somalia-based Islamist group al-Shabaab might try to disrupt Obama’s inauguration, the Secret Service’s mandate for that day became even harder. In total, Kessler reports, the Service coordinated some 40,000 agents and officers from 94 police, military, and security agencies. Bomb-sniffing dogs were deployed throughout the area, and counter-sniper teams were stationed along the parade route. This is a considerable response capability, but in the future, it won’t be enough. A complete defense against the weapons that synbio could make possible has yet to be invented. The range of threats that the Secret Service has to guard against already extends far beyond firearms and explosive devices. Both chemical and radiological attacks have been launched against government officials in recent years. In 2004, the poisoning of the Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko involved TCCD, an extremely toxic dioxin compound. Yushchenko survived, but was severely scarred by chemically induced lesions. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian security service, was poisoned to death with the radioisotope polonium 210. And the use of bioweapons themselves is hardly unknown; the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States nearly reached members of the Senate. The Kremlin, of course, has been suspected of poisoning its enemies for decades, and anthrax has been around for a while. But genetic technologies open the door for a new threat, in which a head of state’s own DNA could be used against him or her. This is particularly difficult to defend against. No amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure the president’s DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information within just a single cell. Each of us sheds millions and millions of cells every day. These can be collected from any number of sources—a used tissue, a drinking glass, a toothbrush. Every time President Obama shakes hands with a constituent, Cabinet member, or foreign leader, he’s leaving an exploitable genetic trail. Whenever he gives away a pen at a bill-signing ceremony, he gives away a few cells too. These cells are dead, but the DNA is intact, allowing for the revelation of potentially compromising details of the president’s biology.

To build a bioweapon, living cells would be the true target (although dead cells may suffice as soon as a decade from now). These are more difficult to recover. A strand of hair, for example, is dead, but if that hair contains a follicle, it also contains living cells. A sample gathered from fresh blood or saliva, or even a sneeze, caught in a discarded tissue, could suffice. Once recovered, these living cells can be cultured, providing a continuous supply of research material. Even if Secret Service agents were able to sweep up all the shed cells from the president’s current environs, they couldn’t stop the recovery of DNA from the president’s past. DNA is a very stable molecule, and can last for millennia. Genetic material remains present on old clothes, high-school papers—any of the myriad objects handled and discarded long before the announcement of a presidential candidacy. How much attention was dedicated to protecting Barack Obama’s DNA when he was a senator? A community organizer in Chicago? A student at Harvard Law? A kindergartner? And even if presidential DNA were somehow fully locked down, a good approximation of the code could be made from cells of the president’s children, parents, or siblings, living or not. Presidential DNA could be used in a variety of politically sensitive ways, perhaps to fabricate evidence of an affair, fuel speculation about birthplace and heritage, or identify genetic markers for diseases that could cast doubt on leadership ability and mental acuity. How much would it take to unseat a president? The first signs of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s may have emerged during his second term. Some doctors today feel the disease was then either latent or too mild to affect his ability to govern. But if information about his condition had been genetically confirmed and made public, would the American people have demanded his resignation? Could Congress have been forced to impeach him? For the Secret Service, these new vulnerabilities conjure attack scenarios worthy of a Hollywood thriller. Advances in stem-cell research make any living cell transformable into many other cell types, including neurons or heart cells or even in vitro–derived (IVD) “sperm.” Any live cells recovered from a dirty glass or a crumpled napkin could, in theory, be used to manufacture synthetic sperm cells. And so, out of the blue, a president could be confronted by a “former lover” coming forward with DNA evidence of a sexual encounter, like a semen stain on a dress. Sophisticated testing could distinguish an IVD fake sperm from the real thing— they would not be identical—but the results might never be convincing to the lay public. IVD sperm may also someday prove capable of fertilizing eggs, allowing for “love children” to be born using standard in vitro fertilization. In the hope of mounting the best defense, one option is radical transparency: release the president’s DNA. As mentioned, even modern cancer therapies could be harnessed for malicious ends. Personalized therapies designed to attack a specific patient’s cancer cells are already moving into clinical trials. Synthetic biology is poised to expand and accelerate this process by making individualized viral therapies inexpensive. Such “magic bullets” can target cancer cells with precision. But what if these bullets were trained to attack healthy cells instead? Trained against retinal cells, they would produce blindness. Against the hippocampus, a memory wipe may result. And the liver? Death would follow in months. The delivery of this sort of biological agent would be very difficult to detect. Viruses are tasteless and odorless and easily aerosolized. They could be hidden in a perfume bottle; a quick dab on the attacker’s wrist in the general proximity of the target is all an assassination attempt would require. If the pathogen were designed to zero in specifically on the president’s DNA, then nobody else would even fall ill. No one would suspect an attack until long after the infection. Pernicious agents could be crafted to do their damage months or even years after exposure, depending on the goals of the designer. Several viruses are already known to spark cancers. New ones could eventually be designed to infect the brain with, for instance, synthetic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or Alzheimer’s. Stranger possibilities exist as well. A disease engineered to amplify the production of cortisol and dopamine could induce extreme paranoia, turning, say, a peace-seeking dove into a warmongering hawk. Or a virus that boosts the production of oxytocin, the chemical likely responsible for feelings of trust, could play hell with a leader’s negotiating abilities. Some of these ideas aren’t new. As far back as 1994, the U.S. Air Force’s Wright Laboratory theorized about chemical-based pheromone bombs.

Of course, heads of state would not be the only ones vulnerable to synbio threats. Al-Qaeda flew planes into buildings to cripple Wall Street, but imagine the damage an attack targeting the CEOs of a number of Fortune 500 companies could do to the world economy. Forget kidnapping rich foreign nationals for ransom; kidnapping their DNA might one day be enough. Celebrities will face a new kind of stalker. As home-brew biology matures, these technologies could end up being used to “settle” all sorts of disputes, even those of the domestic variety. Without question, we are near the dawn of a brave new world. How might we protect the president in the years ahead, as biotech continues to advance? Despite the acceleration of readily exploitable biotechnology, the Secret Service is not powerless. Steps can be taken to limit risks. The agency would not reveal what defenses are already in place, but establishing a crack scientific task force within the agency to monitor, forecast, and evaluate new biotechnological risks would be an obvious place to start. Deploying sensing technologies is another possibility. Already, bio-detectors have been built that can sense known pathogens in less than three minutes. These can get better—a lot better—but even so, they might be limited in their effectiveness. Because synbio opens the door to new, finely targeted pathogens, we’d need to detect that which we’ve never seen before. In this, however, the Secret Service has a big advantage over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization: its principal responsibility is the protection of one specific person. Bio-sensing technologies could be developed around the president’s actual genome. We could use his living cells to build an early-warning system with molecular accuracy. Cultures of live cells taken from the president could also be kept at the ready—the biological equivalent to data backups. The Secret Service reportedly already carries several pints of blood of the president’s type in his motorcade, in case an emergency transfusion becomes necessary. These biological backup systems could be expanded to include “clean DNA”—essentially, verified stem-cell libraries that would allow bone-marrow transplantation or the enhancement of antiviral or antimicrobial capabilities. As so-called tissue-printing technologies improve, the president’s cells could even be turned, one day, into ready-made standby replacement organs. Yet even if the Secret Service were to implement some or all of these measures, there is no guarantee that the presidential genome could be completely protected. Anyone truly determined to get the president’s DNA would probably succeed, no matter the defenses. And the Secret Service might have to accept that it can’t fully counter all bio-threats, any more than it can guarantee that the president will never catch a cold. In the hope of mounting the best defense against an attack, one possible solution—not without its drawbacks— is radical transparency: release the president’s DNA and other relevant biological data, either to a select group of security-cleared bioscience researchers or (the far more controversial step) to the public at large. These ideas may seem counterintuitive, but we have come to believe that open-sourcing this problem—and actively engaging the American public in the challenge of protecting its leader—might turn out to be the best defense. One practical reason is cost. Any in-house protection effort would be exceptionally pricey. Certainly, considering what’s at stake, the country would bear the expense, but is that the best solution? After all, over the past five years, DIY Drones, a nonprofit online community of autonomous aircraft hobbyists (working for free, in their spare time), produced a $300 unmanned aerial vehicle with 90 percent of the functionality of the military’s $35,000 Raven. This kind of price reduction is typical of open-sourced projects. Moreover, conducting bio-security in-house means attracting and retaining a very high level of talent. This puts the Secret Service in competition with industry—a fiscally untenable position—and with academia, which offers researchers the freedom to tackle a wider range of interesting problems. But by tapping the collective intelligence of the life-sciences community, the agency would enlist the help of the group best prepared to address this problem, at no cost. Open-sourcing the president’s genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers would bring other benefits as well. It would allow the life sciences to follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where “red-team exercises,” or “penetration testing,” are extremely common practices. In these exercises, the red team—usually a group of faux-black-hat hackers—attempts to find weaknesses in an organization’s defenses (the blue team). A similar testing environment could be developed for biological war games.

One of the reasons this kind of practice has been so widely instituted in the computer world is that the speed of development far exceeds the ability of any individual security expert, working alone, to keep pace. Because the life sciences are now advancing faster than computing, little short of an internal Manhattan Project–style effort could put the Secret Service ahead of this curve. The FBI has far greater resources at its disposal than the Secret Service; almost 36,000 people work there, for instance, compared with fewer than 7,000 at the Secret Service. Yet Edward You and the FBI reviewed this same problem and concluded that the only way the bureau could keep up with biological threats was by involving the whole of the life-sciences community. So why go further? Why take the radical step of releasing the president’s genome to the world instead of just to researchers with security clearances? For one thing, as the U.S. State Department’s DNA-gathering mandate makes clear, the surreptitious collection of world leaders’ genetic material has already begun. It would not be surprising if the president’s DNA has already been collected and analyzed by America’s adversaries. Nor is it unthinkable, given our increasingly nasty party politics, that the president’s domestic political opponents are in possession of his DNA. In the November 2008 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Robert C. Green and George J. Annas warned of this possibility, writing that by the 2012 election, “advances in genomics will make it more likely that DNA will be collected and analyzed to assess genetic risk information that could be used for or, more likely, against presidential candidates.” It’s also not hard to imagine the rise of a biological analog to the computer-hacking group Anonymous, intent on providing a transparent picture of world leaders’ genomes and medical histories. Sooner or later, even without open-sourcing, a president’s genome will end up in the public eye. So the question becomes: Is it more dangerous to play defense and hope for the best, or to go on offense and prepare for the worst? Neither choice is terrific, but even beyond the important issues of cost and talent attraction, open-sourcing—as Claire Fraser, the director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, points out—“would level the playing field, removing the need for intelligence agencies to plan for every possible worst-case scenario.” It would also let the White House preempt the media storm that would occur if someone else leaked the president’s genome. In addition, constant scrutiny of the president’s genome would allow us to establish a baseline and track genetic changes over time, producing an exceptional level of early detection of cancers and other metabolic diseases. And if such diseases were found, an open-sourced genome could likewise accelerate the development of personalized therapies. The largest factor to consider is time. In 2008, some 14,000 people were working in U.S. labs with access to seriously pathogenic materials; we don’t know how many tens of thousands more are doing the same overseas. Outside those labs, the tools and techniques of genetic engineering are accessible to many other people. Back in 2003, a panel of life-sciences experts, convened by the National Academy of Sciences for the CIA’s Strategic Assessments Group, noted that because the processes and techniques needed for the development of advanced bio agents can be used for good or for ill, distinguishing legitimate research from research for the production of bioweapons will soon be extremely difficult. As a result, “most panelists argued that a qualitatively different relationship between the government and life sciences communities might be needed to most effectively grapple with the future BW threat.” In our view, it’s no longer a question of “might be.” Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology, where dedicated individuals can create new life from scratch. Today, when a difficult problem is mentioned, a commonly heard refrain is There’s an app for that. Sooner than you might believe, an app will be replaced by an organism when we think about the solutions to many problems. In light of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange, continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only way to protect the president. And, in the process, the rest of us. Andrew Hessel is a faculty member and a former co-chair of bioinformatics and biotechnology at Singularity University, and a fellow at the Institute for Science, Society, and Policy at the University of Ottawa. Marc Goodman investigates the impact of advancing technologies on global security, advising Interpol and the U.S. government. He is the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and Chair for Policy, Law & Ethics at Silicon

Valley's Singularity University. Steven Kotler is a New York Times–best-selling author and an award-winning journalist.

Translating Gulf boom into books By Roula Khalaf in Dubai November 20, 2007 2:36 pm Financial Times As Gulf states forge ahead with economic expansion plans, they are starting to address a glaring social deficit - the dismal dissemination of knowledge in Arab societies. In the latest of a series of initiatives, the Abu Dhabi government is on Wednesday launching Kalima - which means ‘word’ in Arabic - a project that aims to finance the translation of 100 classic and contemporary books every year. The project comes as a new Dubai foundation focussing on education works with three regional centres dedicated to translating select works into Arabic and ensure their free distribution to universities. Linking up with 20 of the top publishers in the region, concentrated in two countries - Egypt and Lebanon - Abu Dhabi’s Kalima will choose the works and back their distribution and marketing. The effort to boost translation of foreign works is both educational and political, marking an attempt to counter the dominance of religious books on the market. Among the first books that Kalima will be promoting are Umberto Eco’s The Sign and Stephen Hawkins’ A brief history of Time. A 2003 UN Arab Human Development Report said serious constraints hampered the acquisition, diffusion and production of knowledge in the Arab world and offered some alarming findings. Translation of works into Arabic, it said, lagged far behind the rest of the world, with five times more books translated into Greek at that time, which was spoken by 11m people, compared to an Arab world population of more than 280m. A best seller in Arab countries might have a print run of only 5,000 copies, it said. According to Karim Nagy, chief executive of Kalima, more recent statistics show that from 1972 to date, only 8,000 books were translated into Arabic, compared to 190,000 in Spnish. He attributes part of the problem to the deep fragmentation of the publishing industry. But in the largely autocratic Arab world, government control and censorship have also impeded the industry and hampered the development of other key aspects of a knowledge society, particularly the media. Pressure on publishers has also come from political groups, with Islamists seeking to prevent the sale of books they find offensive. Press laws in the United Arab Emirates itself, which includes Abu Dhabi and Dubai, remain restrictive and there is a high level of self-censorship in the local press. Mr Nagy said Kalima did not intend to be deliberately controversial but that it would also not exercise censorship filters in the title selection. International publishers, he said, will be on the selection committee. “We want to win the readers,” he said. Ends

Qatar’s flowering relationship with Paris By David B. Roberts Last updated: November 1, 2012 9:53 am Financial Times When plans for Qatar to create a €50m euro fund to invest in some of Paris’s poorest suburbs emerged last month, the French political right and left united in disapproval. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, denounced the move as a plot to stoke Islamism in Paris’s Muslim-dominated districts, while the left-leaning Libération railed against the French government allegedly subcontracting its sovereign duties to a Middle Eastern state whose motives were suspect. Yet the reaction shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way Qatar operates globally and what it is trying to achieve. The pattern of its international relations shows its investments are geared primarily to three things: profit, security and building a brand that appeals to its western allies despite not being a democracy. The investment in the banlieue – long a scar on France’s social conscience – looks no different.

Part of the suspicion of French commentators stems from the difficulty of evaluating what kind of financial return Qatar could make from such a venture. Simultaneously, Qatar’s well-known support of Islamists in the Arab Spring has spawned far-fetched reports in the French press, quoting military intelligence sources who accuse Doha of supporting proSharia armed militants in Mali. Yet all this ignores a long record of examples that suggest financial gain is typically foremost in any Doha-backed investment. Such strategy is driven by a desire to bolster the country’s balance sheet and diversify earnings away from oil and gas. The Qatar Investment Authority, the state’s main international investment vehicle, was established in 2005 to bolster and secure the longer term health of the economy through diversification. Subsequently, it has earned a reputation as a successful, thirsty investor with a particular eye for bargains and blue-chip companies. Image in the west is also an important element of Qatari ventures overseas, whether backing Libyan rebels or building the Shard, London and Europe’s tallest building. Since the mid-1990s, Qatar has been trying to present itself as a business-savvy, culturally-sophisticated and forwardthinking country, differentiating itself from other Gulf city-states such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Manama. Doha’s heavy investment in international art and education facilities, conferences and big sporting events such as the World Cup are all part of building the brand of Qatar™. A third strand in Qatar’s financial strategy is linked to its core security concerns. It has seen Kuwait invaded in 1990, a deepening crisis over Iran and often acrimonious relations with Saudi Arabia – all of which mean it needs its western allies. While Doha already has the US security umbrella and various agreements with France and the UK, it has been steadily building these relationships, particularly with London, over the past few years. Tens of billions of pounds of investment in London, not to mention supplying a vast proportion of the UK’s gas requirement, guarantees Qatar an appointment at Downing Street whenever it wishes. Doha has also made a series of important acquisitions in France and buys up to 80 per cent of its military material from the republic. Although there is no document setting out Qatar’s strategy, it is apparent from – and only possible because of – the concentration of power in the hands of a tiny number of decision-makers who are related and share a vision of a country’s future. While Hamad Bin Kalifah Al Thani, the emir, remains in broad strategic control, Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, the crown prince, is increasingly active and is behind several recent sporting ventures, including the acquisition of Paris St Germain football club. Hamad Bin Jassem Al Thani, prime minister and foreign minister, is the key player in the Qatar Investment Authority, while Sheikha Moza, the emir’s second wife, is the guiding force behind the social and educationally-focused Qatar Foundation. Sheikha Mayassa, the emir and Moza’s daughter, is in charge of museums and art projects. The Paris banlieue project contains elements of all the imperatives that have driven Qatar’s international investment spree so far. The fund may prove to be a successful micro-lending facility from which Doha will gain financially in the longer term. Its charitable and social focus also help Qatar look good and while the plan has its roots in the Sarkozy presidency, that it continues under President Hollande reinforces the flowering bilateral relationship between Paris and Doha. Fear of Qatari motives seems unwarranted in this case. Doha’s slowly liberalising rulers prize their key western allies above all else. They would be loathe to see what – for them – is a tiny deal financially jeopardise goals that they have been aiming at for many years now. David Roberts is deputy director for the Royal United Services Institute (Qatar)

DNA project to trace human steps By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter A project spanning five continents is aiming to map the history of human migration via DNA. The Genographic Project will collect DNA samples from over 100,000 people worldwide to help piece together a picture of how the Earth was colonised. Samples gathered from indigenous people and the general public will be subjected to lab and computer analysis to extract the valuable genetic data.

Scientists aim to trace ancient human migratory routes (Image: Chris Johns/National Geographic)

Team leader Dr Spencer Wells calls the plan "the Moon shot of anthropology". The $40m (£21m) privately funded initiative is a collaboration between National Geographic, IBM and the Waitt Family Foundation charity.

We see this as part of the commons of our species

Participating in the five-year study are some of Dr Spencer Wells, The Genographic Project the world's top population geneticists, as well as leading experts in the fields of ancient DNA, linguistics and archaeology. Future resource "We see this as a resource for humanity going into the future. It could potentially become the largest genetic database ever created," Dr Wells told the BBC News website. Members of the public will be able to buy a kit that contains all the material needed to add their genetic information to the database. Already, evidence from genetics and archaeology places the origin of modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. It is thought, the first moderns to leave the continent set off around 60,000 years ago.

The DNA double helix is held together by 2.9 billion chemical components called base-pairs

By studying the Y (or male) chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down Enlarge Image exclusively on the maternal line), scientists have pieced together a broad-brush picture of which populations moved where in the world - and when.

What is lacking, says Wells, is the fine detail, which could be filled in by this large-scale project. Many Native American communities

"We know which markers on the Y chromosome to focus on; we know our way around the mitochondrial genome fairly well. We just haven't had the large sample sizes to apply these technologies properly," Dr Wells explained.

are strongly advised by their elders not to give samples François Balloux, University of Cambridge

"There are still many questions we haven't answered. Was there any interbreeding with Neanderthals as modern humans moved into Europe? Did any of the migrations to the Americas come across the Pacific - or even the Atlantic?" These and other unanswered questions form the research goals of the project. They include:        

Who are the oldest populations in Africa - and therefore the world? Did Alexander the Great's armies leave a genetic trail? Who were the first people to colonise India? Is it possible to obtain intact DNA from the remains of Homo erectus and other extinct hominids? How has colonialism affected genetic patterns in Africa? Was there any admixture with Homo erectus as modern humans spread throughout South-East Asia? Is there any relationship between Australian Aboriginal genetic patterns and their oral histories? What are the origins of differences between human groups?

A total of 10 DNA collection centres located around the world will focus on obtaining samples from indigenous peoples. The genetic markers in the blood of these groups have remained relatively unchanged for generations. "Sub-Saharan Africa harbours the spectrum of variation that will allow us to trace the very origin of our species as well as more recent incursions," said Himla Soodyall, principal project investigator for that region. Collection challenge But some researchers said experience on other projects suggested this one could run into trouble with indigenous groups - particularly those, such as Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, with a history of exploitation. "I don't know how they'll deal with getting samples from more sensitive places," commented François Balloux, a population geneticist at the University of Cambridge, UK. "Amongst Australian Aborigines and Native Americans, the cultural resistance to cooperating with scientists is very strong. "For example, many Native American communities are strongly advised by their elders not to give samples." Ajay Royyuru, IBM's lead scientist on the Genographic Project was optimistic on the issue. "We want to attract their participation by being

Spencer Wells aims to build the world's largest genetic database ( Image: Mark Read)

extremely clear about what we do and do not do. For example, we are very clear about not trying to exploit their genetic diversity for medical uses," he told the BBC News website. Project directors said they had already sought advice from indigenous leaders about their participation. IBM says it will use sophisticated analytical techniques to interpret the information in the biobank and find patterns in the genetic data. The IT giant will also provide the computing infrastructure for the project. Kits sold to the public contain cheek swabs used to scrape the inside of the mouth for a DNA sample. The swabs can then be mailed to a central laboratory for analysis. After four to six weeks, the results of the analysis will appear on the website behind an anonymous password contained in the kit. The exact budget available for the study will depend on how many test kits are sold to the public. The net proceeds will go back into the research and into a "legacy project" to support indigenous peoples.

The project will shed light on the origins of human diversity (Image: Jodi Cobb/National Geographic)

The Genographic Project's directors emphasise that the information in the database will be made accessible to scientists studying human migrations. "We see this as part of the commons of our species. We're not going to be patenting anything - the information will all be in the public domain," said Dr Wells. HUMAN MIGRATION ROUTES

 Map shows first migratory routes taken by humans, based on surveys of different types of the male Y chromosome. "Adam" represents the common ancestor from which all Y chromosomes descended  Research based on DNA testing of 10,000 people from indigenous populations around the world Source: The Genographic Project

Why Sandy became a superstorm By Clive Cookson in London October 29, 2012 2:28 pm The Financial Times Preparations are made in New York for the arrival of hurricane Sandy Sandy is a hybrid monster. It combines a powerful hurricane, laden with energy and moisture from the tropical Atlantic, and a winter storm fuelled by the southward plunge of Arctic air. Although late-season hurricanes sometimes undergo a similar “extra-tropical transition” as they travel up from the tropics, this normally happens safely out to sea over the Atlantic. Sandy’s path is extremely unusual because a static area of high pressure south of Greenland has blocked the jet stream route northeastward across the ocean and instead forced the hurricane into the continental US. “There is no precedent in hurricane records extending back to 1851 of a storm at this latitude taking this path,” said Mark Saunders, professor of climate prediction at University College London. Weather historians are struggling to come up with a precedent for the ferocity of this superstorm, generated as cold air spreading south from Canada feeds into the warm, moist circulation that Sandy brought up from the Caribbean. It has features in common with the Long Island Express hurricane that killed about 700 people in September 1938, but every storm has its own peculiarities, which make it unwise to rely too much on history when predicting impact. “Sandy... has grown to over 3,200km in diameter and is now the largest hurricane in Atlantic storm history,” said Jane Strachan, a marine climatologist at Reading University in the UK. The biggest difference between now and 1938 is accurate hurricane forecasting, based on satellite observations and supercomputer models of the atmosphere. The Long Island Express was so lethal because people were unprepared; the US weather bureau knew there was a hurricane out in the Atlantic but assumed it would follow the usual path away from land. This time the world’s meteorological agencies have known for a few days that Sandy would hit the US coast. They have fed steadily more refined predictions into the National Hurricane Center in Florida, which pulled them together into an increasingly urgent series of warnings for federal, state and local authorities. Sandy threatens devastation in several ways. Near the coastline the “storm surge” will cause most damage, as the hurricane’s winds push water from the sea up against the land, like a slow-motion tsunami. This effect is most serious when there are extensive shallows offshore, as around New York City, where the NHC is forecasting a surge of 6ft to 12ft – exacerbated by unusually high tides. Sustained winds up to 85mph (140kph) are likely to blow down trees and power lines and damage buildings over thousands of square miles. Some estimates suggest that as many as 10m households may lose power. Then, besides the coastal storm surge, prolonged heavy rain will cause inland flooding. The NHC expects rainfall of four to eight inches over the mid-Atlantic states with as

much as 12 inches possible. In the Appalachian mountains one to three feet of snow will accumulate.

Wang particle could help explain gravity By Clive Cookson in Aberdeen September 4, 2012 5:55 pm The Financial Times

The summer’s big scientific news was the discovery of the “god particle” – the Higgs boson, at Cern, the European nuclear physics centre near Geneva. But Higgs has needed back-up, because it explains how matter acquires mass but not how gravity pulls matter together. Now it may have a partner – nicknamed the Wang particle – which could help explain gravity. Charles Wang, an astrophysicist at Aberdeen University, outlined the theory behind the proposed particle at the British Science Festival on Tuesday. He developed the idea with colleagues at Strathclyde University and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK and the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal. Experiments to investigate the proposed “scalar gravitational particle”, to give it its more formal name, will begin in November or December at Cern. In the so-called Standard Model, which particle physicists have built up over the past 50 years, the Higgs boson is crucial to explain how matter acquires its substance or mass. But it does not explain how the force of gravity acts on mass. As a candidate for the long-sought “graviton”, the particle that transmits gravity, the Wang particle could fill that gap. Prof Wang said the gravitational particle would manifest itself most clearly in a supernova, the most extreme concentration of energy and matter known. In a supernova, a dying star collapses in on itself, triggering a type of explosion second only to the original Big Bang in its violent release of radiation. Astronomers observe about one supernova every year in the entire universe. Each one briefly emits as much light as an entirely galaxy with 100bn stars. “No existing theory can explain how so much energy is emitted in a supernova,” said Prof Wang. “My theory is that a scalar particle – one of the most elementary types of particle in the universe and similar to the Higgs boson – is at work in these starbursts and responsible for the additional energy that causes the explosion to take place.” Supernovae are not just astronomical curiosities. They are vital for the chemistry of the universe, because most chemical elements can only be created by fusing atomic nuclei together in the intense temperatures and pressures inside supernovae. Although such conditions cannot be simulated on Earth, scientists at Cern plan to investigate the Wang theory at a facility called Isolde, which carries out a nuclear fusion process akin to the formation of new elements in a supernova.

The discovery of the Higgs particle put the last touch to the “standard model”, which describes the workings of the universe, but it was never intended to explain gravity or to unify Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum theory, which attempts to explain the universe at the subatomic level. Physicists are now keen to move on to the next stage and produce a “general theory of everything”. If the Wang particle exists, it could play a key role in that theory of everything. But it may be decades before we know for sure. After all, the Higgs particle was originally proposed by Prof Peter Higgs and colleagues almost 50 years ago.

The Muslim sisterhood By Roula Khalaf October 26, 2012 7:15 pm The Financial Times

Behind the scenes and on the street women are now stepping out of the shadows and emerging as a vital political force in Egypt

©Giulia Marchi Campaign trail: Muslim sisters Oumayma Kamel and Heba Hassan take a break during a visit to the village of Al Saf, Cairo in June this year. Kamel’s laptop shows a sticker for Freedom and Justice Party candidate Mohammed Morsi, elected shortly afterwards as Egyptian president. Kamel is now a senior adviser to Morsi Sondos Asem was five years old when Hosni Mubarak’s security men broke into the family home after midnight, dragged her father from his bed and locked him up in jail for 18 months. The memory would scar her for life. “We were young, we were scared, it was a traumatising experience for women and children,” she recalls. Her father’s sin was membership of the political bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist movement that tormented Egypt’s dictatorial regimes for decades before

helping to bring it to an abrupt end in last year’s revolution. Belonging to a Muslim Brotherhood family imposed a life of clandestine activity and intrigue that forced Asem to hide her identity for much of her teenage years. Then she saw her professional ambitions constrained by employers’ reluctance to associate themselves with Islamists. “All repressed societies are careful what they say or to whom,” she says. To Asem’s relief, those days are now gone and the Brotherhood is rapidly consolidating its political power in the Arab world’s largest nation. Her father’s publishing house is back in business and she, even at the young age of 25, is an active member of the women’s branch of the Brotherhood – an arm of the movement whose activism has long been overshadowed by the men. Asem studied English and communications and now edits the Brotherhood’s English website. She also travels with the organisation’s political party, Freedom and Justice (FJP), as its leaders attempt to promote their cause as a credible democratic project to a west long sceptical about Islamists’ intentions and fearful that they are on their way to imposing their Islamist vision. We meet in her parents’ marble-floored living room in Dreamland, a compound on the outskirts of Cairo where houses are encircled by manicured lawns and golf courses. It is an upper-middle-class haven that feels a world apart from the dust and chaos of the capital. Asem looks younger than her years and she dresses more fashionably than other Brotherhood women, her body wrapped in a long checkered skirt and a fitted black jacket over a buttoned white shirt, her headscarf shorter than a typical sister’s. Like other Muslim sisters, however, she is coming out, openly sharing the contribution of women in the more than 80-year history of the Brotherhood. It is a tale that not only sheds light on the inner workings of a secretive community but also helps explain its political potency. For Asem, the women’s impact in the movement is as important as that of men. “Women do most of the work on the ground, especially in campaigns. They are larger in numbers, and in influence in campaigns, they can be more convincing,” says Asem, relating how during the race for the presidency earlier this year, she challenged herself and her Islamist female friends to mobilise 100 voters each – and succeeded. “Some women might have convinced 300 people … We had very little time. But that’s what helped the [Mohamed Morsi, Brotherhood candidate] victory.” Islamism and women’s empowerment do not usually go hand in hand, and for good reason. Islamist organisations, which mix religion and politics and aspire to an idealistic state that existed in the days of the Prophet Mohammed, preach that the woman’s place is in the home, her role confined to good wife and mother. Islamist scholars (who have historically been male) can point to verses in the Koran and sayings of the prophet to justify discrimination against women, including the fact that they are not suited for wilaya al-ozma (the great ruler role). The Muslim sisterhood Within the Brotherhood itself many leaders, including president Morsi, believe that the presidency, as well as the highest authority in the organisation, the position of murshid or supreme guide is off limits for women. This is an interpretation that many sisters I have met do not like but say they accept. But the Muslim sisters are something of a paradox, and one that defies the Islamist stereotype. There is no denying that they are skilful political activists and are now increasingly relied upon to further the goals of the FJP. What they are not, however, are feminists looking for the type of freedom that liberals and secular women cherish. Hard-working and determined, the Muslim sisters believe in economic and political advancement but are more docile when it comes to their role within the family. They

see feminism at best as the path to the destruction of the family. “Most sisters are professionals, very active, very energetic, very strong, but they don’t have feminist consciousness,” says Oumayma Abu Bakr, an Egyptian expert on Islam and gender.

©Giulia Marchi Sondos Asem, 25, activist: ‘Women do most of the work on the ground, especially in campaigns. They are larger in numbers, and they can be more convincing’ It is only now, moreover, as they join the FJP, that they are being offered an opportunity for influence. The sisters have never had any significant say within the Brotherhood, even though they make up 50 per cent of the movement (out of a total membership estimated at one million when the group was still banned). They have never paid monthly dues, never voted for the leadership and never been rewarded for their contribution with any official position. Many of the sisters, including Egypt’s first lady, Naglaa Ali, have mostly engaged in da’awa (preaching the message of Islam) and social work. These two activities cannot be dissociated from each other: those who they help through charities run by the Brotherhood, including schools and hospitals, are also more likely to listen to their Islamist message. Gradually, however, the sisters have become more engaged in politics – a process that is now accelerating, and they hope will lead to recognition of their critical role. A few weeks ago the FJP, no doubt eager to calm liberal (and western) jitters over the Islamists’ plans for women in post-revolution Egypt, launched a series of workshops to develop women cadres, teaching them everything from campaigning to media skills. One morning in early October I listened to Sondos Asem’s mother, Manal al-Hassan, a party official and communications professor, lecturing women on the power of the media and how to distinguish between true and fake news. Television channels spread lies about the Brotherhood, she told the attendees, because they are in a struggle for survival with the Islamists – for them it is “to be or not to be”, she said in English. The media is used to denigrating women who wear the veil, she went on, but all this mischief can be countered. “They say the Brotherhood has the strongest media. Why is that?” she asked. One of the women in the audience shot back the right answer: “The Brotherhood is strong in face-to-face communication.” A week earlier, in the same conference room in downtown Cairo, the acting head of the party Essam el-Erian reassured the women that their role was central, not merely supportive, and promised that it would be “revitalised” in all fields.

One of those attending the workshop was Fatma al-Zomor, a warm, enthusiastic teacher from a village near Cairo who was recently elected as assistant head of the teachers’ syndicate, a union in which elections had been banned under Mubarak. I had first met her two days earlier in the ramshackle offices of the syndicate and she had told me that the time had arrived for women to highlight their role in the Brotherhood. “Before the revolution the Muslim Brotherhood had a red line – and that red line was the sisters. They would not put them in the limelight because they feared for them. They had pledged that they would not allow the security services to arrest women.” ... The Muslim sisterhood was set up as a chapter of the Ikhwan, as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic, a few years after the founding of the movement in 1928 by Hassan alBanna. A pious schoolteacher who believed that adhering to Islam in every aspect of life was the path to defeating colonialism and overcoming social injustice, he created what would become the world’s most important Islamic movement. Though the Brotherhood once had a military wing (one of its later ideologues, Sayyid Qutb, inspired jihadi ideology), it evolved into a movement that rejects violence and argues – some say unconvincingly – that democracy can be compatible with its ideal of an Islamic state.

©Giulia Marchi Muslim sisters prepare to hand out leaflets on the streets of El Taba, one of Cairo’s poorer neighbourhoods The sisters tell me that everything they do, whether helping people in need, teaching Islam or campaigning for office, is in the service of God. I met a group of young sisters who are part of a new Brotherhood-backed student organisation on the leafy campus of Cairo’s Ain Shams university. They were huddled on a bench listening to 21-year-old Aya Mustafa reading and explaining a Koranic verse about loyalty. “Ikhlas [loyalty] means to do something for god and not ask for praise in return or for monetary compensation,” says Mustafa. She explains that the new organisation, Nour, assists students with religious education and university life, launching campaigns for better accommodation and more security

on campus. Before the revolution she used to distribute leaflets about Islam and food parcels during Ramadan, but would be harassed by security guards who accused her of wanting to overthrow the Mubarak government. “Egypt was destroyed by Mubarak and, while the men have the biggest burden, we have to help. I felt the weight of responsibility to join Freedom and Justice now that we can have parties because, for us, Islam cannot be disassociated from politics.” When Mustafa mentions that Nour is organising a conference about women leaders, I ask her for examples of such figures. “People like Oprah [Winfrey], for example, but there are also many in Islamic history who even participated in wars and were teachers to some men.” We also talk about love and relationships, and the limits on Islamist girls. They tell me Islamic teachings make them feel precious. “A woman is a very special thing in Islam, her body and her heart is for one man only, it is not a commodity. So we need to protect ourselves,” says Mustafa. The older sisters are for the most part educated, middle-class women who wear their hijab conservatively, letting it hang down their shoulders over loose clothing. They are taught not to wear make-up or jewellery that might attract the attention of men other than their husbands, and nor do they pluck their eyebrows, something they say is forbidden by a saying of the prophet. “The goal of each [sister] is to learn about Islam because it can change her life and improve it and then share and clarify that to people,” says Oumayma Kamel, the most senior woman in the Ikhwan, and an adviser to the president. “So you learn the texts and you practise them and spread them and this takes time and training, it’s very applied.” Being part of the Ikhwan is an all-encompassing project – “it is who you are, how you are brought up and how you identify with others,” as Asem puts it. The building block of the organisation is the usra. The word means family in Arabic but in this context it refers to a group of Brotherhood members of similar ages, often from the same neighbourhood, who form a unit that meets every week to study religious texts, and organises outings and charitable activities on a regular basis. The Brotherhood also runs religious and social programmes for every age, starting with toddlers and moving on to teenagers, with the girls being prepared for their roles as wives and mothers. For adults too, members of an usra help each other, with jobs or financial support. If your child is misbehaving or your marriage is in trouble, the Brotherhood can come to the rescue. The political party, which is now taking on some of the movement’s mainstream activities, also offers Irshad Osari, or family guidance. I attended a session in which women were being trained as family (and marriage) counsellors to be stationed in FJP offices across the country. The instructor prods the women to express their feelings – one rambles on about how she stares at the Nile and feels the water washing away her troubles and another tells of how she knew from an early age that she had the gift of solving other people’s problems. The instructor is trying to focus women on the fact that they have abilities and masses of energy that should be channelled for the benefit of others. “What’s important is not to rest but to feel satisfied,” Ghada Hashad, the organiser of the meeting, tells them. “You are all special because you have so much energy.” ... In its early days, the sisterhood was made up of the wives and female relatives of members. It acted as a quiet addition to the Ikhwan until repression took the men away, leaving the women to carry the flame. Although scholars of the Brotherhood have written about several women leaders, the one that stands out is Zaynab al-Ghazali. She was the strong-minded, charismatic activist who was a central figure after the

assassination of al-Banna in 1949, when she held secret meetings to reorganise the movement and helped the families of those arrested. She too would be detained in 1965 and tortured. Ghazali documented her experience in the jails of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late Egyptian president who had turned ferociously against the Brotherhood, in her book Return of the Pharaoh.

©Getty Hassan al-Banna. Founder in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Banna believed it would help to defeat colonialism Ghazali is held up as an inspiration to sisters of all generations. Azza al-Gharf, a 48year-old member of parliament for the Brotherhood, studied under Ghazali and became attached to her, taking up the preaching and charity work that has made her one of the most high-profile sisters. Gharf told me that Ghazali had picked her husband, another Brotherhood member, whom Gharf married when she was 18 before they both went to university. Gharf’s own work has been in getting women involved in grassroots activities, including educating others. “Instead of sitting in front of the television, women should engage in social work,” she says. It was during the Nasser years that the sisters, who still had freedom of movement, became more active. “When the sisters’ branch was first created, the role of the woman was still in the home, she raised the children and she was the biggest support for her husband. But when the men were repressed, when they were away, and the families had financial strains, the women helped, they could still interact with society, still go to charities and to mosques,” explains Amal Abdelkarim, who heads the FJP women’s section in the governorate of Giza. The 1970s were kinder to the sisterhood, as Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, eased the pressure on the Brotherhood, and political activism flourished at the universities. “Sadat was opening up a bit and politics were thriving at the universities. That’s when I joined – the Muslim Brotherhood seemed closer to my views because it taught that Islam was a way of life,” says Jihan al-Halafawi, a prominent sister who recently suspended her membership in the Brotherhood after her husband, one of the group’s leaders, clashed with other senior figures.

©Kube Publishing Ltd Zaynab al-Ghazali. A key Brotherhood activist following the assassination of al-Banna, Ghazali was imprisoned and tortured in the 1960s Halafawi made history in 2000 in Alexandria as the first female Brotherhood candidate for parliament. Sadat had been assassinated in 1981 and Hosni Mubarak was president. His attitude towards the banned Brotherhood oscillated between tolerance and repression. “When I ran, the world was turned upside down, within the Brotherhood but also within the regime,” recalls Halafawi, a small 60-year-old woman whose shy appearance belies her fiery spirit. We are in her cluttered Cairo apartment, and she sits with her arms crossed. “It was a big crisis for the regime, which was saying that the Brotherhood was a backward organisation.” The regime conspired to deny her a victory even though she received the highest number of votes in her district. But she nonetheless set the Brotherhood on a new course. “A step had been taken and the Muslim Brotherhood could not go back. It opened up to women candidates.” Halafawi is among the sisters who have been asking for official positions for women in the Brotherhood – something which she says has become possible since the revolution. She tells me that some women are demanding representation in the guidance bureau, the highest structure in the organisation, under the supreme guide. It was not until last year’s parliamentary vote, however, that candidates associated with the Brotherhood reached parliament, with four women elected in December (the assembly has since been dissolved). But while the sisters acknowledge that most women in the Brotherhood still vote for male candidates, they have proved their value as activists in campaigns and in mobilising the female vote. “When men saw what we could accomplish in elections, they started to change the way they look at us,” says 35year-old Nermeen Hassan, a professor at Cairo University’s medical school. “I remember how in 2005, in the first rally by women during an election campaign, the men were giving us instructions all the time, telling us not to lose our temper, not to appear too emotional. But then they were impressed – the sisters carried their children with them and marched, and we were clever in how we dealt with the street, we didn’t even disrupt traffic.” Fatma al-Zomor, the hyperactive assistant head of the teachers union, is known for her campaigning skills. She came from a modest family consisting mostly of loyalists to the Mubarak regime but joined the Brotherhood at 17, after benefiting from the free afterschool lessons they provided in her village (the tutoring ranged from mathematics to the Koran). “I read the letters of Hassan al-Banna and other books and I believed in their principles,” she says. She would later run a Brotherhood-backed charity that distributed food in poor neighbourhoods and start two charities on her own, sending monthly stipends to 150 families. The charities were shut down when the authorities discovered who was behind them. She now teaches Arabic and Islamic studies and only told her students she was from the Muslim Brotherhood after the revolution. So she had numerous people to call on when the movement decided to put up Mohamed Morsi for president. “We can work under any pressure,” she says.

... The limelight, however, is not always favourable for the Muslim sisters. As the cause of women emerges as the main battleground between liberals and Islamists in new democracies in the Middle East, some of the most prominent sisters are seen as an integral part of a sinister Brotherhood plot to Islamise the state and undermine women’s rights. At a time when liberals are seeking to limit the encroachment of Islamic law on a new constitution, a stream of accusations have depicted the Muslim sisters as supporters of lifting the ban on genital mutilation and of lowering the marriage age for girls from the current 18. The sisters insist that neither they nor the party intend to change the marriage age or the anti-genital mutilation laws, whatever the constitution says. But some acknowledge that ambiguous statements from Brotherhood officials, both men and women, have muddied the debate and left the movement vulnerable to liberals’ accusations.

©Giulia Marchi Liberal activist Manal Tibe, who resigned from the panel drafting the new constitution, at a demonstration in support of the protection of women’s rights Many liberal women, however, consider the sisters and their ability to influence mainstream society as a bigger threat than the Brotherhood men. “I can’t claim to understand them 100 per cent but I think they have undergone some kind of brainwashing,” says Hoda Badran, chairwoman of the Alliance for Arab Women, a liberal women’s group. I hear more dread at a Cairo demonstration where liberal women are protesting against a constitution drafting process that is overwhelmingly influenced by the Brotherhood. “What scares me is that the sisters are all about obedience and loyalty – the commands come from high above and they just follow,” says Zeynab Abdel Rahman, a 40-year-old veiled woman who runs a charity and supports a liberal party. “If the Brotherhood writes the constitution, they will rule according to their sharia.” To be sure, the Muslim sisters live in a peculiar world, with the strict interpretations of Islam leaving them with convictions that seem at odds with fast-changing modernity. For decades, they have been cocooned in a society that sustained itself by looking

inwards and guarding its secrets – Brotherhood families have often intermarried, for example. Although there is much debate within the movement, once a decision is taken by the guidance bureau, such as the move to field a presidential candidate, which the Brotherhood had promised Egyptians it would not do, discussion ends. The sisters argue that respect for leadership decisions is one of the greatest assets of their movement. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s biggest strength is that they have very dedicated young people ready to implement the democratic decisions even though they might not agree with some of them. That’s why we win elections,” says Asem. Oumayma Kamel, the senior sister who sits on the panel drafting the constitution and who has been at the receiving end of much criticism, says that the liberals are zeroing in on issues that are simply not priorities. What about women’s education and the fight against illiteracy, she asks, which is still rampant in rural Egypt? What about the struggle against poverty in a country where nearly half the population is impoverished? “Is it equality or equity? That’s the issue. What the liberals care about is women’s freedom. But women’s condition won’t improve without education,” she tells me. “Men and women have the same rights and responsibilities but I know that there are differences between men and women, it’s biological. Being a mother is a woman’s most important job, it’s fundamental, and so we speak of the protection of motherhood and child and the liberals don’t like it.” In reality, however, some sisters admit that the Brotherhood has never given much thought to women’s rights. A patriarchal organisation, it has also left issues that are important to women to be decided by the men. Nor has there been much pressure for a rethinking of positions because Egyptian society is, in any case, largely conservative. A woman need not be in the Brotherhood to be warned by her parents against confrontation at home and told to seek the counsel of her husband. Within the sisterhood, however, you can glean a diversity of views, with some of the younger sisters seemingly more attuned to women’s rights, and more empowered by last year’s revolution. With time and greater political participation perhaps their voices will be better heard. “The waters are stirring and we have started to think about what we know about women’s rights,” says Nermeen Hassan, the medical professor. She teaches a course to other sisters about preparing for marriage. In the past, the course instructed the girls to look nice and not pester their husbands. “Now there is no longer language that says you should be obedient but more emphasis on complementing each other and that there should be no power struggle between men and women,” she explains. “We also talk about housework and say that sharia does not oblige a woman to do it, that men and women should discuss it and if no agreement is reached, then the man must provide a servant.” Not quite a revolution yet – nor would such recommendations benefit poorer families – but, as Hassan says, it is all part of a “natural” evolution in the Brotherhood. One, however, that is not fast enough or radical enough for non-Islamists. Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East editor

Supercomputers - Speed within reach at affordable prices By Jessica Twentyman December 2, 2008 3:58 pm Financial Times This has been a milestone year in supercomputing. These high-performance machines, engineered to cope with the most mathematically intensive tasks, have hit new heights of power and performance, while becoming more widely available to businesses. Twice yearly, in June and November, the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world are ranked by Top500.org, a group of supercomputing experts from the Universities of Mannheim and Tennessee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In June, IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer, based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, became the first machine to achieve the long-coveted goal of breaking the “petaflop” barrier, processing more than one million billion calculations per second. In November, Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also passed that milestone. In the most recent rankings, Roadrunner and Jaguar notched up performances of 1.105 petaflops and 1.059 petaflops, respectively. These are giant leaps. “When I started out in the supercomputer industry 25 years ago, we were all talking about the megaflop barrier – millions of operations per second,” says Margaret “Peg” Williams, senior vice-president of engineering at Cray, an established supplier in the field. “These days, that’s just dull and we’ve broken the gigaflop and teraflop barriers along the way to today’s petaflop performance.” Today, even the cheapest PC runs at gigaflop rates yet it is only 11 years since the US government spent about $33m to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve one teraflop. The rate of progress equates to a 1,000-fold increase in processing power roughly every 10 years, says Dave Turek, vice president of IBM’s Deep Computing group, and that in turn has led to “enhanced fidelity”, or more refined analysis, in terms of output. “We’re now getting to the point where a supercomputer isn’t just used to model the behaviour of a single component in a jet engine, for example, but whole collections of components, working together in an integrated system. “Or we can model different processes on a much smaller or larger scale, from the effect of a new drug on a disease at a molecular level, to the impact of human behaviour on climate change over hundreds of years. And we can perform these tasks far faster, too.” This ability, he says, is largely down to parallel processing – breaking a large computing task into logical components and processing them simultaneously on a vast pool of multiple processors. The more chips added to a machine, the quicker they can process large tasks, as long as the application is engineered to run in parallel, rather than sequentially. Since parallel processing became available to commercial organisations in the early 1990s, the line has blurred between traditional supercomputing, geared to solving complex scientific problems, and high performance computing (HPC), which aims to

deliver bulk processing power. Indeed IDC, the consultancy, has redefined its supercomputer category to include HPC systems costing more than $500,000. Sales of such systems, it estimates, grew by 24 per cent in 2007, to reach $3.2bn. But as the technology takes on an increasingly important role in industry and government, as well as academic research, it is increasingly the low end of the market, for HPC systems costing less than $250,000, that is the real engine of growth. The road to such growth began in the 1990s, when high-end computing systems started using standard components in place of proprietary technology. “Twenty years ago, a supercomputer was built from exotic components that made it blindingly fast and blindingly expensive as well,” says John Barr, an analyst with the 451 Group, an industry research company. Today’s supercomputers, he says, use commodity chipsets from Intel and AMD and interconnect technologies based on the widely used Ethernet and Infiniband standards. Prices have dropped and smaller organisations are now able to take advantage of the processing power. Arguably the most striking example of this came in September with the announcement of a partnership between Cray and Microsoft, which has made rapid advances in the sector with its HPC Server operating system. The two companies launched the Cray CX1, touted as ”the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered”, with prices starting at $25,000. Vince Mendillo, director of HPC for Microsoft, says the CX1 is aimed at organisations in industries such as life sciences and financial services that are exploring supercomputing and do not have the in-house expertise or resources to run a fully fledged supercomputer. The partners also hope to lure scientists, and researchers with discretionary IT budgets, to use the system to run workloads locally, creating ”supercomputing on the desktop”, rather than on huge, centralised machines. A similar model is offered by chip maker Nvidia, which in November announced a “Personal Supercomputer” design, that will enable other manufacturers to build highperformance computers that look like traditional workstations. Already, a number of PC vendors, including Dell and Lenovo, have signed up to offer workstations based on this design, at prices starting below $10,000, according to Andy Keane, general manager of GPU computing at Nvidia. These machines, he says, will enable researchers to conduct at least some of their research at their desks. “Now, researchers tend to write the code on a standard notebook and then take it to the supercomputer in order to deploy it,” he says. Carrying out research at a workstation will reduce the time it takes to work on problems and crunch data, he adds.

The growing availability of HPC capabilities, however, raises questions about environmental impact: they consume enormous amounts of energy. Mr Turek of IBM points out: “Energy efficiency has become as important as raw performance for the modern supercomputer. Now, it’s all about how much computing you can get out of each megawatt consumed.”

New York subway devastated by storm By Robert Wright in New York Last updated: October 30, 2012 3:52 pm Financial Times New York City’s subway system faces the most devastating disaster in its 108-year history after the storm surge from post-tropical storm Sandy flooded seven of its 10 tunnels under the East River, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chief executive has said. There was also severe damage to other commuter transport infrastructure, including flooding to a Long Island Railroad tunnel under the East River, flooding on a Path train tunnel under the Hudson and flooding to the Brooklyn-Battery road tunnel. Although Joseph Lhota, the MTA’s chief executive, declined to put a date on when service would be fully restored, it looks likely to be weeks before service on key commuter routes returns fully to normal. “The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” Mr Lhota said. “Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots.” New York’s public transport networks appear to have suffered some of the most severe damage in the region affected by Monday night’s storm, the largest in decades to hit the US’s eastern seaboard. New Jersey transit services remained suspended on Tuesday and Chris Christie, the state’s governor, said all routes had suffered “major damage”. All large New York area airports – including JFK, Newark and La Guardia – also remained closed. However, the Washington Metro, the US’s second-busiest mass transit system, was able to announce plans for a partial restoration of service from 2pm on Tuesday. It is likely to be the damage to New York City’s underwater rail tunnels that takes longest to rectify. Mr Lhota told New York’s WNYC public radio that he would be unable until later in the day on Tuesday even to estimate how long restoration of service in the affected tunnels would take. However, in a report following last year’s Hurricane Irene, Klaus Jacob, a professor at Columbia University, told WNYC that a “best-case scenario” for reopening a flooded subway tunnel would take 29 days. Mr Lhota told WNYC he was going to try to get the subway running again “as quickly as I possibly can”. But the challenge was likely to be not only that the tunnels had been inundated but that the flooding had involved saltwater entering delicate electrical systems. “Water and electricity never mix properly, but when you add salt to it, once the water is gone, the salt leaves a film,” Mr Lhota said. “The way electronics work on the subway

system is two pieces of metal running together conducting electricity. And if there’s anything in between those two pieces of metal – like film left over from salt – that needs to be cleaned off because the connections need to be clear.” Mr Lhota stressed, nevertheless, that the subway system was flexible and that it would be possible to reroute some services. Two of the system’s East River crossings are by bridges, which appear to have suffered little damage. On other key commuter services, Mr Lhota said the Long Island Rail Road yards by Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, as well as its East River tunnels and much of the network in suburban Long Island, had all been flooded. Tracks on the Metro North railroad connecting Westchester County and Connecticut to New York City had suffered damage from “hundreds” of trees on the track, he said. On non-MTA services, the Path service – operated by the New York New Jersey Port Authority and linking New York City and parts of New Jersey – remained suspended. There were pictures of water flooding into the foundations of new buildings at the site of the World Trade Center, which connect to a Path train station, and reports that Path’s tunnel under the Hudson by the site was flooded.

Q&A - Where will China's innovators come from 30 October 2012 Last updated at 01:02 GMT BBC web site China is making rapid advances in technology, but without reform in the education system and a culture tolerant of failure, it won't produce the next Steve Jobs, says technology entrepreneur Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with the BBC, as part of a series of features on challenges for China's new leaders. What was the technology scene like in China when you went there in the late 1990s? In 1998 I returned to China to work for Microsoft and start up technology research labs. Young Chinese people I met while in the US showed a lot of potential and were very hungry for success, very hard-working. I felt with my experience that I could help them realise their potential as well as to do great things for my employer. How much has it changed since then? In the late 1990s business leadership was lacking. Companies were being built, but leaders did not have enough experience to run them. Industries were much smaller and it felt like a backward country. Fourteen years on, we see a very vibrant economy with powerful and successful companies led by leaders with experience. At that time, many companies were about pure manufacturing and now there are quite a few in the hi-tech sector. They are not in the forefront of the world, but they are capable companies with decent technology portfolios. What capacity does China have to develop a truly creative technology industry?  

Kai-Fu Lee is a Chinese-American technology entrepreneur He is currently the CEO of China-based Innovation Works, a venture capital firm for Chinese technology start-ups

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In 1998 he went to China to set up Microsoft Research Labs. In 2005 he became founding president of Google China and stayed as its chief there until 2009

I think China is well on the path to becoming competitive with South Korea. Companies are able to come up with product concepts and understand user needs. But it will be much more difficult to catch up with the US - Silicon Valley. Companies like Apple and Google are innovative from their very roots, built to change the world and with people willing to take big risks. The US has a culture tolerant of failure, driven by individual passion. Companies are not started to make money or make the founders a billionaire, but to build great technology. China is in a state where entrepreneurs' major desire is to gain influence and wealth. It is still in a place where Chinese companies are understanding user needs and filling them rather than understanding user needs that users can't even articulate. Before China gets to that level of innovation, it has to overcome a lot of issues that are cultural and about education, where there is emphasis on discipline and obedience. Silicon Valley, on the other hand is innovative, passionate, rebellious and fearless. Because of such differences, it will be difficult to produce a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg in China. Can there be true innovation when society and politics is so top-down? What about censorship? Innovation is a key part of the current as well as the next five-year plan so the government will have the opportunity to put resources into venture capital incubation, universities and research. But there are some questions: you cannot force or decree innovation out of funding or planning. I think the current five-year plans will drive China to South Korea's level but it will probably fall short of reaching the true innovation that people like Jobs and Zuckerburg pioneered. Censorship is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it limits what people can do but it also creates an environment where many American companies cannot or choose not to enter, thus reducing competition - so the market is open to local players. What would you like China's new leaders do to encourage innovation? I would like to see education reform, but done in an appropriate, gradual way so that the Chinese education system can retain all that is good about it, such as developing basic skills. But it would be important to let in some Western influences so students are not just sitting in a room and following orders but learning to ask the key questions. The injection of critical thinking and curiosity is probably the most important thing I would hope to see. I think the government should also put resources into letting experts make key decisions, because government bureaucrats can't possibly be experts on what companies to fund, what technologies to reward or even what kind of talent to educate or bring to China. What is the power of microblogs in China?

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China has 538 million internet users as of June 2012, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) Among them, 388 million use the internet through smartphones The Twitter-like weibo platforms had 170 million users as of June 2012, 24.2% up from the end of 2011. Online banking users by June were up 14.8% from the end of 2011, totalling 191 million Examples of Chinese technological innovations include: Beidou navigation system (China's rival to the the US GPS system), Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast - a digital TV standard

I wrote a book on microblogs changing China. It is something I thought would happen and it did. It created a platform for people to contribute their expressions, ideas, observations and share it all in real time. Microblogs reflect current news events, social problems, unfairness in courts, local government corruption and information about events in the US, such as the presidential elections - all difficult to access before. The state-owned press has one view, not multiple views, and microblogs opened people eyes and created a degree of relative freedom of speech and transparency. They even act as a kind of media check on government, because when media is state-owned it is difficult for them to perform that purpose. Although microblogs have generated more criticism of the government, the authorities have also tended to respond in a constructive manner. And when government officials start their own microblogs, it brings them closer to the people. What innovations might we see coming from China? China is not likely to come up with next world-changing product. Innovation is likely to come from taking products that are already known and applying them in another context. I can see this working in areas where there is government support, in areas that do not require out-of-the box thinking but innovative trial and error, such as pharmaceuticals and alternative energy. Software innovation is certainly possible. A company called Tencent has a very innovative product called "wechat" - an online communication system. It has reached 200m people in China already and is available in English. Venture capital investment is also important - it has a very clever multi-phase approach so when funding runs out for a project, you make fresh decisions about its direction. What do you think China might look like in 10 years? That is a very difficult one to speculate about. There is a lot of pressure and desire for improvements in rule of law, greater representation and greater transparency. I would take an optimistic view - I think we will see progress. There can always be unfortunate incidents and I can't assess the degrees to which these changes might take place. If you adopt a view that spans three or four years, progress might not appear significant, but if you adopt the longer view looking across eight to 10 years, there is likely to be progress on openness.

The Voyager probe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Voyager Golden Record From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

The Voyager Golden Record

Cover of the Voyager Golden Record The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and the Monopoly (game) board game selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future

humans, who may find them. The Voyager spacecrafts are not heading towards any particular star, but Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in the Ophiuchus constellation in about 40,000 years.[1] As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space, the probability of a space-faring civilization encountering them is very small, especially since the probes will eventually stop emitting any kind of electromagnetic radiation. If they are ever found by an alien species, it will most likely be far in the future as the nearest star on Voyager 1's trajectory will only be reached in 40,000 years. Carl Sagan noted that "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."[2] Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule or a symbolic statement more than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.

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1 Background 2 Contents 3 Playback 4 Materials 5 Journey 6 In popular culture 7 Publications 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

Background As of 2012, the two Voyager spacecraft became the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched in 1972 and 1973 and preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more comprehensive message aboard Voyager 1 and 2—a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.

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This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. — U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Contents Main article: Contents of the Voyager Golden Record The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Sagan and his associates assembled 116 images and a

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variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales). To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white and color. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the solar system and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction. Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day to day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe. The musical selection is also varied, featuring artists such as Beethoven, Guan Pinghu, Mozart, Stravinsky, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry and Kesarbai Kerkar. After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.[3] The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque. The 116 images are encoded in analogue form and composed of 512 vertical lines. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute.

Playback

Explanation of the Voyager record cover diagram, as provided by NASA In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour. The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the

typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the "picture lines," about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 (29) vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.[4]

Materials The record is constructed of gold-plated copper. The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.51 billion years. It is possible that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to daughter elements to determine the age of the record. The records also had the sentence "To the makers of music — all worlds, all times" handwritten on them. Since this was not in the original disc specification, it almost caused their rejection.[5]

Journey Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system (in the sense of passing the termination shock) in November 2004. It is now in the Kuiper Belt. In about 40,000 years, it and Voyager 2 will each come to within about 1.7 light-years of two separate stars: Voyager 1 will have approached star Gliese 445, located in the constellation Ophiuchus; and Voyager 2 will have approached star Ross 248, located in the constellation of Andromeda. In August 2009, Voyager 1 was over 16.5 billion km from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.5 AU per year (approximately 61,000 km/h, or 38,000 mph) while Voyager 2 was well over 13 billion km away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year (approximately 56,000 km/h, or 35,000 mph). Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock. The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300-700 km per second (700,000–1,500,000 miles per hour) and becomes denser and hotter.[6]

In popular culture

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The motion picture Starman portrayed the Voyager Golden Record as having been located by an extraterrestrial intelligence who subsequently sent one of their own race to investigate intelligent life on Earth. In a Saturday Night Live segment ("Next Week in Review") in episode 64 of the show's third season, Steve Martin's character, a psychic named Cocuwa, predicts that the cover of Time Magazine for the upcoming week will show the four words "Send more Chuck Berry," which had supposedly been sent from extraterrestrials to Earth the week before.[7] In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, Brain changes the design of the Golden Disk so that it shows his and Pinky's body as that of the leaders of Earth. When aliens intercept the disk, they capture Pinky and Brain as pets, thinking them to be the leaders of Earth. In the speculative nonfiction series Life After People it is stated that, after a million years of travel in interstellar space, the Voyager probes will be so heavily damaged from micrometeoroid impacts that the disks will likely become unreadable. This process will be dependent on the frequency of particle impacts upon the spacecraft in interstellar space. A key plot element of the 1994 science fiction film Without Warning involves an alien race having intercepted Voyager and relaying part of the UN SecretaryGeneral's message back to Earth. In the movie Battlefield Earth an alien race finds the voyager probe and are interested in Earth because gold is extremely rare and valuable to them. In the Transformers spinoff Beast Wars, one of the discs is a key plot point that sets the series in motion. The disc is a plot element of an episode of The West Wing, titled "The Warfare of Genghis Khan".

Publications Most of the images used on the record (reproduced in black and white), together with information about its compilation, can be found in the 1978 book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan, F.D. Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman.[8] A CD-ROM version was issued by Warner New Media in 1992.[9] The CD-ROM was the result of Sagan's diligence in obtaining copyright clearances for many of the numerous musical passages and photographs that the original Golden Record contained, to allow for their inclusion in the Warner New Media release. (The copyright owners for the images and music on the actual record signed agreements which only permitted the replay of their works outside of the solar system.[citation needed]) In July, 1983, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the 45-minute documentary Music from a Small Planet, in which Sagan and Druyan explained the process of selecting music for the record and introduced excerpts.

See also Astrobiology portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Voyager Golden Record    

Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence Pioneer plaque Time capsule Arecibo message

References 1. ^ "Voyager - Interstellar Mission". Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA. January 25, 2010. Retrieved January 25, 2010. 2. ^ "Voyager - Golden Record". NASA. Retrieved September 23, 2010. 3. ^ Jon Lomberg: "Pictures of Earth". in Carl Sagan: Murmurs of Earth, 1978, New York, ISBN 0-679-74444-4 4. ^ "Voyager Record". NASA. Retrieved May 26, 2010. 5. ^ Ferris, Timothy (September 5, 2007). "The Mix Tape of the Gods". New York Times. Retrieved February 11, 2009. 6. ^ NASA: Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier 7. ^ http://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77rreview.phtml 8. ^ Sagan, Carl et al. (1978) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-41047-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-34528396-1 (paperback) 9. ^ Sagan, Carl et al. (1992) Murmurs of Earth (computer file): The Voyager Interstellar Record. Burbank: Warner New Media. 

Originally based on public domain text from the NASA website, where selected images and sounds from the record can be found.

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Official NASA JPL page about the Golden Record Multimedia showcase with the contents of the Golden Record Web site with all of the images, languages, and sounds on the Record. Cosmic Journey: The Voyager Interstellar Mission and Message U Iowa website with Termination Shock information

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John Cohen and the Voyager Record from The Celestial Monochord Article on Ithaca, NY connections to the Voyager Record, 30th anniversary, page 11 NYT 30th Anniversary OP-ED article by Timothy Ferris, who supervised the production of the disc NPR.org: Voyagers' Records Wait for Alien Ears David Munrow and the Voyager Golden Record WNYC Radiolab interview with Ann Druyan on her role in the making of the Voyager Record, May 12, 2006 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Voyager Record Cover Interview with Jon Lomberg on Australia's Radio National The Science Show, November 19, 2005

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Voyager program

Spinoffs from Space! "The greatest gain from space travel consists in the extension of our knowledge. In a hundred years this newly won knowledge will pay huge and unexpected dividends." - Professor Werner von Braun

Significant impacts and benefits from the space program include a dollar return of $2 to $1 for every dollar spent on the space program. Lives have been made better and have been saved here on Earth due to the medical and technological breakthroughs that have come out of space research. Just a few of the spinoffs from the space program are listed in the chart above and on the list below. Better than 1,300 documented NASA technologies have benefited U.S. industry, improved our quality of life and created jobs for Americans. The Space Shuttle Program alone has generated better than 100 technology spinoffs that are incorporated into the tools you use, the foods you eat, and the biotechnology and medicines you use to improve your health. Some of the shuttle's contributions are noted in the chart above and in the list below. 3-D Biotechnology Developed for space shuttle medical research, the 3-D biotechnology is a rotating cell-culture device that simulates the microgravity of space. This allows researchers to grow cells in three dimensions. The device may one day help researchers find cures for dangerous infectious diseases and offer alternatives to patients who need organ transplant surgery. Artificial Heart Technology used in space shuttle fuel pumps led to the development by a NASA and renowned heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey of a miniaturized ventricular-assist pump. The tiny pump_a mere 2 inches long, 1 inch in diameter, and weighing less than 4 ounces_is currently undergoing clinical trials in Europe, where it has been successfully implanted into more than 20 people. Artificial Limbs In responding to a request from the orthopedic-appliance industry, NASA recommended that the foam insulation used to protect the shuttle's external tank replace the heavy, fragile plaster used to produce master molds for prosthetics (artificial limbs). The new material is light, virtually indestructible, and easy to ship and store. Automotive Insulation

Materials from the space shuttle thermal protection system are used on NASCAR racing cars to protect drivers from the extreme heat generated by the racing car engines. Better Balance Devices built to measure the equilibrium of space shuttle astronauts when they return from space are now widely used by major medical centers to diagnose and treat patients suffering from head injury, stroke, chronic dizziness, and disorders of the central nervous system. Blood Serum Research An astronaut's body, once freed of gravity's pull, experiences a redistribution of body fluids that can lead to a decrease in the number of red blood cells and produce a form of space anemia. Monitoring and evaluating blood serum was required to understand these phenomena. However, existing blood-analysis technology required the use of a centrifugation technology that was not practical in space. NASA developed new technologies for the collection and real-time analysis of blood as well as other bodily fluids without the need for centrifugation. Bioreactor Developed for space shuttle medical research, this rotating cell culture apparatus simulates some aspects of the space environment, or microgravity, on the ground. Tissue samples grown in the bioreactor are being used to design therapeutic drugs and antibodies. Some scientists believe the bioreactor will routinely produce human tissue for research and transplantation. Byte Out of Crime Image-processing technology used to analyze Space Shuttle launch videos and to study meteorological images also helps law enforcement agencies to improve crime-solving videos. The technology removes defects due to image jitter, image rotation, and image zoom in video sequences. It also may be useful for medical imaging, scientific applications and home video. Computer Joysticks

Computer games can now be played with all the precision and sensitivity needed for a safe and soft space shuttle touchdown. A game-controlling joystick for personal computer-based entertainment systems was modeled after controls used in shuttle simulators. Astronauts use the joystick to practice runway landings and orbit maneuvering. Faster Diagnostics NASA technology was used to create a compact laboratory instrument for hospitals and doctor offices. This device quickly analyzes blood, accomplishing in 30 seconds what once took 20 minutes to accomplish with conventional equipment. Fire-Resistant Foam A unique foam developed for space shuttle thermal insulation and packing is now being used as thermal and acoustical insulation in aerospace, marine, and industrial products. Since it's also fire resistant, it's also being used for fire barriers, packaging, and other applications requiring either high-temperature or very low-temperature insulation in critical environments. For example, use of these foam products by airframe manufacturers such as Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Airbus provides major weight savings while retaining good thermal and acoustical properties in various products. Fire Sighting A sensitive, gas infrared camera used by NASA observers to monitor the blazing plumes from the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters is also capable of scanning for fires. Firefighters use this hand-held camera to pinpoint the hotspots of wildfires that rage out of control.

Gas Gauges A gas leak-detection system, originally developed to monitor the shuttle's hydrogen propulsion system, is now being used by the Ford Motor Company to produce a natural gaspowered car. Jet Stripping NASA developed a tool that uses powerful jet streams of water to strip paint and primer from the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters. A commercial version of this water jet is now being used to treat turbine-engine components, airframe components, large aerospace hardware, ships and other mechanical devices using only pure water. No hazardous chemicals are needed. Jeweler's Gem Jewelers no longer have to worry about inhaling dangerous asbestos fibers from the blocks they use as soldering bases. Space shuttle heat-shield tiles offer jewelers a safer soldering base with temperature resistance far beyond the 1,400°F generated by the jeweler's torch. Land Mine Removal The same rocket fuel that helps to launch the space shuttle is now being used to save lives_by destroying land mines. A flare device which uses leftover fuel donated by NASA, is placed next to the uncovered land mine and is ignited from a safe distance using a battery-triggered electric match. The explosive burns away, disabling the mine and rendering it harmless. Lifesaving Light Special lighting technology developed for plant-growth experiments on space shuttle missions is now being used to treat brain tumors in children. Doctors at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee use light-emitting diodes in a treatment called photodynamic therapy, a form of chemotherapy, to kill cancerous tumors. Meal Systems for the Elderly

Meal systems for the elderly uses NASA's food preparation expertise to improve the nutritional status of elderly people.

Product Labeling NASA needs to identify, track, and keep records on each of the thousands of heat-shield tiles on the space shuttle. This need required a labeling system that could be put on ceramic material and withstand the rigors of space travel to be readable after a flight. NASA developed high datadensity, two-dimensional, machine-readable symbol technology used to mark individual tiles. This novel method of labeling products with invisible and virtually indestructible markings can be used on electronic parts, pharmaceuticals, and livestock_in fact, on just about anything. Quick-Fit Fasteners Fastening items in space is a difficult task. A Virginia company developed a fastener for NASA that can be pushed on, rather than turned. These quick-connect fasteners are flexible and strong, and they have been used by NASA astronauts since 1989. The product is now in use by firefighters and nuclear power-plant repair technicians, and it has other commercial applications as well. Rescue 911 Rescue squads have a new extrication tool to help remove accident victims from wrecked vehicles. This handheld device requires no auxiliary power systems or cumbersome hoses and is 70% cheaper than previous rescue equipment. The cutter uses a miniature version of the explosive charges that separate devices on the space shuttle. Slick Products

A lubricant used on the transporter that carries a space shuttle to the launch pad has resulted in a commercial penetrating-spray lube, which is used for rust prevention and loosening corroded nuts. It's also a cleaner and lubricant for guns and fishing reels, and it can be used to reduce engine friction. Taking Temperatures Infrared sensors developed to remotely measure the temperature of distant stars and planets for the Space Shuttle Program led to the development of the hand-held optical sensor thermometer. When it is placed inside the ear canal, the thermometer provides an accurate reading in 2 seconds or less. Toys for Tots Already successful with its Nerf® toy products, Hasbro, Inc., wanted to design a toy glider that a child could fly. In benefiting from NASA windtunnel and aerodynamic expertise used in the Space Shuttle Program, Hasbro improved the flying distances and loop-to-loop stunts of its toy gliders. Tracking Vehicles on Earth Tracking information originally used for space shuttle missions now helps to track vehicles here on the ground. This commercial spinoff allows vehicles to transmit a signal back to a home base. Many cities today use the software to track and reassign emergency and public works vehicles. The technology is also used by vehicle fleet operations, such as taxis, armored cars, and vehicles carrying hazardous

cargo. There are many more practical benefits to space exploration. Advances in space technology have a dramatic effect on Earth technology. Benefits range from new ergonomic solutions for people who do repetitive work to industrial medical X-ray machines. Click here for links to more detailed descriptions of some of the new technologies that have benefited life on Earth. Click here to take a short tutorial of a large variety of spin-offs.

A workman inspects the results of convergent spray technology used to resurface a bridge on Interstate 65 near Lacon, Alabama. Originally developed as a heat-resistant coating to the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters. This environmentally friendly technology reduces the required worktime from days to hours.

Click here for the 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 on-line Spinoff Magazines from NASA featuring spinoffs from the following disciplines.            

Space Operations Space Science Space Access and Technology Aeronautics Health and Medicine Transportation Public Safety Consumer/Home/Recreation Environment and Resources Management Computer Technology Industrial Productivity and Manufacturing Technology Technology Transfer & Commercialization

Marshall Space Flight Center used technology from astronaut space suits to improve the safety of firefighter attire. This new attire is lightweight, fire-resistant, and heat-protective. The Technology Transfer Program at NASA helps business take advantage of NASA research to benefit technologies in the home, in hospitals, at the mall, at the airport, in the sports stadium, in museums, on farms, for science, at the firehouse, and for the environment. Click here for descriptions of all of the benefits that NASA has helped bring to your daily life. The commercial development of the space frontier is one of the greatest opportunities facing our nation. It is the growth of business into space that will continue to bring the benefits of space down to Earth and enrich the everyday lives of people here on Earth. NASA is encouraging businesses through the Space Product Development (SPD) Program. This program helps to ensure the continued economic growth of the U.S. and to bring the opportunities for new advances, technological understanding, products, and jobs to the public. Click here to read more about the SPD Program. The NASA Commerical and Technology Network (NCTN) highlights the successful transfer and commercialization of NASA-sponsored research and technology through information dissemination, technical assistance, technology licensing, cooperative research and development (R&D) and other forms of collaboration and partnership. Click here for a variety of NCTN stories that illustrate technology transfer and commercialization methods, and highlight the benefits of NASA technology to U.S. enterprises, U.S. economic growth and competitiveness, and the quality of life.

Astronaut relaxation techniques that use biofeedback have fostered stress-relieving commercial products. Bio-Ball® is a baseball game in which deep muscle relaxation controls events rather than joystick manipulation. Music Magic® is an interactive piano keyboard that responds to different levels of deep muscle relaxation. Click here for a free NCTM Spinoffs Screen Saver! Click here for the a bimonthly publication from NASA's Office of Aeronautics and Space Transportation Technology featuring stories on technology transfer and commercialization activities and accomplishments. IPIX fish-eye spherical cameras seamlessly blend two 180-degree images into one image. 360-degree panoramas can be viewed over the Web and are used by real estate agents and museums.

Click here to visit the Space Technology Hall of Fame at the U.S. Space Foundation. Its purpose is threefold: (1) to honor the innovators who have transformed technology originally developed for space use into commercial products; (2) to increase public awareness of the benefits of space spinoff technology; and (3) to encourage further innovation. You can even nominate a technology for induction into the Space Technology Hall of Fame! Download Aerospace Technology Spinoffs for a compliation of 10 outstanding NASA spinoffs prepared by the Foundation. Check out the U.S. Competitive Advantage, a quarterly newsletter of the NASA Regional Technology Transfer Centers, that highlights successful technology transfer and commercialization projects with U.S. industry. Search the Spinoffs Network Database. This database will help you to find products/services that incorporate NASA technology in such areas as health and medicine, environment, public safety, consumer/home/recreation, transportation, computer technology, and industrial productivity. Search the NCTM Database. Use the keywords "success story" or "spinoffs" to uncover stories posted on the Web sites of NASA Commercial Technology Network. Studies of astronauts floating in microgravity have yielded data useful in the design of ergonomic chairs that relieve the body of back and leg pain, as well as muscle fatigue in the workplace.

Questions to think about: 

What is the best reason to fund the space program? Why?

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Which of the spinoffs that you read about was a complete surprise to you?

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What other kinds of technology transfers do you envision coming out of future space programs to the Moon and Mars?

In the next chapter, you will read about the goals and activities of the first phase of the International Space Station Program, the international cooperative venture called Shuttle-Mir. Next... Shuttle-Mir

Phase 1 Shuttle Mir "Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation." - U.S. Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, 1958

Shuttle-Mir Phase 1 was a NASA program encompassing 11 space shuttle flights over a 4-year period from 1995 to 1998. Its goal was to build joint space experience and start joint scientific research. It was called Phase 1 because it was the first phase in the International Space Station (ISS) project that is currently under way. Phase 2 is the actual construction of the ISS that is occurring now. Seven American astronauts lived on board the Mir space station with the Russian cosmonaut crews for up to 6 months at a time. The missions were highlighted by crew exchange and resupply trips from the space shuttle to the Mir station. NASA

Cosmonaut Valeri Korzun and Astronaut John Blaha

learned how to successfully dock the shuttle with the Mir, which was advantageous to our knowledge of docking techniques and systems that we are now using with the ISS facility. A fire and a spacecraft crash during Phase 1 helped us to learn ways of coping with emergencies situations and helped lead to new training methods, safety precautions, emergency procedures, and structural and design concerns as we built and inhabit the ISS.

Cosmonaut Nicolai Budarinon on the Mir

NASA and Russian engineers, designers, technicians, and flight crews worked together to achieve a common goal melding their different work styles into a unified plan. The Shuttle-Mir Program was a complicated program incorporating the very different working styles and philosophies of the U.S. and Russian space agencies and their international partners.

The Russian space station Mir provided the long-duration living and working quarters for the international flight crews. Its oldest components have now been in orbit for 12 years, but it has been constantly renewed, updated, and resupplied to keep it in good condition. The collision of a Progress cargo vessel with the Spektr module in 1997 resulted in the loss of that module. However, joint efforts to locate the source of the leak and figure out ways to repair it allowed crews and engineers to gain experience working on a difficult.

NASA astronauts underwent specialized training before living on board Mir. As a prerequisite for the assignment, they had to acquire cosmonaut certification training in Star City. They also learned to speak Russian and attained proficiency with the experiments they would perform. The first American to live on board Mir reported feelings of loneliness and isolation, and steps were taken to prevent that happening to his successors. These experiences have led to greater understanding of the psychological as well as the physical stresses of long-duration spaceflight.

Astronaut Norman E. Thagard in a cosmonaut space suit in the Training Simulator Facility at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (Star City)

Both United States and international microgravity science partners used the facilities aboard Mir to conduct investigations in fluid physics, combustion, biotechnology, and materials science. The microgravity facilities aboard the Mir space station included furnaces, a glovebox, and a system to isolate experiments from the station’s vibration environment. Click here for an interview with American Mir astronaut Shannon Lucid. This Phase 1 Program, a precursor to the International Space Station, Astronaut Shannon Lucid aboard maintained a continuous the shuttle Atlantis after her 6 presence in space and months on board Mir developed the procedures and hardware required for international partnerships in space.

Crew of STS-79 and Mir-22

The Shuttle-Mir Program sought to answer vital questions about the future of human life in space. Crews could experience real-life issues that might otherwise arise with even more serious

consequences aboard the International Space Station. Mir was a test site for three main areas of experience and investigation. Cooperation Designing, building, and staffing the International Space Station are big jobs. As Phase 1 participants draw from the experience and resources of many nations to make it all happen, ShuttleAstronauts Shannon Lucid and Mir experience teaches John Blaha on Mir them how to work together and learn from one another. Click here for more on international cooperation in spaceflight. Investigation Mir offered a unique opportunity for long-duration data gathering. Station designers are used Mir as a test site for space station hardware, materials, and construction methods. Mir astronauts conducted scientific investigations into biological and material studies in microgravity. NASAMir scientists sought to answer vital questions about how humans, animals and plants function in space, how our solar system originated and developed, how we can build better technology in space, and how we can build future space stations. Click here for links to each of the experiments carried and completed on the Shuttle-Mir missions.

Operation

In the 35-year history of human spaceflight, no previous program had required so many transport vehicles, so much interdependent operation between organizations, and so much good timing. Shuttle-Mir was an opportunity to gear up for the major cooperative effort the International Space Station requires.

Click here for some great animations of the space shuttle Discovery docking with the Mir and some 36- views of the Mir space station.

Astronauts and Cosmonauts "The most valuable contribution of Phase 1 has been the way it brought U.S. and Russian personnel together." -Astronaut Frank Culbertson, Phase 1 Program Manager

The crews of the Shuttle/Mir flights were: Norman Thagard Mir 18 crewmember Launch - March 14, 1995 (Soyuz TM21) Landing - July 7, 1995 (STS-71) Shannon Lucid Mir 21 crewmember Launch - March 22, 1996 (STS-76) Landing - September 26, 1996 (STS79) John Blaha Mir 22 crewmember Launch - September 16, 1996 (STS-79) Landing - January 22, 1997 (STS-81) Jerry Linenger Mir 22/23 crewmember Launch - January 12, 1997 (STS-81) Landing - May 24, 1997 (STS-84) Mike Foale Mir 23/24 crewmember Launch - May 15, 1997 (STS-84) Landing - October 5, 1997 (STS-86)

Astronaut Mike Foale returns from Mir

Astronaut Dave Wolf hands over to Astronaut Andy Thomas

David Wolf Mir 24 crewmember Launch - September 25, 1997 (STS-86) Landing - January 31, 1998 (STS-89) Andy Thomas Mir 24/25 crewmember Launch - January 22, 1998 (STS-89) Landing - June 12, 1998 (STS-91)

Click here for an interview with Andy Thomas on board the Mir. Click here for links to biographies of all the Mir astronauts. The Soyuz spacecraft docked with Mir

Click here for the shuttle crews and links to each shuttle mission involved in the Phase 1 program, and click here for links to the Russian Mir commanders and flight engineers.

Click on any of the below links for many great videos from the Shuttle-Mir Phase 1 program. STS-91 Videos STS-81 Videos

Cosmonaut Pavel V. Vinogradov, Mir-24 flight engineer; Cosmonaut Salizan S. Sharipov, shuttle payload specialist representing the Russian Space Agency (RSA); Cosmonaut Anatoliy Y. Solovyev, Mir-24 commander - wearing the space helmet; and Astronaut Andrew S. W. Thomas

Click here to visit the S/MORE Shuttle/MIR Online Research Experience site. S/MORE is a K-12 project providing a behind-the-scenes look at the life sciences research conducted in space aboard the Mir station. Although S/MORE is no longer interactive, the archive will remain available indefinitely and will remain educationally useful.

Questions to think about: 

The fire on board the Mir contributed a lot of smoke to the cabin before it was extinguished. How could you train astronauts to be prepared for this kind of fire and smoke contingency?

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The crash of the Progress vehicle into the Mir space station caused a cabin leak. Luckily, the crew had time to seal off the module from the rest of the space station How would you train astronauts to be prepared for a sudden cabin leak contingency?

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How would you design the modules of the space station to compensate for possible cabin leaks due to crashes or micrometeorite debris?

In the next lesson, we will take you on a tour of the International Space Station, its goals, and its early achievements. Come explore the largest space laboratory ever to be built and meet the international partners that are helping to make it a reality for this new century in space.

Computer vision Eye robot

Poor eyesight remains one of the main obstacles to letting robots loose among humans. But it is improving, in part by aping natural vision Oct 21st 2010 The Economist ROBOTS are getting smarter and more agile all the time. They disarm bombs, fly combat missions, put together complicated machines, even play football. Why, then, one might ask, are they nowhere to be seen, beyond war zones, factories and technology fairs? One reason is that they themselves cannot see very well. And people are understandably wary of purblind contraptions bumping into them willy-nilly in the street or at home. All that a camera-equipped computer “sees” is lots of picture elements, or pixels. A pixel is merely a number reflecting how much light has hit a particular part of a sensor. The challenge has been to devise algorithms that can interpret such numbers as scenes composed of different objects in space. This comes naturally to people and, barring certain optical illusions, takes no time at all as well as precious little conscious effort. Yet emulating this feat in computers has proved tough. In natural vision, after an image is formed in the retina it is sent to an area at the back of the brain, called the visual cortex, for processing. The first nerve cells it passes through react only to simple stimuli, such as edges slanting at particular angles. They fire up other cells, further into the visual cortex, which react to simple combinations of edges, such as corners. Cells in each subsequent area discern ever more complex features, with those at the top of the hierarchy responding to general categories like animals and faces, and to entire scenes comprising assorted objects. All this takes less than a tenth of a second. The outline of this process has been known for years and in the late 1980s Yann LeCun, now at New York University, pioneered an approach to computer vision that tries to mimic the hierarchical way the visual cortex is wired. He has been tweaking his “convolutional neural networks” (ConvNets) ever since.

Seeing is believing A ConvNet begins by swiping a number of software filters, each several pixels across, over the image, pixel by pixel. Like the brain’s primary visual cortex, these filters look for simple features such as edges. The upshot is a set of feature maps, one for each filter, showing which patches of the original image contain the sought-after element. A series of transformations is then performed on each map in order to enhance it and improve the contrast. Next, the maps are swiped again, but this time rather than stopping at each pixel, the filter takes a snapshot every few pixels. That produces a new set of maps of lower resolution. These highlight the salient features while reining in computing power. The whole process is then repeated, with several hundred filters probing for more elaborate shapes rather than just a few scouring for simple ones. The resulting array of feature maps is run through one final set of filters. These classify objects into general categories, such as pedestrians or cars. Many state-of-the-art computer-vision systems work along similar lines. The uniqueness of ConvNets lies in where they get their filters. Traditionally, these were simply plugged in one by one, in a laborious manual process that required an expert human eye to tell the machine what features to look for, in future, at each level. That made systems which relied on them good at spotting narrow classes of objects but inept at discerning anything else. Dr LeCun’s artificial visual cortex, by contrast, lights on the appropriate filters automatically as it is taught to distinguish the different types of object. When an image is fed into the unprimed system and processed, the chances are it will not, at first, be assigned to the right category. But, shown the correct answer, the system can

work its way back, modifying its own parameters so that the next time it sees a similar image it will respond appropriately. After enough trial runs, typically 10,000 or more, it makes a decent fist of recognising that class of objects in unlabelled images. This still requires human input, though. The next stage is “unsupervised” learning, in which instruction is entirely absent. Instead, the system is shown lots of pictures without being told what they depict. It knows it is on to a promising filter when the output image resembles the input. In a computing sense, resemblance is gauged by the extent to which the input image can be recreated from the lower-resolution output. When it can, the filters the system had used to get there are retained. In a tribute to nature’s nous, the lowest-level filters arrived at in this unaided process are edge-seeking ones, just as in the brain. The top-level filters are sensitive to all manner of complex shapes. Caltech-101, a database routinely used for vision research, consists of some 10,000 standardised images of 101 types of just such complex shapes, including faces, cars and watches. When a ConvNet with unsupervised pre-training is shown the images from this database it can learn to recognise the categories more than 70% of the time. This is just below what top-scoring hand-engineered systems are capable of—and those tend to be much slower. This approach (which Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, a doyen of the field, has dubbed “deep learning”) need not be confined to computer-vision. In theory, it ought to work for any hierarchical system: language processing, for example. In that case individual sounds would be low-level features akin to edges, whereas the meanings of conversations would correspond to elaborate scenes. For now, though, ConvNet has proved its mettle in the visual domain. Google has been using it to blot out faces and licence plates in its Streetview application. It has also come to the attention of DARPA, the research arm of America’s Defence Department. This agency provided Dr LeCun and his team with a small roving robot which, equipped with their system, learned to detect large obstacles from afar and correct its path accordingly—a problem that lesser machines often, as it were, trip over. The scooter-sized robot was also rather good at not running into the researchers. In a selfless act of scientific bravery, they strode confidently in front of it as it rode towards them at a brisk walking pace, only to see it stop in its tracks and reverse. Such machines may not quite yet be ready to walk the streets alongside people, but the day they can is surely not far off. Science and Technology

100 UK university discoveries EurekaUK is a new report from Universities UK showcasing 50 years of research in UK universities. Here is its top 100 world-changing discoveries, innovations and research projects to come out of the UK universities in the last 50 years Wednesday July 5, 2006 Guardian Unlimited Section one: Healthy babies and birth control Producing the contraceptive pill In 1961 Herchel Smith, a researcher at the University of Manchester, developed an inexpensive way of producing chemicals that stop women ovulating during their monthly menstrual cycle. The first test tube baby Cambridge University embryologist, Robert Edwards and his colleague Patrick Steptoe, were the first to develop the IVF technique, to enable infertile women to have babies. Modern infertility treatment Medical scientists, led by Robert Winston at Imperial College London, have developed a number of tests that enable doctors to select newly created embryos that do not contain the genetic abnormalities.

Scans during pregnancy: seeing babies through sound Ian Donald invented the use of ultrasound for unborn babies at the University of Glasgow 40 years ago. Babies should sleep on their backs Peter Fleming and Jem Berry at Bristol University uncovered a link between the sleeping position of babies and unexplained deaths (Sids). Spina bifida and folic acid In 1974, Nicholas Wald, then at Oxford University, discovered a way of predicting whether babies are likely to have debilitating paralysing conditions, such as spina bifida and anencephaly (where the brain is small, or missing altogether). Smoking harms babies During the 1970s Harvey Goldstein and Neville Butler, then based at the National Children's Bureau in London, studied 17,000 babies born in 1958 and discovered that babies with mothers who smoked were lower in weight by an average of 200g than other babies. Section two. Healthier and longer lives Ultrasound to detect weakened bones In the 1980s Chris Langton at Hull University was the first to develop an early detection system for osteoporosis utilising "ultrasonic" waves. Magnetic Resonance Imaging In 1976 Peter Mansfield at Nottingham University was the first to publish a successful MRI scan of a living human body part - a finger. Using light emitting chemicals to detect disease Scientists have exploited a phenomenon called "chemiluminescence" - where chemicals emit light during reactions - to develop faster and more accurate tests for allergies, anaemia, cancer and HIV. Seeing the light: inside the human body: keyhole surgery and the endoscope Harold Hopkins showed in 1954 how a bundle of tiny pin-like glass fibres allowed light and images to be transmitted along them even when they were curved- fibre optics. Pace of change; patient-controlled pacemakers Leon Abrams and Ray Lightwood at the University of Birmingham developed and implanted the first patient-controlled variable rate pacemaker. Fluoride and tooth decay Neil Jenkins, Andrew Rugg-Gunn and John Murray, based at Newcastle University, found that higher levels of fluoride in water were linked to fewer incidents of tooth decay among children. The Holy Grail of hip surgeons In 1961, John Charnley performed the first operations to replace whole hips at Wrightington hospital in Wigan. The portable defibrillator: saving lives wherever The portable defibrillator, developed in the early 1970s by Frank Pantridge at Queen's University Belfast, has saved thousands of lives. The needle-free injection In 1993 Brian Bellhouse at Oxford University invented a way of giving vaccinations and other treatments without a needle. Smoking damages your health Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll published a study that found that 0.5% of men with lung cancer were life-long nonsmokers compared with 5% of men of the same ages in the general population. Combating a world killer: the Hepatitis B vaccine Ken Murray's search for a vaccine for Hepatitis B was prompted following a 1969 outbreak in Edinburgh that claimed 11 lives. Eradicating the Tsetse fly Scientists from the University of Greenwich have been working to eradicate the Tsetse fly from Africa through the use of a novel artificial cow.

Section three: Medicine under the microscope Revealing the recipe of life James Watson and the late Francis Crick unveiled the double helix structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA on February 28, 1953. How proteins work Max Perutz pioneered the study of how proteins, the essential constituents of all living beings, work, illuminating for the first time their complex molecular structures. The building blocks of insulin In the 1950s, at the University of Cambridge, Fred Sanger revealed the exact order of the 51 basic building blocks, or amino acids, that make up the insulin molecule. The body's feel-good hormone In 1975 Hans Kosterlitz and John Hughes at Aberdeen University were the first to show that the body produces endorphins naturally. Uncovering the body's defence mechanisms In 1967 Rodney Porter at Oxford University helped to uncover the secret to the body's defence mechanisms. Genetic fingerprinting In 1985 Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester developed a reliable way to detect differences in the DNA of individuals - a technique now known as genetic fingerprinting. Cancer and cell division In 1987 Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt at Cancer Research UK were the first to identify the key genes that govern and regulate the cell cycle and cell division, which paved the way for progress in treating cancer. Dolly the sheep- the first cloned adult animal Ian Wilmut, a scientist at the Roslin Institute (an associated institute of the University of Edinburgh) introduced the world to Dolly the sheep, the world's first animal cloned from a cell taken from an adult animal, in 1997. Stem cells Martin Evans' early research at Cambridge University led to his discovery of embryonic stem cells - cells so early in their development that they have the potential to grow into the different cells that make up the human body. Section four: Discoveries for the digital age Fibre optics: lighting up the world In the 1950s the "founding father of fibre optics" Narinder Kapany and Harold Hopkins at Imperial College London demonstrated that light could bend, given the right encouragement. Generating information for CDs, DVDs and the internet The internet, CDs and DVDs have all been made possible through a technology called strained quantum-well lasers, first proposed by Alf Adams at Surrey University. Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) George Gray and his colleagues at Hull University first created the first stable liquid crystals for use in LCDs. Holograms Dennis Gabor at Imperial College London, invented the method of producing holograms. Manchester: birth of the first working computer Two University of Manchester scientists, Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, are credited with running the world's first stored program computer. The scanning electron microscope The scanning electron microscope allows researchers to peek inside materials, right down to the level of their most basic building blocks, atoms, and by so doing, to design materials that have the right properties to fit many different purposes. 3D modelling by hand "ModelMaker" is the world's first hand held 3D laser scanner that can accurately and quickly scan physical objects to make colour three-dimensional computer models.

Using technology to assist disabled people Robotic Caterpillar developed by scientists at Staffordshire University allows people to perform basic day-to-day tasks by themselves. Glass, photocopiers and solar panels Nevill Mott researched into how materials conduct electricity and absorb light. Microscopic footballs Harry Kroto at Sussex University, and his US collaborators, revealed that carbon can exist as tiny spherical molecules, now known as fullerenes or buckyballs. Section five: Planes, trains and automobiles Improving engineering design The design and engineering of vehicles and buildings has been revolutionised by a technique called "finite element analysis", which was developed in part by UK academics. Motorway signs: the corporate identity of Britain The unique road signs that we see in the UK are all thanks to the work of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert at the Royal College of Art. Seeing atomic scale defects in metals In 1956 Peter Hirsch and his collaborators at Oxford University observed for the first time the motion of tiny dislocations in the atomic structure of metals. The birth of "aeroacoustics" James Lighthill at the University of Manchester was the first to understand how to minimise sound created in jet engines. Magnetically levitated trains In the 1950s Eric Laithwaite at Imperial College London designed the world's first magnetically levitating train. Microcab Researchers from Coventry University have developed technology that does not give rise to harmful fumes generated by traditional petrol powered engines. Computerised train schedules British Rail introduced the world's first computerised train schedule in 1963 - designed by Tony Wren at the University of Leeds. Survival in plane accidents Aircraft interiors and flight procedures are designed differently today thanks to the work of Helen Muir, at Cranfield University. Cooling the tube Academics at London South Bank University have been working to develop a revolutionary cooling system for the underground utilising one of the capital's natural resources - rising underground water. Road bridges Researchers at the University of Teesside and the universities of Sheffield and Liverpool have been developing new techniques to reduce accidents by cars crashing through road bridges. Sirens using directional sound Deborah Withington's "localiser" siren, developed at the University of Leeds in 1994, uses directional sound. Section six: Ideas for ideals Helping the poor During the 1970s Richard Morris Titmuss at the London School of Economics and Political Science meanwhile found that poverty, not family circumstances, were behind the behavioural problems and learning difficulties in children from oneparent families. The causes of poverty in the developing world Arthur Lewis, at the London School of Economics and at the University of Manchester, led economists to study how relations between local agriculture and modern markets combined to create poverty.

International accounts Richard Stone during the 1950s at Cambridge University, created the methods needed to produce national accounts. People do not suffer in famines because of food shortages In the 1980s, while at Oxford University, Amartya Sen was the first to conclude that people suffer in famines not because of food shortages, but because they lack the resources or other entitlements that are needed to obtain food. Slavery today Kevin Bales' work at the University of Roehampton identified that there are 27 million slaves in the world today. Language and learning In the 1960s and 1970s, Basil Bernstein, at the Institute of Education, University of London, showed how the design, organisation and control of school lessons should be tailored to suit particular children. Optimal taxation in an uncertain world In work begun in 1967, and continued at Oxford University from 1968, James Mirrlees found methods for analysing and calculating incentive systems when the behaviour to be affected cannot be directly observed. Improving the effectiveness of schools In 1979 Michael Rutter and fellow researchers at the Institute of Education, University of London showed that schools in poverty-ridden areas could be successful and revealed the secrets of their success. Pensions and old age Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend from the London School of Economics and Political Science made the case for wage-related state pensions, changing the course of legislation in the UK such as the Pensions Act of 1959. The nature of law The work of Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, one of the most important legal philosophers of the 20th century, changed the way that lawyers understand their world and their work. Hart argued that law and morality are independent but interconnected. Empowering the nations and regions Constitutional reforms in Scotland and Wales were greatly facilitated the groundwork of Robert Hazell and his team of researchers in the Constitution Unit at University College London. Voting trends and election swings The idea of election swing is an academic concept - created by David Butler of the University of Oxford and other researchers. Using the notion of swing it is much easier to understand why elections turn out the way they do. Section seven: Understanding ourselves The Third Way Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, argued that new political solutions were needed to respond to the modern globalised and constantly changing world we now inhabit. War crimes Alan John Percivale (A.J.P.) Taylor's seminal work, Origins of the Second World War (published in 1961), changed our perceptions of the war for ever. War and peace Michael Howard, who 40 years ago became the country's first professor of war studies at King's College London, continues to analyse the factors behind the latest wars around the world, asking whether peace will ever be possible. Sage of the ages Eric Hobsbawm, now professor emeritus at Birkbeck College, London, has charted the complex patterns and mechanisms that transformed the world during the 19th and 20th centuries. Cracking the ancient code Michael Ventris and John Chadwick had conquered what came to be known as "the Everest of Greek archaeology". Understanding the Celts Miranda Aldhouse-Green's work at the University of Wales, Newport has helped us understand the Celts to a much greater extent.

Shaping politics and debunking science One of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper helped to shape British politics in the 1980s and also changed our views of how science develops. Literal truths Richard Hoggart's 1957 work of literary sociology, The Uses of Literacy, stands as a pioneering study of what had been achieved, since the Universal Education Act of 1870, and the Butler Education Act of 1944, for the working classes of Britain. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru In December 2001 the first standard historical Welsh dictionary, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, was complete. Pevsner architectural guides Created by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, the guides were the first authoritative source of information on the architectural sites that populate the country, from ancient cathedrals, great country houses and their parks to Victorian public buildings and industrial monuments. Section eight: Understanding our environment Gaia: Earth as a living organism It was while studying the atmosphere on the planet Mars, that James Lovelock developed a new revolutionary way of thinking about the Earth. The "Gaia hypothesis" - the idea of the earth as a self-regulating living organism -- transformed public attitudes towards the environment. Detecting CFCs in the atmosphere James Lovelock discovered the electron capture detector in 1957 because of nuisance signals from a detector designed for someone else's scientific problem. Seafloor spreading and plate tectonics In 1963, two British marine geologists discovered huge matching magnetic 'stripes' in the rocks by ocean ridges. Understanding global warming The pioneering climatologist Hubert Lamb was instrumental in establishing the study of climate change as a serious research subject. Lasting impact of flooding Researchers at the University of Middlesex show that the immediate impact of flooding is just the start of the problems with long term physical and psychological impacts. Section nine: Space exploration We are all made of stardust In 1957 Fred Hoyle and three fellow scientists at Cambridge University proposed a startling theory: the elements were created in the oldest chemical factories in the universe: stars. The discovery of Pulsars In 1965 postgraduate student Jocelyn Bell joined Anthony Hewish in the astronomy department of Cambridge University to look for quasars, certain types of galaxies. Big bangs and singularities Stephen Hawking as a graduate student at Cambridge University, working with the theoretical physicist, Roger Penrose at Oxford University in the 1960's proved that singularities exist. Black holes are common in space Research by Ken Pounds and his team at Leicester University helped to provide the best evidence so far that black holes are common in the universe. Seeing a postage stamp on the moon Martin Ryle, an astronomer at Cambridge University, knew that the development of more powerful telescopes would hold the key to many unanswered space questions. Sensing the weather In the 1970s Fred Taylor at the University of Oxford pioneered a technique that would be applied across the entire solar system called infrared remote sensing.

Low-cost satellites Thanks to Martin Sweeting and fellow academics at the University of Surrey, low-cost satellites now exist to provide the crucial links for disaster relief all over the world. EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

The MIT factor: celebrating 150 years of maverick genius The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led the world into the future for 150 years with scientific innovations. Its brainwaves keep the US a superpower. But what makes the university such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas?

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Ed Pilkington The Guardian, Wednesday 18 May 2011

MIT students at a physics class take measurements in 1957. Photograph: Andreas Feininger/Time & Life Pictures Yo-Yo Ma's cello may not be the obvious starting point for a journey into one of the world's great universities. But, as you quickly realise when you step inside the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there's precious little about the place that is obvious. The cello is resting in a corner of MIT's celebrated media lab, a hub of techy creativity. There's a British red telephone kiosk standing in the middle of one of its laboratories, while another room is signposted: "Lego learning lab - Lifelong kindergarten." The cello is part of the Opera of the Future lab run by the infectiously energetic Tod Machover. A renaissance man for the 21st – or perhaps 22nd – century, Machover is a composer, inventor and teacher rolled into one. He sweeps into the office 10 minutes late, which is odd because his watch is permanently set 20 minutes ahead in a patently vain effort to be punctual. Then, with the urgency of the White Rabbit, he rushes me across the room to show me the cello. It looks like any other electric classical instrument, with a solid wood body and jack socket. But it is much more. Machover calls it a "hyperinstrument", a sort of thinking machine that allows Ma and his cello to interact with one another and make music together.

"The aim is to build an instrument worthy of a great musician like Yo-Yo Ma that can understand what he is trying to do and respond to it," Machover says. The cello has numerous sensors across its body, fret and along the bow. By measuring the pressure, speed and angle of the virtuoso's performance it can interpret his mood and engage with it, producing extraordinary new sounds. The virtuoso cellist frequently performs on the instrument as he tours around the world. When Machover was developing the instrument, he found that the sound it made was distorted by Ma's hand as it absorbed electric current flowing from the bow. Machover had a eureka moment. What if you reversed that? What if you channelled the electricity flowing from the performer's body and turned it into music? Armed with that new idea, Machover designed an interactive system for Prince that the rock star deployed on stage at Wembley Stadium a few years ago, conjuring up haunting sounds through touch and gesture. Later, two of Machover's students at the media lab had the idea of devising an interactive game out of the technology. They went on to set up a company called Harmonix, based just down the road from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which they developed Rock Band and Guitar Hero. From Ma's cello, via Prince, to one of the most popular video games ever invented. And all stemming from Machover's passion for pushing at the boundaries of the existing world to extend and unleash human potential. That's not a bad description of MIT as a whole. This maverick community, on the other side of the Charles River from Boston, brings highly gifted, highly motivated individuals together from a vast range of disciplines but united by a common desire: to leap into the dark and reach for the unknown. The result of that single unifying ambition is visible all around us. For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading us into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the warp and weft of modernity, the stuff of daily life that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel . . . the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on. And with that drive into modernity MIT has played no small part in building western, and particularly US, global dominance. Its explosive innovations have helped to secure America's military and cultural supremacy, and with it the country's status as the world's sole superpower.

A typical MIT student 'hack' or prank: a replica Apollo lunar module on top of the university's famous dome. Photograph: Erik Nygren As the school marks its 150th anniversary this month, it seems the US has never needed MIT's help more than it does today. The voices of the nay-sayers are in the ascendancy, questioning the US's ability to reinvent itself, to heal its wounded economy and sustain its leadership in the face of a burgeoning China. Questions too, are increasingly being asked about the ability of science and technology to address the world's problems, as optimism about the future slides into doubt. "There is a profound cynicism around the role of science that is debilitating for those in the enterprise, and devastating for this country," says MIT's president, Susan Hockfield.

"If we can't figure out how to make technological innovation the path to the future, then America is not going to have invented the future, some other country will have." She fears the US is increasingly suffering from what she calls a deficit of ambition. While 85% of MIT students are studying science and engineering, in the US as a whole the proportion is just 15%. That leaves the world's creative powerhouse vulnerable. "If you travel to Asia, to Shanghai or Bangalore, you feel the pulse of people racing to a future they are going to invent. You feel that rarely any more in the US." Which makes MIT's mission all the more essential. "MIT has an enormous responsibility right now," Hockfield says. "We feel that deeply. It needs to be a beacon of inspiration around the power of science and technology to create a brighter future for the world." No pressure, then. From the moment MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 it was clear what it was not. It was not like the other school up the river. While Harvard stuck to the English model of an Oxbridge classical education, with its emphasis on Latin and Greek as befitted the landed aristocracy, MIT would look to the German system of learning based on research and hands-on experimentation, championing meritocracy and industry where Harvard preferred the privileges of birth. Knowledge was at a premium, yes, but it had to be useful. This gritty, down-to-earth quality, in keeping with the industrialisation that was spreading through the US at the time, was enshrined in the school motto, Mens et Manus – Mind and Hand – as well as its logo, which showed a gowned scholar standing beside an ironmonger bearing a hammer and anvil. That symbiosis of intellect and craftsmanship still suffuses the institute's classrooms, where students are not so much taught as engaged and inspired. There is a famous film of one of MIT's star professors, the physicist Walter Lewin, demonstrating the relationship between an oscillating metal ball and mass. Halfway through the experiment he climbs on to the ball and starts swinging himself around the lecture theatre in a huge oscillating arch as though he were appearing in Spider-Man on Broadway. When Emily Dunne, an 18-year-old mechanical engineering student from Bermuda, was taking a course in differential equations recently, she was startled when her professor started singing in the middle of the lecture. "He was trying to show us how to understand overtones. It was kind of weird, but then everyone here is a little quirky," she says. Mind and Hand applies too to MIT's belief that theory and practice go together; neither is superior to the other, and the two are stronger when combined. That conviction is as strongly held by the lowliest student as it is by its Nobel laureates (there have been 50 of them). Take Christopher Merrill, 21, a third-year undergraduate in computer science. He is spending most of his time on a competition set in his robotics class. The contest is to see which student can most effectively programme a robot to build a house out of blocks in under 10 minutes. Merrill says he could have gone for the easiest route – designing a simple robot that would build the house quickly. But he wanted to try to master an area of robotics that remains unconquered – adaptability, the ability of the robot to rethink its plans as the environment around it changes, as would a human. "I like to take on things that have never been done before rather than to work in an iterative way just making small steps forward," he explains. "It's much more exciting to go out into the unknown." Merrill is already planning the start-up he wants to set up when he graduates in a year's time. He has an idea for a new type of contact lens that would augment reality by allowing consumers to see additional visual information. He is fearful that he might be just too late in taking his concept to market, as he has heard that a Silicon Valley firm is already developing similar technology. As such, he might become one of many MIT graduates who go on to form companies that fail. Alternatively, he might become one of those who go on to succeed, in spectacular fashion. And there are many of them. A survey of living MIT alumni found that they have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms between them

generate global revenues of about $1.9tn (£1.2tn) a year. If MIT was a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP of any nation in the world. Ed Roberts, MIT's professor of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, says such figures belie the fact that the institute is actually quite small, with just 10,000 students and about 1,000 faculty. "That's not big. But when all those people sign up to a mission to forward entrepreneurship, you have a dramatically bigger impact. In MIT, people are encouraged not just to think bold, but to do it boldly. "If you come up with a brilliant idea, that's OK. If you win a Nobel prize for your research, that's fine. But if you take that idea and apply it and make something transformative happen, then in MIT that's deeply admired." Inevitably, perhaps, there is a nerdy quality to the place that is reflected in one of its much cherished traditions – the student "hack". Hack is a misleading word here, as it is less to do with cracking into computers than with hi-tech high-jinks. "Prank" is a better description. In the student canteen you can see two of the most famous MIT hacks preserved for prosperity – a police car that was balanced on top of the institute's great dome, and a functioning fire hydrant that was erected in one of the lobbies. The latter hack, dating from 1991, was a wry comment on a former president's remark that "getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a fire hose". Then there is the Baker House Piano Drop, an annual institution ever since students first dropped a stand-up piano from a sixth-storey dormitory in 1972, then measured the impact that it made when it crashed on the pavement below. Wacky, perhaps. Geeky, certainly. But also extraordinarily difficult technically and requiring great imagination and ingenuity. MIT in a nutshell.

MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky in his office in the Stata Centre. Photograph: Rick Friedman/Corbis The current president offers two other important clues to MIT's success as a cauldron of innovation. The first is meritocracy. Hockfield is MIT's first female president, which is significant for an institution that since the 1990s has been battling against its own in-built discrimination against women. Women still make up only 21% of the faculty. But the gender balance of its students is almost 50:50, and about 40% of its staff members were born outside the US, underlying how MIT remains a huge magnet for talented individuals around the world. "It's one thing to talk about fostering creativity, but unless you strive for a true meritocracy you are driving away the best people, and what would be the point of that?" Hockfield says. MIT delights in taking brilliant minds in vastly diverse disciplines and flinging them together. You can see that in its sparkling new David Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which brings scientists, engineers and clinicians under one roof. Or in its Energy Initiative, which acts as a bridge for MIT's combined firepower across all its five schools, channelling huge resources into the search for a solution to global warming. It works to improve the efficiency of existing energy sources, including nuclear power as it has its own nuclear reactor, a lesser-known fact that MIT prefers not to brag about. It is also forging ahead with alternative energies from

solar to wind and geothermal, and has recently developed the use of viruses to synthesise batteries that could prove crucial in the advancement of electric cars. Before my tour of MIT ends I am given a taste of what this astonishing abundance of riches means in practice. In the space of half an hour I enjoy the company – in the flesh and spacially – of three of the towering figures of the modern age. I begin by dragging Tim Berners-Lee away from his computer screen to talk to me about how he ended up here. The Briton who invented the world wide web is part of the global brain drain to MIT. He created the web by linking hypertext with the internet in 1989 while he was at Cern in Geneva, but then felt he had no option but to cross the Atlantic. "There were a couple of reasons I had to come – one was because the web spread much faster in America than it did in Europe and the other was because there was no MIT over there." What is it about MIT that Europe could not offer him? "It's not just another university, it has this pre-eminent reputation and that in turn sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy: as soon as it becomes seen as the cool place to go for technology, then people will head there as I did. Even though I spend my time with my head buried in the details of web technology, or travelling the world, the nice thing is that when I do walk the corridors I bump into people who are working in other fields that are fascinating, and that keeps me intellectually alive." Berners-Lee offers to take me to my next appointment, and in so doing makes his point about MIT's selffulfilling prophecy even more eloquently. We walk along the squiggly corridors of MIT's Stata Centre, which was designed by Frank Gehry. It is a classic Gehry structure, formed from undulating polished steel and tumbling blocks of brushed aluminium that reminds Berners-Lee, he tells me, of the higgledy-piggledy Italian village one of his relatives grew up in. After negotiating a maze of passageways Berners-Lee delivers me at the door of Noam Chomsky. It sums up this wild place: the inventor of the web leads me through the work of a titan of modern architecture to one of the world's foremost linguists and anti-war activists. Chomsky is in a hurry. On the night of our meeting he will appear on stage alongside the Kronos Quartet at the world premiere of a new piece of music dedicated to him. The composer? Tod Machover, he of the Yo-Yo Ma cello. I put it to Chomsky that it's a revealing paradox that he, as a leading critic of the US's overweening military might, has been based, since the 1950s, at an institution that was centrally involved in erecting the burgeoning military-industrial complex he so incisively opposes. After all, MIT has long been a leader in military research and development, receiving huge sums in grants from the Pentagon. It was core to America's prosecution of the cold war, developing ever more sophisticated guidance systems for ballistic missiles trained on Moscow. "What people don't understand is that the role of the Pentagon," Chomsky says, "to a large extent was developing the technology of the future. There were some odd things about it. This building was also one of the centres of the antiwar resistance, and it was right in there, 100% funded by the Pentagon. But they didn't care." What does that tell us about MIT? "I was just left alone to my own devices. Other people took days off to run their businesses; I went off as an antiwar activist. But no one ever objected. MIT is a very free and open place." 

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101 gadgets that changed the world Compiled by Simon Usborne Published: 03 November 2007 The Independent Condom: The earliest remains of a condom, which date from 1640, were discovered in Dudley 1. Abacus, AD190 Use of the abacus, with its beads in a rack, was first documented in Han Dynasty China in about AD190, but the word dates to much earlier calculating devices. "Abacus" derives from the Hebrew ibeq, meaning to " wipe the dust" or from the Greek abax, meaning "board covered with dust", which describes the first devices used by the Babylonians. The Chinese version was the speediest way to do sums for centuries and, in the right hands, can still outpace electronic calculators. 2. Archimedes Screw, c.700BC Purportedly devised by the ancient Greek physicist Archimedes of Syracuse in the 3rd century BC to expel bilge water from creaking ships, the screw that bears his name in fact predates Archimedes by about 400 years. Recent digs have established that earlier screws, which are capable of shifting water " uphill", were used in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the 7th century BC. So effective was the device, it is still used today in several sewage plants and irrigation ditches. 3. Aspirin, 1899 Little tablets of acetylsalicylic acid have probably cured more minor ills than any other medicine. Hippocrates was the first to realise the healing power of the substance – his related ancient Greek treatment was a tea made from willow bark, and was effective against fevers and gout. Much later, in turn-of-the-century Germany, chemist Felix Hoffman perfected the remedy on his arthritic father, marketing it under the trade name Aspirin. 4. Atari 2600, 1977 The gaming industry today is worth $30bn (£15bn) and new titles are released to more fanfare (and fervour among legions of gaming nuts) than the biggest Hollywood blockbusters (see Big Game Hunters, p37). Not so in the 1970s, when consoles were hard-wired to play one or two crude games such as Pong. Atari changed that with the 2600, the first console to take an unlimited number of games cartridges. The 1978 release of Space Invaders sent sluggish early sales skywards, heralding the age of the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360. 5. Barbed wire, 1873 Symbol of oppression or a revolution in farming? It depends on which side of the fence you sit. Certainly, the world's most divisive invention was conceived not to keep people in or out, but cows. Joseph Gidden, a 60-year-old New Hampshire rancher was the first to invent a method for mass manufacturing of barbed wire and he made a fortune as miles of his wire criss-crossed American farms. Its low cost means it remains first choice for farmers and border guards. 6. Barcode, 1973 Barcodes were conceived as a kind of visual Morse code by a Philadelphia student in 1952, but retailers were slow to take up the technology, which could be unreliable. That changed in the early 1970s when the same student, Norman Woodland, then employed by IBM, devised the Universal Product Code. Since then, black stripes have appeared on almost everything we buy, a ubiquity fuelled by their price – it costs about a tenth of a penny to slap on a barcode. 7. Battery, 1800 For the battery we must thank the frog. In the 1780s, the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani discovered that a dead frog's leg would twitch when he touched it with two pieces of metal. Galvani had created a crude circuit and the phenomenon was

taken up by his friend, the aristocratic Professor Alessandro Volta, whose voltaic cells stacked in a Voltaic pile amazed Napoleon. The pile was also the first battery, whose successors power more than a third of the gadgets on this list. 8. Bicycle, 1861 The renowned 19th-century US feminist Susan B Anthony said in an interview in 1896: "I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." First devised as a gentleman's play thing in the 1820s, the push-powered hobby-horse quickly evolved to become the most classless form of transport, trundling by the millions along highways and byways all over the world. The French vélocipède, invented in 1861 by Pierre Marchaux, is widely considered to be the first true bicycle. 9. Biro, 1938 Had the Hungarian journalist Laszlo José Biró kept the patent for the world's first ballpoint pen, his estate (he died in 1985) would be worth billions. As it happened, Biró sold the patent to one Baron Bich of France in 1950. Biró's breakthrough had been to devise a ball-bearing nib capable of delivering to paper the smudge-resistant ink already used in printing. Today around 14 million Bic "Biros" are sold every day, perhaps making the pen the world's most successful gadget. 10. Blackberry, 1999 Ask the average office worker what he or she thinks of their Blackberry and they will variously call it (if they're not furiously tapping away at one) a boon and a curse. Developed by the Canadian firm Research in Motion and unleashed in 1999, the gizmo has provided legions of roaming desk jockeys with a hotline to their inboxes, and enabled armies of bosses to keep employees digitally shackled to their swivel chairs. The addictiveness of the device led it to be dubbed the "Crackberry". 11. Bow and arrow, 30,000BC The major preoccupation for pre-historic man was killing whatever moved, and devising ever more efficient means to do it. For centuries hunters relied only on what missiles they had the strength to throw, breaking bones with sticks and stones. That changed somewhere in Africa, sometime more than 30,000 years ago, when the earliest archers emerged with bows and arrows. The earliest recovered weapons, dating from around 9,000BC, were unearthed near Hamburg and were made of pine tipped with flint. 12. Bra, 1913 Before she patented her creation, the New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob, widely considered to be the inventor of the modern bra, had bought a sheer silk dress and devised a handkerchief and ribbon device as an alternative to unsightly corsets. She later sold her business for $1,500 to Warner Brothers Corset Company, who made $15m from her uplifting invention. Today, UK women spend £1.2bn on bras and pants each year; Marks & Spencer claims a market-leading 38 per cent share of sales. 13. Button, 1235 Which came first, the button or the buttonhole? The button; the ancient Greeks fastened tunics using crude buttons and loops, but it took the buttonhole to popularise the little discs of perforated plastic that adorn our clothes today. The earliest evidence comes from 13th-century German sculptures, which show tunics featuring six buttons running from neck to waist. Today, 60 per cent of the world's buttons are made in one Chinese town, Qiaotou, which churns out 15bn buttons a year (see also Zip). 14. Camcorder, 1983 It wasn't long ago that capturing moving images required a crew of grubby-handed technicians, yards of magnetic tape and a camera the size of a garden shed. These days, anyone can call themselves a film-maker. Sony was the first to produce a consumer camcorder with the release of its Betamovie in 1983. 15. Camera, 1826

The British polymath William Talbot, inventor of one of the earliest cameras (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had produced the earliest surviving photograph on a pewter plate in 1826), was inspired by his inability to draw. He described one of his sketches as "melancholy to behold", wishing for a way to fix on paper the fleeting photographic images that had been observed for centuries using camera obscura. His early developing techniques in the late 1830s set the standard for decades – he invented the negative/positive process – and photography passed swiftly from novelty into ubiquity, helped in large part, in 1888, by George Eastman's Kodak, the first camera to take film. 16. Cardiac pacemaker, 1958 It wasn't long ago that if you had a terminally dodgy ticker you would be sent to hospital and hooked up to a large, static piece of kit. Cue Swedish doctors Rune Elmqvist and Ake Senning, who in 1958 designed the first implantable pacemaker. Their device failed within hours and it took the US engineer Wilson Greatbatch to build a reliable model in his garden shed. He tested a prototype on a dog in 1958 and, in 1960, Henry Hannafield, 77, became the first human recipient. 17. CD, 1965 For the US inventor James Russell, the crackly sound of vinyl ruined music, so he patented a disc that could be read with a laser rather than a needle. Philips and Sony picked up the trail in the early 1970s, when they perfected the Compact Audio Disc or CAD, later shortened to CD. The first discs appeared in shops in the early 1980s and could play 74 minutes, on the insistence of Sony chief Akio Morita, who stipulated one disc could carry Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. 18. Clockwork radio, 1991 With the wind-up radio, not only did deprived areas of the developing world get access to public information about Aids and contraception, but we were gifted a true legend of invention. Trevor Bayliss (see My Secret Life, p7), a former professional swimmer, stuntman and pool salesman, devised the contraption after being horrified by reports from Africa that safe-sex education wasn't getting through. 19. Compass, 1190 Forced to rely on natural cues such as cliffs or spits of land, as well as crude maps and the heavens, early mariners would get hopelessly lost. Desperate for something more reliable, sailors in China and Europe independently discovered in the 12th century lodestone, a magnetic mineral that aligned with the North Pole. By 1190, Italian navigators were using lodestone to magnetise needles floating in bowls of water. The device set humanity on the course to chart the globe. 20. Condom, 1640 Egyptians donned them 3,000 years ago and the 16th-century Italian gynaecologist Gabriele Falloppio (he of the tubes) first advocated their use to prevent the spread of disease. The earliest remains of a condom, which date from 1640, were discovered in Dudley. In modern times, condoms, which until the 1960s were made from animal gut, have allowed generations of couples to avoid unwanted pregnancies and saved an inestimable number of lives by preventing the spread of diseases such as Aids. 21. Credit card, 1950 Before the advent of "plastic", consumers were forced to queue at bureaux de change and high-street banks to get their hands on cash. Today millions of us (there are 66 million credit cards in circulation in the UK – six million more than there are people) can get our hands on anything with just a swipe of a card, whether we can afford it or not (outstanding credit stands at about £60bn). We have the American Ralph Schneider, founder of the Diners' Club card, to thank for this dangerous convenience. 22. Digital camera, 1975 There could be no digital camera without the charge-coupled device (CCD), the "digital film" that captures images electronically. Developed in 1969, the widget allowed the Kodak engineer Steven Sasson to build the first digital camera, which resembled a toaster. The first, horribly blurry snap (of a female lab assistant) he took boasted just 0.01 megapixels and took almost a minute to record and display, but in those 60 seconds, Sasson had transformed photography – today digital cameras have all but killed off film and made photographers of us all.

23. Digital TV recorder, 1999 In homes full of slimmed-down TVs and gleaming DVD players, video cassettes, with their clunky heads and jam-prone magnetic tape, look decidedly dated and are a more common site at car boot sales than on living-room shelves. That is thanks, in part, to the rise of the digital recorder, which (almost) silently lays down programmes on a computer hard disk. The first consumer systems came from ReplayTV and TiVo, and have been joined in the UK by Sky+, as well as cable and Freeview hard-disk recorders. 24. Digital watch, 1972 Watches made the short journey from bosom to wrist during the 19th century, due in part to the craze among middle-class women for cycling. Their new, more convenient position made sense and they developed quickly. Rolex made the first waterproof watch in 1926 and a year later the ultra-accurate quartz-crystal controlled clock arrived. Watches finally went digital in the 1970s when the Hamilton Company developed the Pulsar, which sported lights in place of hands; the liquid crystal display (LCD) followed in 1977. 25. Drum, 12,000BC It's a mystery as to what made man first knock on a bone or a gourd with no other intention than to make a nice noise, but thank goodness he did – it is hard to imagine a world without music. Evidence of music-making dates back tens of thousands of years, but it is thought the drum was the first instrument to be built, possibly as early as 12,000BC. The earliest tuneable instrument, the stringed harp, was first plucked in modern-day Iraq in around 4,500BC. 26. Dynamite, 1867 Few inventions, save perhaps the atomic bomb, can claim to have shaken the world in quite the same way as nitroglycerine. And few inventions can have claimed so many lives. The first to succumb to the explosive force of Dynamite was the inventor's brother; Alfred Nobel's youngest sibling perished when an early experiment to stabilise nitroglycerine by adding a chalky material called kieselguhr, went horribly wrong. In 1896, Nobel used his Dynamite fortune to endow the Nobel Prizes. 27. Electric shaver, 1928 For sensitive-skinned men who daily face the choice between tearing their cheeks to shreds or growing a scraggly beard, the electric razor is a godsend. They can thank a retired American soldier for the invention. While working in Alaskan mines before returning to service in the First World War, Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Schick struggled with foam and blades in the sub-zero temperatures. His prototype electric alternative resembled modern razors, but it was attached to a bulky external motor: self-contained shavers appeared in 1928. 28. Eraser, 1770 Strange, perhaps, that it took 200 years after the invention of the lead pencil for somebody to dream up the eraser. Until then, draughtsman had to use bread, but the English engineer Edward Naine saw potential in natural rubber to do a better job. It did, but, like bread, was perishable. The advent of more durable vulcanised rubber in 1839 (a method pioneered by the tyre tycoon Charles Goodyear) sealed the future of the eraser. Hymen Lipman conceived the all-in-one pencil eraser in 1858. 29. Fax machine, 1843 A young person today might struggle to pick a fax machine out of a line-up of obsolete office gadgets, but most desk jockeys still familiar with the device probably don't realise it is more than 160 years old. Yes, they didn't have digital displays and printouts that say "OK", but the device built by the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain in 1843, which comprised a pen attached to a pendulum kept in motion by electromagnetic impulses, is remarkably similar in principle to the modern machine. 30. Fibre optic cable, 1966 In an experiment requiring nothing more complicated than two buckets, a tap and some water, the Irish scientist John Tyndall in 1870 observed that a flow of water could channel sunlight. Fibre optics – tubes of glass or plastic capable of

transmitting signals much more efficiently than traditional metal wire – operate under the same principles and were perfected by Charles Kao and George Hockham in 1966. Today, thousands of miles of cables link all corners of the globe. 31. Fire, 590,000BC Fire, like air or water, is nothing new – but the ability to control it is. Well, quite new. Evidence suggests early man used fire more than a million years ago, but the earliest signs that we had learned to command it date from nearly 800,000 years ago. Archaeologists at a dig in Israel in 2004 discovered clusters of burnt flint tools, evidence of hearths or campfires. The ability to start fire in a flash only came with the invention of the match in 1827 (see Match). 32. Fish hook, 30,000BC It isn't a complicated device, the fish hook – just a bit of bent wire with a sharpened end – but throughout most of human history it has allowed man to nab a meal without risking life and limb hunting wild animals, or busting a gut in the fields. The earliest hooks, which probably date to around 30,000BC, were in fact carved in wood. Others have been fashioned from horns, shells, thorns or even, in the case of the Easter Islands, the thigh bones of deceased fishermen. 33. Floppy disk, 1971 They may seem horribly dated today (many modern computers don't even ship with floppy disk drives) but for more than 20 years – aeons in the digital age – they were the only effective means to carry data between computers. The first floppies, invented in 1971 by IBM geek Alan Shugart, held just 100 kilobytes; modern disks can store 1.44 megabytes. Today, the largest iPod can store the same amount of data as 113,778 floppy disks, which in a stack, would match the height of London's BT Tower. 34. Flushing toilet, 1597 Thomas Crapper, right? Wrong. Sir John Harrington, author, courtier and godson to Queen Elizabeth I, is the true inventor of the flush toilet. The miscredited Crapper, whose name helped build the urban myth that has surrounded him for centuries, indeed had a hand in toilets, but Harrington beat him to it, installing lavatories for the Queen at Richmond in the late 16th century. The "Crapper" (the world crap existed long before Thomas) was improved with the invention of the "S" bend in 1775. 35. Fridge, 1834 The greatest kitchen convenience was the death of the greengrocer, allowing harried professionals to keep perishables "fresh" for days at a time. But few people (greengrocers aside) would bemoan their invention. Jacob Perkins was the first to describe how pipes filled with volatile chemicals whose molecules evaporated very easily could keep food cool, like wind chilling your skin after a dip in the sea. But he neglected to publish his invention and its evolution was slow – fridges would not be commonplace for another 100 years. 36. Gore-Tex, 1972 Hard to believe that, in 1924, Edmund Hillary set off for Everest wearing a tweed jacket and plus fours. Whether or not he reached the summit, chances are he would have kept a whole lot warmer with the help of Gore-Tex. Robert Gore started a career in innovation with insulated electrical wire but made his name by creating a breathable yet waterproof fabric (its key feature being an incredible 1.4bn pores per square inch, each 20,000 times smaller than a water droplet). 37. GPS, 1978 Determining your location used to require such cumbersome devices as a map, compass and ruler. Now a single press of a button (and up to 32 satellites) will pinpoint your precise position to within a couple of metres. Great for explorers, paramedics and pilots – not so good for unwitting Latvian lorry drivers sent on cross-country wild goose chases by budget sat-navs. Developed by the US military in the 1970s, the Global Positioning System has been globally available since 1994. 38. Guillotine, 1792 It is surely one of the greatest ironies that the inventor of the most efficient machines of execution was a campaigner against the death penalty. Until such a ban could be passed, the French physician and penal reformer, Joseph Ignace

Guillotin, proposed the device as a swift and relatively " humane" alternative to public quartering or beheading by blunt axe. But it stuck; the guillotine was used in France for the last time in 1977 and remained the only legal method of execution until Paris finally abolished the death penalty in 1981. 39. Gun, 14th century It seems that black powder, as gunpowder was originally called, emerged in 11th-century China as a medicine, but it was the mixture's explosive properties that sparked interest in Europe. It led to the creation of the cannon in the 13th century, which transformed warfare, greatly boosting the force of mediaeval armies. One of the biggest steps on the road to the modern gun was Smith and Wesson's metal-cased cartridge, first fired in 1857. 40. Internal combustion engine, 1859 It may have fallen firmly out of favour in today's green-aware world, but the importance of the internal combustion engine is impossible to overstate. Without it, we could not drive, fly, travel by train, build factories, motor across oceans, trim our lawns ... the list is endless. Credit for the first working internal combustion engine goes to the Belgian inventor Étienne Lenoir, who converted a steam engine in 1859. It boasted just one horsepower and was woefully inefficient, but spawned the billions of engines that have been built since. 41. iPod, 2001 Can it really be just six years since the now ubiquitous slab of sleek white plastic and polished steel burst on to the gadget scene and helped to revolutionise the music industry? Conceived by Apple's British design luminary, Jonathan Ive, the iPod, the largest of which can store more than 30,000 songs, has sold an astonishing 110m units in 14 incarnations (that's an average 2,000 iPods an hour). 42. Kettle, 1891 In tea-obsessed Britain, where would we be without the humble kettle? It has been said that the kitchen-counter staple is found in more homes than any other appliance. Non-electric kettles date back thousands of years but would leave you waiting ages for your brew. The first electric kettle was developed in Chicago in 1891 but even that took 12 minutes to boil water. Things soon got quicker and today's speediest kettles can boil two cups in little over a minute. 43. Laptop, 1982 A sturdy lap was required to support the earliest portable computers. The Osborne 1, released in 1981, often stakes a claim as the first laptop but it looked more like a sewing machine than today's sleek machines, and tipped the scales at more than 10kg. Introduced a year later, the GriD Compass 1100, designed by Brit Bill Moggridge, is a more likely contender. It was the first laptop to sport the now standard "clamshell" case and its lightweight build (5kg) made it a hit with Nasa and US paratroopers. 44. Laser, 1960 Laser, as any quiz night regular will know, stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. It was Albert Einstein who laid the foundations for its development, when in 1917 he said atoms could be stimulated to emit photons in a single direction. The phenomenon was first observed in the 1950s and the physicist Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960. His device was based around a ruby crystal that emitted light "brighter than the centre of the sun". 45. Lawnmower, 1830 Back in the old days only the very wealthy could afford to pay teams of scythe-wielding labourers to keep their pristine lawns in check (or get sheep to do the job, and put up with with droppings between the toes). A farmer's son and textile mill labourer called Edwin Budding changed that in 1830, when, inspired by rotary machines used to trim velvet, he joined forces with the businessman John Ferrabee to build a self-powered cylinder mower almost identical to those still in use. 46. Lead pencil, 1564

Any schoolboy worth his salt knows pencils do not in fact contain potentially poisonous lead. And they never did; the pencil arrived with the discovery in 1564 in Borrowdale, Cumbria, of a pure deposit of graphite, then thought to be a type of lead. A year later, the German naturalist Conrad Gesner described a wooden writing tool that contained the substance. Nicolas Conté perfected the pencil more than a century later by mixing graphite with clay and gluing it between two strips of wood. 47. Light bulb, 1848 So new-fangled was the light bulb in the 19th century, it came with a warning: "This room is equipped with Edison Electric Light. Do not attempt to light with match. Simply turn key on wall by the door. The use of electricity for lighting is in no way detrimental to health, nor does it effect the soundness of sleep." Joseph Swan in fact developed a bulb before Edison, but the pair later joined forces and share credit for creating the gadget we perhaps take for granted more than any other. 48. Locks, 2000BC Listen to the jangle of the average set of keys and it's clear just how important security has become in today's trustnobody world. The Egyptians were the first to put things under lock and key about 4,000 years ago (clever knots were one earlier solution). The wooden contraption included a key that lifted pins, allowing a latch bar to slide free. The device was similar in principle to the pin-tumbler lock invented in 1848 by Linus Yale, whose name still adorns billions of keys. 49. Machine gun, 1884 Hiram Maxim, the London-based American man who invented the world's first totally automatic machine gun, was supposedly inspired by an American friend, who said the route to riches was to "invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility" . It worked: Maxim's brutally efficient gun was adopted by several armies and its successors inflicted horrific casualties in the First World War. Displaying an apparent penchant for deadly devices, Maxim also invented the only slightly less destructive common mousetrap. 50. Mechanical clock, 1092 The time on the earliest clocks could be heard and not seen, indeed the word "clock" comes from the Latin clocca (bell). The most elaborate early examples date to 11th-century China, when a monk described a water-powered time keeping device. The first known public clock appeared on the Viscount of Milan's palace in 1335. The big revolution in clock design came with the introduction of the pendulum in the 17th century, allowing everyone from traders to farmers and military commanders to know precisely what the time was. 51. Microchip, 1958 It is impossible to sum up how much these tiny slivers of silicon and metal have transformed our lives. They feature in everything from toys to tanks and motorbikes to microwaves but when, in 1952, the engineer Geoffrey Dummer proposed using a block of silicon, whose layers would provide the components of electronic systems, nobody took him seriously and he never built a working prototype. Six years later, US engineer Jack Kilby took the baton and built the world's first monolithic integrated circuit, or microchip. 52. Microscope, 1590 When the British polymath Robert Hooke published his 1665 masterpiece, Micrographia, people were blown away by its depictions of the miniature world. Samuel Pepys called it "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life". Until then, few people knew that fleas had hairy legs or that plants comprised cells (Hooke coined the term "cell"). Zacharias Janssen, a Dutch spectacle maker, had invented the first microscope in 1590, although it was then regarded as a novelty rather than a revolution in science. 53. Microwave oven, 1946 The first victim of the microwave was a peanut bar. It had been in the pocket of American engineer Dr Percy Spencer, who was working in range of the radio waves emitted by a magnetron, a key component in radar. It melted, so an intrigued Spencer applied the magnetron to an egg, which exploded. By the end of the year, the first prototype had been built and commercial ovens (costing £30,000 in today's money) soon followed, eventually producing dodgy dinners by the million.

54. Mobile phone, 1947 There are more than two billion mobile phones in the world, and the EU is home to more "cells", as the American's call them, than people. It is difficult to quantify the economic and social impact of the device – of all the gadgets in the average person's arsenal, it is surely the one we would be worst off without. Those who disagree can blame Bell Laboratories for their invention; the firm introduced the first service in Missouri in 1947. Widespread coverage in Britain did not begin until the late 1980s. 55. Mouse, 1964 Early computers were the size of houses and sported a bewildering array of buttons and sliders. With the explosion in the amount of information pinging across screens around the world, a simple way to manage it all was required. The US radar technician Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute took up the challenge and produced the first "X-Y position indicator" prototype in 1964. Its tail-like cable lead to the mouse moniker, and their population is expected to top a billion by the end of next year. 56. Nintendo Gameboy, 1989 On its release in the late 1980s, the Gameboy was surely the most coveted piece of kit in the playground, but dig one out of the attic today and its two-tone grey face and titchy screen give few clues to its extraordinary success. Many companies would try to better it but none could come close to toppling the Gameboy, and its stable of killer games, including Tetris and Super Mario Land, as the best-selling gaming system of all time (worldwide sales reached well over 100m). 57. Noise-cancelling headphones, 1988 So they haven't cured pandemics or furthered man's understanding of the universe, but for airline passengers allergic to the sound of crying babies or easily distracted office workers, headphones that block out the ambient din are a life-saver. The story goes that, on a flight to Europe, Amar Bose, the billionaire founder of the Bose audio equipment firm, was so unimpressed with the complementary pair of cans, he set about making a pair that could generate sound waves to neutralise incoming noise. 58. Paper clip, c.1892 The simplicity of the paperclip made it an instant hit – an example of that rare marriage of aesthetics and function. Bentwire clips cropped up in American offices as early as 1867 but it was the British-designed Gem paper clip, which was never patented, that took off and is still produced by the billion (18bn a year in the US). An 1894 advert for the clips read, " Don't mutilate your papers with pins or fasteners, but use the Gem Paper Clip." 59. Paper, AD105 Modern means of communication have only slightly diminished our dependence on paper, but for 500 years its existence remained secret. The Chinese began using bark, bamboo fibres, hemp and flax to mill the first reams almost 2,000 years ago, but it took centuries for paper to envelop the world, first taking in Japan, then Central Asia and Egypt. Until then, writers could still write, but the parchment, vellum or silk used by early scribes was prohibitively expensive. 60. PC, 1977 The computers IBM were producing for businesses as early as the late 1950s cost about $100,000 (almost £500,000 today), so the idea of one in every home remained a dream. But that changed in the 1970s when a group of chip-wielding geeks based in California began tinkering in garages. One of the brightest techies operating in what is now dubbed Silicon Valley was Steve Jobs, whose Apple II, launched in 1977, was the first consumer PC to resemble the machines that went on to transform our lives. 61. Plough, AD100 Means to turn over soil are as old as agriculture – the first farmers in the Middle East used tree branches or roots to grub up fields – but when farming spread to the heavier ground of northern Europe, a more sturdy solution was required. The carruca, which comprised a blade to dig the earth and a mouldboard to turn over the furrow, set the principles for the early heavy plough and, pulled by oxen or horses, contributed, eventually, to the agricultural revolution.

62. Pneumatic tyre, 1845 Back when cars relied on real horse-power and bicycles weighed a ton, travellers were forced to endure bone-jarring rides over the bumps and potholes of the nation's primitive roads. Cue Robert Thomson, a civil engineer who realised the potential of air to soften the way. In 1845, he patented the use of pneumatic leather tyres on bikes. In 1888, a Scottish vet called John Dunlop devised the more durable rubber inner-tube model that helped inflate the age of the automobile. 63. Pocket calculator, 1971 Even the legendary superbrain Isaac Newton was known to complain about the time it took to do simple sums on paper. He would have been delighted by the introduction in 1948 of the Curta calculator, a hand-cranked, barrel-shaped calculator small enough to fit in the pocket and capable of basic calculations. The first slimline digital pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive, which cost about three times the average weekly wage but set the standard. 64. Polaroid camera, 1947 Edwin Land probably did not predict his photographic innovation would one day allow a generation of couples to take naughty pictures without fear of exposure at the developer's. He was inspired by his daughter, Jennifer, who asked why she had to wait so long to see her holiday snaps. He unveiled the Land Camera in 1947, and the first instant camera became popular with police officers and artists (and those naughty couples – one luxury hotel in Mexico provides a Polaroid camera in every room). 65. Pop-up toaster, 1926 Toast is nothing new – the Romans held bread over flames to prolong its edible life – but it took convenience-obsessed America to come up with a contraption that would do it for us. In 1926, the Toastmaster popped into general stores, but it took another 18 years for the wedding present favourite to land in the UK, where Morphy-Richards introduced the first model in 1948. Last year Americans bought 12.3m toasters. 66. Post-it note, 1973 The scourge of office cleaners and the obsession of list freaks, Post-It notes have peeled out of the factory of US manufacturing giant, 3M, in their billions since their serendipitous invention nearly 35 years ago. It was a 3M designer called Art Fry who, frustrated by errant hymnbook page markers at choir practice, realised the need for a low-tack sticky note. He applied a weak glue to yellow paper and the Post-It, now sold in more than 100 countries and in 62 colours, was born. 67. Printing press, 1454 For the large part of modern civilisation, the written word reigned supreme as the only means of communication. The Chinese were the world's first printers – they practised block printing as early as 500 AD – but a German goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg was the first to construct a press that comprised moveable metal type, which, when laid over ink, could print repeatedly on to paper. In 1454 he used the revolutionary system to print 300 bibles, of which 48 copies survive, each worth millions of pounds. 68. Qwerty keyboard, 1868 Little surprise that the idea for a practical typing machine capable of churning out pages faster than the speediest penwielding copytaker was born in the offices of a newspaper. The journalist Christopher Latham Sholes of the Milwaukee News devised the first typewriter, but its alphabetical layout meant common letters in close proximity frequently jammed at high typing speeds. To minimise such clashing, Sholes conceived the Qwerty layout, which outlived mechanical keyboards. 69. Radio, 1895 We were nearly denied radio by an uncharacteristic lack of foresight shown by one Heinrich Hertz who, while demonstrating electromagnetic waves in 1888, told his students, "I don't see any useful purpose for this mysterious, invisible electromagnetic energy." Fortunately, Alexander Popov, a Russian, and the Italian-Irish inventor Guglielmo Marconi, saw the potential in the technology and separately sent and received the first radio waves. Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message (three dots for the letter "S") in 1901.

70. Robot, 1921 The term robot dates to 1921, when the Czech playwright Karel Capek referred to put-upon serfs as "robots" in his play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots). Eventually they cause unemployment and lead to the collapse of society. That hasn't happened yet in the real world, but nearly 90 years since Capek's vision, the rise of the robot has gathered pace as a gallery of droids and autonomous machines walks, crawls and rolls out of robotics labs around the world, able to do anything from building cars to performing brain surgery. 71. Rubber band, 1845 Debate about the origins of the humble rubber band stretches back centuries, but the likeliest candidate for its conception is thought to be one Stephen Perry of the London-based rubber manufacturing company Messers Perry and Co. He patented the invention in 1845 to hold papers or envelopes together. Their manufacture (sleeves of vulcanised rubber are chopped into bands) and function has changed little since. Today, Royal Mail gets through 342 million red rubber bands a year. 72. Saddle, AD200 The horse had almost joined the woolly mammoth and the T. rex on the list of extinct species when man first domesticated it in around 4,000BC. The beast's fortunes quickly changed and the horse soon became man's most useful (if not best) friend. Early ranchers and riders rode bareback or on blankets, limiting the efficiency with which they could hunt. These rattled horsemen had to wait until AD200 to get their bums on a saddle, which is thought to have been invented by Chinese nomads. 73. Safety razor, 1895 Generations of sore-faced inventors struggled to make a razor blade for shaving that was lethally sharp yet safe, until one man came up with the solution. King Camp Gillette of America, possessor of the greatest name in the history of innovation, devised in the 1890s the world's first razor fitted with disposable blades mounted in safety housing. The system made him a fortune – by 1903 he had sold 12 million blades. In 2005, Procter & Gamble bought Gillette for $57bn. 74. Sellotape, 1937 The earliest reference to sticky tape turns up in a 17th-century book about music, which describes how lute makers used "little pieces of Paper, so big as pence or two pences, wet with Glew" to help make their instruments. But it wasn't until the 1930s that Colin Kininmonth and George Gray, inspired by a French patent, coated Cellophane film with a natural rubber resin. They came up with the name Sellotape, and it stuck. 75. Sewing machine, 1830 Humans had used bone and horn to sew for tens of thousands of years, but the first patent for a machine that could do it without the need for such cumbersome devices as pins and thimbles was submitted in 1790. It didn't work. The first functioning machine was invented by Frenchman Barthélemy Thimonnier in 1830, but his machines were destroyed in riots. In 1845, Elias Howe built the contraption that would spawn the modern day machine, including those built by one Isaac Merritt Singer. 76. SMS, 1992 Linguist purists H8 txtspk. The Short Message Service (SMS) has developed the thumbs of a generation of communicators who have devised their own shorthand, textspeak, to stay in touch (and uncover extra-marital affairs). The British engineer Neil Papworth sent the first (unabbreviated) text 15 years ago. It read: "MERRY CHRISTMAS". Their popularity exploded in the late 1990s and now in the UK alone we send millions every day (a record 214 million last New Year's Eve). 77. Spectacles, 1451 The correcting qualities of stone have been known for millennia – Emperor Nero was thought to use emerald to watch (presumably green-tinted) gladiatorial games. Modern glasses were first depicted in a 1352 portrait of Hugh de Provence, and the first evidence of their sale dates to 1450s Florence. The US founding father Benjamin Franklin is credited with the

invention of bifocals in 1784 and useable contact lenses followed in 1887. Today, an estimated 75 per cent of UK adults sports a pair of specs. 78. Stethoscope, 1819 You would think in this age of electron microscopes and robot surgeons that a bit of rubber tubing attached to headphones and a diaphragm would have joined the head mirror and the cauterising iron in the graveyard of medical innovation. But so simple and effective is the stethoscope that the sight of one slung about the shoulders of a white coated doctor remains as familiar as ever. The flamboyantly monikered Frenchman, René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec, invented the first device that amplified the sounds of the human body. 79. Swiss Army Knife, 1897 Every camper's favourite multitool was originally called the Offiziersmesser (officer's knife) but that was a bit of a mouthful for the American soldiers who popularised it outside its landlocked birthplace, so they called it the Swiss Army Knife. It originated in Schwyz, Switzerland, more than a 100 years ago, after a surgical equipment manufacturer was dismayed to learn Germany supplied the Swiss army with knives. The company he founded, Victorinox, still supplies Swiss soldiers and makes 5.5 million knives a year. 80. Syringe, 1844 Syringe devices have been in use since the 9th century, when an Egyptian surgeon used a glass suction tube to remove cataracts from a patient, but the first hypodermic syringes with needles fine enough to pierce skin did not appear until the 1840s. The Irish physician Francis Rynd used the first syringe to inject a sedative to treat neuralgia, revolutionising medicine with a single push of a plunger. 81. Telephone, 1876 Frenchman Charles Bourseul first proposed transmitting speech electronically in 1854, but he was ahead of his time and it took another six years before Johann Reis used a cork, knitting needle, sausage skin and a piece of platinum to transmit sound, if not intelligible speech (that took another 16 years). Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell raced to make the first working phone in the 1870s, Bell winning in a photo-finish. Today there are 1.3 billion phone lines in use around the world. 82. Telescope, 1608 Galileo was the inventor of the word "telescope", but not the instrument. That distinction goes to the two Dutchmen who inspired him, Hans Lipperhey and Zacharias Jansen. They were the first to combine convex and concave lenses at either end of a wooden tube, a device Galileo later touted as a military aid, before turning his attention to the stars. Early telescopes could magnify up to only 20 times; today even the amateur astronomer can pick up a telescope with 500x magnification for as little as £40. 83. Television, 1925 Without it there would be no Celebrity Love Island, no Extraordinary Breastfeeding (Channel 4, 2006), no Chantelle. OK, so it hasn't all been bad – television has helped connect people around the world, entertained billions, and kept generations of children occupied on lazy Sunday mornings. Not that CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, was impressed. He said in 1920: "Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it." Scotsman John Logie Baird first demonstrated TV to the public in 1925. 84. The internet, 1969 The simplest way to illustrate the inestimable impact of the internet is to chart the growth in the number of people connected to it: from just four in 1969 to 50,000 in 1988; a million by 1991 and 500 million by 2001. And today - 1.2 billion, or 19 per cent of the world's population. Conceived by the US Department of Defense in the 1960s, the internet, together with the World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by Brit techie, Tim Berners-Lee, has shrunk the world like no other invention. 85. The match, 1826

The Stockholm-based chemist John Walker was the first to make the striking discovery that when a stick coated in potassium chlorate and antimony sulphide was brushed across stone, it created a flame. For the first time, man could make fire quickly, cleanly and safely, be it against a rock, a doorframe or the jaw of a bestubbled cowboy. A succession of chemists perfected Walker's mix and in the 1850s, a Swedish scientist split the chemicals between the match and the striking surface, creating the safety match. 86. The Pill, 1951 The contraceptive pill not only empowered women, but marked a turning point in medicine – it was the first drug used by "healthy" people to prevent something rather than by the sick to treat an ailment. It was developed by a team headed by Carl Djerassi, a chemist, in 1951, but wasn't marketed in the UK until 1962. Since then, more than 300 million women are thought to have used the Pill; in the UK, an estimated three million women use it each year. 87. Thermometer, 1592 It is difficult to place the thermometer in the history of modern invention; it is one of those devices that would inevitably appear – the product of no single mind. Galileo Galilei is most commonly credited, but his clumsy air thermometer, in which a column of air trapped in water expanded when warmed, was the culmination of more than 100 years of improvement. The classic mercury-in-glass thermometer, still in use today, was conceived by Daniel Fahrenheit in the 1720s. 88. Tools, 2,600,000BC If there is one defining feature of Homo that has separated it from all other genera, it is the ability to make tools. The earliest tool fragments come from East Africa and were made by Homo habilis more than two million years ago, but it is certain early man used tools before then, likely fashioning them from perishable materials such as wood or bone. Axes emerged as early as 10,000BC and by 3000BC the Egyptians were creating finely worked flints. 89. Toothbrush, 1498 For millennia people have used a fantastic array of implements to keep their pearly whites brilliant. Frayed twigs, chewing sticks, birds' feathers and porcupine quills; all have been discovered in the excavated remains of the earliest bathrooms. An unknown Chinese was the first, at the turn of the 15th century, to mount bristles at right angles to a handle – the spines were plucked from hogs and set into bamboo or bone. By the 17th century toothbrushes were widely used in Europe. 90. Transistor radio, 1953 Pottering around the garden to the sounds of the Ashes; lying back in the bath with The Archers on; blocking out the office din with a chart hit; all simple pleasures made possible by the transistor radio. Until their introduction, radios were bulky affairs hooked up to the mains, but that changed in the early 1950s when the transistor manufacturer Texas Instruments commissioned the Indianapolis firm IDEA to develop the Regency TR1, which cost almost £300 in today's money when it went on sale in 1954. 91. Transistor, 1947 We have all heard the word and probably know that it's something to do with electronics, but how many of us realise the importance of the transistor, possibly the most unsung gadget in the history of invention? Barely the size of a finger nail and resembling a tiny insect, the little widget is the fundamental building block of the circuitry in computers, mobile phones, and practically every other electronic device we take for granted. They were invented at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1947. 92. TV remote control, 1950 It is no surprise that the first remote control, made by the US company Zenith Electronics, was quickly nicknamed "Lazybones". The device, originally linked to the television by an unsightly wire, enabled generations of channel hopping couch potatoes to sit back and zap. In 1955, Zenith released the first wireless remote, the "Flashmatic", which spawned the family of remotes that now crowds the average coffee table. Universal remotes, made by One For All, followed in 1987.

93. Umbrella, 2400BC Named after the Latin umbra, meaning shade, the umbrella started life in Mesopotamia as a sunshade. Rain-proof brolleys made of treated paper popped up in China about 1,700 years ago and had become a French fashion accessory by the 17th century. But not for men – it took London man-about-town Joseph Hanway, who was rarely seen without a brolley, to make it socially acceptable for chaps to be seen with one. The Sheffield manufacturer Samuel Fox invented the modern steel-ribbed umbrella in 1852. 94. Vacuum cleaner, 1901 Cumbersome contraptions that required the user to crank a handle while pushing them along the floor were sucking up dust in the US as early as the 1860s. The first powered vacuum cleaner arrived in 1901 but Hubert Booth's huge device relied on a five horse-power engine. The American cleaner James Spangler refined the vacuum in 1908 with the introduction of a pillow case to collect dust. He sold the rights to a saddle and leather company by the name of Hoover. The rest, along with dust in millions of homes around the world, is history. 95. Velcro, 1948 The Swiss inventor George de Mestral became so fed up with removing cocklebur seeds from his dog and jacket, he put one under a microscope to discover the secret of its stickiness. The answer: velours (the French for loops, in clothing) and crochets (hooks, on the burs). He took the first syllables of the words, replicated the fastening phenomenon synthetically to create Velcro, used today in everything from ski jackets to "human Velcro walls". 96. VHS recorder, 1976 For more than 30 years after TV broadcasting as we know it appeared in the 1930s, viewers were forced to cancel dates and delay dinners if they wanted to catch the latest episode of Coronation Street (well, the Coronation of King George VI, anyway). Video recording in fact dates back to 1927, when John Logie Baird used wax discs, but it wasn't until JVC won the video format war with Sony that its VHS format became the standard, bringing the power to record into every home. 97. Vibrator, 1902 They may not have shaken the world, but for generations of women, a fantastically diverse gallery of powered dildos has caused the earth to move. In a 2005 global survey, 26 per cent of women admitted to using a vibrator (47 per cent in Taiwan; 3 per cent in India; but presumably none in Alabama, where vibrators are banned) and today "massage" devices can be purchased, discretely, with the click of a mouse. Things were different in the 1890s, when "vulvular stimulation" was prescribed to treat "female hysteria". 98. Walkman, 1979 Today we take music on the move for granted – naturalists have even speculated that future iPod generations will evolve headphone jacks where our tails used to sprout. Well, not really, but most of today's music listeners will not remember a time when mobile music meant groaning under the weight of a ghettoblaster. Sony came up with the first popular personal stereo cassette player, although the German-Brazilian Andreas Pavel had patented a similar device called the Stereobelt in 1978. The Walkman was commissioned by the firm's opera-loving chief, Akio Morita (see CD), who wanted to access all arias on plane flights. 99. Weighing scales, 5000BC For most of us, weighing scales appear only from beneath the bath to deliver bad news or collect dust at the back of the kitchen cupboard, but their invention stands as one of modern civilisation's most important achievements. Thought to have been conceived, in the form of a crude equal-arm balance, in Egypt in around 5000BC, weighing scales facilitated early trade – the first balances were used to weigh gold dust. The Egyptians also invented the first unit of weight – the kite – in around 3000BC. 100. Wheel, 3500BC The wheel surely deserves a place near the top of any "greatest inventions" list; a post-industrial world without it is inconceivable. Its invention was perhaps inevitable, but it came later than it might have done; several civilisations,

including the Incas and the Aztecs did pretty well without wheels. The earliest evidence of a wheel – a pictograph from Sumeria (modern day Iraq) – dates from 3500BC; the device rolled West soon after that. 101. Zip, 1913 Look at your flies or your handbag and, chances are, the zip that keeps your valuables in place started life in a factory in the Qiaotou, a dusty town in Zhejiang Province, China. Qiaotou's zip plants manufacture an astonishing 80 per cent of the world's zips, churning out 124,000 miles of zip each year (enough to stretch five times round the globe or half way to the moon). Credit for the device's invention goes to Gideon Sundback. In 1913, the Swedish engineer made the first modern zip to fasten high boots.

ASTRONOMY - OBITUARY : Professor Carl Sagan Carl Murray

Saturday, 21 December 1996 The Independent

In 1994, Carl Sagan was presented with the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the US National Academy of Sciences. The citation rightly claimed that "No one has ever succeeded in conveying the wonder, excitement and joy of science as widely as Carl Sagan and few as well". Such skills are rare in any individual, yet Sagan was also a professional astronomer who carried out important research in planetary science inspiring millions with his writings and broadcasts was just one of his many talents. Carl Sagan had already decided to be an astronomer by the age of 13. Having told his grandfather of his choice of career, the response was "Yes, yes, but how will you make your living?" Sagan once said that one of the greatest moments of his life was when he was told by his high school biology teacher that there were people who were actually paid to do astronomy. Suitably inspired he went on to obtain his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1960 and taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory before taking a position at Cornell in 1968. A recurring theme in his research was the origin of life. Following on from the laboratory experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, Sagan and his colleagues showed that it was relatively easy to produce amino acids, the building blocks of life, by exposing mixtures of methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen sulphide to longwavelength ultraviolet light. This work continued under Sagan's directorship of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell. He also worked on studies of the surface of Mars and Venus, and he was an active participant in the highly successful Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions which sent robot spacecraft to explore the planets. In 1976 Sagan was appointed David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences, and from 1968 to 1979 he was Editor-in-Chief of Icarus, the International Journal of Solar System Studies. Sagan remained at Cornell for the rest of his life and his presence there enhanced the university's reputation as one of the leading centres for planetary research in the world. A vociferous proponent of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), an experiment originally funded by Nasa to locate radio signals from other civilisations in outer space, Sagan investigated the practicalities of conveying information about ourselves to other intelligent beings. In 1977, he became the driving force behind a project to prepare a disk of recorded material for attachment to each of the two Voyager spacecraft due to reach interstellar space following their exploration of the outer solar system. The project, detailed in the book Murmurs of Earth (1978), provided an opportunity to convey the essence of our own civilisation to others. As well as 118 photographs and greetings in almost 60 languages, the disk contained 90 minutes of music selected

from around the world encompassing many cultures and traditions ("I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach," remarked a biologist, "but that would be boasting".) In 1978 Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dragons of Eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence. Other books include Broca's Brain (1979), Comet (1986) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1993), these last two with his third wife, Ann Druyan, as co-author. He also wrote a novel, Contact (1985). However, to the general public he will be best-remembered for Cosmos (1980), an ambitious book and 13- part television series on astronomy which highlighted the efforts of those people throughout history who have tried to make sense of the universe. It is estimated that the series has been seen by almost 10 per cent of the world's population and it justifiably earned Sagan many accolades and awards. Sagan made frequent television appearances and with his slow, deliberate voice of reason, he became an articulate spokesman for astronomy and science, often espousing the cause of rational scientific argument and debate in the face of a tide of pseudo-science and superstition. He returned to this theme in his final book, Demon Haunted World (1996). He believed that all scientists should be capable of describing their work in terms that were understandable to the general public and furthermore that they had a duty to do so. Ironically, something he had in common with many professional scientists who undertake to make complex concepts more accessible to the public, his ability to popularise his own subject led some astronomers to doubt his credentials as a working scientist. However, even though the publicity resulting from Cosmos made it difficult for him to return to his normal duties at Cornell, he continued to produce important contributions to planetary science on a wide range of subjects. One of his most influential papers (with Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman and James Pollack - the Ttaps group) introduced the concept of nuclear winter, whereby the fires resulting from a thermonuclear war would inject fine smoke particles into the Earth's atmosphere, trigger a global ice age and cause the collapse of agriculture; there could be no winners of such a war. With supporting evidence from the dust forms on Mars and the subsequent verification of the concept using computer models, Sagan speculated that perhaps the prospect of nuclear winter had played a constructive role in convincing nations of the futility of nuclear war. Sagan was fond of pointing out that we are living at a unique point in our history when, in the course of a few generations, humans have taken the first steps beyond their home planet to explore the solar system. He delighted in the fact that he was alive at this exciting time and he drew parallels with a previous age of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. The title of his penultimate book, Pale Blue Dot (1994), refers to the insignificant appearance of Earth as viewed from deep interplanetary space; in it he looked forward to an era when future generations will have escaped self-destruction and natural catastrophes to move beyond the confines of Earth. He finished the book with these words: They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. If we do manage to find our way, it will be thanks to the efforts of Carl Sagan. The inhabitants of the blue dot mourn his departure. Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer: born Brooklyn, New York 9 November 1934; David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Science, Cornell University 1976-96; married first Lynn Margulis, second Linda Saltzman (three sons), third 1981 Ann Druyan (one son, one daughter); died Seattle 20 December 1996.

Quick Facts       

NAME: Carl Edward Sagan OCCUPATION: Astronomer, Journalist, Author BIRTH DATE: November 09, 1934 DEATH DATE: December 20, 1996 EDUCATION: University of Chicago, University of California PLACE OF BIRTH: Brooklyn, New York PLACE OF DEATH: Seattle, Washington

Best Known For Carl Sagan was one of the most well-known scientists during the 1970s and ‘80s. He studied extraterrestrial intelligence and advocated for nuclear disarmament.

Carl Sagan biography Synopsis Astronomer Carl Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the University of Chicago and studied planets and extraterrestrial intelligence. He was named director of Cornell’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies in 1968. Being against nuclear weapons, he introduced the idea of “nuclear winter” in 1983. He wrote several novels and the TV series Cosmos before his death in 1996.

Profile (born Nov. 9, 1934, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 20, 1996, Seattle, Wash.) American astronomer and science writer. A popular and influential figure in the United States, he was also controversial in scientific,

political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and religion. Sagan wrote the article “life” for the 1970 printing of the 14th Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1929–73). Sagan attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in physics in 1955 and 1956, respectively, and a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. From 1960 to 1962 he was a fellow in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1962 to 1968 he worked at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His early work focused on the physical conditions of the planets, especially the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter. During that time he became interested in the possibility of life beyond Earth and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a controversial research field he did much to advance. For example, building on earlier work by American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, he demonstrated that amino acids and nucleic acids—the building blocks of life—could be produced by exposing a mixture of simple chemicals to ultraviolet radiation. Some scientists criticized Sagan's work, arguing that it was unreasonable to use resources for SETI, a fantasy project that was almost certainly doomed to failure. In 1968 he became the director of Cornell University's Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He became a full professor there in 1971. He helped select the Mars landing sites for the Viking probes, and he codesigned the messages from Earth that were attached to the Pioneer and Voyager probes that were launched out of the solar system. Sagan remained at Cornell until his death from pneumonia, a complication of the bonemarrow disease myelodysplasia, at age 62. Although Sagan did important research on planetary atmospheres, in astrobiology, and on the origin of life on Earth, he made his reputation primarily as a spokesman for science and a popularizer of astronomy. In the 1970s and '80s he was probably the best-known scientist in the United States. Both an advocate for and a showman of science, he invested much of his career in improving public understanding of science and defending its rational nature. In 1973 he published, with Jerome Agel, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, which earned him prominence as a popular science writer. The following year he confronted the American writer Immanuel Velikovsky in a public debate over Velikovsky's theories of the history of the solar system. In 1980 Sagan cofounded the Planetary Society, an international nonprofit organization for space exploration. That same year he reached the height of his public fame with the television series Cosmos, which he wrote with his wife, Ann Druyan. The accompanying book, with the same title, became a best seller. It was followed by several other books, including the science-fiction novel Contact (1985), which in 1997 was made into a successful film. Sagan sometimes used his prestige for political purposes, as in his campaign for nuclear disarmament and his opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative of Pres. Ronald Reagan. In 1983 he cowrote the paper that introduced the concept of “nuclear winter,” a catastrophic global cooling that would result from a nuclear war. Sagan was also coauthor of The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War (1984). A tireless advocate of scientific rationality, he argued strongly against tendencies toward pseudoscience and occultism, most comprehensively in his last major book, The DemonHaunted World (1996), significantly subtitled Science as a Candle in the Dark. Although he denied that he was an atheist, Sagan expressed skepticism about conventional religion, which he wanted to replace with a scientifically based belief system. Some critics claimed that Sagan's arguments against traditional religious beliefs were simplistic and revealed his lack of theological insight. Sagan received numerous awards and honours, including the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978 for his book The Dragons of Eden, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Distinguished Public Service Medal (1977 and 1981), and the rsted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1990. In 1994 he was awarded the Public Welfare Medal by the National Academy of Sciences, but he never succeeded in becoming a member of that prestigious academy. Helge Kragh Copyright © 1994-2011 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com

OBITUARY : Professor Carl Sagan Carl Murray Saturday, 21 December 1996 The Independent In 1994, Carl Sagan was presented with the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the US National Academy of Sciences. The citation rightly claimed that "No one has ever succeeded in conveying the wonder, excitement and joy of science as widely as Carl Sagan and few as well". Such skills are rare in any individual, yet Sagan was also a professional astronomer who carried out important research in planetary science - inspiring millions with his writings and broadcasts was just one of his many talents. Carl Sagan had already decided to be an astronomer by the age of 13. Having told his grandfather of his choice of career, the response was "Yes, yes, but how will you make your living?" Sagan once said that one of the greatest moments of his life was when he was told by his high school biology teacher that there were people who were actually paid to do astronomy. Suitably inspired he went on to obtain his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1960 and taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory before taking a position at Cornell in 1968. A recurring theme in his research was the origin of life. Following on from the laboratory experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, Sagan and his colleagues showed that it was relatively easy to produce amino acids, the building blocks of life, by exposing mixtures of methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen sulphide to long-wavelength ultraviolet light. This work continued under Sagan's directorship of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell. He also worked on studies of the surface of Mars and Venus, and he was an active participant in the highly successful Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions which sent robot spacecraft to explore the planets. In 1976 Sagan was appointed David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences, and from 1968 to 1979 he was Editor-in-Chief of Icarus, the International Journal of Solar System Studies. Sagan remained at Cornell for the rest of his life and his presence there enhanced the university's reputation as one of the leading centres for planetary research in the world. A vociferous proponent of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), an experiment originally funded by Nasa to locate radio signals from other civilisations in outer space, Sagan investigated the practicalities of conveying information about ourselves to other intelligent beings. In 1977, he became the driving force behind a project to prepare a disk of recorded material for attachment to each of the two Voyager spacecraft due to reach interstellar space following their exploration of the outer solar system. The project, detailed in the book Murmurs of Earth (1978), provided an opportunity to convey the essence of our own civilisation to others. As well as 118 photographs and greetings in almost 60 languages, the disk contained 90 minutes of music selected from around the world encompassing many cultures and traditions ("I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach," remarked a biologist, "but that would be boasting".)

In 1978 Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dragons of Eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence. Other books include Broca's Brain (1979), Comet (1986) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1993), these last two with his third wife, Ann Druyan, as coauthor. He also wrote a novel, Contact (1985). However, to the general public he will be bestremembered for Cosmos (1980), an ambitious book and 13- part television series on astronomy which highlighted the efforts of those people throughout history who have tried to make sense of the universe. It is estimated that the series has been seen by almost 10 per cent of the world's population and it justifiably earned Sagan many accolades and awards. Sagan made frequent television appearances and with his slow, deliberate voice of reason, he became an articulate spokesman for astronomy and science, often espousing the cause of rational scientific argument and debate in the face of a tide of pseudo-science and superstition. He returned to this theme in his final book, Demon Haunted World (1996). He believed that all scientists should be capable of describing their work in terms that were understandable to the general public and furthermore that they had a duty to do so. Ironically, something he had in common with many professional scientists who undertake to make complex concepts more accessible to the public, his ability to popularise his own subject led some astronomers to doubt his credentials as a working scientist. However, even though the publicity resulting from Cosmos made it difficult for him to return to his normal duties at Cornell, he continued to produce important contributions to planetary science on a wide range of subjects. One of his most influential papers (with Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman and James Pollack - the Ttaps group) introduced the concept of nuclear winter, whereby the fires resulting from a thermonuclear war would inject fine smoke particles into the Earth's atmosphere, trigger a global ice age and cause the collapse of agriculture; there could be no winners of such a war. With supporting evidence from the dust forms on Mars and the subsequent verification of the concept using computer models, Sagan speculated that perhaps the prospect of nuclear winter had played a constructive role in convincing nations of the futility of nuclear war. Sagan was fond of pointing out that we are living at a unique point in our history when, in the course of a few generations, humans have taken the first steps beyond their home planet to explore the solar system. He delighted in the fact that he was alive at this exciting time and he drew parallels with a previous age of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. The title of his penultimate book, Pale Blue Dot (1994), refers to the insignificant appearance of Earth as viewed from deep interplanetary space; in it he looked forward to an era when future generations will have escaped self-destruction and natural catastrophes to move beyond the confines of Earth. He finished the book with these words: They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. If we do manage to find our way, it will be thanks to the efforts of Carl Sagan. The inhabitants of the blue dot mourn his departure. Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer: born Brooklyn, New York 9 November 1934; David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Science, Cornell University 1976-96; married first

Lynn Margulis, second Linda Saltzman (three sons), third 1981 Ann Druyan (one son, one daughter); died Seattle 20 December 1996.

Are Coral Reefs really doomed? 

By Ben Goldfarb Tuesday, 31 July 2012 at 6:02 am The Independent

Earlier this month the New York Times published an op-ed by Australian ecologist Roger Bradbury entitled “A World Without Coral Reefs.” Bradbury’s article makes a frightening claim: the planet’s reefs are doomed, sentenced to death by overfishing, pollution, and acidification caused by the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide. Instead of preserving the dregs of these “zombie ecosystems,” scientists and conservationists should plan for our reefless future, in which slime will carpet ocean floors and hundreds of millions of people will lack sustenance. The sooner we accept this grim outcome, argues Bradbury, the sooner we can adapt to it. Bradbury’s message has been greeted by many coral advocates as a welcome dose of realism. “Roger’s editorial is the most powerful piece of writing on coral reefs I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever,” says marine biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson. “Scientists have to maintain the public’s trust by being honest, and Roger tells the truth instead of clinging to false hope.” If anything, Bradbury’s op-ed undersold the peril by omitting coral bleaching from the litany of threats. Bleaching is typically caused by increased water temperatures, which induce stressed corals to eject the symbiotic algae that provide nutrients when times are good. Without their algal partners, corals turn a ghostly white, and reefs that remain bleached for too long can perish. Mass bleaching events, such as the die-off that swept Southeast Asia in 2010, are almost certain to occur more frequently in coming years. Like acidification, warming water is a diffuse danger inflicted by the worldwide burning of fossil fuels. But while carbon emissions represent the greatest existential hazard to corals, many reefs are, at least for now, more damaged by local pressures such as overfishing and agricultural runoff. In the minds of many scientists, the fate of reefs will be determined by whether solving these local, comparatively manageable problems can make corals more resilient against intractable global ones. For example, studies have suggested that large populations of herbivores like parrotfish, which graze seaweed and so prevent reefs from being engulfed by vegetation, can help corals recover from damage. This revelation has led scientists to advocate for the creation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) to safeguard parrotfish from overfishing and, in turn, preserve corals. But can algae-eating fish fortify reefs against rampant warming and acidification? Probably not: a 2012 study by a trio of American scientists indicated that protected areas haven’t saved reefs from die-offs caused by temperature spikes. “The majority of coral scientists think that creating MPAs will improve coral resilience, but a lot of science suggests that hasn’t worked,” says John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina and one of the study’s authors. If interventions such as MPAs won’t save corals from runaway carbon, is there any hope that corals will save themselves? Certain species appear to be capable of adjusting to heat stress, and some, like the Northern Star Coral, can increase the pH of their calcifying fluid – the substance they excrete to form skeletons – under acidic conditions. As researchers wrote in Science in 2011, studies that forecast irreversible demise “may not adequately take account of reef organisms’ capacity for coping with stress and their potential for adaptation.” Yet relying on acclimation and evolution is foolhardy, as the slow growth rates of many species impede rapid adaptation. “Corals can do some adapting, but the change that’s coming down the road is too great for them to handle,” says Doug Fenner, a reef ecologist at the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources in American Samoa. “They’re pretty sensitive little animals.” Coral scientists are unanimous on one point: if humans don’t cease pumping copious amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, reefs will eventually perish. “I’ve seen reefs that were destroyed by hurricanes bounce

back in a decade,” says Fenner, “so I’m convinced that preventing local abuses can buy us some time. But if we don’t reduce CO2, we’re in deep trouble.” According to a 2007 study, reefs begin to erode faster than they grow when atmospheric CO2 exceeds 450 parts per million; our atmosphere already holds 396 ppm, and emissions show no signs of slowing. Of course, just because we are on pace to turn oceans into hot, acidic dead zones does not mean that we necessarily will. Corals are only damned if civilization fails to stem the CO2 tide, and while Bradbury considers failure a fait accompli, not everyone agrees. “If we can get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, corals have a chance,” says Bruno, who, it is worth noting, has been described as a pathological optimist. “I don’t think all reefs will die as soon as we cross, say, 400 ppm. I think we have some wiggle room.” But Bruno’s if is a huge one, and ultimately, whether you think corals are “doomed” comes down to whether you believe society can completely transforming itself in the proximate future. On that point, Randy Olson is pessimistic. “Imagine a truck approaching a cliff at 100 miles per hour,” he says. “Sure, the driver could wake up and slam on the brakes, but that’s not likely.” Coral’s destiny, like that of so many natural and human systems, is inseparably hitched to the trajectory of climate change. The rest of it – establishing MPAs, mitigating local pollution, praying for evolution to intervene – represents, in all likelihood, a collection of stall tactics that, if we’re extremely proactive and fortunate, will stave off extinction until we’re able to muster the political will to cut carbon. “We know what we need to do, and it’s pretty simple,” says Fenner. “Then again, our society has lots of fixable problems that we never manage to fix.”

Science-fiction author Arthur C Clarke dies at 90 By James Macintyre Wednesday, 19 March 2008 The Independent Arthur C Clarke: Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke, the science fiction author of over a hundred books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. The author, who is credited with acting as a bridge between science and the arts, died after suffering breathing problems, an aide said last night. Clarke, whose grounding in science allowed his fiction to act as the forerunner to real inventions, predicted as early as 1945 that satellites would one day broadcast TV images around the world. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are known as Clarke orbits. Born in Minehead, Somerset, in 1917, Clarke moved to London in 1936 and pursued his early passion for space science by joining the British Interplanetary Society. He also began to contribute to the BIS Bulletin and to write science fiction. After the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the RAF, becoming an officer in charge of pioneering radar equipment. His only non-science-fiction novel, Glide Path, was based on his role in the military. But it was for 2001: A Space Odyssey that he was most famous, published in 1968 while the author collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the film by the same name. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956, attracted by marine diving which he said was as close as he could get to the weightlessness of space. He was knighted in 2000.

The astronomer Sir Patrick Moore last night described his friend Clarke as, "a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster ... he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970 – while I said 1980 – and he was right."

Scientists and writers pay tribute to Arthur C Clarke Sarah Knapton and agencies Wednesday March 19, 2008 guardian.co.uk Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books in a career spanning seven decades, died of heart failure linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years. His forecasts often earned him derision from peers and social commentators. But although his dreams of intergalactic space travel and colonisation of nearby planets were never realised in his lifetime, Clarke's predictions of a host of technological breakthroughs were uncannily accurate. He was one of the first people to suggest the use of satellites for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000 - an idea that experts at first dismissed as nonsense. The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke's since the 1930s, said: "He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 - and he was right." The science fiction author Terry Pratchett praised Clarke as a "great man" who "put some science into science fiction". "Most notably, I think he was probably the first science fiction writer to break out of the science fiction ghetto," Pratchett told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. "He became a national treasure like Patrick Moore." The film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey - in which Sir Arthur was closely involved - was "totally, totally new", Pratchett said. "What I particularly recall is Arthur complaining that the reason why the apes never won the Oscar for best make-up was that they were so good the judges thought they really were apes." In 1983, Clarke wrote: "At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years." On his 90th birthday last December, Clarke recorded a farewell message to his friends, saying he would have liked to have seen evidence of extraterrestrial life during his lifetime. His secretary, Rohad de Silva, last night confirmed that Clarke had died from a cardio-respiratory attack. Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, in December 1917 and served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force during the second world war. He became involved in the British Interplanetary Society after the war, where he proposed the idea for satellites as telecommunications relays. He sold his first story, The Rescue Party, in May 1946. In 1952 his non-fiction book The Exploration of Space became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. A keen diver, he moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 where he wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey; in 1968 he shared an Oscar nomination for the film with the director Stanley Kubrick with whom he wrote the screenplay. Clarke was knighted in 2000 in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo - more than two years after the honour was conferred on him. He had been confined to a wheelchair since 1995, a victim of post-polio syndrome. Clarke married Marilyn Mayfield in 1953, but they divorced in 1964.

Sir Arthur C Clarke Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, space visionary and writer, born December 16 1917; died March 18 2008 Anthony Tucker Wednesday March 19, 2008 guardian.co.uk Giant among imaginative promoters of the ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space, Sir Arthur C Clarke, who has died aged 90, was pre-eminent because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of spaceflight and of the use of near-earth space for global communications. Yet, in spite of Clarke's deep seriousness, JB Priestley described him in the 1950's as the happiest writer he had ever known. Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and increasingly thin on top, he tended to be described by his friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little. Yet his mind was like a razor. Unlike earlier writers on space travel, his imagination and creativity sprang, not from fantasy, but from sharp scientific and technical insight,

unfettered by the arbitrary limitations of the perceptions of his time. Clarke's amazing career was possible largely because he was never, in any ordinary sense, quite a part of this world. Indeed he chose to live in Sri Lanka, to some extent at least, because it helped him neutralise the influence of western culture. As he approached 80, it seemed that he had done almost everything that was possible in a single lifetime, for he had written dozens of books, plumbed the depths of the Indian Ocean, carried the imagination of mankind to the remotest parts of the galaxy, and gained honours in every corner of the globe. But he then declared that one of his many remaining ambitions was to observe the meeting of alien intelligence with the intelligence on earth, a declaration he qualified by adding with his usual smile - "if there is true intelligence on earth". The great American astronomer Carl Sagan, no less interested in alien intelligence, replied rapidly, if informally, that the existence of Arthur C Clarke was proof enough. Sagan was one of the many teenagers whose lives, in the years immediately after the second world war, were profoundly changed by Clarke's non-fiction book Interplanetary Flight. This did more than spell out the technical case for spaceflight as a close and exciting reality: it embraced aspects of a new philosophy - in many ways Clarke's lifelong philosophy that sprang from the perceived and enormous spiritual need for exploratory adventures of a new kind which, by their magnitude and imagination, might pull and hold mankind together. Written in 1949 and quickly published on both sides of the Atlantic, it was unique. The text, uncluttered by equations, is aimed at the general reader; yet all the relevant mathematics are gathered in an appendix. The arguments are clear and accessible. Sagan says he found it modest, beautifully written, and stirring. "Most striking for me was the discussion of gravitational potential wells and the use in the appendices of differential and integral calculus to calculate propulsion requirements, staging and interplanetary trajectories. The calculus, it dawned on me, could be used for important things, not just to intimidate high school students. Interplanetary Flight was a turning point in my scientific development." The turning point in Clarke's career came slightly later with the publication in 1952 of The Exploration of Space, a non-fiction work which nevertheless became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. As a writer he was made. Clarke's stature and impact was probably greater than he could have imagined at that time: it has certainly been far greater than that accorded by popular acclaim, for he was highly and, sometimes, effectively critical of the limitations and military basis of the world's major space programmes. He was bitterly critical of the 1980s concept of Star Wars and, well before this emerged as US policy, sent a personal message of appeal from his Physics and Space Institute in Sri Lanka to the US Congress. His video statement A Martian Odyssey, which was read into the congressional record, argued that money being spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles could, to everyone's benefit, be imaginatively channelled into an international space voyage to Mars to mark the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus in search of the Americas in 1492. He did not predict an end to the cold war, but he always sought and fought for new bridges between cultures. This underlying seriousness led him to view his creative participation in commercial, if poetic, other-worldly enterprises, such as the film of his book 2001: a Space Odyssey, as a kind of scenario writing, not to be taken as an example of his central work. In this, however, many would disagree, for 2001 ("a glorified screenplay" according to Clarke) was in many ways so accurate and convincing that Alexei Leonov, the first spacewalking human, said that he felt that it had carried him into space again. The film director Stanley Kubrick held the view that Clarke's ability was unique. "He has the kind of mind of which the world can never have enough, a composite of imagination, intelligence and knowledge that is driven by great energy and a quirkish and unceasing curiosity." In this Kubrick summarised the qualities of all great explorers. Inevitably, since he was slightly unhappy about both the book and the film, Clarke extended 2001: a Space Odyssey into a loosely linked trilogy - 2010: Odyssey 2 and 2061: Odyssey 3. Commenting on these books, Clarke said emphatically that "2010 is better than 2001, but 2061 is the best." Eventually this may prove to be right, but in the sense of timing and public acceptance, 2001 rode space enthusiasm at its height. Strangely, out of his huge corpus of non-fiction books, novels, short stories, plays, films, TV series and anthologies (the 1992 Official Biography lists 137 separate titles) Clarke had a special affection for his interstellar novel The Songs of Distant Earth. With its context and action entirely removed from and remote from Earth, it is the first of a new genre. Although not completed until 1985, Clarke had worked on it, directly and indirectly, for over 30 years. It was the novel in which Clarke finally shook the last vestiges of earthly soil from his imagination, freeing his curiosity to probe the deepest recesses of the universe and allowing him to isolate and examine human relationships and emotions. Some might say that it was

here, in the vastness and extraordinary beauty of space, that after a lifetime of confinement by technology Clarke finally rediscovered his own humanity. This was evident at this time by his increasing belief in the use of communications to bring mankind together in what he called the "global village". His lifetime thoughts on this were gathered in 1992 into a collection of ideas and idealistic possible futures published under the title How the World was One: Beyond the Global Village, a dream that satellite communications would promote understanding and worldwide peace. By this time, however, it was clear that, as with any other technology, the effect of communication satellites depends entirely on their manner of use. The coverage of the Falklands campaign of 1982 and Operation Desert Storm, the American-led liberation of Kuwait from Iraq of 1990-91, showed clearly that global TV, rather than bringing mankind together in peace, can transform the horror of war into exciting and technically interesting family entertainment. It was never evident that this reality soured the dreams that had driven Clarke for eight decades, for he never lost either his smile or his enthusiasm. Born in Minehead, Somerset, during the final appalling battles of the first world war, in which his father suffered injuries that brought him to an early death 13 years later, Clarke went to Huish's grammar school, Taunton, and, at 19, into the civil service in London. His father was a telephone engineer who, disastrously, turned to farming after the war because of lung damage, and his mother Nora (Willis) was formerly a telegraphist. His was a communications family. Like many schoolboys at this time, Clarke became fascinated by American science-fiction magazines ,which reached Britain in bulk, probably as scrap-paper ballast in returning cargo ships. But as Clarke later wrote, the turning point of his life was the discovery, shortly before his father died, of W Olaf Stapleton's book Last and First Men. Its imagination, timescale of billions of years and grand perception of the scale of the universe, provided a cosmic framework large enough to set Clarke's imagination free. He began writing science fiction. At 17 he joined the British Interplanetary Society, an organisation then widely regarded as crackpot, but of which he was later to be treasurer and, eventually, chairman. In the civil service his mathematical ability took him into the audit branch. But, after the outbreak of the second world war, he opted to join the RAF where, via electronics training, he became an instructor at radio school. Finally he went to work on the development and proving of American ground control approach - talk-down - radar at Davidstow Moor in north Cornwall, a system which pilots never liked because it robbed them of control until the last moments. The head of the US team was Nobel-prizewinning physicist Luis W Alvarez - the first high-level scientist with whom Clarke had worked. As he described obliquely in his book Glide Path (1963), his only non-science fiction novel, this period shaped his decision to turn to science. In 1945 he published his famous pioneering paper on the possibility and technical potential of geosynchronous satellite orbits in global and interplanetary communications. He went on to gain a first in physics and mathematics at King's College London, and then a postgraduate degree in astronomy. The course was so boring that he became assistant editor on Science Abstracts, so that he would have time to think and to write. The rest is almost a legend of our time. In 1953, on a US tour and with success already evident, he had a whirlwind romance with Marilyn Mayfield, a very young and beautiful divorcee who described the then bearded and buccaneering Clarke as her own Errol Flynn. A decade later, as Clarke chose the Sri Lankan culture as his working environment, the marriage was dissolved. Clarke's energy and momentum was at its height, taking him to the depths of the Indian Ocean and to every forum in the world where missiles and spaceflight were an issue. Clarke unwaveringly spoke for collaboration and peace. His last years were, increasingly, limited: post-polio syndrome left him confined to his wheelchair, and much of his public contact with the wider world was by telephone and then videolink. He was often - almost always by television link - one of the celebrities exploited by Nasa and other agencies to mark great moments in the exploration of space. But he remained unsentimental, and with a cheerful capacity for sending himself up: having lent his name to books and television programmes that explored the unlikely, the downright improbable and the decidedly dotty end of New Age speculation, he was once asked for his views on corn circles, those unexpected patterns that appeared suddenly, like eczema, in the wheat and barley fields of southern England, to be interpreted by New Age enthusiasts as messages from alien civilizations. "I do have a theory," he volunteered at a Science Museum press conference, on one of his rare visits. "They were made by

half-witted extraterrestrials." His confinement and his age seemed not to trouble him, but in 1998 a British newspaper printed claims that Sir Arthur - his knighthood had just been announced - had been involved in sexual predation upon the young. He refused to accept his honour until the Sri Lankan authorities had investigated, and cleared his name. His knighthood was then awarded by Prince Charles on a visit to Sri Lanka in 2000. Apart from his huge output of fiction and scientific books, Clarke left us his Three Laws. These are touched by the kind of eternal practicality which make his science fiction so effective and reveal his inner convictions: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The limits of the possible can only be found by going beyond them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology may, at first, be indistinguishable from magic. Certainly, Clarke's imagination was magical, carrying him beyond the limits of possibility: his greatness was and remains that, from his almost Olympian heights, he could see more than ordinary men will ever see. Moreover, he possessed the power to carry anyone who wished to join him on these great heights of mystery and clarity. If the world believes the clarity to be deceptive, it is not the fault of Arthur C Clarke

Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Science-fiction writer best known for '2001: A Space Odyssey' Thursday, 20 March 2008 The Independent Next to H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke was the widest-known English writer of science fiction of the 20th century. Like Wells, he was also a voluminous author of non-fiction; both men were great popularisers of science, with styles of such pellucidity that the great issues of the century – if only for a moment or two of relief – seemed solvable. It is, however, almost certainly for their science fiction that these two great and prominent Englishmen of the world will be remembered. Both were honoured in the United States – for the past century the main home of the SF genre – which understandably tended to advocate American dreams of the future. In their different ways, however, both men escaped that hegemony. Wells escaped the dominance of the American form by precursing it, Clarke by surviving it. Although both men were English, they aimed their work – fiction, film scripts, non-fiction – at the whole human family, many of whose members are conspicuously less evangelical about the future than Americans have been. In their later years both were treated, and thought of themselves, as spokesmen for humanity at large. A sometimes touching vanity about the prominence they had earned marked each man, though Wells laced his amour propre with ire. Clarke's, at least until the terrible year of 1998, seemed unassailably serene. He spoke for the highest hopes of the 20th century. Arthur Charles Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, before the end of the First World War, and remained loyal to his roots for the rest of his life, though his last half-century was spent mostly abroad. He described his early years in Astounding Days: a science fictional autobiography (1989), acknowledging the liberating power of the American pulp science-fiction magazines of the early 1930s. But the book that transformed his imaginative life

was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which he read soon after its first publication in 1930. The metaphysical scope of Stapledon's aeon-spanning vistas, and his stately pessimism about the ultimate fate of Homo sapiens, clearly affected Clarke at a profound level; at the heart of his finest novels, like Childhood's End (1953) and Rendezvous at Rama (1973), a serene and lyrical impassivity about the fate of individual humans transforms plots that might otherwise seem routine. By 1937, the two-fold nature of Clarke's eventual career began to take shape. He had joined the British Interplanetary Society, for which he twice served as Chairman, in 1946-47 and 1950-53, and he had begun to publish fiction in an amateur magazine. During these years he worked as an Assistant Auditor in a British government department. When the Second World War came he joined the Royal Air Force, serving 1941-46, eventually becoming a radar instructor and technical officer on the first Ground Controlled Approach radar. In 1945, before leaving the service with the rank of Flight Lieutenant, he published a technical paper, "Extraterrestrial Relays", in Wireless World; it may not be his most widely read non-fiction piece, but it has been by far the most influential, for in it he was the first to propose (and to describe) a geosynchronous communications satellite. It was an idea that continues to transform our world. Not until 1946 did "Rescue Party", the first story he wrote for professional publication, appear in Astounding Science Fiction. Against the Fall of Night (1953), a novel combining Stapledonian perspectives with a fey juvenile protagonist, was published in magazine form two years later, but Clarke's first published volume, the first of several he wrote on the subject, was Interplanetary Flight (1950). Beneath the technical literacy and lucid, popularising smoothness of this book and its successors, there lies a powerful sense of urgency and longing. Humanity (Clarke suggests, carrying on from Wells) must transcend the physical trap of this single planet, which we are in any case destroying, or humanity will not survive. Several of the novels of the early 1950s, like Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars (both 1951), read almost like technical manuals for the first steps into space; although they suffer as fiction, they manage to convey impressively a sense of the possibility of escape, and they helped shape the minds of the aspiring young rocket scientists who would grow up to create Nasa. But the mild triumphalism of tales like these was undercut by Clarke's best work – novels like Childhood's End, which was also written in the early 1950s – tales whose perspectives are vast, and which surefootedly convey a sense that the technologies and aspirations of humanity are evanescent. Even the short fiction, much of it datedly jocular, reflects this sharp dichotomy between the advocacy of technological expedients and the ironies that undercut the mayfly aspirations of the human species. Clarke's most famous short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953), rewards a triumph of science with the calm extinction of the universe. An Asian sect hires a computer expert to tabulate all the possible names of God, in the belief that the universe will end when that essential task has been accomplished. The computer makes short shrift of the task. And the stars begin to go out . . .

Clarke's own life clearly shared something of the transcendental longings of his fiction. In the early 1950s he discovered, through skin-diving, the southern oceans, and in 1954 he moved to Sri Lanka, where he remained until his death. Here, in some isolation, but close to his beloved ocean, he turned more and more to works of celebratory non-fiction about the sea, several of them, like Indian Ocean Adventure (1961), written with his diving partner Mike Wilson. The fiction of this period either reflected his new interests, like The Deep Range (1957), or was relatively inconsequential. The extraordinary fame of his later years began, of course, with Stanley Kubrick, who asked him to expand an early short story, "The Sentinel" (1951), into the script that led to the enormous success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The application of new cinematic technologies to a script of literacy and scope made this the first science-fiction film to express the imaginative and speculative reach of the genre at its best. For many viewers whose knowledge of science fiction may not have been extensive, Clarke became an almost ubiquitous guru of future-studies, performing his public roles with a dignity not unmixed with complacence (even before the war he had been nicknamed "Ego" by his friends, ostensibly after the initials of a pseudonym he then used). In later years he became a household word after the release of his two main television series, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980) and Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers (1985), and his work as commentator for the American CBS television network on the lunar flights of Apollos 11, 12 and 15. With the success of 2001 and its sequels, Clarke returned more actively to the writing of fiction, and Rendezvous with Rama (1973), which won all four major awards for science fiction in 1973, was soon followed by Imperial Earth (1975) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979), his last novel to make a genuinely innovatory suggestion about future technologies. The physical link by elevator he here suggests between Earth and a geosynchronous space station may seem merely fantastical, but is closely argued. In future years, it may well seem an inspired prediction. Illness now began to dog Clarke's steps. In 1985 he was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease and given two years to live; only in 1988 was this discovered to be a misdiagnosis, though he continued to suffer from the effects of the polio he had contracted as a young man. Honours and awards were numerous. He won the Unesco Kalinga Prize in 1961, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Westinghouse Award in 1969, and from 1979 was Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka, only one of the influential roles he played in his adopted country; in 1986 he was made a Nebula Awards Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In turn, he established foundations and grants; such as the annual Arthur C. Clarke Award (at first for £1,000, increased in 2001 to £2,001) for the best British science-fiction novel of the year, given annually in London since 1986. Clarke's last years should have been serenely plenipotential. He had been appointed CBE in 1989, and a knighthood was

announced in the New Year's Honours of 1998; he had planned to be formally invested when the Prince of Wales visited Sri Lanka that February, but as it turned out, the ceremony had to be called off. On 1 February, the Sunday Mirror published allegations that Clarke had paid for sex with under-age boys. Clarke – by then 80, and in a wheelchair for 15 years – categorically denied the allegations. The Sri Lankan authorities, after an extensive investigation of the story, found no evidence to sustain them and cleared the author – who remained deeply respected in Sri Lanka. Lingering questions about the nature of Clarke's sexuality seemed merely intrusive. Despite his position as a world-famous popular guru of the future, and as the 20th-century's most eminent science-fiction writer still alive and active, he had managed to live his life in private for more than half a century, with no breath of controversy or tabloid prurience until the abortive "exposure" of 1998. He was married, briefly, in the 1950s, to Marilyn Mayfield. The rest of his life, it seems, was devoted mainly to work. Until the beginning of this year he maintained a vast correspondence, mostly by e-mail. Leslie Ekanayake, who shared his passion for skin-diving, was his companion for many years until his death in 1977 in a motorcycle accident. Leslie's brother, with his wife and children, then shared Clarke's home. But he maintained his privacy until the end. In any case, well before the celebrations marking 2001 – a year he had, in a sense, made his own – Clarke had fully regained his old serenity, and his last years were soothed by continuing acclaim. He had described near-space so vividly that aspiring astronauts dreamed his visions, and made them come true. He had written dozens of books which are a central record of what the 20th century hoped to accomplish. He had briefed the world about what to do next. It was not his fault that the journey has just begun. John Clute A glance round his study, or "Ego Chamber" as he liked to call it, gave visitors to Arthur C. Clarke's home in Colombo the bare bones of his story, writes Simon Welfare. The walls were covered with the memorabilia of a long, successful and influential life: framed citations, an Oscar nomination, photographs taken with the world's movers and shakers, tributes from astronauts, cosmonauts and scientists, and a faded, but prized, copy of his famous Wireless World satellite paper. His shelves were crammed with awards and countless editions of his best-selling books. And the daily ritual of opening the morning post, and more recently the countless emails that somehow reached him at his secret inbox, were other reminders that Clarke was one of the few authors who could claim, with justification, that his words had changed the world. Yet the Arthur Clarke whom those same visitors invariably found lounging, wrapped in a colourful sarong, on the study sofa, was far keener to share his enthusiasm for the present and future than to talk about the past. A hand outstretched in greeting was usually filled with a press cutting that had caught his eye a few minutes earlier; books on obscure subjects were dusted down to help in the discussion; and video evidence produced at the click of the remote

control that sometimes seemed to be an extension of his hand. It was during one of these unpredictable mornings, which we spent away from his study on his favourite beach at Unawatuna, that the seeds of his famous television series took root. He began by telling me how his love of diving had taken him to Sri Lanka, and how, within hours of stopping off in Colombo en route to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, he had fallen in love with the island. Typically, this was the prelude to the far more exotic tale of a schooner, The Pearl, which, somewhere off that very shore, had been enveloped in the tentacles of a giant squid and dragged beneath the waves. A few years later, this was one of many tales that Clarke shared with television viewers in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. Probably the first factual entertainment series shown on British television, Mysterious World was an instant hit, particularly with young viewers, who voted it their favourite new programme of 1980. The crystal skull in its titles became an icon of the age and Alan Hawkshaw's spooky theme music held millions in its thrall. Although, at first sight, many of the stories appeared preposterous – they included UFOs, Ape Men, and weird objects that had fallen from the sky – Clarke felt they merited serious, if sceptical, consideration. "The universe is such a strange and wonderful place that reality will always outrun the wildest imagination," he said. "There will always be things unknown, and perhaps unknowable." He could be uncompromising in his scepticism and mischievously witty in his put-downs of outlandish claims, yet he happily acknowledged that there were many mysteries that he could not explain. In the midday break, he would often travel home, eat lunch, deal with his correspondence, have a nap and rewrite the afternoon's scripts: all within the allotted hour. Mysterious World was a notable start to a new career that made him a household name far beyond the world of sci-fi. Three more series followed, and the 52 programmes, now something of a cult, have been shown around the planet. The accompanying books were all best-sellers: Arthur particularly enjoyed the publishers' claim that the first had outsold all their other offerings, bar Life on Earth and the Bible. Between takes on location, Arthur often amused himself, and us, by concocting new, and often outrageous, epitaphs. We gave a prize for the best. For once, I think, it was written by someone else, but it was fitting for a man whose vision had ranged so inspiringly across the seas of space. It read: "I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." Arthur Charles Clarke, writer and broadcaster: born Minehead, Somerset 16 December 1917; Chairman, British Interplanetary Society 1946-47, 1950-53; Fellow, King's College London 1977-2008; Chancellor, Moratuwa University, Sri Lanka 1979-2002; CBE 1989; Kt 1998; married 1953 Marilyn Mayfield (marriage dissolved 1964); died Colombo, Sri Lanka 19 March 2008.

Arthur C. Clarke; Sci-Fi Writer Foresaw Mankind's Possibilities By Patricia Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, 90, the world-famous science-fiction writer, futurist and unofficial poet laureate of the space age, died of a respiratory ailment March 18 at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Mr. Clarke co-wrote, with director Stanley Kubrick, the screenplay for "2001: A Space Odyssey," which is regarded by many as one of the most important science fiction films made. A prolific writer, with more than 100 published books, he was praised for his ability to foresee the possibilities of human innovation and explain them to non-scientific readers. The most famous example is from 1945, when he first proposed the idea of communications satellites that could be based in geostationary orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground. Some scoffed, but the idea was proved almost a generation later with the launch of Early Bird, the first of the commercial satellites that provide global communications networks for telephone, television and high-speed digital communication. The orbit is now named Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union. "He had influenced the world in the best way possible," writer Ray Bradbury said in Neil McAleer's 1992 book "Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography." "Arthur's ideas have sent silent engines into space to speak in tongues. His fabulous communications satellite ricocheted about in his head long before it leaped over the mountains and flatlands of the Earth." In addition to his books, he wrote more than 1,000 short stories and essays. One of his short stories, "Dial F for Frankenstein" (1964), inspired British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World Wide Web in 1989. Mr. Clarke also popularized the idea of a space elevator as an energy-efficient alternative to rockets. Conceived by a Russian engineer in 1960 and re-invented at least four times in the next decades, Mr. Clarke's inclusion of the idea in a 1979 novel brought it to popular attention and helped launch a new field of study. He told New Scientist magazine last year that it would be built "50 years after everyone stops laughing." But it was his collaboration with Kubrick in the 1968 film that made him internationally famous. The screenplay for "2001: A Space Odyssey" was based on Mr. Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel," and Mr. Clarke simultaneously wrote the companion novel, which was released three months after the film and was believed by many to be a more detailed explanation of the ideas in the film. Mr. Clarke's work inspired the names of spacecraft, an asteroid and a species of dinosaur. He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as a commentator on the Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. Two television series in the 1980s spread his ideas around the world. He was knighted in 1998, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and received the Franklin Institute gold medal, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization-Kalinga Prize and other honors. Mr. Clarke, a resident of Sri Lanka since 1956, worked with Jacques Cousteau and others to help perfect scuba equipment. He moved to the country, then known as Ceylon, to open a dive shop and explore the undersea world. Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Mr. Clarke said diving was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space. "I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.

His dive shop was destroyed in the 2004 tsunami. Born Dec. 17, 1917, in Minehead, Somerset, England, he was the son of a postal service engineer turned farmer and a post office telegrapher. He became addicted to science fiction at 11. In 1936, he moved to London and joined the British Interplanetary Society and began writing science fiction. After enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1941, he became a radar instructor and participated in the development of ground-controlled landings of aircraft under zero-visibility conditions. That experience proved the inspiration for his only non-science-fiction novel, "Glide Path." It is also where, in 1945, he wrote an RAF memo about satellites. He later revised it and submitted it as "ExtraTerrestrial Relays" to Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched. He was wrong about some things: He expected that three satellites would take care of the world's communication needs and that each would require a crew in residence. After World War II, Mr. Clarke obtained a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics at King's College, London. In 1954, Mr. Clarke wrote to Harry Wexler, then chief of the Scientific Services Division at the U.S. Weather Bureau, about satellite applications for weather forecasting. From these discussions, a new branch of meteorology was born. Mr. Clarke's marriage to Marilyn Mayfield ended in divorce. Survivors include a brother and sister, both of whom live in England. According to a news release from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, Mr. Clarke reviewed the final manuscript of his latest science fiction novel, "The Last Theorem," a few days ago. It is scheduled to be published later this year. Although he rarely left Sri Lanka, he kept in touch with the rest of the world by using the satellite communication he predicted so long ago. He told the Associated Press that he didn't regret never going into space because he had arranged to have the DNA from his hair sent into orbit. "Some day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. In a 90th birthday video recorded in December, Mr. Clarke said he had only three last wishes: That someone find evidence of extraterrestrial life; that the world adopt clean energy sources; and that an end be found to the long civil war in Sri Lanka. "I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser," he said. "Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer -- one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well." © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Arthur C Clarke: Still looking at the stars   

05 December 2007 NewScientist.com news service Andrew Robinson

"I BET Arthur has forgotten this," British astronomer Patrick Moore tells me before launching into a story about Arthur C. Clarke, his old friend from the heyday of the British Interplanetary Society. In those cold-war times, a group such as the BIS - which advocated space travel and collaboration with the Russians - was the object of official suspicion, not to mention derision from scientists working for the establishment. (In 1956, no less a figure than Richard Woolley, the UK's astronomer royal, asserted: "All this writing about going to the moon is utter bilge.") Moore recalls that around 1950, Clarke went into a museum - it may have been London's Science Museum carrying a suitcase. "Knowing that he was a member of the BIS, one of the attendant officers insisted on looking into the suitcase to make sure it didn't contain a bomb." Clarke has indeed forgotten the suitcase incident when I mention it over lunch on the veranda of his house in Sri Lanka, where he has lived for almost half a century, and where I first met him in the 1980s. This is hardly surprising, given that he turns 90 on 16 December. His memory, he says ruefully, has undergone a "data dump", even if his mind ranges as swiftly and eclectically as ever. But he is curious to know what was in the suitcase. Perhaps, we speculate, it contained some futuristic, though no doubt technically sound, designs for a rocket put forward by the precocious enthusiasts of the BIS. Clarke's fascination with rockets goes back to his teenage years in England, when he launched home-made ones from his mother's farm in his native Somerset. His father, a post office engineer, died when Arthur was 13, from the lingering effects of being gassed in the first world war. Space rockets became possible, at least technically, with the launch of Germany's V2 rocket during the second world war, when Clarke was serving in the Royal Air Force, working on radar. Looking back, that feels like the "Jurassic" period of his life, he says. Even the start of the space age 50 years ago is "sort of ancient history - the Battle of Hastings so far as I'm concerned". By then he had fully embarked on his tireless advocacy of space travel in both fiction and non-fiction, through books such as The Sands of Mars, A Fall of Moondust, The Exploration of Space and Profiles of the Future. Nevertheless, he was amazed that the moon landing happened so soon, in 1969. He had not expected to see it in his lifetime. "And then I was also surprised, and disappointed, that it wasn't followed up. We abandoned space for decades." Clarke's screenplay and companion novel for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, made by Stanley Kubrick in 1968, had imagined the construction of a moon base in the 1990s. He still expects the establishment of scientific bases and perhaps colonies on the moon and in other parts of the solar system by the end of the century. But will people go to live in these outposts and regard them as their home planets? They probably will, Clarke says, pointing out that this has already happened on Earth in very "improbable", inhospitable places. "With the technologies we have, or should have, I'd expect people to live, most certainly, on Mercury, Venus and Mars, the satellites of Jupiter and quite a few asteroids." As he once remarked, twisting Oscar Wilde: "We have to clean up the gutters in which we are now walking - but we must not lose sight of the stars." There is an element of faith in Clarke's attitude to space, though not the religious type. His attitude is more like a boundless optimism in the power of intelligence. Such optimism underlies his best-known novels, Childhood's End, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama. Kubrick, who tended to be sparing with his praise, once said of his collaborator: "Arthur somehow manages to capture the hopeless but admirable human desire to know things that can really never be known." “Clarke has a boundless optimism in the power of intelligence” This visionary hopefulness is Clarke's chief appeal to his legion of non-scientist admirers. These include Rupert Murdoch and Steven Spielberg, and a host of science fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury, Stephen Baxter and the late Gene Roddenberry, the brain behind the TV series Star Trek. Ronald Reagan was also an admirer, despite Clarke's opposition to his "Star Wars" strategic defence initiative in the 1980s. Many scientists - and astronauts - go further in their admiration, respecting Clarke for his unique combination of scientific knowledge, intellectual originality and literary flair. J. B. S. Haldane, Wernher von Braun, Luis

Alvarez, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan were all personal friends of Clarke, as well as fans of his writing. As a high-school student in the early 1950s, Sagan decided to become an astronomer after reading Interplanetary Flight, Clarke's first book. Moore considers the greatest science fiction books to be Last and First Men and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, but "these were Stapledon's only two great books, which is why on balance I must make him number two to Arthur". Martin Rees, the UK's current astronomer royal, agrees: "The geostationary satellite idea - just one of his far-sighted concepts - was 'rediscovered' after Sputnik, and soon became reality. But his other concepts still lie far ahead - some, indeed, in a post-human future billions of years hence... Scientists can derive more benefit and stimulus from him than from routine science fact." Clarke's influence on the development of satellites is profound. John Pierce and Harold Rosen, the two engineers principally responsible for the design of communications satellites in the 1960s, regarded him as the "father" of satellite communications on the strength of his technical article "Extra-terrestrial relays", published in Wireless World in late 1945 while its 27-year-old author was still in the RAF. This acknowledgement has now entered encyclopedias - much to the satisfaction of Clarke, who regards the article as "the most important thing I ever wrote", even above his novels. Though he has never been one to downplay his science fiction, or indeed any of his achievements - witness his annual self-styled "Egogram" newsletter to friends and acquaintances - Clarke is probably right about his "comsat" idea: it will be his most enduring legacy. He cannot recall exactly how the basic idea came to him, though he says it emerged from a combination of his family's connection with post office engineering, his passion for rockets and his work during the war on ground-controlled radar, later fictionalised in Glide Path. "While working on radar I remember thinking: could the beam be powerful enough not just to detect the other guy but also to shoot his plane down? Power-beaming was one of the ingredients in the comsat idea, I'm sure." But deferring to the engineers who made his 1945 concept a reality, he prefers to style himself not as the father of satellite communication but as its godfather. "If I hadn't written that paper in October 1945, 10 people would have done it the next year." “He styles himself as godfather to satellite communications” While this may be uncharacteristically modest, it is true that a similar idea had been discussed by others before 1945, and that Pierce's first paper on the subject was published a decade later without knowledge of Clarke's pioneering proposal. One irony of all this is that Clarke now depends on comsats, since he can no longer travel far due to the debilitating effects of post-polio syndrome. For years, he has sent video messages via satellite to conferences across the globe - most recently on the 60th anniversary of his 1945 article. Yet as a "failed recluse" addicted to email, he is ambivalent about the benefits of everyone being able to communicate instantaneously. "It's the fractal future," he says. "Although everybody is ultimately connected to everybody else, the branches of the fractal universe are so many orders of magnitude away from each other that really nobody knows anyone else. We will have no common universe of discourse. You and I can talk together because we know when I mention poets and so on who they are. But in another generation this sort of conversation may be impossible because everyone will have an enormously wide but shallow background of experience that overlaps by only a few per cent." Prescient though many of his ideas are, Clarke is aware he is as vulnerable as anyone to what he calls "the perils of prophecy". In his 1945 article he assumed that the three geostationary space satellites required for a global communications service would need a crew, with supplies ferried up by a "regular rocket service". The radar he was in charge of in 1945 contained over 1000 vacuum tubes, at least one of which burned out every day, so it seemed inconceivable to him that any complex piece of electronic equipment could function in space without on-the-spot engineers. "Well, along came the transistor, and then the microchip. So within a decade, electronic equipment that was once as large as a house could be put in a hatbox." The other major scientific idea that makes him proud is the space elevator - an energy-efficient alternative to rockets, which envisions carbon-fibre ribbons stretching from the Earth's surface to a geostationary orbital station some 36,000 kilometres up. Unlike comsats, Clarke didn't invent the space elevator; it was conceived in

1960 by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov (who called it a "heavenly funicular"). It was independently reinvented at least four times by American scientists in the 1960s and 1970s. But it was Clarke who brought it to popular attention with his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which the elevator rises from the summit of a sacred mountain on an equatorial island remarkably similar to his adopted home. The novel, and his subsequent technical writing on the elevator, helped to spawn a large new field of study. There is now an annual competition to encourage the development of a workable space elevator - the Spaceward Games, organised by the Spaceward Foundation and NASA's Centennial Challenges programme. It may sound like outlandish fantasy, but in 1945 so did communication satellites and landing on the moon. He doesn't always get it right, however: in 1999 he predicted the last coal mine would close in 2006. Nevertheless, Clarke maintains that the space elevator will be built "50 years after everyone stops laughing" - probably sometime this century. Whenever this fabulous structure is finally constructed, some aspect of it will surely be named after him. Sir Arthur - who already has a geostationary orbit and an asteroid for namesakes - would expect no less. Andrew Robinson is the author of The Story of Measurement (Thames & Hudson, 2007) and a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge From issue 2632 of New Scientist magazine, 05 December 2007, page 58-60

What will future generations condemn us for? By Kwame Anthony Appiah Sunday, September 26, 2010; B01 The Washington Post

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones? After all, not every disputed institution or practice is destined to be discredited. And it can be hard to distinguish in real time between movements, such as abolition, that will come to represent moral common sense and those, such as prohibition, that will come to seem quaint or misguided. Recall the book-burners of Boston's old Watch and Ward Society or the organizations for the suppression of vice, with their crusades against claret, contraceptives and sexually candid novels. Still, a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation. First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries. Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?") And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks. With these signs in mind, here are four contenders for future moral condemnation.

Our prison system We already know that the massive waste of life in our prisons is morally troubling; those who defend the conditions of incarceration usually do so in non-moral terms (citing costs or the administrative difficulty of reforms); and we're inclined to avert our eyes from the details. Check, check and check. Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China's rate is less than half of ours. What's more, the majority of our prisoners are non-violent offenders, many of them detained on drug charges. (Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering.) And the full extent of the punishment prisoners face isn't detailed in any judge's sentence. More than 100,000 inmates suffer sexual abuse, including rape, each year; some contract HIV as a result. Our country holds at least 25,000 prisoners in isolation in so-called supermax facilities, under conditions that many psychologists say amount to torture. Industrial meat production The arguments against the cruelty of factory farming have certainly been around a long time; it was Jeremy Bentham, in the 18th century, who observed that, when it comes to the treatment of animals, the key question is not whether animals can reason but whether they can suffer. People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs. Of the more than 90 million cattle in our country, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own feces, their nostrils filled with the smell of their own urine. Picture it -- and then imagine your grandchildren seeing that picture. In the European Union, many of the most inhumane conditions we allow are already illegal or -- like the sow stalls into which pregnant pigs are often crammed in the United States -- will be illegal soon. The institutionalized and isolated elderly Nearly 2 million of America's elderly are warehoused in nursing homes, out of sight and, to some extent, out of mind. Some 10,000 for-profit facilities have arisen across the country in recent decades to hold them. Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.) Is this what Western modernity amounts to -- societies that feel no filial obligations to their inconvenient elders? Sometimes we can learn from societies much poorer than ours. My English mother spent the last 50 years of her life in Ghana, where I grew up. In her final years, it was her good fortune not only to have the resources to stay at home, but also to live in a country where doing so was customary. She had family next door who visited her every day, and she was cared for by doctors and nurses who were willing to come to her when she was too ill to come to them. In short, she had the advantages of a society in which older people are treated with respect and concern. Keeping aging parents and their children closer is a challenge, particularly in a society where almost everybody has a job outside the home (if not across the country). Yet the three signs apply here as well: When we see old people who, despite many living relatives, suffer growing isolation, we know something is wrong. We scarcely try to defend the situation; when we can, we put it out of our minds. Self-interest, if nothing else, should make us hope that our descendants will have worked out a better way. The environment

Of course, most transgenerational obligations run the other way -- from parents to children -- and of these the most obvious candidate for opprobrium is our wasteful attitude toward the planet's natural resources and ecology. Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you'll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That's the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe's first man-made desert. Desertification, which is primarily the result of destructive landmanagement practices, threatens a third of the Earth's surface; tens of thousands of Chinese villages have been overrun by sand drifts in the past few decades. It's not as though we're unaware of what we're doing to the planet: We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions -- the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they won't be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to. *** Let's not stop there, though. We will all have our own suspicions about which practices will someday prompt people to ask, in dismay: What were they thinking? Even when we don't have a good answer, we'll be better off for anticipating the question. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."

Lines of beauty - British Library’s medieval manuscripts go digital By Alice Fishburn Last updated: February 8, 2013 8:40 pm Financial Times The British Library aims to digitise its 25,000 medieval manuscripts, so readers around the world can see them. Here are six of the rarest

©Michael Bodiam The opening pages of Beowulf in the Beowulf manuscript, anonymous, c AD1000, in Old English Nothing brings a book of 900-year-old parchment to life as much as realising that you can still see the hair follicles of the unfortunate beasts who gave up their hides for it. The illuminated “Silos Apocalypse”

manuscript may date from 1091, grapple with the end of the world and contain page after page of miniatures depicting devils, foxes, snakes and the angel of the abyss. But it is the marks on that long-dead animal skin that make its history really hit home. The book is part of the British Library’s collection of medieval manuscripts. One of the greatest in the world, it features 25,000 books dating from before 1600, as well as numerous medieval charters and papyri. Some are the sole copy in existence, others are worth millions of pounds (how do you value something that is literally written in gold?). The only way for scholars or the rest of us to view them is via a pilgrimage up the Euston Road in London and into the reading room or gallery.

©Michael Bodiam Book of Hours,'Use of Rome (The Golf Book), Crucifixion', c1540, in Latin Until now, that is. British Library curators have long followed the mantra that nothing within the library should be inaccessible to the public (though in many cases, one has to apply). Their plan to digitise all the manuscripts – and place the high-quality, full-colour, completely-zoomable-down-to-the-last-animal-pore pages online for free – will make this much easier. “It’s a transformational thing … These are national, international, treasures,” says Claire Breay, head of medieval and earlier manuscripts. “Anybody can enjoy them whether they are the leading academic on some aspect of that manuscript … or a schoolchild doing a project.” Two hundred of the highest-profile and most valuable manuscripts in the collection are currently undergoing digitisation. The six photographed exclusively for the FT can be viewed online from today, the first time readers all over the world will be able to see them in full. Among them is the Spanish “Silos Apocalypse”, as vivid and well-preserved as if the monk had just stopped for lunch. “You couldn’t go down to WH Smith and get that kind of yellow felt tip pen,” says Julian Harrison, curator of pre-1600 manuscripts. You’d have a similarly hard time finding the ink for the ninth-century “Harley Golden Gospels”, written in gold. But the books offer us more than aesthetics. “The thing about medieval manuscripts is they’re about the whole range of human knowledge from the middle ages – history, literature, philosophy, religion, art … They are the primary sources for knowing about that period of history,” says Breay. The ultimate example of this is the Leonardo da Vinci notebook – complete with mirror handwriting, astronomical drawings and doodles that are actually an early study for the “Virgin of the Rocks”.

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The only copy of the epic poem ‘Beowulf’ was made about AD1000. The manuscript also contains a text called ‘Marvels of the East’, which describes centaurs and ‘Blemmyae’, strange men with no heads and their faces on their chests ©The British Library Board

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The parchment pages of ‘Beowulf’ were damaged by fire in 1731, and have since been mounted on modern paper ©The British Library Board 

Book of Hours, ‘Use of Rome (The Golf Book)’, c1540, in Latin. Books of Hours [Christian devotional books, often illuminated] typically begin with a calendar giving saints days. For May the image is of ladies and gentlemen riding, with Gemini in a roundel in the right-hand border ©The British Library Board

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This calendar scene for the month of September gives this manuscript its name, ‘Golf Book’. It is said to be one of the earliest known representations of the game of golf ©The British Library Board

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The Gospel of Mark, ‘Harley Golden Gospels’, first quarter of the 9th century, in Latin. An Evangelist portrait of Mark writing the first words of his Gospel in an open book. Above him, his symbol, a lion, unrolls a scroll bearing the same words ©The British Library Board

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On the opening page of the Gospel of John the letter ‘I’ is supported by the eagle of John and decorated with two medallions showing John and the Lamb of God

©The British Library Board 

This page from the Gospel of John is written entirely in gold, as is the rest of the text, giving the manuscript the epithet ‘Golden Gospels’ ©The British Library Board

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A page from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook (‘The Codex Arundel’) showing his characteristic lefthanded mirror writing and technical drawings, 1478-1518, in Italian. Leonardo’s notebooks provide a fascinating insight into his creative process. One scholar has described them as containing “an explosion of ideas”. Leonardo was an exceptionally skilled draughtsman, whose sketches record natural phenomena, the designs of apparatuses and machines, and allegorical drawings ©The British Library Board

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Here Leonardo advises how to design a coal stove that would provide long-lasting heat. He probably executed this drawing about 1500, in connection with his duties as court artist and engineer in Milan ©The British Library Board

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The ‘Petit Livre d’Amour’ was commissioned in about 1500 by Pierre Sala as a gift for Marguerite Bullioud, and contains a collection of love poems that he wrote for her. Pierre and Marguerite were childhood sweethearts but went on to marry other people; when they were both widowed, they eventually married each other in about 1515-1519. Here, Pierre places his heart into a ‘Marguerite’ flower ©The British Library Board

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A portrait of the author of ‘Petit Livre d’Amour’, Pierre Sala, attributed to Jean Perréal ©The British Library Board

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In ‘The Silos Apocalypse’ John’s vision of Christ in Majesty is surrounded by the symbols of the four Evangelists: the angel of Matthew, the eagle of John, the lion of Mark and the ox of Luke, at the beginning of Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on Revelation ©The British Library Board

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Here, Christ is surrounded by angels appearing in a cloud above the 24 Elders of the Apocalypse, at the beginning of the commentary on Revelation 1:7-10 ©The British Library Board

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Also in ‘The Silos Apocalypse’ is a map of the world where the earth is surrounded by the ocean. Numerous inscriptions identify geographical regions and cities, but only the most important places are shown in more detail. Jerusalem is represented as an architectonical structure (doubtless referring to the Temple of Jerusalem) and the Garden of Eden is seen with Adam and Eve being tempted by a snake ©The British Library Board

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©Michael Bodiam Petit Livre d’Amour, by Pierre Sala, c1500-18th century, in French and Italian For sport-lovers, a Book of Hours from 1540 contains the first rendering of golf, in which tiny players show off their swings. Or for romantics, there is the Petit Livre d’Amour, with the initials of the lover and his mistress appearing alongside miniatures of the lovestruck suitor. “No wonder she married him,” says Kathleen Doyle, curator of illuminated manuscripts. Just don’t ask the curators to pick their favourite. “To me, that’s part of the point. You can’t pick because there’s so much and that can be so surprising to people,” Doyle says. Many of these books have been treasured for centuries, on a shelf or inside a desk drawer. As such, they are often much less well known than paintings from the same periods, and much better preserved. “The illuminated manuscripts contain a fantastic number of works of art from the medieval period – far more than you’d find in the National Gallery,” says Breay. Doyle agrees. “Because they are in this form, they survived.” It was a close call for some though. In 1731, the Ashburnham House fire destroyed several manuscripts and singed the only copy of Beowulf known to exist. But it lives on, a headless man adorning one of its tattered pages. “Most people who’ve studied the poem will never have looked at the manuscript … They don’t realise it’s got all these other illustrations,” says Harrison. “Every time you look at a medieval manuscript, you see something you’ve never seen before.” As more libraries put their collections online, the question remains of what happens to the institutions left behind. So far, digitisation of manuscripts has increased demand to see the originals. And for every reader turning pages in a hushed reading room, many more are clicking through them in the comfort of their homes or classrooms, with 100,000 visiting the British Library site to date. Some might even notice those follicles. As Harrison puts it, “They’re not museum objects, not something to be put in a case. They’re still a book. There’s still so much you can learn from it.”

©Michael Bodiam

©Michael Bodiam

Leonardo da Vinci notebook ('The Codex Arundel') The Gospel of Luke, 'Harley Golden Gospels', first showing mirror writing and technical drawings, 1478- quarter of the ninth century, in Latin 1518, in Italian

©Michael Bodiam Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse, 'Silos Apocalypse', 1091-1109, in Latin

©Michael Bodiam The Gospel of Luke, ‘Harley Golden Gospels’, first quarter of the ninth century, in Latin Alice Fishburn is deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine. To view the British Library’s collection of manuscripts, go to www.bl.uk/manuscripts . To read their blog, go to http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/

Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire First pieces of gold were found in a farm field by an amateur metal detector who lives alone on disability benefit 

Maev Kennedy

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 September 2009 06.56 BST

A harvest of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver so beautiful it brought tears to the eyes of one expert, has poured out of a Staffordshire field - the largest hoard of gold from the period ever found.

The weapons and helmet decorations, coins and Christian crosses amount to more than 1500 pieces, with hundreds still embedded in blocks of soil. It adds up to 5kg of gold – three times the amount found in the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939 – and 2.5kg of silver, and may be the swag from a spectacularly successful raiding party of warlike Mercians, some time around AD700. The first scraps of gold were found in July in a farm field by Terry Herbert, an amateur metal detector who lives alone in a council flat on disability benefit, who had never before found anything more valuable than a nice rare piece of Roman horse harness. The last pieces were removed from the earth by a small army of archaeologists a fortnight ago. Herbert could be sharing a reward of at least £1m, possibly many times that, with the landowner, as local museums campaign to raise funds to keep the treasure in the county where it was found. Leslie Webster, former keeper of the department of prehistory at the British Museum, who led the team of experts and has spent months poring over metalwork, described the hoard as "absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells". "This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries," she predicted. The gold includes spectacular gem studded pieces decorated with tiny interlaced beasts, which were originally the ornamentation for Anglo-Saxon swords of princely quality: the experts would judge one a spectacular discovery, but the field has yielded 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt collars, a find without precedent.

The hoard has just officially been declared treasure by a coroner's inquest, allowing the find which has occupied every waking hour of a small army of experts to be made public at Birmingham City Museum, where all the pieces have been brought for safe keeping and study. The find site is not being revealed, in case the ground still holds more surprises, even though archaeologists have now pored over every inch of it without finding any trace of a grave, a building or a hiding place. The field is now under grass, but had been ploughed deeper than usual last year by the farmer, which the experts assume brought the pieces closer to the surface. Herbert reported it as he has many previous small discoveries to Duncan Slarke, the local officer for the portable antiquities scheme, which encourages metal detectorists to report all their archaeological finds. Slarke recalled: "Nothing could have prepared me for that. I saw boxes full of gold, items exhibiting the very finest Anglo-Saxon workmanship. It was breathtaking." As archaeologists poured into the field, along with experts including a crack metal detecting scheme from the Home Office who normally work on crime scene forensics, Herbert brought one friend sworn to secrecy to watch, but otherwise managed not to breath a word to anyone – even the fellow members of his metal detecting society when they boasted of their own latest finds. None of the experts, including a flying squad from the British Museum shuttling between London and Birmingham, has seen anything like it in their lives: not just the quantity, but the dazzling quality of the pieces have left them groping for superlatives. They are still arguing about the date some of the pieces were made, the date they went into the ground, and the significance of most seemingly wrenched off objects they originally decorated. There are three Christian crosses, but they were folded up as casually as shirt collars. A strip of gold with a biblical inscription was also folded in half: it reads, in occasionally misspelled Latin, "Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate the be driven from thy face." Kevin Leahy, an expert on Anglo-Saxon metal who originally trained as a foundry engineer, and who comes from Burton-on-Trent, has been cataloguing the find and describes the craftsmanship as "consummate", but the make up of the hoard as unbalanced. "There is absolutely nothing feminine. There are no dress fittings, brooches or pendants. These are the gold objects most commonly found from the Anglo-Saxon ere. The vast majority of items in the hoard are martial war gear, especially sword fittings." If the date of between AD650 and AD750 is correct, it is too early to blame the Vikings, and just too early for the most famous local leader, Offa of Offa's Dyke fame. Leahy said he was not surprised at the find being in Staffordshire, the heartland of the "militarily aggressive and expansionist" 7th century kings of Mercia including Penda, Wulfhere and Æthelred. "This material could have been collected by any of these during their wars with Northumbria and East Anglia, or by someone whose name is lost to history. Here we are seeing history confirmed before our eyes." Deb Klemperer, head of local history collections at the Potteries museum, and an expert on Saxon Staffordshire pottery, said: "My first view of the hoard brought tears to my eyes – the Dark Ages in Staffordshire have never looked so bright nor so beautiful." The most important pieces will be on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from tomorrow until Tuesday October 13, and will then go to the British Museum for valuation – a process which will involve another marathon collaboration between experts. Their best guess today is "millions". Leahy, who still has hundreds of items to add to his catalogue, has in the past excavated several Anglo-Saxon sites including a large cemetery of clay pots full of cremated bone. He said: "After all those urns I think I deserve the Staffordshire find."

Mysteries of Mercia It is no longer politically correct to refer to the period as the dark ages – but Anglo-Saxon England remains a shadowy place, with contradictory and confusing sources and archaeology. Yet out of it came much that is familiar in modern Britain, including its laws, its parish boundaries, a language that came to dominate the world, as well as metalwork and manuscript illumination of dazzling intricacy and beauty. Mercia was one of Britain's largest and most aggressive kingdoms, stretching from the Humber to London, its kings and chieftains mounting short but ferocious wars against all their neighbours, and against one another: primogeniture had to wait for the Normans, so it was rare for a king to reign unchallenged and die in his bed. They were nominally Christian by the date of the Staffordshire hoard, but sources including the Venerable Bede suggest that their faith was based more on opportune alliances than fervour. In south Staffordshire, at the heart of the kingdom, Tamworth was becoming the administrative capital and Lichfield the religious centre as the cult grew around the shrine of Saint Chad. There were few other towns, and most villages were still small settlements of a few dozen thatched buildings. Travel, if essential, would have been easier by boat: archaeology suggests that much of the Roman road network was decaying, and in many places scrub and forest was taking back land which had been farmed for centuries. The metalwork in the hoards came from a world very remote from the lives of most people, in mud and wattle huts under thatched roofs, living by farming, hunting, fishing, almost self-sufficient with their own weavers, potters and leather workers, needing to produce only enough surplus to pay dues to the land owner. A failing harvest would have been a far greater disaster than a battle lost or the death of one king and the rise of another. The world of their nobles is vividly evoked in poems like Beowulf, probably transcribed long after they became familiar as fireside recitations, of summer warfare and winter feasting in the beer hall, where generous gift giving was as important as wealth. Rich and poor lived in the incomprehensible shadow of a vanished civilisation, the broken cement and stone teeth of Roman ruins studding the countryside, often regarded with dread and explained as the work of giants or sorcerers. One poem in Old English evokes the eerie ruins of a bathing place, possibly Bath itself: "death took all the brave men away, their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed."

September 25, 2009

Golden hoard sheds light on Dark Ages

By Arifa Akbar

The chance discovery of a huge cache of Anglo Saxon treasure in a Staffordshire field has been hailed as one of the most significant archaeological finds in decades It must have been among the epic battles of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia - aristocratic warriors charging into combat draped in their gold and silver finery, surrounded by cadres of brutish guards. Fourteen hundred years later, on 5 July 2009, unemployed Terry Herbert tramped across familiar fields in Staffordshire, carrying his 14-year-old metal detector. He murmured a prayer in hope of finding something before sunset: "Spirits of yesteryear, take me where the coins appear."

His detector bleeped over a haul of ancient gold and silver so immense that it has been classed the most significant hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever to come to light, exceeding the impact of the legendary Sutton Hoo discovery of 1939, a ship burial site dating from the 7th century. Mr Herbert's Staffordshire hoard contains 5kg of 7th-century gold and 2.5kg of silver, far surpassing the 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold found at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge in Suffolk. He uncovered beaded ornaments lying beside 88-per-cent gold artefacts decorated with complex and exquisite animal engravings. Eighty-four bejewelled sword fittings are each believed to be worth in excess of £10,000. One of the most spectacular pieces in the shimmering haul is a gold strip that carries the biblical Latin inscription: "Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face." The charm did not save its owner, and was most likely stripped from his corpse after victory. The artefacts are likely to change our perception of the Dark Ages and rewrite history. Several archaeologists spoke of how they wept when they first viewed them; historians hope that, like Sutton Hoo, it will shed light on a part of England's past that remains caught between myth and historical documentation. "People laugh at metal detectorists," said Mr Herbert yesterday. "I've had people walk past and go 'Beep beep, he's after pennies.' Well no, we are out there to find this kind of stuff and it is out there." The 55-year-old from Burntwood, Staffs, added: "People have said it [the hoard] is bigger than Sutton Hoo and one expert said it was like finding Tutankhamun's tomb. I just flushed all over when he said that. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, you just never expect this." Extraordinarily, much of the loot was scattered in - and even atop - the field's top soil, probably disturbed by recent ploughing. The haul was found down to a depth of about 14 inches in an area only 20 yards long. One gold band was found next to a modern 20-pence piece, lately of a farmer's pocket, presumably. The 1,345 items were officially declared "treasure trove" yesterday by the South Staffordshire Coroner, Andrew Haigh, rendering it property of the Crown. They will be valued by a committee of experts and offered to British museums. The proceeds will be divided equally between Mr Herbert and the unwitting farmer whose field near Lichfield contained the bounty. Both will become millionaires, although archaeologists hope to keep the farmer's identity secret, lest there be any more Anglo-Saxon gold down there. The discovery guarantees Mr Herbert the bungalow he has always wanted. Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe, said the latest treasure "is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, than the Sutton Hoo discoveries". She said that it was "absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells" - referring to the illuminated manuscripts of the four New Testament Gospels dating from the 8th and 9th centuries. There will now follow decades of conjecture and study. In the 7th century, Engand did not yet exist. A number of kingdoms with tribal loyalties vied with one another for control, in a state of pretty much perpetual warfare. Dr Kevin Leahy, who has been cataloguing the find for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, said it was likely that this was buried by an "incredibly powerful individual or individuals" and that it was probably "war trophies" taken from a battlefield. "All the archaeologists who've worked with it have been awestruck."

Dr Roger Bland, head of portable antiquities and treasure at the British Museum, said: "It is assumed that the items were buried by their owners at a time of danger with the intention of later coming back and recovering them." Many of the ornate artefacts are related to warfare: crosses and garnet studded gold items that appear to be parts of helmets and sword fittings. Yet others, such as the series of gold snakes, have, for the moment, left experts nonplussed as to their function or ritual meaning. "It will be debated for decades," said Dr Leahy. The last of the treasures came out of the ground only three weeks ago and none has been cleaned. The stillearth-covered collection is being kept in secure storage at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and a selection of the items will be displayed at the museum from today until 13 October. Deb Klemperer, local history collections officer at The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Staffordshire, which hopes to acquire the treasure along with the area's county council and Birmingham Museum and Gallery, said her first view of the hoard "brought tears to my eyes - the Dark Ages in Staffordshire have never looked so bright nor so beautiful". Ian Wykes, an archaeologist and leader of Staffordshire County Council's historic team, declared: "For any archaeologist this is the find of a lifetime and reaffirms why you became an archaeologist in the first place." There is more to come. Fifty-six further clods of earth have been x-rayed and are known to contain metal artefacts; the total number of items is expected to rise to 1,500. Thirty other objects were found and dated to the 20th or 21st centuries. Mr Herbert said: "I don't know why I said the prayer that day, but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it. This is what metal detectorists dream of, finding stuff like this. "My mates at the [metal detecting] club always say that if there is a gold coin in a field, I will be the one to find it. I dread to think what they'll say when they hear about this." Treasure hunt: Previous finds in Britain * In 1938, the archaeologist Basil Brown discovered the Sutton Hoo ship burial below one of a series of low mounds near Ipswich - perhaps the most magnificent find of its type. The 30m-long oak ship from the 7th century had a burial chamber which contained weapons, armour, gold coins, gold and garnet fittings, silver vessels and silver-mounted drinking horns. * The Hoxne hoard was also discovered in Suffolk, in 1992, containing more than 15,000 gold and silver coins, gold jewellery and silver tableware - pepper pots, ladles and spoons. Coins show the burial took place after AD407. * In 1831, kings and queens, knights and bishops carved from walrus ivory and whales' teeth were found in mysterious circumstances on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. Chess was a popular game in the 12th century, whence the pieces date, though this is unlikely to have been known to the cow, who is rumoured to have discovered them, 700 years later. * Fourth-century silver tableware of outstanding quality was discovered during ploughing at Mildenhall, Suffolk, in 1942. It was made famous four years later by Roald Dahl's non-fiction children's story on the find. Independent News and Media Limited

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BBC Website Interesting articles weblinks http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4576351.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/3206867.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/6761809.stm http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21063401 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20345009 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21490542 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21487016   

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2013/apr/06/british-library-digital-video http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_%28t%C3%A9lescope_spatial%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_%28rover%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_webb_telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lunar_Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_probes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_Research_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2013/apr/05/how-to-delete-yourself-from-the-internet-video

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/04/delete-your-digital-life-advice http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130322-inside-nasas-hurricane-drone-lab http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130122-himalayas-water-towers-of-asia

LINKS TO FAMOUS SCIENTISTS AND THEIR OBITUARIES Bruce E. Ivins: Born: 1946-04-22 - Died: 2008-07-29 Bruce Edwards Ivins graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a PHD in microbiology and is known for his extensive research with Anthrax. He aided the FBI after the Anthrax attacks of 2001 in analyzing the substance. Eventually, authorities came to suspect his as a culprit of the attacks. According to ABC News, “FBI officials [...]

John Wheeler: Born: 1911-07-09 - Died: 2008-04-13 John Wheeler was a theoretical physicist, and one of the last known collaborators of Albert Einstein. He tried to achieve Einstein’s vision of a unified field theory. Wheeler is also credited for coining the terms black hold and wormhole.

Albert Hoffmann: Born: 1906-01-11 - Died: 2008-04-29 Albert Hoffman was a Swiss scientist who is best known for being the first to synthesize, and ingest the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

Randy Pausch: Born: 1960-10-23 - Died: 2008-07-25 Pausch died from pancreatic cancer at his home in Chesapeake, Virginia. They had recently moved to Chesapeake so that his wife and children would be near family after his passing.

Victor McKusick: Born: 1921-10-21 - Died: 2008-07-22 A geneticist, Professor of Medical Genetics and Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is widely regarded as the father of clinical medical genetics

Michael DeBakey: Born: 1908-09-07 - Died: 2008-07-11 Born Michel Dabaghi, Dr. Michael DeBakey could be considered one of the most important people to grace the pages of this database, though perhaps not the household name that he deserved to be. DeBakey is known as the father of modern heart medicine. He was a pioneer in heart surgery and worked with over 70,000 [...]

Albert Einstein: Born: 1879-03-14 - Died: 1955-04-18 He was one of the most important scientists in the world. He wrote the general theory of relativity.

Galileo Galilei: Born: 1564-02-15 - Died: 1642-01-08 Philosopher, Astronomer, inventor.

Charles Robert Darwin: Born: 1809-02-12 - Died: 1882-04-19 He is known as the father of evolutionary biology.

Isaac Newton: Born: 1643-01-04 - Died: 1727-03-31 He was one of the most important scientists of all time. President of the Royal Society, Physicist, astronomer, inventor, mathematician. You may have also heard of the “theory of relativity”.

Alexander Graham Bell: Born: 1847-03-03 - Died: 1922-08-02 Inventor and Scientist. He is best known as being the inventor of the Telephone.

Blaise Pascal: Born: 1623-06-19 - Died: 1662-08-19 Mathematician, physicist and philosopher.

Nicolaus Copernicus: Born: 1473-02-19 - Died: 1543-05-24 He was the Astronomer that introduced the theory that the sun was the center of our solar system.

Antoine Lavoisier: Born: 1743-08-26 - Died: 1794-05-08 French chemist known as the father of modern chemistry.

Guglielmo Marconi: Born: 1874-04-25 - Died: 1937-07-20 An Italian electrical engineer, an inventor, won the physics Nobel prize in 1809. He is generally considered the inventor of the radiotelegraph. In 1901 he sent signals across the Atlantic for the first time.

Carl Edward Sagan: Born: 1934-11-09 - Died: 1996-12-20 Astronomer, astrophysicist. Known also for his tv series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” (1980) and his science books. He also promoted the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Louis Pasteur: Born: 1822-12-27 - Died: 1895-09-28 French chemist and biologist. « Older Entries

Why Science Is Better When It's Multinational International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline when it comes to scientific discovery By Alice P. Gast | Wednesday, May 9, 2012 | 8 Nations are rivals in soccer and international relations, but science is a unifying force. Many of our biggest achievements seem to come from international collaborations. A team from 11 laboratories in nine countries identified the SARS coronavirus in 2003 with unprecedented speed. Scientists come from all over to chase the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Centers of excellence dot the globe. The world of science is getting flatter. What has gone underappreciated in this trend is the effect on science itself and how science is actually done. It has become a cliché that great discoveries come from interdisciplinary thinking—a chemist bringing insight to a discussion of a materials problem, a physicist sharing an intuition about a problem in biology, a biologist helping an engineer see how nature comes up with optimal solutions. Few realize how much science is energized when team members have different cultural approaches to problem solving. International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline. I have seen this phenomenon at close quarters. For years I have collaborated with colleagues from Mexico and Germany. We see eye to eye on so many things. We like one another’s cuisine, hiking, and the mathematics and physics our research involves. When we began writing out equations on a chalkboard, though, our cultural differences became apparent. When we first started out, our approaches seemed irreconcilable. The physics problems we work on—fluid suspensions of small particles—are hard. They encompass many unknowns, and the physics bumps up against many constraints and boundary conditions—rules that cannot be broken, like conservation of matter or the impassibility of a solid wall. While working on difficult equations, my Mexican cohorts wanted to relax the rules to make the mathematics more tractable and later put them back in. This set our German friends on edge. They kept reminding us of the constraints and the boundary conditions to make sure we did not stray too far. My American training left me somewhere in the middle: I worried about the constraints but was tentatively willing to relax them.

Over the years the creative clash of viewpoints bred success. The German-Mexican teams, along with some Americans, wound up solving challenging multibody hydrodynamics problems—the complicated mathematical descriptions of the way swarms of particles squeeze the fluid between them, explaining the flow behavior of pastes and slurries. I first got a lesson in cross-cultural dynamics during a NATO postdoctoral fellowship in Paris in 1985. Working with French colleagues taught me a different way to simplify and clarify a physics problem. An appreciation for the beauty of the problem and the value of intuition might have led us to solutions more easily than the typical American approach: to attack the problem with loads of mathematical equations. Later in Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awardee, I found that approaching an experimental problem with a deliberate, tactical and strategic way reduced the need for trial and error. The power of this diversity of thought comes alive in international conferences where there is an opportunity to listen, ask questions, think about problems, confer with and critique one another, and continue the dialogue after the meeting is over. New institutions have sprung up to take advantage of the synergies in multinational collaborations. Singapore has created an intensely international science scene, where talent converges to contribute and compete to form some of the best research teams in the world. In December, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology graduated its second cohort of men and women receiving master’s degrees in science and engineering, who hail from Saudi Arabia, China, Mexico, the U.S. and 29 other countries. Labs, institutes and universities are hubs that gather the best scientists to tackle the hardest problems. The need to reach across national boundaries places greater demands on scientists. While scientists become more specialized as they proceed through their studies, broadening and collaborative experiences make them better able to “think differently” and “connect the dots” to discover new things. Ultimately it leads to better science. This article was published in print as "Boundary Conditions."

POETRY FOR ENGINEERS AND SCIENCE STUDENTS Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Poetry of John Keats (1795-1821) When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

William Blake. 1757–1827 487. The Little Black Boy MY mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O, my soul is white! White as an angel is the English child, But I am black, as if bereaved of light. My mother taught me underneath a tree, And, sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissèd me, And, pointing to the East, began to say:

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'Look at the rising sun: there God does live, And gives His light, and gives His heat away, 10 And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday. 'And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face 15 Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear, The cloud will vanish; we shall hear His voice, Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."' 20 Thus did my mother say, and kissèd me, And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy, I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear 25 To lean in joy upon our Father's knee; And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him, and he will then love me.

The poem "When I heard the learned astronomer" by Walt Whitman. When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

In My Craft or Sullen Art by: Dylan Thomas In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.