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Costa Concordia: The rules of evacuating a ship

2012-01-17T19:31:00.002+08:00

Costa Concordia: The rules of evacuating a ship

By Tom de Castella BBC News Magazine

Cruise disaster

It's been suggested women and children were not given priority for lifeboats when the Costa Concordia capsized. But are there rules governing who leaves a sinking ship first?

It's a famous moment in the Titanic story. "Women and children first!" went the cry.
It's too early to know exactly what happened in the final hours of the Costa Concordia. The captain has already had to deny allegations he left the ship before everyone had been evacuated.
And it has been reported that some male passengers ignored informal injunctions to wait until women and children had made it into the lifeboats.

How did the priority rule begin?

This protocol started when HMS Birkenhead sank in 1852
"Women and children first" phrase coined in 1860
RMS Titanic disaster in 1912 popularised the rule
Only 20% of men on board Titanic were saved
It is not a part of international maritime law

Edwin Gurd, a retired police chief, told the Times. "We were keen for women and children to go first, and men if they had babies or families. A lot of men regardless of that were trying to save themselves."

But is the traditional maxim of women and children going first really part of the maritime rules?
Once passengers board a cruise ship, they are assigned a lifeboat according to where their cabin is, says Rob Ashdown, operations director at the European Cruise Council.
If there is an accident, as is the case with the Concordia hitting the rocks, it is up to the captain to decide whether to abandon ship. To signal the start of an evacuation, a loud alarm sounds ordering people to go to their muster station.

Costa sinking: How it happened

Maps and stats on the grounded cruise ship

From this point onwards, ships have 30 minutes to load, launch and manoeuvre away the lifeboats, under regulations set down by the International Maritime Organisation. And there is no legal duty to allow women and children to board first, Ashdown says.

The evacuation of the troop ship HMS Birkenhead in 1852 is widely believed to be the first occasion of women and children being told to board the lifeboats first.
The ship was carrying nearly 500 troops and about 26 women and children. After the commanding officer's order for the soldiers to wait, all the women and children survived but most of the men died. The phrase "women and children first" is thought to have come later.
But there is one group who may receive preferential treatment today - disabled people with special mobility needs, Ashdown says.
"This idea of women and children first is just a convention there is for historical reasons," he suggests. "It may be appropriate in certain circumstances and cultures and not elsewhere."
When it comes to air travel, the point is immaterial as prioritising women and children in an evacuation would be impractical.
An argument could be made in relation to ships that men are generally likely to be stronger swimmers than women and therefore have a better chance of survival in the water. But today the argument is less about survival chances and more about treating people fairly.
Prof Ed Galea, an evacuation expert at the University of Greenwich, says orderly behaviour among passengers is crucial to a successful evacuation.

The women and children first rule caused more men to die when the Titanic sank

And having studied major disaster situations, including interviewing survivors from the World Trade Center, he says that people don't respond to these evacuations in the way that one might think.
"It's not like Hollywood, it's not like every man for himself. People behave quite selflessly. You'll find people screaming and crying but it doesn't mean they are panicking."
Usually people will help the most vulnerable to leave the scene first. It's not necessarily women, but is likely to be the injured, elderly and young children, he says.
It's too early to know in detail what happened during the Concordia evacuation. But it seems that the crew did an "exemplary" job and that most passengers behaved well, Galea says.
The real problem aboard the Concordia was the slowness of the order to "abandon ship", he argues. Crucial minutes were lost after the ship hit the rocks and reports suggest it was only once the ship began to heel that the evacuation began.
Once a ship heels at 20 degrees it becomes difficult to launch the lifeboats and after the Concordia began to tip over it was soon heeling dramatically.
"They had time," Galea says. "But as I understand it the evacuation didn't start until the ship had a serious heel."

Aye aye 'heats up' middle finger

2012-01-17T19:30:00.000+08:00

Aye aye 'heats up' middle finger

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

Cold finger: the special digit shows up black on thermal images

Madagascar's mysterious aye aye warms up its extra-long finger when searching for dinner, scientists have found.

The lemur, the world's largest nocturnal primate, taps its specialised middle finger on tree trunks to find nutritious beetle larvae.
Studying thermal images, researchers found that the digit was colder than the others but warmed by up to 6C during foraging.
Scientists suggest that the aye aye saves energy by keeping the digit cool.
The findings are published in the International Journal of Primatology.

FINGER FACTS

The aye aye's middle finger is long and very thin - less than half the width of its other digits
It has a ball and socket joint so it is far more flexible when it comes to extracting grubs from trees
The finger is also used for grooming, scraping out coconuts and drinking. The animal uses it to move water or nectar rapidly into its mouth

Watch the aye aye's finger in action

The team from Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, US, wanted to investigate the surface temperature of sensitive structures.

The aye aye's unusual middle finger has already been found to be super-sensitive to vibrations, so provided the perfect subject for their study.
"It was striking to see how much cooler the third digit was while not in use and how quickly it warmed to [match] the other digits when engaged in an active foraging task," said graduate student Gillian Moritz, who carried out the study under the guidance of her supervisor, Dr Nathaniel Dominy.
Black and white When not in use, the finger appeared black on thermal images. This indicated a large difference in temperature between it and the white (hot) ears and eyes.
But when the animal was looking for food, the finger rose in temperature by up to 6C.

The finger heats up as it probes a food source

"We think the relatively cooler temperatures of the digit when not in use could be related to its [long, thin] form," said Ms Moritz.
"This form results in a relatively high surface-to-volume ratio [but] such a ratio is bad for retaining heat."
In order to sense the vibrations of beetle larvae through the bark of a tree, the finger is "packed with sensitive nerve endings", the scientist explained.
Because of its specialist sense receptors, using this tapping tool is very costly in terms of energy.
"Like any delicate instrument, it is probably best deactivated when not in use," Ms Moritz told BBC Nature.
Kink in the flow The question of how the lemur controls the heat of a single digit remains unclear.
Ms Moritz suggested two explanations. The first was simply that the blood vessels that supplied the digit could be constricted or dilated.
The second more unusual possibility, she said, was that the creature might employ temperature control method that was linked to the flexibility of its finger.
Ms Moritz explained: "Because the finger is fragile and vulnerable to injury, it is often extended back and out of the way during locomotion and periods of inactivity," she said.
This extension could cause a "kink" in the artery that supplies warm blood to the digit.

“Start Quote

Like any delicate instrument, it is probably best deactivated when not in use”

Gillian Moritz Dartmouth University

In the same way a bent garden hose supplies less water, the artery could supply less blood, keeping the finger much colder than its fully supplied neighbouring digits.

Aye ayes are the only primates known to have this strange adaptation.
The species is listed as Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), mainly because of threats to its habitat.
But the odd-looking primate also suffers direct persecution. Superstition in Madagascar describes the species as a bad omen. Those that are pointed at by the creature's mysterious finger are said to meet their death.

Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone

2011-11-08T22:02:00.000+08:00

Aneyoshi Journal

Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

A stone tablet in Aneyoshi, Japan, warns residents not to build homes below it. Hundreds of these so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: April 20, 2011

ANEYOSHI, Japan — The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: “Do not build your homes below this point!”

Multimedia

TimesCast | Warnings Written in Stone

Japan Prohibits Access to Nuclear Evacuation Zone (April 21, 2011)

Enlarge This Image

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Tamishige Kimura, village leader of Aneyoshi, Japan, took a walk with his grandson this week.

Readers’ Comments

Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone.
“They knew the horrors of tsunamis, so they erected that stone to warn us,” said Tamishige Kimura, 64, the village leader of Aneyoshi.
Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation. But modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher seawalls would protect vulnerable areas, came to forget or ignore these ancient warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami struck.
“The tsunami stones are warnings across generations, telling descendants to avoid the same suffering of their ancestors,” said Itoko Kitahara, a specialist in the history of natural disasters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. “Some places heeded these lessons of the past, but many didn’t.”
The flat stones, some as tall as 10 feet, are a common sight along Japan’s northeastern shore, which bore the brunt of the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that left almost 29,000 people dead or missing.
While some are so old that the characters are worn away, most were erected about a century ago after two deadly tsunamis here, including one in 1896 that killed 22,000 people. Many carry simple warnings to drop everything and seek higher ground after a strong earthquake. Others provide grim reminders of the waves’ destructive force by listing past death tolls or marking mass graves.
Some stones were swept away by last month’s tsunami, which scientists say was the largest to strike Japan since the Jogan earthquake in 869, whose waves left sand deposits miles inland.
Aneyoshi’s tsunami stone is the only one that specifically tells where to build houses. But many of the region’s names also seem to indicate places safely out of the waves’ reach, like Nokoriya, or Valley of Survivors, and Namiwake, or Wave’s Edge, a spot three miles from the ocean that scholars say marks the farthest reach of a tsunami in 1611.
Local scholars said only a handful of villages like Aneyoshi heeded these old warnings by keeping their houses safely on high ground. More commonly, the stones and other warnings were disregarded as coastal towns grew in the boom years after World War II. Even communities that had moved to high ground eventually relocated to the seaside to be nearer their boats and nets.
“As time passes, people inevitably forget, until another tsunami comes that kills 10,000 more people,” said Fumio Yamashita, an amateur historian in Iwate Prefecture, where Aneyoshi is situated. He has written 10 books about tsunamis.
Mr. Yamashita, 87, who survived the recent tsunami by clinging to a curtain after waters flooded the hospital where he was bedridden, said Japan had neglected to teach its tsunami lore in schools. He said the nation had put too much store instead in new tsunami walls and other modern concrete barriers, which the waves easily overwhelmed last month.
Still, he and other local experts said that the stones and other old teachings did contribute to the overall awareness of tsunamis, as seen in the annual evacuation drills that many credit with keeping the death toll from rising even higher last month.
In Aneyoshi, the tsunami stone states that “high dwellings ensure the peace and happiness of our descendants.” Mr. Kimura, the village leader, called the inscriptions “a rule from our ancestors, which no one in Aneyoshi dares break.”
The four-foot-high stone stands beside the only road of the small village, which lies in a narrow, cedar-filled valley leading to the ocean. Downhill from the stone, a blue line has been newly painted on the road, marking the edge of the tsunami’s advance.
Last week, a university group said the waves reached their greatest height in Aneyoshi: 127.6 feet, surpassing Japan’s previous record of 125.3 feet reached elsewhere in Iwate Prefecture by the 1896 tsunami.
Just below the painted line, the valley quickly turns into a scene of total destruction, with its walls shorn of trees and soil, leaving only naked rock. Nothing is left of the village’s small fishing harbor except the huge blocks of its shattered wave walls, which lie strewn across the small bay.
Mr. Kimura, a fisherman who lost his boat in the tsunami, said the village first moved its dwellings uphill after the 1896 tsunami, which left only two survivors. Aneyoshi was repopulated and moved back to the shore a few years later, only to be devastated again by a tsunami in 1933 that left four survivors.
After that, the village was moved uphill for good, and the stone was placed. Mr. Kimura said none of the 34 residents in the village today know who set up the stone, which they credit with saving the village once before, from a tsunami in 1960.
“That tsunami stone was a way to warn descendants for the next 100 years that another tsunami will definitely come,” he said.
For most Japanese today, the stones appear relics of a bygone era, whose language can often seem impenetrably archaic. However, some experts say the stones have inspired them to create new monuments that can serve as tsunami warnings, but are more suited to a visual era of Internet and television.
One idea, put forth by a group of researchers, calls for preserving some of the buildings ruined by the recent tsunami to serve as permanent reminders of the waves’ destructive power, much as the skeletal Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima warns against nuclear war.
“We need a modern version of the tsunami stones,” said Masayuki Oishi, a geologist at the Iwate Prefectural Museum in Morioka.
Despite Aneyoshi’s survival, the residents are in no mood for rejoicing. Four of the village’s residents died last month: a mother and her three small children who were swept away in their car in a neighboring town.
The mother, Mihoko Aneishi, 36, had rushed to take her children out of school right after the earthquake. Then she made the fatal mistake of driving back through low-lying areas just as the tsunami hit.
The village’s mostly older residents said they regretted not making more of an effort to teach younger residents such tsunami-survival basics as always to seek higher ground.
“We are proud of following our ancestors,” the children’s grandfather, Isamu Aneishi, 69, said, “but our tsunami stone can’t save us from everything.

The only living master of a dying martial art

2011-10-30T12:53:00.002+08:00

The only living master of a dying martial art

By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service

In today's Magazine

A former factory worker from the British Midlands may be the last living master of the centuries-old Sikh battlefield art of shastar vidya. The father of four is now engaged in a full-time search for a successor.

The basis of shastar vidya, the "science of weapons" is a five-step movement: advance on the opponent, hit his flank, deflect incoming blows, take a commanding position and strike.
It was developed by Sikhs in the 17th Century as the young religion came under attack from hostile Muslim and Hindu neighbours, and has been known to a dwindling band since the British forced Sikhs to give up arms in the 19th Century.
Nidar Singh, a 44-year-old former food packer from Wolverhampton, is now thought to be the only remaining master. He has many students, but shastar vidya takes years to learn and a commitment in time and energy that doesn't suit modern lifestyles.
"I've travelled all over India and I have spoken to many elders, this is basically a last-ditch attempt to flush someone out because if I die with it, it is all gone."

Mr Singh is searching India and Pakistan for a young successor

He would be overjoyed to discover an existing master somewhere in India, or to find a talented young student determined to dedicate his life to the art.
Until he was 17 years old, he knew little of his Sikh heritage. His family were not religious - he wore his hair short and dressed like any British teenager. He was a keen wrestler, but knew nothing of martial arts.
He spent his childhood between Punjab and Wolverhampton and it was on one of these trips to see an aunt in India that he met Baba Mohinder Singh, the old man who was to become his master.
Already in his early 80s, Baba Mohinder Singh had abandoned life as a hermit in a final effort to find someone to pass on his knowledge to.
"When he saw my physique he looked at me, even though I was clean-shaven and he asked me: 'Do you want to learn how to fight'," recalls Nidar Singh. "I couldn't say no."
On his first day of training, the frail old man handed him a stick and instructed Mr Singh to hit him. When he tried, the master threw him around like a rag doll.
"He was a frail old man chucking me about and I couldn't touch him," he says. "That definitely impressed me."
Open-minded
Mr Singh spent the next 11 years on his aunt's farm, milking the buffalos in the morning and spending every day training with his master.
In 1995 he returned to Britain to get married and took work packing food in a factory. He began to teach shastar vidya and immersed himself in research on early Sikh military history.
Soon he had enough interest from students to go into teaching full-time. He now travels around the UK to teach classes and to Canada and Germany where eager students have asked him to share his knowledge.

History of shastar vidya

When Sikh leader Guru Arjan Dev was murdered by the Mughal emperor in 1606, his son Guru Hargobind set out to militarise the Sikh people
Men were instructed to carry arms - including the kara (iron bracelet) and kirpan (small blade) still worn by orthodox Sikhs today
Hair was worn long and wrapped around the head to protect the skull
Hargobind also set up schools to train an elite warrior caste called the Akali Nihang, the immortal crocodiles, which developed secret fighting techniques
They also adopted a unique belief system with the martial art as a main tenet of their faith

"The people who are here are open-minded," he says. "I have Muslims and Christians here as well as Sikhs."

But even his most advanced pupils have only recently reached the stage where they can fight him with weapons without getting hurt.
Shastar vidya often gets confused with Gatka, a stick-fighting technique that was developed during British occupation of Punjab and was widely practised among Sikh soldiers in the British army.
Though it is a highly skilled art it was developed for exhibition rather than mortal combat. It is much easier to practise in public.
By working to revive a culture and practice that left the mainstream more than 200 years ago, Mr Singh has come up against a lot of resistance from within the Sikh community.
He says he received 84 death threats in his first two years as a teacher, from other Sikh groups who disagree with the ideology of shastar vidya and the beliefs of the small Nihang sect, which he identifies with.
"It is not just martial technique, there is a lot of oral tradition and linguistic skills that has to be there as well," he explains.
Nihangs still maintain some tenets of the Hindu faith, they have three scriptures rather than one and these extra books contain influences from Hinduism.
Many Nihangs also eat meat and drink alcohol which fundamentalist Sikhs disagree with. Traditionally they also drank bhang, an infusion of cannabis, to get closer to God.
"Sikhism has gone through several stage of evolution," says Christopher Shackle , a former professor of South Asian studies at Soas, University of London. "When the Nihangs were formed at the end of the 17th Century they were a very powerful group but they became rather marginalised."

An Akali Nihang soldier in 1865

When the Sikhs established their own kingdom under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, he realised he needed a modern army to keep the British out, and he hired ex-Napoleonic officers to train up his soldiers, sidelining the Nihangs.
The Nihangs were further isolated when the British Raj defeated the Sikh state in 1849 and forced Sikhs to give up arms.
"The British introduced a shoot-to-kill policy," says weapons collector and historian Davinder Tool, adding that accounts of British army officers show some troops fired on any man with a blue turban and a firearm.
"There is a sense that the Nihang's got left behind by time," says Mr Shackle.
Mr Singh spends a lot of time travelling to India and Pakistan researching the art, searching for descendents of the Akali Nihang and adding to his vast collection of weapons.
So far he has only met four people who could claim to be masters, now all dead. The last of these, Ram Singh, whom he met in 1998, died four years later.
"Nidar Singh is like someone who has walked straight out of the 18th Century," says Parmjit Singh, who has worked on several books on Nihang culture with the master.
"He is like a window into the past."
He is also still hoping to be a door to the future, opening up the path for new practitioners of the art to follow.

Fish living in dark caves still feel the rhythm of life

2011-09-10T21:37:00.002+08:00

Fish living in dark caves still feel the rhythm of life

By Leila Battison Science reporter

Millions of years of evolution in the dark have led to this Somalian cavefish losing its eyes, scales, and pigmentation.

A blind, cave-dwelling fish in Somalia knows what time it is, but its "day" is twice as long as ours.

Most animals have an internal body clock, or circadian rhythm, that lasts around 24 hours and is modified by the light-dark cycle of a day.
But an international team, whose research is published in the open access journal PloS Biology, shows that certain blind cave fish have a circadian rhythm that lasts almost two days.
The cavefish, Phreatichthys andruzzii, has evolved for nearly two million years in the isolated darkness of caves beneath the Somalian desert.
Professor Nick Foulkes, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, said that this particular species was chosen "because it was such an extreme example, having been isolated from a day-night cycle for so long".
In the course of its evolution it has lost its eyes, colouration and scales, having no need for them in the pitch-black of an underground cave system.
But it appears that the absence of day and night has caused a much more profound change in the fish's life rhythm.
Light sensitivity The internal body clock of most mammals is slightly longer than 24 hours, although it is unique for each person and is modified by light.

“Start Quote

If we look again at them in a few million years, they may have no trace of a circadian rhythm”

Nick Foulkes Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

This is most obvious to us when we travel across time zones, as jet lag is caused by the delay in our circadian rhythm synchronising with the new daylight times.

On a smaller scale, the body clock can be measured by the switching on and off of certain "clock genes" at different times during the day. This happens automatically daily, but is synchronised with the day-night cycle through exposure to light.
Light is detected primarily by the eyes, but most cells in the body have some reaction to light levels. In non-mammalian animals, such as fish, these "peripheral" detectors play a more important role.
This means that, even though the cavefish have lost their eyes over the course of evolution, their bodies should still be able to react to changes in light.
When comparing the reactions of the circadian rhythm of the cavefish to those of a "normal" zebrafish, however, the blind fish showed none of the responses to external light changes that the zebrafish did.
After two million years in the dark, the cavefish have no need to react to the light, and their body clocks have permanently changed to reflect this.
Alternative triggers But these blind fish do still have a body clock, which can be reset by triggers other than light.
Feeding the fish at regular times showed that both the zebrafish and the cavefish responded by resetting their circadian rhythms.
Furthermore, when the cavefish were left to reset their clock according to their natural rhythm, the researchers found that their "day" is 47 hours long.
Professor Foulkes said that this was "possibly linked with food availability, or we could have caught them in the process of losing their clocks. If we look again at them in a few million years, they may have no trace of a circadian rhythm".
The team plans to investigate whether this gradual loss of body clock is a common feature among all species of fish living in perpetual darkness.

Toronto couple defend move to keep baby's sex secret

2011-05-29T17:36:00.000+08:00

27 May 2011 Last updated at 19:02 GM

Toronto couple defend move to keep baby's sex secret

Mr Stocker and Ms Witterick say the decision to keep Storm's sex a secret was "a tribute to freedom"

A Toronto couple are defending their decision to keep their infant's sex a secret in order to allow the child to develop his or her own gender identity.

Kathy Witterick and David Stocker have been widely criticised for imposing their ideology on four-month-old Storm.
The family were the subject of a recent profile in the Toronto Star newspaper.
In an e-mail, Ms Witterick wrote that the idea that "the whole world must know what is between the baby's legs is unhealthy, unsafe, and voyeuristic".
Ms Witterick, 38, and Mr Stocker, 39, have also been criticised for the manner in which they are raising their two sons Jazz, five, and Kio, two.
The boys are encouraged to choose their own clothing and hairstyles - even if that means wearing girls' clothes - and to challenge gender norms. Jazz wears his hair in long braids, and the boys are "almost exclusively assumed to be girls," Mr Stocker told the Toronto Star.
The child's grandparents do not know Storm's sex, the Toronto Star reported, and have grown weary of explaining the situation, but are supportive.
In an e-mail to the Associated Press news agency, Ms Witterick, a stay-at-home mother, said a four-month-old infant was still learning to recognise him or herself, and said it was inappropriate to impose a gender identity on the child.

What Paddington tells us about German v British manners

2011-05-29T17:09:00.000+08:00

26 May 2011 Last updated at 10:14 GMT

What Paddington tells us about German v British manners

By Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin

Paddington stories reveal a lot about this cultural difference

Are Germans ruder than the British? Are Britons more dishonest than Germans? Fortunately, we don't have to rely on blind prejudice for answers. Serious academic research has been done on both sides of the North Sea.

“Start Quote

'Hallo Mrs Bird,' said Judy. 'How's the rheumatism?'”

End Quote This doesn't appear in German editions of A Bear called Paddington

There are Britons in Berlin who get taken aback by the directness of Germans. And there are Germans who get really annoyed when Britons (and Americans), in an effort to appear friendly, say things they don't really mean. Some Germans call this "lying".

So, what do the experts say on the matter?
Professor Juliane House, of the University of Hamburg, has studied groups of people interacting in controlled situations, watching with academic rigour how they behave as human guinea-pigs.
She found (or verified) that Germans really don't do small talk, those little phrases so familiar to the British about the weather or a person's general well-being, but which she describes as "empty verbiage".

There is no word in German for "small talk"

In academic language, this is "phatic" conversation - it's not meant to convey hard information but to perform some social function, such as making people feel good.
The German language doesn't even have an expression for "small talk", she says. It is so alien that in the German translation of A Bear called Paddington - Paddington unser kleiner Baer - it was omitted.
So this exchange of small talk occurs in the English original: "'Hallo Mrs Bird,' said Judy. 'It's nice to see you again. How's the rheumatism?' 'Worse than it's ever been' began Mrs. Bird."
In the German edition, this passage is simply cut.
Might a German talk about the weather, then?

But small talk is a staple of social interaction in the UK

"In a lift or a doctor's waiting room, talk about the weather in German? I don't think so," she says.
So does that mean the British are more polite? No, just different.
For their part, the British have what House calls the "etiquette of simulation". The British feign an interest in someone. They pretend to want to meet again when they don't really. They simulate concern.
Saying things like "It's nice to meet you" are rarely meant the way they are said, she says. "It's just words. It's simulating interest in the other person."
From a German perspective, this is uncomfortably close to deceit.
"Some people say that the British and Americans lie when they say things like that. It's not a lie. It's lubricating social life. It's always nice to say things like that even if you don't mean them," says House.
Blunt or direct? For Britons it's German directness that most often gives rise to bafflement or even fury. House, who married a Scouser - a native of Liverpool - gives an example from her own experience.

“Start Quote

There seem to be one or two problems here”

End Quote How a Briton might raise a serious concern

She would tell her husband to bring something from another part of the house - without the British lardings of "would you mind...?" or "could you do me a favour...?"

He would hear this as an abrupt - and rude - command.
This gap between German directness and British indirectness is the source of much miscommunication, says Professor Derek Bousfield, the head of linguistics at the University of Central Lancashire, and one of the editors of the Journal of Politeness Research.
There are many documented cases where the British understate a very serious problem with phrases like "there seem to be one or two problems here" or "there seems to be a little bit of an issue with this", he says.

British understatement might note that the Grim Reaper can rather spoil the mood

A British listener knows there is a gap between what is said and what is meant - and this can be a source of humour, as when the Grim Reaper's arrival at a dinner party in Monty Python's Meaning of Life "casts rather a gloom" over the evening.
Sometimes it's endearing, or at least the British think it is, as when this announcement was made by British Airways pilot Eric Moody in 1982, after flying through a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia:
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
But it can also be confusing if you're not used to it.
When BMW bought the British car manufacturer, Rover, it took a while for the seriousness of some of the problems at Rover to sink in. All too often, British managers spoke in euphemisms that their German counterparts took at face value.
Beach towels at dawn Both professors reject the idea that one nation's manners are better than the other's. Each has its own rules of communication, or patterns of behaviour, and neither can be blamed, they say, when clashes occur.

Reserved your sun-lounger yet?

What about those sun-loungers - the seats by the pool, which German holidaymakers allegedly grab at the crack of dawn?
"I think what you've got there is a clash of prototypical German efficiency with the prototypical British sense of fair play," says Bousfield.
House reckons the British do get the sun-loungers in the end, by one means or another.
"The British want the sun-lounger, but they do it differently," she says.
"Are the British devious? Yes, but why should you directly go for something if it doesn't work? Devious is not a bad thing."

Cosmic distance record 'broken'

2011-05-29T17:05:00.000+08:00

25 May 2011 Last updated at 18:12 GMT

Cosmic distance record 'broken'

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The blast may have occurred a mere 520 million years after the Big Bang

A cataclysmic explosion of a huge star near the edge of the observable Universe may be the most distant single object yet spied by a telescope.

Scientists believe the blast, which was detected by Nasa's Swift space observatory, occurred a mere 520 million years after the Big Bang.
This means its light has taken a staggering 13.14 billion years to reach Earth.
Details of the discovery will appear shortly in the Astrophysical Journal.
The event, which was picked up by Swift in April 2009, is referred to by astronomers using the designation GRB 090429B.
The "GRB" stands for "gamma-ray burst" - a sudden pulse of very high-energy light that the telescope is tuned to find on the sky.
These bursts are usually associated with extremely violent processes, such as the end-of-life collapse of giant stars.
"It would have been a huge star, perhaps 30 times the mass of our Sun," said lead researcher Dr Antonino Cucchiara from the University of California, Berkeley.
"We do not have enough information to claim this was one of the so-called 'Population III" stars, which are the very first generation of stars in the Universe. But certainly we are in the earliest phases of star formation," he told BBC News.
Swift, as its name implies, has to act quickly to catch gamma-ray flashes because they will register for only a few minutes.
Record breaker Fortunately, an afterglow at longer wavelengths will persist sometimes for days, which allows follow-up observations by other telescopes that can then determine distance.
It was this afterglow analysis that established another burst in the week previous to GRB 090429B to be at a separation from Earth of 13.04 billion light-years, making it temporarily the "most distant object in the Universe".

The event was picked up in April 2009 by Nasa's Swift telescope

This other event (GRB 090423) was reported fairly soon after its occurrence, but it has taken astronomers two years to come back with a confident assessment that an even greater expanse lies between Earth and GRB 090429B.
There are other competing candidates for the title of "most distant object". Hubble, for example, was given much more powerful instruments during its final astronaut servicing mission in 2009, and teams working on new images from the famous space telescope have seen galaxies that look not far short of GRB 090429B - and potentially even further out.
It should be stated, of course, that in these sorts of observations, there is always a degree of uncertainty.
Hubble's targets were galaxies - collections of stars; and GRB 090429B is the signature of a single event, a single star. So, in that sense, it might be considered apart.
Scientists are very keen to probe these great distances because they will learn how the early Universe evolved, and that will help them explain why the cosmos looks the way it does now.
They are particularly keen to trace the very first populations of stars. These hot, blue giants would have grown out of the cold neutral gas that pervaded the young cosmos.
Brilliant but brief These behemoths would have burnt brilliant but brief lives, producing the very first heavy elements.
Their intense ultra-violet light would also have "fried" the neutral gas around them - ripping electrons off atoms - to produce the diffuse intergalactic plasma we still detect between nearby stars today.

A GAMMA-RAY BURST RECIPE

Models assume GRBs arise when giant stars burn out and collapse
During collapse, super-fast jets of matter burst out from the stars
Collisions occur with gas already shed by the dying behemoths
The interaction generates the energetic signals detected by Swift
Remnants of the huge stars end their days as black holes

So, apart from its status as a potential record-breaker, GRB 090429B is of intense interest because it is embedded directly in this time period - the "epoch of re-ionisation", as astronomers call it.

Whether GRB 090429B was one of the very first stars to shine in the Universe is doubtful, as Dr Cucchiara states. There may be several generations before it.
But Swift will keep looking, and it is ideally suited for the purpose, explains co-researcher Dr Paul O'Brien from the University of Leicester, UK.
"By finding the most distant objects we get an estimate, of course, of when the first objects formed," he told BBC News. "But then if you can find a location on the sky - in this case of a single star - you can go and look for the galaxy this object is presumably in, and you can start to study the very first galaxies.
"Because gamma-rays can get right through dust, this gives you a good, unbiased way of finding those first galaxies. One could just find very bright galaxies, whereas Swift means we can find the smaller galaxies, too. It was all of these objects that grew up to form the Universe we see around us today. If you think in terms of a human lifespan, it's about understanding what the Universe was like as a toddler."
The Swift mission was launched in 2004. It is a US space agency-managed venture but has a big UK and Italian contribution.
Britain's major input has been to provide an X-ray camera and core elements of the satellite's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope.

Observations made at longer wavelengths - as in this infrared image of GRB 090429B taken by the Gemini North Telescope - are used to work out the distance

'Rapture' apocalypse prediction sparks atheist reaction

2011-05-26T02:28:00.000+08:00

'Rapture' apocalypse prediction sparks atheist reaction

Harold Camping says he will spend Saturday at home in California

US atheists are holding parties in response to an evangelical broadcaster's prediction that Saturday will be "judgement day".

The Rapture After Party in North Carolina - "the best damned party in NC" - is among the planned events.
Harold Camping, 89, predicts that Jesus Christ will return to earth on Saturday and true believers will be swept up, or "raptured", to heaven.
He has used broadcasts and billboards to publicise his ideas.
He says biblical texts indicate that a giant earthquake on Saturday will mark the start of the world's destruction, and that by 21 October all non-believers will be dead.
Mr Camping has predicted an apocalypse once before, in 1994, though followers now say that only referred to an intermediary stage.
"We learn from the Bible that Holy God plans to rescue about 200 million people," says a text on the website of Mr Camping's network, Family Radio Worldwide.
"On the first day of the Day of Judgment (May 21, 2011) they will be caught up (raptured) into Heaven because God had great mercy for them."
'Countdown to back-pedalling' The Rapture After Party in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is a two-day event organised by the Central North Carolina Atheists and Humanists.

This prediction has been given an unusually high level of publicity

"Though the absurdity of this claim is obvious to the majority of the world, it's a great opportunity to highlight some of the most bizarre beliefs often put forth by religious fundamentalists and raise awareness of the need for reason," said a posting about the party on the group's website.
Atheists in Tacoma, Washington, have headed their celebration "countdown to back-pedalling".
Events were also due to take place in Texas, Florida and California.
An atheist and entrepreneur from New Hampshire, Bart Centre, is enjoying a boost in business for Eternal Earth-bound Pets, which he set up to look after the pets of those who believe they will be raptured.
He has more than 250 clients who are paying up to $135 (£83) to have their pets picked up and cared for after the rapture.
They would be disappointed twice, he told the Wall Street Journal. "Once because they weren't raptured and again because I don't do refunds."
'No Plan B' Meanwhile Mr Camping says he knows "without any shadow of a doubt" that "judgement day" is arriving.
There is no "Plan B", he says.
His campaign has been unusually widely promoted - both in the US and overseas, including in the Middle East.
In Vietnam, thousands of members of the Hmong ethnic minority gathered near the border with Laos earlier this month to await the 21 May event, the Associated Press reported.
He said rolling earthquakes would occur at 1800 in the world's various time zones.
The internet has been alive with reactions as the apocalypse failed to materialise in various countries.
One early posting on Twitter read: "Harold Camping's 21st May Doomsday prediction fails; No earthquake in New Zealand."

Rare window into life of tsarist Russia

2011-05-19T02:13:00.002+08:00

6 December 2010 Last updated at 01:06 GMT

Rare window into life of tsarist Russia

By Imogen Foulkes BBC News, Geneva

Thousands of letters, photos and drawings have been discovered in Geneva

A rare window into life in imperial Russia is due to open on Monday, when hundreds of letters, postcards, photographs and even menus from the court of Tsar Alexander III are put up for auction in Geneva.

The documents were all sent by Alexander's children, Nicholas (who later became Nicholas II), George, Michael, Olga and Xenia to their Swiss tutor Ferdinand Thormeyer.
Mr Thormeyer was born and brought up in Geneva, but emigrated to Russia as a young man where - in 1886 - he became a tutor of French language and literature to the imperial children.
Throughout his time with them the children wrote him letters, partly as a way of practising their French.
But when Mr Thormeyer left Russia in 1899, they continued to write to him and to his family; Olga's letters only stopped when she died in exile in 1960.
Attic trove

The tsarist children had an enormous affection for their Swiss tutor

The documents were only discovered this year, when a descendant of Mr Thormeyer's was clearing out his attic. There, hidden in an old trunk, he found letters spanning 70 years.
"He came to see us first with just 20 letters," recalls Christina Robinson of the Geneva auction house Hotel des Ventes. "He wondered if they were worth anything."
"We saw that the letters had been written by Olga Kulikovsky, Grand-Duchess Olga Alexandrovna in fact, the youngest sister of Tsar Nicholas II."
A visit to the attic revealed more than 1,000 more documents, including family photographs, postcards, and even sketches.
What the documents reveal are an intimate portrait of life at the court of the tsar and the enormous affection the children had for their Swiss tutor.

Olga's postcard to Mr Thormeyer, where her brother Mikhail is dressed for a grand costume ball in 1903

"I think when Alexander III died in 1894 Mr Thormeyer became, probably unwittingly, almost a father figure for them," says Mrs Robinson.
"They address their letters to him 'my dear Siocha', which was their nickname for him, and Mikhail signs himself 'your loving Misha', rather familiar for a grand-duke."
The children also clearly felt they could confide their feelings to their tutor in a way that they perhaps couldn't to their families.
Grand-Duke George, for example, suffered from tuberculosis, and - sent away in 1896 to take the cure - wrote to Mr Thormeyer complaining about his doctor: "I do fear sometimes he's injecting me with something other than the medicine I actually need…the man is a dog."
Mikhail, meanwhile, was having difficulty accepting his role as heir to the throne once his brother Nicholas became tsar.
In 1904, when Nicholas's son Tsarevich Alexis was born, Mikhail wrote to Mr Thormeyer: "I thank God for liberating me from the burden I have been carrying all these years."
And in 1910, Grand-Duchess Olga explains bluntly why Mikhail, at the time causing scandal because of his private life, would be unable to attend the coronation of his cousin George V of England.
"Mikhail is sick, he has come out in a most horrible and disgusting rash, with pink spots all over his face," she wrote. "Naturally, with his head all bandaged to cover them up, he cannot possibly represent Russia at the coronation."
Dream world What comes across most of all, however, is the complete separation of the tsarist family from life in everyday Russia at the time.

In his letters, Mikhail liked to boast how many bears he had managed to kill

While discontent among ordinary people mounted, the imperial children were busy visiting and receiving visits from Europe's royal families, almost all of whom were their cousins.
Their letters tell stories of picnics, bicycle rides, and bear hunts.
"On an almost daily basis Mikhail goes shooting," says Mrs Robinson, "and he often writes to Ferdinand Thormeyer to tell him how many bears he managed to shoot on that particular outing."
"They are so far detached from reality that they don't even know it," she adds.
A glance at various court menus saved by Ferdinand Thormeyer proves the point.
In the cold November 1910 in St Petersburg, when many Russians were going hungry, the royal family were having pheasant, artichoke, and asparagus for lunch, followed by fresh fruit and ice cream, sweet pastries, tea, coffee and liqueurs.
Life in exile Of course, it all came to a bloody end after the revolution of 1917. Mikhail, Nicholas II and his entire family were shot, Olga and Xenia escaped into exile.

Tsar Alexander III and his children in 1888

But there is little in the Geneva letters to indicate that any of them really saw what was coming.
"We actually have one letter from Olga in 1914, which starts off talking about the weather and her flower collection,' says Mrs Robinson.
"There's really no indication that she was aware of what was happening around her, and the political situation in Russia.
"After that we jump to 1920, so there is a kind of blackout through most of the trouble."
But, safely exiled in Denmark and then Canada, Olga continued writing to her beloved tutor.
"She talks a lot about her love for Russia, and how much she misses it," explains Mrs Robinson.
"She says she always feels Russian, and she writes of her childhood, her happy memories… she still wants, even at the end of her life, to maintain a contact with her past life."
Now, that long-forgotten life will become more public; the letters and other documents are expected to sell for $70,000-$100,000 (£44,544-£63,634).
The auction house has divided them into different lots, but the hope is that they will all be bought by a library or foundation, in order to make this previously unknown historical archive accessible to all who are interested.

Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next

2011-05-19T01:54:00.000+08:00

Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next

By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine

Cheap air travel was among the predictions (illustration from Geoffrey Hoyle's book)

A 1972 book which predicts what life would be like in 2010 has been reprinted after attracting a cult following, but how hard is it to tell the future?

Geoffrey Hoyle is often asked why he predicted everybody would be wearing jumpsuits by 2010. He envisioned a world where everybody worked a three-day week and had their electric cars delivered in tubes of liquid.
These colourful ideas from his 1972 children's book, 2010: Living in the Future, helped prompt a Facebook campaign to track him down. His work has now been reprinted with the year in the title amended to 2011.
"I've been criticised because I said people [would] wear jumpsuits," explains Hoyle, the son of noted astronomer and science fiction author Fred Hoyle. "We don't wear jumpsuits but to a certain extent the idea of the jumpsuit is the restriction of liberties."
Hoyle's book is a product of its time. The move towards a planned society with an emphasis on communal living colour it.

Fortunately, jumpsuit proliferation has not occurred as Hoyle predicted

"Most of it is based on the evolution of a political system," Hoyle notes.
The author also predicted widespread use of "vision phones" and doing your grocery shopping online.
He is one of a long line of science fiction authors to have tried their hand at futurology, the discipline of mapping out the future.
"If you go back over the years in terms of science fiction and fantasy you find many very brilliant simulations of futures that have occurred," says Richard Rhodes, author of Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World.
Perhaps one of the most celebrated pieces of futurology by a science fiction author was Arthur C Clarke's prediction of a network of satellites in geostationary orbits [effectively remaining at the same spot in relation to a fixed point back on earth].
The idea of satellites in geostationary orbit had been floated before but Clarke was the first to see the possibilities for their use as relays for broadcasting and communications.
And HG Wells was years ahead of his time, predicting nuclear weapons in 1914, and later inspiring physicist Leo Szilard.

FAMOUS PREDICTIVE HITS

Arthur C Clarke: Network of geostationary communications satellites
HG Wells: Nuclear weapons, world wars, rise of air power
George Orwell: Monitoring of population as standard

In more recent times, author David Brin, in the 1989 novel Earth and in his other works, predicted citizen reporters, personalised web interfaces, and the decline of privacy.

"The top method is simply to stay keenly attuned to trends in the laboratories and research centres around the world, taking note of even things that seem impractical or useless," says Brin.
"You then ask yourself: 'What if they found a way to do that thing ten thousand times as quickly/powerfully/well? What if someone weaponised it? Monopolised it? Or commercialised it, enabling millions of people to do this new thing, routinely? What would society look like, if everybody took this new thing for granted?'"
Conscious efforts at futurology go back a long way. In 1931, to celebrate its 80th anniversary, the New York Times went to several prominent men for their predictions of what life would be like in 2011.
There were "hits". William Mayo predicted a 70-plus-year lifespan. Other predictions about an ageing population and less importance for national boundaries were promising.

HG Wells predicted nuclear weapons 30 years before it became a reality

But there were bad misses - certainly for Michael Pupin, the physicist - who predicted the equitable distribution of wealth.
A similar exercise had been undertaken in 1893 - looking forward to 1993 - for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Florida as a major tourist destination and fast trains are among the hits, but there are many misses.
Politician John J Ingalls was one of the most prescient when he wrote about travelling from New York to London in less than a day.
Predictions, failed or successful, tell us as much about the time they were made as they do about the future.
Go back to the early years of the Cold War and predictions of catastrophic nuclear war were widespread.
"It is the dog that didn't bark," says Rhodes, also author of The Twilight of the Bomb. "In the nuclear community in the years after World War II, they were pretty clear if we didn't eliminate nuclear weapons, if they didn't get it under control, there would inevitably be a nuclear war.
"They didn't see the deep existential fear those weapons induced in leaders of the various countries."
And it's easy to get things wrong or to miss a potential development, because an insurmountable obstacle seems to stand in the way.

Internet grocery shopping isn't exactly like this

One common wrong prediction, made by utopian socialists in the 19th Century, and cropping up in 1893 and 1931 and many times since, is the idea that mechanisation just has to go a bit further to earn us all a life of leisure.
Hoyle's three day week for 2010 has failed to materialise. "People are going to have to work very hard. It's gone the other way. People are working seven days a week. I'm very pessimistic now," he says.
But Hoyle got it right when predicting the role of the vision phone. And the vision desk sounds rather familiar too. "The glass on top of the screen is made in a special way so that when you write on it the camera photographs what you write."
If you predicted today that within a few years time key electronic devices like phones, GPS and media players would be embedded in the human body, you would hardly be saying anything daring.
"It's fairly straightforward to extrapolate from existing technology - that tends to be what people do," says Rhodes. "But the really important changes are almost inevitably complete surprises."
The proliferation of the computer and the microchip comes into this category, says Tim Mack, president of the World Future Society.
"Computers were all looked at as big data crunchers," says Mack. "People missed that - the embedding of chips in just about everything."
Futurology is big business now. The defence industry picked it up a long time ago, but now it's used in everything from consumer technology to food firms.
And it will still prove delightful to read 2010's predictions in a century's time.

The words that could unlock your child

2011-05-19T01:08:00.000+08:00

The words that could unlock your child

As children face their final month of revision before the exam season starts, many parents are looking for the words to motivate their offspring. But could they be mistakenly praising the value of ability over effort, asks Matthew Syed.

Take a glance at these expressions of encouragement:
"You learned that so quickly, you're so smart!"
"Look at that drawing. Are you the next Picasso or what?"
"You're so brilliant - you passed that exam without really studying!"
They come across as precisely the kind of confidence-boosting statements that should be given to children or, indeed, anyone else. Such phrases are used in homes and classrooms every day, particularly with exams looming.
But are they benign? Or could they unlock the reason why so many children are failing at school and elsewhere?

“Start Quote

Intelligence-based praise orients the receiver towards the fixed mindset - it suggests to them that intelligence is of primary importance rather than the effort through which intelligence can be transformed”

End Quote

To find out we need to take a quick detour into the science of expertise, and ask a question. Where does excellence come from? For a long time, it was thought the answer to this hinged, to a large degree, on genetic inheritance. Or, to put it another way, it is all about talent.

It turns out that this is mistaken. Dozens of studies have found that top performers - whether in maths, music or whatever - learn no faster than those who reach lower levels of attainment - hour after hour, they improve at almost identical rates.
The difference is simply that high achievers practise for more hours. Further research has shown that when students seem to possess a particular gift, it is often because they have been given extra tuition at home by their parents.
This is not to deny that some kids start out better than others - it is merely to suggest that the starting point we have in life is not particularly relevant.
Why? Because, over time, with the right kind of practice, we change so dramatically. It is not just the body that changes, but the anatomy of the brain.
A study of pianists, for example, showed that the area of the brain governing finger movement is substantially larger than for the rest of us - but it did not start out like this; it grew with practice.
The question of talent versus effort would not matter terribly much if it was merely theoretical. But it is so much more than that. It influences the way we think, feel, and the way we engage with our world.

Mindset experiments

Computer studies students received lessons on importance of growth mindset. It resulted in a dramatic improvement in test scores after a six-week intervention
Students at Stanford University were encouraged towards the growth mindset in a workshop. At the end of term, these students had earned significantly higher grade point averages than the control group

To see how, consider a youngster who believes excellence is all about talent - labelled the "fixed mindset". Why would she bother to work hard?

If she has the right genes, won't she just cruise to the top? And if she lacks talent, well, why bother at all? And who can blame a youngster for this kind of attitude, given the underlying premise?
If, on the other hand, she really believes that effort trumps talent - labelled the "growth mindset" - she will persevere. She will not see failure as an indictment, but as an opportunity to adapt and grow. And, if she is right, she will eventually excel.
What a young person decides about the nature of talent, then, could scarcely be more important.
Think how often you hear children saying "I just lack the brain for numbers" or "I don't have the coordination for sports". These are direct manifestations of the fixed mindset, and they destroy motivation.
Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, do not regard their abilities as set in genetic stone. These are the youngsters who approach tasks with gusto. "I may not be good at maths now, but if I work hard, I will be really good in the future!"

Many schools already praise effort as much as achievement

So, how do we orient our children to the growth mindset? A few years ago, Carol Dweck, a leading psychologist, took 400 students and gave them a simple puzzle.
Afterwards, each of the students were given six words of praise. Half were praised for intelligence: "Wow, you must be really smart!" The other half were praised for effort: "Wow, you must be hard working!"
Dweck was seeking to test whether these simple words, with their subtly different emphases, could make a difference to the student's mindsets. The results were remarkable.
After the first test, the students were given a choice of whether to take a hard or an easy test.
A full two-thirds of the students praised for intelligence chose the easy task - they did not want to risk losing their "smart" label. But 90% of the effort-praised group chose the tough test - they wanted to prove just how hard working they were.
Then, the experiment came full circle, giving the students a chance to take a test of equal difficulty to the first test.
The group praised for intelligence showed a 20% decline in performance compared with the first test, even though it was no harder. But the effort-praised group increased their score by 30%. Failure had actually spurred them on.

Many people believe that talent is a fixed quality

And all these differences turned on the difference in six simple words spoken after the very first test.
"These were some of the clearest findings I've seen," Dweck said. "Praising children's intelligence harms motivation and it harms performance."
Intelligence-based praise orients the receiver towards the fixed mindset - it suggests to them that intelligence is of primary importance rather than the effort through which intelligence can be transformed.
And this takes us right back to those expressions of praise we started out with. They all sounded like confidence-boosting statements. But now listen to the subliminal messages in the background:
"If I don't learn something quickly, I'm not smart."
"I shouldn't try drawing anything hard or they'll see I'm no Picasso."
"I'd better quit studying or they won't think I'm brilliant."
This reveals a radical new approach to the way we engage with children - that we should praise effort, never talent; that we should teach kids to see challenges as learning opportunities rather than threats; and that we should emphasise how abilities can be transformed.
Experiments from around the world have shown that when parents and teachers adopt this approach, and stick to it, the results are remarkable.
Matthew Syed is the author of Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice.

Swearing can help relieve pain, study claims

2011-05-19T01:03:00.000+08:00

Swearing can help relieve pain, study claims

Swearing after hurting yourself can help numb the pain of an injury, new research suggests.

Research proves that swearing triggers not only an emotional response, but a physical one too Photo: ALAMY

10:05AM BST 18 Apr 2011

27 Comments

Scientists from Keele University found that letting forth a volley of foul language can have a powerful painkilling effect, especially for people who do not normally use expletives.

To test the theory, student volunteers placed their hands in a bucket of ice cold water while swearing repeatedly.

They then repeated the exercise but, instead of swearing, used a harmless phrase instead.

Researchers found that the students were able to keep their hands submerged in the icy water for longer when repeating the swear word - establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance.

They also found that the pain-numbing effect was four times more likely to work in the volunteers who did not normally use bad language.

The team believes the pain-lessening effect occurs because swearing triggers the ''fight or flight'' response.
The accelerated heart rates of the students repeating the swear word may indicate an increase in aggression, in a classic fight or flight response of ''downplaying feebleness in favour of a more pain-tolerant machismo''.
The research proves that swearing triggers not only an emotional response, but a physical one too, which may explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and why it still persists today.
Dr Richard Stephens, who worked on the project, said: ''Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon.
''It taps into emotional brain centres and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.
''Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists.''

Cheap wine 'good as pricier bottles' - blind taste test

2011-04-27T01:17:00.000+08:00

Cheap wine 'good as pricier bottles' - blind taste test

The wines tested were priced up to £30 a bottle

Wine costing less than £5 a bottle can have the same effect on the palate as those priced up to six times as much, a psychological taste challenge suggests.

The blind test at the Edinburgh Science Festival saw 578 members of the public correctly identify the "cheap" or "expensive" wines only 50% of the time.
They tasted a range of red and white wines including merlot and chardonnay.
University of Hertfordshire researchers say their findings indicate many people may just be paying for a label.
Two champagnes costing £17.61 and £29.99 were compared, alongside the bottles costing less than £5 and vintages priced between £10 and £30.
The other varieties tasted were shiraz, rioja, claret, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc.
The participants were asked to say which they thought were cheap and which were expensive.
By the laws of chance, they should have been able to make a correct guess 50% of the time - and that was the exact level of accuracy seen.
The findings demonstrate the volunteers cannot distinguish between wines by taste alone, the organisers of the test say.
Lead researcher psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman said: "These are remarkable results. People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear - the inexpensive wines we tested tasted the same as their expensive counterparts."

Born in a death camp: A miracle baby and her mother

2011-04-18T19:25:00.000+08:00

Born in a death camp: A miracle baby and her mother

By Emily Davis Producer, The Baby Born In A Concentration Camp

Eva Clarke has been called the miracle baby. By the time of her birth, her mother Anka had endured six years of Nazi rule, had survived three concentration camps and weighed just five stone.

Eva and Anka: Baby Eva weighed just 3lbs (1.5kg) when she was born

In the late 1930s, Anka Bergman was a lively law student living in the Czech capital Prague.
"I wanted company and boyfriends and to enjoy myself. I didn't know that Hitler was coming, but I filled my time with only cinemas and theatres and concerts and parties," she says.
It was at a nightclub that Anka met her husband, Bernd Nathan, an attractive German-Jewish architect who had fled Germany in 1933.
"He thought that it was far enough to be safe," said Eva. "It wasn't but, if he hadn't come to Prague, he wouldn't have met my mother."
In March 1939, the Nazis invaded Prague and, from that moment Anka's life, and Bernd's, changed forever.
Secret pregnancy Anka and her entire family were sent to Terezin (also know as Theresienstadt), a transit camp for the Auschwitz death camp.

Eva's father was killed before his daughter was born

Anka and her husband Bernd were to remain there for the next three years.
Although the sexes were segregated, Anka managed to meet secretly with her husband and she became pregnant.
"My mother stayed in the same barracks as I did," said Anka.
"And she looked at me: 'How? And where?' She laughed actually, because - in all that misery there - she had a sense of humour."
But as Anka soon discovered, to be Jewish and become pregnant under Nazi rule was a serious offence.
"There were five couples in the same position and we had to sign a paper that the babies, when they are born, will be taken away.
"That's the first time I heard the word 'euthanasia'. But we did sign it."
Anka gave birth to a baby boy. He was not taken away, but he died in the camp from pneumonia when he was two months old.
Chimneys In October 1944, Anka became pregnant again - but before she was able to tell her husband, he was sent to Auschwitz.

Eva and Anka Clarke now live together in Cambridge

Astonishingly, Anka volunteered to follow him and was transported to Auschwitz the following day. However, she never saw Bernd again. She later found out that he was shot dead in the camp on 18 January 1945.
It was at Auschwitz that Anka came to understand the true horror of the Nazis' actions.
"We saw the chimneys spouting the smoke and fire and the smell. And it looked like hell," she says.
She herself was lucky to survive more than a few hours there.
"Had my mother arrived in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp holding my brother in her arms, she would have been sent straight to the gas chambers," Eva says.
"But because she arrived in Auschwitz not holding a baby, and although she was pregnant again - this time with me - nobody knew, so she lived to see another day."
As Eva puts it, she owes her life to her brother: "His death meant my life, which is a very strange thing to say."
Anka was selected for hard labour working in an armaments factory. Food was scarce and for the next six months she slowly starved.
Then, in April 1945, in the dying days of the war, she was caught up in the Nazi attempt to get rid of all living witnesses to the Holocaust. She endured a torturous three-week train journey.
"It was open to the skies and it was filthy, with no food and hardly any water," she says.
Liberation On 29 April 1945, Anka arrived at Mauthausen death camp.
The sight of the name Mauthausen at the station was a deep shock to her, as she had heard of the camp's awful reputation early on in the war.

“Start Quote

She always says that nobody knows what they can withstand until they have to”

End Quote Eva Clarke

"She says the shock was so great that she thinks it provoked the onset of her labour and she started to give birth to me on that coal truck," Eva says.

"There are two reasons why we survived, and the first is that, on 28 April 1945, the Nazis had dismantled the gas chamber in Mauthausen.
"Well, my birthday is the 29th so presumably - had my mother arrived on the 26th or 27th - I wouldn't be sitting here today.
"And the second reason we survived was because, a few days after my birth, the American army liberated the camp. My mother reckons she wouldn't have lasted much longer."
After the war, Anka remarried and in 1948 - when the communists took over Czechoslovakia - the family moved to Cardiff.
Today she lives in Cambridge with Eva, who is now retired and spends her time visiting schools, telling pupils the story of how she came into the world.
For her it is important to commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust.
"To remember all those thousands and thousands and thousands of people who died, who were killed in the Holocaust, and especially all those thousands of people who've never ever had one single person remember them because all their families were killed," she says.
And she has a huge amount of admiration for her mother: "I can hardly believe that she actually did go through it. But, you know, she always says that nobody knows what they can withstand until they have to.
"And fortunately most of us are not put to the test."

Staedtler and Faber-Castell's productive pencil rivalry

2011-04-14T15:13:00.002+08:00

Staedtler and Faber-Castell's productive pencil rivalry

By Caroline Bayley Producer, In Business, BBC Radio 4

The proximity of Staedtler and Faber-Castell encourages innovation at both firms

The ancient city of Nuremberg, steeped in medieval and Nazi history, is home to a cluster of fiercely competitive pen and pencil manufacturers whose survival is driven by innovation.

Staedtler and Faber-Castell are both part of the Mittelstand, the backbone of German industry, made up of thousands of small and medium-sized companies. Privately-owned, many are still family businesses after several generations.
Ancient 'pencil war' Staedtler celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2010, while Faber-Castell will celebrate its 250th birthday in summer 2011.
But despite this, the two companies have argued about which company can rightfully claim to be the oldest, a "pencil war" that ended up in court in the 1990s.

“Start Quote

I would have been fired a couple of times in a publicly-traded company somewhere in the US, where you are judged according to quarterly earnings per share”

End Quote Count von Faber-Castell Head of Faber-Castell

Staedtler lost the legal case, but managing director Axel Marx still points out that Friedrich Staedtler, who was born in Nuremberg in 1636, was "the first person worldwide to be mentioned as a pencil manufacturer".

His sons had their own pencil-making businesses. But the city's strict guild rules meant that the Staedtler company was not set up until 1835.
By this point, 10km (6.2 miles) down the road in the small town of Stein, there was already a flourishing pencil company, Faber-Castell.
Outside the city limits, Kasper Faber had been able to incorporate a company in 1761.
The current head of the family firm, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, is the eighth generation and a direct descendent of the founder.
"I do hope the company will still flourish with the ninth and tenth generations," he says.
That the disagreement over longevity continues to rankle is symptomatic of the keen rivalry that has helped to shape both companies.
The need to survive in high-cost Germany - and in such close proximity to each other - has forced the companies to innovate and export.
Both are profitable, global companies and still highly dependent on the same school-age consumers who use their pencils, crayons and pens.

Head to head
Vital statistics	Faber-Castell	Staedtler
Founded	1761	1835
Turnover	451m euros	250m euros
Staff	7,000	2,200
Factories	14 in 10 countries	5 in 3 countries
Innovations	Grip pencil	Wopex pencil

Source: Faber-Castell and Staedtler

Staedtler has an annual turnover of approximately 250m euros (£220m). It has some factories in Asia and world-wide sales but still manufactures 80% of its pencils and pens in Germany.

At the Nuremberg plant where it makes graphite leads and pens, it has developed an "anti-break system" for coloured pencils.
This extra coating around the coloured pencil leads stops them breaking when sharpened, which Staedtler says has boosted sales.
Its most recent development is the Wopex pencil, manufactured on a secret production line visitors are not allowed to see.
It uses mashed up wood and therefore, the company says, is more environmentally friendly - 80% of the wood from a tree can be used, rather than the 20% used in traditional wood-cased pencils.
Axel Marx describes this new production method as a "revolution", and says the pencils have double the writing capacity of older versions.
He accepts that the new process will be copied in time, but is determined to exploit the window of opportunity before competitors catch up.
'Cautious' decisions Staedtler is no longer in the Staedtler family. It is owned by a private foundation.
It has no bank debts, and in fact the company is reluctant to take out bank loans for new projects, preferring to re-invest profits and expand more slowly. Mr Marx says this is typical of the Mittelstand mentality.

Find out more

In Business is on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 14 April at 2030 BST and Sunday 17 April at 2130 BST.

"You do not say, 'OK, there is a business opportunity, let's take a bank credit to realise it'. You are more on the cautious side," he says.

He acknowledges this approach means many Anglo-Saxon rivals consider German companies to be "a little bit conservative in financial issues".
Down the road at Faber-Castell, in factories painted as brightly as the pencils that roll off its production line, Count von Faber-Castell appears to share his opposite number's philosophy.
"I would have been fired a couple of times in a publicly traded company somewhere in the United States, where you are judged according to quarterly earnings per share," he says.
But even without shareholders breathing down his neck, there were some in his company who were sceptical about his plan to introduce luxury pencils, a move he says was unique among pencil manufacturers. The Perfect Pencil comes in a platinum holder, and sells for 190 euros (£170).
"It helped tremendously to really position Faber-Castell as a company which is making interesting products even in a dull business of pencils," he says.
Thinking big Turnover for the financial year 2009-10 was 451m euros (£402m), with pre-tax profits of 46.5m euros (£41m).
In contrast to Staedtler, Faber-Castell has more of its production abroad than at home, with factories in South America and Asia, but remains committed to its German presence.
Ten years ago the company introduced the grip pencil which has painted dots on the outside to make it easier to hold and use.

Staedtler has developed an "anti-break" system

The product won five design awards, and was one of Business Week's products of the year in 2001. It boosted sales worldwide and secured the future of the German pencil plant in Stein.
With yet another large writing instrument manufacturer, Stabilo, nearby, Nuremberg mayor Ulrich Maly insists the pencil makers are "more than just companies, because they are part of the city's history".
He says Nuremberg's economy depends on the Mittelstand companies like the pencil makers to provide employment. There is a great deal of loyalty to local firms, and he says pencils are bought "patriotically".
And he says the relatively high labour and manufacturing costs the companies face within Germany offer their own reward.
"In places where labour is expensive, the ideas simply have to be greater."

Stone tools 'demand new American story'

2011-04-13T23:22:00.002+08:00

Stone tools 'demand new American story'

By Paul Rincon and Jonathan Amos Science reporters, BBC News

Researchers report almost 16,000 items

The long-held theory of how humans first populated the Americas may have been well and truly broken.

Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of stone tools that predate the technology widely assumed to have been carried by the first settlers.
The discoveries in Texas are seen as compelling evidence that the so-called Clovis culture does not represent America's original immigrants.
Details of the 15,500-year-old finds are reported in Science magazine.
A number of digs across the Americas in recent decades had already hinted that the "Clovis first" model was in serious trouble.
But the huge collection of well-dated tools excavated from a creek bed 60km (40 miles) northwest of Austin mean the theory is now dead, argue the Science authors.
"This is almost like a baseball bat to the side of the head of the archaeological community to wake up and say, 'hey, there are pre-Clovis people here, that we have to stop quibbling and we need to develop a new model for peopling of the Americas'," Michael Waters, a Texas A&M University anthropologist, told reporters.
For 80 years, it has been argued that the Clovis culture was the first to sweep into the New World.
These people were defined by their highly efficient stone-tool technology. Their arrow heads and spear points were formidable hunting weapons and were used to bring down the massive beasts of the Ice Age, such as mammoth, mastodon and bison.
Clovis first? The hunter gatherers associated with this technology were thought to have crossed from Siberia into Alaska via a land bridge that became exposed when sea levels dropped. Evidence indicates this occurred as far back as about 13,500 years.

“Start Quote

The Debra L Friedkin site demonstrates that people were in the Americas at least 2,500 years before Clovis”

End Quote Michael Waters Texas A&M University

But an increasing number of archaeologists have argued there was likely to have been an earlier occupation based on the stone tools that began turning up at dig sites with claimed dates of more than 15,000 years.

Dr Waters and colleagues say this position is now undeniable in the light of the new artefacts to emerge from the Debra L Friedkin excavation.
These objects comprise 15,528 items in total - a variety of chert blades, bladelets, chisels, and abundant flakes produced when making or repairing stone tools.
The collection was found directly below sediment containing classic Clovis implements. The dating - which relied on a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) that can tell how long minerals have been buried - is robust, says the team. And, they add, the observed sequence is also reliable; the sediments have not been mixed up after the tools were dropped.
"The sediments were very rigid in the fact that they were clay, which worked to our advantage," explained Lee Nordt from Baylor University. "If you go to many other sites, they are loamy or sandy in texture, and they are mixed very rapidly by burrowing from animals or maybe from plant roots, etc."
Getting around The newly discovered tools are small, and the researchers propose that they were designed for a mobile toolkit - something that could be easily packed up and moved to a new location. Although clearly different from Clovis tools, they share some similarities and the researchers suggest Clovis technology may even have been derived from the capabilities displayed in the earlier objects.

The Debra L Friedkin site lies just outside Austin

"The Debra L Friedkin site demonstrates that people were in the Americas at least 2,500 years before Clovis," said Dr Waters.
"The discovery provides ample time for Clovis to develop. People could experiment with stone and invent the weapons and tools that would potentially become recognizable as Clovis. In other words, [these tools represent] the type of assemblage from which Clovis could emerge."
But anthropologist Tom Dillehay, who was not involved with the latest study, commented: "The 'Clovis first' paradigm died years ago. There are many other accepted pre-Clovis candidates throughout the Americas now."
Professor Dillehay, from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told BBC News: "If you look at the prose of this paper, it bothers me a little bit because it's as if they are reconstituting the Clovis-Pre-Clovis debate and saying, 'Here's the site that kills it'."
He commended the researchers on their well-presented data and "tight discussion". But he said that the OSL technique was less reliable than radiocarbon dating, which has been applied to other early American sites.
And assigning the artefacts to Clovis and pre-Clovis technologies was not straightforward because the site lacked the projectile points required to reliably distinguish between the two. Clovis projectile points are unmistakeable.
In addition, said the Vanderbilt anthropology professor, the tools come from a floodplain deposit that is just 6-7cm thick. This, he said, was "potentially problematic" because of the possibility that artefacts were transported around by water.
Professor Gary Haynes, from the University of Nevada in Reno, US, praised the "good work" by the research team.
But he said it was plausible that natural processes could have caused some stone tools to migrate downwards in the clay - giving the impression of a pre-Clovis layer.

'Music of the stars' now louder

2011-04-13T23:20:00.002+08:00

'Music of the stars' now louder

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Washington, DC

Kepler studies of distant stars will help us understand our own local star, the Sun, much better

The Kepler space telescope measures the sizes and ages of stars five times better than any other means - when it "listens" to the sounds they make.

Bill Chaplin, speaking at the AAAS conference in Washington, said that Kepler was an exquisite tool for what is called "astroseismology".
The technique measures minuscule variations in a star's brightness that occur as soundwaves bounce within it.
The Kepler team has now measured some 500 far-flung stars using the method.
Bill Chaplin of the University of Birmingham told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that astroseismology was, in essence, listening to the "music of the stars".
But it is not sound that Kepler measures. Its primary job is spotting exoplanets, by measuring the tiny dip in the amount of light that it sees when a planet passes in front of a distant star.
Such precision light-level measurements also work for astroseismology, because as sound waves resonate within a star, they slightly change both the brightness and the colour of light that is emitted.

“Start Quote

I could literally spend the rest of my research career working on these data”

End Quote Bill Chaplin University of Birmingham

Researchers can deduce the acoustic oscillations that gave rise to the ripples on the light that Kepler sees.

Like a musical instrument, the lower the pitch, the bigger the star. That means that the sounds are thousands of times lower than we can hear.
But there are also overtones - multiples of those low frequencies - just like instruments, and these give an indication of the depth at which the sound waves originate, and the amount of hydrogen or helium they are passing through.
Since stars fuse more and more hydrogen into helium as they grow older, these amounts give astroseismologists a five-fold increase in the precision of their age estimates for stars.
"With conventional astronomy, when we look at stars we're seeing the radiation emitted at their surfaces; we can't actually see what's happening inside."
"Using the resonances, we can literally build up a picture of what the inside of a star looks like - there's no other way of doing that. It's not easy to do, but we're now getting there, thanks to Kepler."
Kepler is not the first mission to lend itself to astroseimology; Canada's Most and Esa's Corot satellites, for example, are designed specifically to collect similar data.
But just the first few months of observations by Kepler has provided scientists with data on hundreds of stars, whereas Dr Chaplin said that only about 20 have been studied in detail before.
"Suddenly we have this huge database to mine," he said.
"I could literally spend the rest of my research career working on these data - we're just starting to mine them."

New York set to be big loser as sea levels rise

2011-04-13T23:19:00.002+08:00

New York set to be big loser as sea levels rise

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News, Vienna

Places like New York are projected to experience an above average sea level increase

New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2007 that sea levels would rise at least 28cm (1ft) by the year 2100.
But this is a global average; and now a Dutch team has made what appears to be the first attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations.
Other researchers say the IPCC's figure is likely to be a huge under-estimate.
Whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be regional differences.
Ocean currents and differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater are among the factors that mean sea level currently varies by up a metre across the oceans - this does not include short-term changes due to tides or winds.
So if currents change with global warming, which is expected - and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea - the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.
"Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise," said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.
"But places like New York are going to have a larger contribution than the average - 20% more in this case - and Reykjavik will be better off."
Of the 13 regions where the team makes specific projections, New York sees the biggest increase from the global average, although Vancouver, Tasmania and The Maldives are also forecast to see above-average impacts.
Gravity trap
One peculiarity of the projections is that areas closer to melting ice sheets will experience a smaller sea level rise than those further away.

Sea level rise is not set to be consistent around the globe

Battling against the rising tide

This is because ice sheets such as those on Greenland or Antarctica gravitationally attract the water.

This pulls the water towards the coast, effectively making it pile up to an extent that can be measured in centimetres.
If the ice begins to melt, it raises the average sea level simply by entering the sea; but the gravitational pull is now smaller, so locally the sea level may go down.
"So if the Greenland sheet melts more, that's better for New York; but if Antarctica melts, that's worse for New York - and it's equally true for northwestern Europe," Professor van der Wal told BBC News.
The effects are particularly pronounced for Reykjavik, the closest capital to Greenland, which is projected to receive less than half the global average sea level rise.
Ice sheet question
Roderik van der Wal is one of scientists working on the sea level projections that will be included in the next IPCC assessment, due out in 2013-4.
Before then, other scientists are likely to have completed more regional models that can be put into this mix
"We're right at the beginning of making regional projections, and at this point there is still a lot of uncertainty," commented Stefan Rahmstorf, a sea level specialist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
"But it is clear that some parts of the world will feel sea level rise much more quickly than other parts; and an additional factor is land movements.
"In some places such as a lot of the Scandinavian coastline, the land is rising so fast that they will not have any problem with sea level rise in the near future, whereas in other places the land is subsiding - that includes some of the world's big delta cities."
Just before the last IPCC report came out in 2007, Professor Rahmstorf published research showing that sea levels had been rising faster that climate models predicted.
Since then, he and others, using various techniques, have concluded that somewhere between half a metre and two metres is likely by the end of the century.
He came to the EGU with a further analysis putting the likely range at 0.75-1.9m - the range reflecting uncertainties in how ice sheets may melt, and in how society may or may not respond to the findings of climate scientists by controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

Nazi family history put to good use by Inge Franken

2011-04-13T23:16:00.002+08:00

Nazi family history put to good use by Inge Franken

By Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin

Inge Franken is a sprightly 70-year-old who lives in an apartment on two floors in Berlin. She has a task, a mission. She tours schools educating children about her - and their - country's dark history.

She shows the class a photograph of two young boys (see photo) who pose in Nazi regalia, and she seeks reaction. One has his chest puffed out in pride, the other seems reluctant. It is for today's children to decide which they would rather be.
If the school visit goes well, she says, a child will say that he or she is going home to ask the parents and grandparents what happened in the war in their family. It makes Inge feel that she has set people thinking and asking.
She was spurred to this mission by her own past, a past hidden in a suitcase - and her mother's mind.

Inge was 40 when she read letters detailing her father's activities during the war

She was only two when her father died in the Siege of Leningrad, so she never knew him, or knew him only through the letters that her mother would read to her on Sundays.
"She said, 'Come, sit down. I will read some parts of father's letter. You should know him because he is not here and you can't see what a wonderful man he was'."
Letters from the front But Inge the child noticed gaps, sections that her mother skipped over, and those gaps nagged her for decades into adulthood. At the age of 40, she asked her mother if she could read the letters in full.
What she discovered was that the gaps were detailed descriptions of bad events in which her father seemed to be implicated. He was a committed Nazi who joined the party in 1933 and an officer on the Russian front, and he had clearly been involved in terrible things.
"More than 30 partisans are hanging on the trees," one letter said. There was a sense of pride in his letters at the might of the German war machine.

“Start Quote

My mother was a proud widow because she was widow for the Fuhrer, for the leader, for Hitler”

End Quote Inge Franken

"I phoned my mother and she said, 'Oh Inge. I didn't want you to read this because it was terrible'."

Over the years, Inge's mother, herself, had undergone a rebirth. When war broke out, she and her husband were both staunch Nazis, and when her husband died she had grieved with pride.
"My mother was a proud widow because she was widow for the Fuhrer, for the leader, for Hitler," says Inge.
She had a certificate from the Nazi authorities telling her that her husband had died "in the struggle for the freedom of Greater Germany". She kept photographs of him taken in uniform on the Russian front, his chest puffed out in pride.

Inge uses this picture of two boys in her lessons on moral choice

And, then, with total defeat, she found she had lost everything - her home, her husband and her ideology.
And shame gradually came to her, helped by her daughter, so when Inge asked her about the events in the letters, her mother was very ashamed.
Jewish connections The discovery prompted Inge to help the descendants of Holocaust survivors and victims to find their history, and also to talk in schools.
"When I started to make connections with Jews in Germany and elsewhere, my mother said, 'You are doing this for me, too'."
Throughout Germany, there are people like Inge, seeking out the painful past - tending cemeteries and synagogues, creating museums, simply documenting.
Arthur Obermayer, who is Jewish, used to visit Southern Germany with his wife to trace their families' pasts.

Inge's mother was initially proud of her husband who died in the Siege of Leningrad

"In every town, we found people who on a volunteer basis were preserving Jewish history and culture," he says.
"And they were doing it just because they felt that as Germans it was the right thing to do, because they felt that there was no other constructive way they could respond to Germany's horrible past."
Inge has called a family meeting for this summer. "In my family it was a long time before we could talk about the family history because a lot of the family have been Nazis," she says.
Will it be an easy, amicable meeting? "No," she roared. "People my age say: 'Why are we talking about it? Everybody knows what happened in the family'. And then the next generation says, 'Father, you never told me. I knew nothing about the family background'.
"But now they can come. They can listen. They can read a lot of letters and documents.
"And people are coming. Young people are coming".
It should be said that Arthur Obermayer feels great hope for Germany. Inge, too, says that much is being done. A past is being confronted - painfully.

Has feminism blocked social mobility for men?

2011-04-09T18:03:00.001+08:00

Has feminism blocked social mobility for men?

In today's Magazine

Feminism provided an obstacle to social mobility for working-class men, Cabinet minister David Willetts has controversially argued. But is he right?

They were meant to welcome a new era of fairness and opportunity for all. Instead, a minister's remarks have prompted debate over the effect of women's entry into higher education and the professions.

In a briefing to journalists ahead of the government's social mobility strategy, David Willetts, the universities minister, appeared to suggest that feminism had made it harder for working-class men to get ahead in life.

Asked what was to blame for a lack of social mobility, the Daily Telegraph quoted him saying: "The feminist revolution in its first-round effects was probably the key factor.

"Feminism trumped egalitarianism. It is not that I am against feminism, it's just that is probably the single biggest factor."

His remarks sparked a wave of criticism, and Mr Willetts made it clear that he supported the move of women into the workplace and higher education. But to some the notion that more jobs for females equals fewer opportunities for males will be a convincing one.

An economist's view

Alan Manning, professor of economics, LSE

"The expansion of university education was faster among women - they went from being a minority of students to a majority.

"But it's not true that if one group takes something, there's automatically less for the other.

"The deterioration in employment opportunities among young men was primarily the consequence of the decline in manufacturing.

"It's not the case that all these apprenticeships were suddenly taken by lots of young women. It's that the manufacturing jobs just weren't there anymore."

Certainly, there is no question that the number of female workers in the UK has increased significantly over the past four decades.

Labour Force Survey estimates suggest that the employment rate for women aged 16 to 59 rose from 56% in 1971 to 73% in 2004.

Whereas in 1971 there were nine million women over the age of 16 in work, by 2004 that figure stood at 13 million.

At the same time, social mobility for men appears to have fallen back over the same period.

According to the government's own social mobility strategy, the proportion of males born in 1958, with parents who were in the bottom fifth of earners, moving upwards was 70%. For those born in 1970, the figure was 62%.

In 2008-09, 51% of young women entered higher education, according to figures released earlier this year by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, compared with 40% of young men.

It was the first time more than half of women went on to higher education - 20 years previously, only about one in five young women went into higher education and a decade prior to that it was about one in 10.

It is figures like these that may have led Mr Willetts to conclude that greater opportunities for women have resulted in fewer for men.

Mind the gap

The 2010 gender pay divide, which was the closest since figures started in 1997, showed UK men took home 10% more pay than their female counterparts
The Office for National Statistics data shows that, in April 2010, the UK workforce was made up of 12.7 million men and 12.3 million women.
However, work patterns were vastly different between the sexes. Some 88% of men worked full-time, but only 58% of women worked full-time
Women tended to have lower hourly rates of pay in general, the figures show

Rod Liddle, the son of a train driver who has risen to become a prominent journalist, says he does not like the manner in which the minister made his point. And Liddle insists the move of women into the workplace was just and correct.

But he says such statistics demonstrate that the arrival of middle-class women in large numbers into the universities and professions has restricted the prospects for men with working-class backgrounds.

"The move of women into the workplace is absolutely right - it should be guaranteed," he says.

"But what Willetts said in down-the-line, factual terms is right. It annoys me when the left refuse to accept that it's harder for men or that the process has had an effect on the family. That doesn't mean it was wrong."

Of course, the number of job opportunities on offer and the nature of the labour market did not stand still as women began to make up a greater proportion of the labour force.

As a result, many academics regard such an interpretation of the data as simplistic.

Men used to achieve social mobility by rising through the factory ranks

Karen Mumford, professor of economics at the University of York, says it is "woolly-minded" to assume that the number of job opportunities has remained static.

In the days before feminism, she says, those working-class men who achieved upward social mobility tended to do so by moving through the ranks at their workplace.

But, Prof Mumford adds, the decline in manufacturing - which traditionally was a source of better-paid jobs for a predominantly male workforce - has meant that these opportunities are no longer available.

The number of jobs in manufacturing fell to 2.5 million in 2010, according to figures from business organisation, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). This is equal to just 9% of the total workforce. In 1978 over seven million people were employed in the sector, equal to 28.5% of the workforce.

She points out, additionally, that the rise in the proportion of women attending higher education mirrored a huge increase in the number of places available for both genders. Government figures show an all-time high of 45% of young people going to university in 2008-09 compared with only about one in 20 in the early 1960s.

As a result, Prof Mumford says, there was never a pre-feminist golden age in which large numbers of working-class men attended universities.

A feminist for Willetts

Janice Turner, Times columnist

"I don't like to defend government ministers.

"But I don't think David Willetts was saying feminism is wrong or evil.

"It's not about social mobility per se. What's happened is that middle-class parents aren't just getting their sons into university, they're now getting their daughters in as well.

"That's just a fact. We need to have a clearer debate about these things. The issue needs to be unpicked."

"It was very rare then and it's very rare now," she says. "They are not competing. The problem isn't feminism.

"What's happened is that those middle-income working class jobs with which a man used to be able to keep a family have disappeared, while the number of lower-skill service sector jobs, which women have always tended to do, has expanded."

She acknowledges that the number of better-paid "problem-solving" occupations at the top of the income scale which require a university education have increased, but that this has benefited male and female workers alike.

Moreover, feminists would point to the fact that men in the UK took home 10% more pay than their female colleagues in 2010, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Kate Saunders, feminist writer and novelist, says the idea that greater female participation in the workforce is to blame for a decline in male social mobility ignores the large numbers of women working in badly paid service sector jobs that many men don't want.

"So many things have changed, not just the number of women in the workplace," she says.

"Years ago many working-class men used to work in the factory at the bottom of their street, it just doesn't happen like that anymore and that's not the fault of women. They aren't to blame for things like the decline of the manufacturing industry in this country."

But as long as there is a debate over social mobility, there will also be debate about the repercussions of feminism.

Why did LOL infiltrate the language?

2011-04-09T17:56:00.000+08:00

Why did LOL infiltrate the language?

Comments (286)

By James Morgan BBC News

In today's Magazine

The internet slang term "LOL" (laughing out loud) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the mild dismay of language purists. But where did the term originate? And is it really a threat to our lexicon?

"OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!"

If you find the above string of letters utterly unintelligible, you are clearly an internet "noob". Let me start again.

Golly gosh! The popular initialism LOL (laughing out loud) has been inducted into the canon of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. Blimey! What is going on?

The OED defines LOL as an interjection "used chiefly in electronic communications... to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement".

It is both "LOL" where all the letters are pronounced separately, but also commonly "lol" where it is pronounced as a word.

The phrase was ushered in alongside OMG (Oh My God), with dictionary guardians pointing to their growing occurrence "in e-mails, texts, social networking... and even in spoken use".

As well as school playgrounds, words like "lolz" and "lolling" can be heard in pubs and offices - though often sarcastically, or in parody.

OED definition

LOL (ɛləʊˈɛl/lɒl) colloq.

A. int. Originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: 'ha ha!'; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.

B. n. An instance of the written interjection 'LOL'.

Love it or loathe it, "lol" is now a legitimate word in our lexicon, says Graeme Diamond, the OED's principal editor for new words.

"The word is common, widespread, and people understand it," he explains.

The word serves a real purpose - it conveys tone in text, something that even the most cynical critics accept.

"I don't 'LOL'. I'm basically someone who kind of hates it," says Rob Manuel of the internet humour site b3ta.

"But the truth is, we do need emotional signifiers in tweets and emails, just as conversation has laughter. 'LOL' might make me look like a twit, but at least you know when I'm being arch."

Death of the dictionary

But for young internet entrepreneurs like Ben Huh, of the Cheezburger Network of comedy sites, "LOL" is much more than a necessary evil. It's both a tool and a toy.

Ben Huh says LOL is 'a part of everyday life'

"'LOL' is a part of everyday life. I use it all the time in e-mail exchanges. It's a polite way of acknowledging someone," he says.

"And yes, I do say 'LOL' out loud. In almost an ironic sense, like a slow handclap after a bad joke. 'Lol' means 'yes, I understand that was funny, but I'm not really laughing'."

But no matter how much irony we cake it in, the L-word grinds the ears of many people over the age of 25.

"The death of the dictionary" is how one blogger greeted its induction to the bastion of English.

While on Facebook, there are at least half a dozen "anti-LOL" groups, where lol-ophobes dream of loll-ageddon:

"If something is funny, 'ha', 'hehehehe', or 'hee hee' is perfectly fine depending on the joke, and more descriptive than 'lol'," writes one hater.

Another complains that lol "doesn't sound anything like laughter. In fact you physically CAN'T say it while smiling. I'm all for bastardisation of the language, but with lol, that thing you thought was rubbish really is rubbish".

Wags point out that "LOL" is almost always disingenuous. "How many people are actually laughing out loud when they say LOL?" asks David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet.

LOL around the world

mdr (and derivatives)

French version, from the initials of "mort de rire" which roughly translated means "dying of laughter"

חחח‎/ההה

Hebrew version. The letter ח is pronounced 'kh' and ה is pronounced 'h'. Putting them together makes "khakhakha"

555

Thai variation of LOL. "5" in Thai is pronounced "ha", three of them being "hahaha"

asg

Swedish abbreviation of the term Asgarv, meaning intense laughter

mkm

Afghan abbreviation of the Dari phrase "ma khanda mikonom", which means "I am laughing"

Source: Know Your Meme

But those laughing least of all are the language purists, who lament "LOL" as a hallmark of creeping illiteracy.

"There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak," says Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign, in the Daily Mail.

"They [adults] are using slang words and ignoring grammar. Their language is deteriorating."

But is "LOL" really a lazy, childish concoction?

When the OED traced the origins of the acronym, they discovered 1980s computer fanatics were responsible.

The oldest written records of "LOL" (used to mean laughing out loud) are in the archives of Usenet, an early internet discussion forum.

And the original use was typed by Wayne Pearson, in Calgary, who says he wrote the first ever LOL in reply to a gag by someone called "Sprout".

"LOL" was "geek-speak that filtered through to the mainstream", says Manuel.

"I first saw it in the 1990s - at the end of emails. Then it got picked up by the young kids. Then it went naff. But it came back ironically - with people saying things like 'megalolz'."

Lolcats brought the phrase to a whole new audience

Grandparents, for example, often adopt "LOL" as one of their first "internet words", says Huh. "'LOL' and 'OMG' are like momma and dada."

But many mistake "LOL" for "lots of love", leading to some unintended "LOLs", such as the infamous tale of the mother who wrote: "Your grandmother has just passed away. LOL."

It has also lent its name to some wildly popular internet crazes, like Lolcats, whose appeal spread far beyond the realms of cyber-geeks.

More than funny

So why has "LOL", above all other web phrases, become such a phenomenon?

Because it's simple and multipurpose, says Tim Hwang, founder of ROFLCon, a whole festival dedicated to "internet awesome".

"The magic of LOL is that it's both exclusive and inclusive," he says. "On one level, it's simple to understand.

"But it also conveys something subtle - depending on the situation. It means more than just 'funny'. For example, if I had my bike stolen, my friend might reply 'LOL'. It helps overcome an awkward moment."

For school kids, acronyms like "LOL" and "KMT" (kiss my teeth) are a kind of secret code, a badge of belonging, says Tony Thorne, author of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang.

LOL-ternatives

:D (smileys)

Simple and clear but may appear childish. Are you a Comic Sans fan?

ROFL, LMAO, BWL

Even more annoying than LOL.

!!!

One is fine, three reeks of desperation: 'Look!!! I made a joke!!!' Yes, we noticed.

Haha, Hehehe, Arf arf

The safe option. Effective but not very imaginative. Were you really laughing?

Hilarious! How funny!

You are living in the dark ages.

"I go into schools and record slang words - all the new terms kids are saying - words like 'lolcano'. And if you talk to kids they will say this is our language - this is what identifies us."

But aren't these slang words also harmful to children's vocabulary? Not at all, says Thorne.

"Government educationalists get all worked up about words like LOL - they see them as substandard and unorthodox.

"But the small amount of research on this issue shows that kids who use slang abbreviations are the more articulate ones. It's called code switching."

If we have a literacy crisis, it's among adults as well as children, says Thorne. And slang is not the culprit. In fact, it is enriching the language.

Diamond agrees: "There will always be a minority who want the English language to remain as a frozen beast, that doesn't admit changes," he says.

"But language is a vibrant, evolving animal."

A Rallying Cry From Atheists

2011-04-07T01:17:00.001+08:00

A Rallying Cry From Atheists

Written by my atheist friends from a local Singapore Atheist Group, Atheisthaven:

Atheism is an abject failure.

As atheists we are in a unique situation. While we are ostracized,
marginalized, persecuted, prosecuted, abused and generally deprived of
our rights by unsympathetic regimes and autocratic systems in the real
world, it is in cyberspace where we can express ourselves freely to
some substantial degree. It is in this virtual realm that we dare
challenge theists and other proponents of illogicality and come away
truly victorious.

However, these victories, impressive as they are, cannot but feel
hollow. For all the reasoning and logic which made us, dare I say it,
ubermensch, we are unable to demonstrate our superiority where it
really matters. Dawkins and Hitchens might have made the world stand
up in recognition of the fallacies of religion, but is this
proliferation of truth and rationality changing the way people really
behave?

Sadly, the answer is no. Superstition still holds sway. To many,
atheism is a passing fad. People remain attached to their cherished
beliefs. After all, knowing the truth does not equate its acceptance.
Not only do people want to believe in something, they need to feel
wanted. Religion provides a very strong support in satisfying this
emotional need, as evident by the number of support groups, cell
groups, social and community structures the religious have put
together to bind its adherents.

It must be intoxicating knowing that `Someone' will always love you.
That `Someone' will look after you in every situation and never falter
in His efforts. To have this preposterous notion `validated' by your
fellow humans who actually help you in times of difficulties while the
`Someone' never makes an appearance must seem an affirmation to the
desperate. What religion does so effectively is to make each and
everyone of its followers feel special. Logic goes out of the window
in the face of this compelling emotional assault. It is an irony,
considering that rationality is painted over by a very real human need
which in turn is satisfied by an illusion instead.

This is where atheism fails so miserably. Atheists do not help each
other just because they believe in the same creed. The theists,
however, do so because their doctrine specifically wills it. For all
our arguments and justifications we do not deign to help one another
because we take the point of `not giving a damn about God' one step
further to include ourselves. I see friends who are Christians support
each other within their own church and cell groups. What do I see when
I look upon my fellow atheists?

Theist : 1 Atheist : 0.

Our endless debates with theists achieve little. We are wasting
precious time trying to convince people who do not want to be
convinced. People would rather live a happier life believing in a lie
than accept things as they really are and being less happy as a
result. Reading about the articles atheists post on the Internet makes
me think that all these well-meaning writers want are to amass as many
hits for their sites and to comment favorably on each other's writings
in the hope that the praised party, overjoyed at being appreciated,
would return the favor. We hide behind monikers like `infidel' and
`heretic', perhaps to impart some perceived quality in our cause, but
we do not back our words with concrete action. I have more respect for
the religious folk (the non-violent ones) who preach their gospel and
live their life accordingly than for self-proclaimed atheists who
cannot even be bothered to scrap their addled brains off the computer
screen to think: I am an atheist. What does this mean? What do I do?

Atheism is on precarious ground in this respect. And it is time to
stop the rot.

We must acknowledge that we are on our own. We have no god(s), no
temples, no institutions and nothing to rely upon. Social structure
and cultural norms, influenced to some extent by religion does not
give the atheist credence. In many parts of the world, atheism is
punishable by stoning. In more civilized climates, a priest who
incites violence against non-believers is at the most given a slap on
the wrist – he might even be lauded for his sense of justice. But an
atheist who gives credible reasons for his rejection of religion, and
quotes from reliable sources – he is making `seditious' remarks and
persecuted for being `anti-religion' . It is obscene. You can say that
people are treated equally in these modern times, but you cannot deny
that some are more equal than others.

In view of the many difficulties atheists face, I propose we take care
of our own. And we can do this through support groups.

A support group need not have a club-house or a fixed physical
location where members can convene. We can host a bulletin board
(forum) in cyberspace, much like what Atheisthaven is doing. However,
instead of `ghost members' and people who pack only rhetoric and
little else, such a group must consist of dedicated individuals who
genuinely want to make a difference. While we do not restrict the
membership to atheists (the non-religious, freethinkers, agnostics,
even Buddhists - especially those leaning towards a philosophical
bent may join), members must be committed. As this commitment takes
the form of certain obligations, we want positive individuals who
truly believe in improving themselves and others. Atheism by its own
nature, promotes self-reliance and an internal locus of control. All
efforts should have an egalitarian spirit in its core, mutual aid as
its strength, and self-actualization its ultimate goal.

This is strictly an informal group. No membership fee is required. We
only ask that members make an effort to know each other and to
interact, preferably face-to-face. This fosters cohesiveness which is
very important because people tend to help their own friends than
relative strangers.

What form should this aid take? At the most basic level, information
exchange. People who have questions can post them on the group site,
and those with the answers can promptly reply. Questions can range
from anything – potential job openings, which university to choose,
even where to get the best bargains! At a deeper level, members can
work on some task together or maybe enjoy a little soiree.

While we encourage members to look after each other's interests, we do
not look kindly to people who join for ulterior motives. This is not a
MLM (multi-level- marketing) scam, nor is it a dating agency. Promoting
any political agenda is also a no-no. In a nutshell, the group is
similar to a normal theist cell group, minus the praying and speaking
in tongues. Think of it as a secular social network, where normal
people (without a faith) make friends and chill out.

We must succeed in this endeavor. If sodden theists can organize
themselves, it would be a crying shame if intelligent atheists cannot
even produce a similar response. The time has passed for talking. Let
us show people that we are capable of doing great things, even without
divine edicts… because In Humanity We Trust.

Liu Weixian and Liang Xianghong
- 14/03/2008

Interview Transcripts: Atheism, & What It Means To Be An Atheist In Singapore

2011-04-07T01:16:00.000+08:00

Interview Transcripts: Atheism, & What It Means To Be An Atheist In Singapore

In my previous post, I mentioned that I had the ignominious honour of being interviewed by a Straits Times journalist (Straits Times is a national, major newspaper in Singapore), who, upon chancing upon my post with regards to the issue of interfaith dialogues, decided to conduct a email interview, with what I presume as a further query with regards to the atheistic point of view.

Transcripts of the interview was sent to me on the 3rd of July, and my reply was sent out on the following day.

While I was hoping that the interview would be published (knowing full well the conservative nature of Straits Times, I was expecting a watered-down version of it), but the latest word I have received was that the journalist concerned, Ms Li (I shall not divulge the full name. For those who are infinitely curious, leave a note in my email or this blog's comments) seems to be occupied with her work.

So, without further ado, the transcripts, as follows. My replies, in red:

1) As an atheist, do you feel marginalised in Singapore? Why/why not? If so, do you have any specific examples?

With regards to feeling marginalized, I feel that much of what has been said and touched on about faith is mostly centered on two or three faiths, namely Catholicism, Christianity and its related denominations, and most important of all, Islam.

Take the latest issue on interfaith dialogues. We have imams, priests, reverends and even the odd Confucian scholar who gets invited. But no one, none from the scholastic circles, such as historians, scientists and the like, gets invited to such talks, much less atheists.

What is it about religion that allows them this privilege to get a piece of the limelight and spread their propaganda in such a manner? Are we saying that, short of discussing each other's religion, people from the various religions can't really communicate beyond mere religion? Or are atheists and other members of the free thought community so highly ostracized that we aren't even allowed a whiff of these bunch of self-appraised folks?

Dialogues are a good thing, but dialogues such as these are much political tools fabricated by people who wish to glamorize religion and portray a falsified unified front of various religious views.

2) Do you feel that because of the sensitivity of religious issues and the emphasis on inter-religious harmony in Singapore, you do not have freedom of expression, when it comes to airing your views?

I think a few years back, two young people or teenagers were arrested and charged with the Sedition Act, one for slandering Islam and the other for drawing Jesus-zombies munching cute little babies.

To talk about freedom of speech in Singapore is pretty much like playing Russian roulette: You can heap as much vitriol as you want, but once you bothered some higher-ups, get prepared to be slapped with ignominous charges, such as the ISA (Internal Security Act) and the Sedition Act.

3) Do you think that atheism is a faith in itself? And should it be accorded the same "respect" that other religions have?

Atheism, by its very definition (Atheist from the Greek word, atheos: A, without, theos, God), refers to a negative position of non-belief. An atheist, in essence, is a person who does not believe in God due to the absence of proof (To some atheists, it means observable, empirical proof).

Faith requires an element of belief. In the case of faith, it is more aptly described as "Belief in things unseen", which really boils down to blind belief.

If anything, atheism is the exact polemic of faith: One is an atheist because one sees no proof to validate the claim, while a person who dwells in faith believes because he or she has subjected to himself or herself a creed irregardless of evidence.

As for the question of respect, I feel that we should respect everybody who is generally law-abiding. The case of the gay movement (which I did wrote on my blog), for example, is one that deserves respect, because gays have long been marginalized and in a way, segregated from the majority heterosexuals because of this misguided notion that sex outside the realms of procreation is an abominal sin, a view justified and mortified by the biblical code of stoning gays to death.

Just as law-abiding gays deserve respect, recognition and dare I say, the rights to marriage, atheists deserve to have their voices and views heard. Unfortunately in Singapore, the religious right has mostly reserved for themselves the right to be heard, and many times, their views are highly eschewed by their belief systems. For example, one would not expect a priest to extol the virtues of condoms and other contraceptives, despite the devastating effects of AIDS and other sexual diseases. To the priest, sex for pleasure is a sin, regardless of the outcome.

4) Do you think that atheists should be allowed to set up an organisation to propagate their views, such as Christians have church organisations, Muslims Islam organisations and Buddhists Buddhist organisations to propagate their tenets? Why/why not? How do you think the society and the Government will react?

I feel that the atheist community in Singapore is too small at the moment: Unlike the American Atheists (AA), atheists here are mainly closeted and disjointed, so no, at the moment, atheists should simply focus on getting out of the closet, which itself is a difficult thing to do, especially for those who are stuck in very strict, fundamentalist sects like I was in the past.

If an atheist organization were to exist here, I cannot really fathom the framework which we should go about in setting up such an organization. Religion in Singapore is something that is held in excessive awe and respect, even rationalized in the form of moderate belief systems. If the organization seeks to be just a freethought organization, then I would feel that there is no need for an atheist organization, or for myself to joing one. An active atheist organization that is highly vocal against religious irrationality may be too hot a potato for a distinctively conservative and highly cautious society here in Singapore.

5) Do you think that a Singaporean atheist would be allowed to write a book like that of Richard Dawkins' or Christopher Hitchens'?

The problem here in Singapore, I suspect, is that in higher academic circles here, is that any academic must be strictly neutral, or at worst, slightly sympathetic of religiosity in order to continue their research here.

That aside, most publishers in Singapore would baulk at publishing such controversial material here. If there is even an outside bet that one could actually sneak past such works, I would gladly be the first one to try.

6) Do you feel that there are increasing tensions between those who are religious, and those who are secular, within Singapore? Some will call you a "secularist fundamentalist". Do you agree with such a label?

One of my earliest blog posts (still there, but I have abandoned it) was about this pastor in a megachurch who actually proclaimed that "the red colour of the Singapore flag symbolizes the blood of Christ".

I had attended that service on the behest of a friend,and was profoundly shocked to hear this lie being spoken life in front of 20,000 church members.

While it is too early to say whether the secularity of our nation is under threat, I think there are people in Singapore who definitely enjoy the idea that the tenets of our Constitution is somehow aligned with the Ten Commandments, even if it clearly isn't.

At present, I do not detect this threat in the Parliament. To me, the status quo quo of "Equal playing ground" still holds true up to a point, and I for one would definitely not want to see our nation turn into a fascist theocracy.

The final question with regards to "secular fundamentalist" was left out, because I find that such a term is indeed a grave insult to rational people, religious or otherwise, who do not seek to widen the religious scope towards the secular sector, be it in government institutions or even to the tenets of government.

Frankly, I doubt this interview would ever be published in our closeted media, and hence I have decided to publish this without the permission of the journalist.

In concluding this article, I urge all Singaporeans to speak up in the face of religious domination within our media. We must find a voice in a society that continuously trumpets the need for religious reconciliation, without sparing a thought for the 13%-15% of us who refuse to be part of this hypocrisy of grovelling towards religious moderates who, ironically are the major source of inspiration for fundamentalists and their dastardly plans of terror and extremism.

The Invisible Atheists of Singapore?

2011-04-07T01:14:00.000+08:00

The Invisible Atheists of Singapore?

I must admit: in recent weeks, I have been thoroughly frustrated (to put it mildly) by the hypocrisy that has surrounded the recent rise of Atheism brought about by the meteoric rise of Richard Dawkins and other prominent atheist authors.

In response to this trend, the local media in Singapore has decided to entrench itself with the religious right. This pro-right stance is so pervasive that much of the opinions from the pro-left are either ignored, or moderated to a point that they do not offend "religious sensitivities". Our pro-religious Ministry of Home Affairs has actively supported inter-faith dialogues that effectively cater to the major official religions, effectively ignoring the non-religious communities altogether. Everyone in Singapore is either religious to the hilt, or are merely non-Singaporeans to begin with.

In short, atheists and the non-religious do not exist within the Singaporean clique.

According to this article, written by Today, atheists do not even feature in the sectarian landscape. No atheists. No infidels. Period.

Excerpts From Today Online
Tug of War for America's Soul
14th July 2007
By Tiffany Tan

A wave of secularisation is again sweeping through industrialised nations, but will it come around to our corner of the world? Even though Singapore is on the same economic development scale as secular Western countries, experts say atheism in the city-state is a distant possibility. In a study, Dr Pereira discovered that Singaporeans value religiosity and it is "deeply embedded in society".

For some religious leaders, atheism is no reason to lose sleep over.

"If there is a war, it has been going on for the last 300 years and atheism is clearly not winning," said Dr Simon Chan, a professor of systematic theology at Singapore's Trinity Theological College.

"Previous generations of atheists had been no less vehement and hopeful, but a vast majority of the world's population are too incurably religious to be bought over."

A distant possibility??? For the love of Zeus, I don't know where these journalists got their facts from, but just for the sake of "objective journalism", we shall take a sneak peek into a population consensus report taken in the year 2000 (Link here).

According to the report, 340,094 Singaporeans have no religious affiliation, out of a population of 2,494,630. The minimum age group of this consensus was in the 15-19 category, so we can safely surmise that no kids were involved, which would have muddled up the numbers and give the religious ranks a higher boost in numbers.

With these figures, one can assume that at least 13% of Singaporeans do not subscribe to any religion. Unfortunately, there is no way to break the figures down further into atheists, agnostics, deists and other non-religious affiliates, but surely, there ought to be atheists amongst them?

Quite contrary to the news article, religion has not been "embedded deeply" into the fabric of society. Considering that there were only 9733 Sikhs reported by the consensus, the non-religious community occupies a sizable chuck across the sectarian board.

And then there is the "vehement" culture of atheists. Of course, we are riff-ruffs of the sort that really do speak out against religious abuse, but hey, we aren't the ones strapping bombs and flying planes to skyscrapers for the sake of paradise and some 72 virgins (I am sure most atheists like sex, but we are not delirious enough to believe in bullshit of this nature), or for any particular father figure in the sky.

Not a good word, it seems, can be said about atheism. If this article is to be taken as gospel truth, then atheists are no more than invisible shrews, so to speak, good only for spewing vitriol at our persecuted religious counterparts.

Ignoring the Non-Religious Community In Singapore

But why are we, the non-religious sector, constantly ignored by the mass media? Are they trying to tell us that we do not belong here, or that we are, at least in the metaphorical sense, "expendable"???

On a more personal note, I have had an email interview with an ST journalist, who has somehow stumbled on one of my articles regarding interfaith dialogue. While she did not promise to mention about it from her political correspondence desk, I doubt she will ever publish it (again, to my frustration) because of the anti-religious nature of my replies.

Perhaps it is time for the atheist community in Singapore to rally together and break this religious monopoly within the ranks of the mass media. Only then, will our voices be heard by those who will spare no afford to undermine the interests of the non-religious community.

Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom

2011-03-20T19:59:00.001+08:00

2 March 2011 Last updated at 11:33 GMT

Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom

Many students cross the line under pressure

In today's Magazine

A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel Gaddafi's son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his own. So is plagiarism out of control?

It's been a bad week for honest educational endeavour.

The German defence minister has stepped down after being stripped of his 2006 university doctorate thesis for copying large parts of it. The University of Bayreuth had decided Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had lifted whole sections without attribution.

And the LSE is looking into allegations that Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam plagiarised his PhD thesis.

These are very high-profile cases, but in the worlds of academia and publishing, the issue of plagiarism has been a problem for many years.

The internet now offers students unparalleled opportunities to duplicate and to fabricate, says Jude Carroll, of Oxford Brookes University, the author of A Handbook for Deterring Plagiarism in Higher Education.

“Start Quote

The pronouns go from single to plural, a sentence is cut off in the middle, or a strange reference to Australia appears”

End Quote Jude Carroll On the tell-tale signs

"Google gave students access to a much greater library of texts," she says. "The opportunities to harvest material have increased."

Where once plagiarism might have involved extensive reading and copying by hand, now it can be as easy as Googling the subject matter and hitting Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. From Wikipedia and other free sources to academic journal databases like JSTOR, there's a treasure trove for the would-be cheat.

"The poet Byron never let people come into his library because he didn't want people to see what he was copying from," Carroll notes, referencing a story from Robert Macfarlane in the Times Higher Education.

"The difference now is that we can all copy each other's libraries."

Plagiarism has been with us for as long as the written word. From the classical Greek playwrights, to Dr Martin Luther King, even the greatest of historical figures have been tainted by scandal.

But over the last decade, academics have spoken out with increasing exasperation over the tide of students using everything from Wikipedia to bespoke essay writing services in pursuit of easy high grades. Universities are involved in a cat and mouse game to stop the plagiarists in their tracks.

In the UK, 98% of universities now use a computer programme called Turnitin to analyse suspicious essays, the company that provides it says.

The software scans text for passages which match a database of 155 million student papers, 110 million documents, and 14 billion web pages. Back in 2006/7, more than 600,000 essays were checked in this way in the UK. By last year, that figure leapt to three million.

The German minister has been mocked as zu Googleberg for his extensive plagiarism

But of course, a matching passage does not necessarily indicate a plagiarist. A scholarly essay is traditionally embroidered with well-chosen quotes and references.

"The software is not a silver bullet," says Barry Calvert, of iParadigms, the creators of Turnitin. "It still takes a human to detect a cheat."

Often, what appears to be fraud is simply a student who is unable to write proper footnotes, or who forgets to accredit properly.

In cases of genuine deceit, suspicion is more often aroused by a lecturer reading over the essay, and noticing "something which just doesn't feel right", says Carroll.

"You might notice a sudden variation - from good language to bad, from academic tone to journalistic tone. The pronouns go from single to plural, a sentence is cut off in the middle, or a strange reference to Australia appears."

And who are the plagiarisers? Many are first year undergraduates who copy and paste simply because they have not been given appropriate instructions on how to write an essay, says Dr John Olsson, of the Forensic Linguistics Institute.

"You're just out of school and suddenly you're being asked to write 3,000 words on a subject by Monday. It's a daunting task," he says.

Plagiarism allegations

Kaavya Viswanathan: Young adult novelist accidentally "internalised" somebody else's novel
US vice-president Joe Biden: Accused of plagiarism in law article and of taking line in speech from Neil Kinnock
Martin Luther King: Posthumously accused of plagiarism over doctoral thesis

"I've handled cases where students were thrown off courses for paraphrasing a couple of paragraphs."

But it's not just a problem in academia. Journalism is rife with episodes of alleged plagiarism.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd admitted using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from blogger Josh Marshall without attribution. Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said her mistake was unintentional, claiming she had heard the line from a friend.

And in the world of publishing, agents and editors must be on their guard for a potentially commercially damaging episode of lifting.

In publishing, incidents of apparent plagiarism have increased a lot in recent years, says literary agent Mark Lucas, due to such widespread access to electronically transmitted data.

But while detecting plagiarism is increasingly difficult, the rules remain the same, he says.

"Our agreement with our clients is that they undertake to us that plagiarism is off limits, as it always has been," he says.

"The line that exists between something unique and original and something that is clearly derivative is a relatively thick one still."

But there are some who think a more generous approach should be taken to lesser offenders in the digital age.

Instead of coming down hard, first year students should be allowed a little leeway, "to find their own voice", Olsson says. But for postgraduate students, like zu Guttenberg and Gaddafi, there is no excuse.

'Mixing' not copying

There are some who sense a generational shift in what is and isn't acceptable.

Kaavya Viswanathan, whose 2006 young adult novel was the subject of extensive and wide-ranging allegations of plagiarism, detailed at great length on Wikipedia, came a cropper, and faced the wrath of her publisher.

But more recently Helene Hegemann, a 17-year-old German author, defended herself against allegations of wholesale lifting by reference to "mixing" and insisting: "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."

It's prompted discussions about the long tradition of authors drawing on other people's work. Some would see a shifting into a more modern tendency to lift other's stuff because of a failure to recognise long-held notions about ownership of ideas.

But academics want to hold the line. Advances in technology do not mean we should redefine our idea of what plagiarism is, says Olsson.

"I don't think we should change our standards. That would be very dangerous in higher education," he says.

Carroll agrees: "Being 'original' does not mean having novel ideas never before expressed by a human. It simply means doing the work for yourself."

Additional reporting by James Morgan and Brigitt Hauck

孙燕姿《明天的记忆》

2011-03-20T19:32:00.000+08:00

孙燕姿《明天的记忆》

在我最深处有过你祝福
有花瓣的飞舞泪水的凝固
轻抚一路上成长的纹路
在默读那些爱的仓促

友谊的脚步坚持的酸楚
可是我很清楚别在乎付出
轻抚内心最柔软的感触
回忆的泥土让生命有厚度

让明天把今天给记住不是因为孤独
因为我们追求的专注不管它起起伏伏
让今天把明天变特殊回忆因为会幸福
因为我们努力不服输从来不曾退出

回头不可恕被误解的路
现在我弄清楚那让我成熟
轻抚内心最柔软的感触
长成的大树让生命有高度

让明天把今天给记住不是因为孤独
因为我们追求的专注不管它起起伏伏
让今天把明天变特殊回忆因为会幸福
因为我们努力不服输尽管失误

让明天的记忆不模糊不是因为孤独
因为我们执着的态度不管它起起伏伏
让今天把明天变特殊未必因为满足
因为我们过得不含糊从来不曾退出

Japan crisis: two schoolboys with futures in ruins

2011-03-20T18:55:00.001+08:00

Japan crisis: two schoolboys with futures in ruins

Three days after pupils at an elementary school in Japan's Iwate province posed for an end-of-term photo, their childhood world was lost for ever thanks to the tsunami that engulfed their town

Image 1 of 3

A world in rubble: Taiga Toba (left) and his friend Manabu Tsurushiba look over the ruins of their school. Their mothers are both missing, presumed dead. 'We realised it wasn't the usual earthquake,' says Taiga. 'I thought, am I going to die here?' Photo: KEITH BEDFORD

By Robert Mendick and Andrew Gilligan 11:45PM GMT 19 Mar 2011

The photograph was taken only last week, but it is already a scene from a vanished world. Just before graduating, Takata Elementary School’s top class of 12-year-olds play up to the camera, the holidays and their lives ahead of them, their eyes full of excitement and hope. Three days later, the sea changed everything.

Friday was meant to have been Taiga Toba’s graduation party. His mother would probably have bought him a present. Instead, if they can find her body, he will soon be attending her funeral. Staring into the photo, he picks out five other children who lost parents. The teacher is missing. The boy next to him, his hand in the air, waving to the camera, is dead. And these are just the people he knows about.

We found him searching the rubble near the wreck of his home, a thin, serious little boy with glasses who wants to be a basketball player. He was with his best friend, Manabu Tsurushiba, yet another child who has lost his mother. In a yellow plastic shopping basket, Taiga carried everything he’d found of his old life: one left basketball boot and a dirty LA Lakers cap. His other possessions are the clothes on his back, and a second set he kept at school. He is homeless now, living with 25 other relatives in a house outside the town.

We were in Rikuzentakata, the worst-hit city in the province of Iwate. Eighteen hundred people died here, and three quarters of the town no longer exists. Where it did not destroy the buildings, the water came through them, bringing whatever it carried. The shopping centre has cars and boats on the third floor. But mostly it was destroyed. The landscape is a flat-plan of shattered wood and rubble.

Taiga’s class was making music boxes when the earthquake happened. The teacher was just giving out the mechanisms. They’re still there in the classroom, in their little polystyrene trays, with the boxes and all the kids’ belongings, left behind in the rush.

“We got under the desks but the floor was rocking,” says Taiga. “We realised it wasn’t the usual earthquake. I thought: ‘Am I going to die here?'” The playground is now six feet deep in debris. But nobody did die at the school building. Even the goldfish, in their tank in the lobby, are still in one piece. By sad irony, it was the kids whose parents rushed to save them who were at the greatest risk.

“My mother came for me and took me home,” says Manabu, looking down at the floor, driving his fist into his palm. “She went inside the house to pick up blankets, and then the tsunami came.”

Manabu was still outside, but found he couldn’t say a word. “I just couldn’t call out,” he says. “I just didn’t realise how fast it was. I just ran up the hill. I could hear the noise of the houses being destroyed behind me and I just kept running.”

Taiga was still at school. “One of the teachers was looking out,” he says. “Then he suddenly shouted ‘Run!’ It was like Godzilla. You could see the wave coming towards you, knocking down houses. It was quite slow, but very powerful.

“I didn’t try to get home. I couldn’t see where my house was any more.”

Taiga’s classmate Tomoki Ogata, also 12, was collected from the playground and taken by his mother into the path of the tsunami. Now both mother and child are in another local school, the one that has been turned into the temporary mortuary.

“He was a very gentle boy. He never had fights. He was very kind, very studious. He loved to read,” says Yuko Marakami, his class teacher, who has come into the school staffroom while we are with Taiga and Manabu. Then, suddenly, she notices something on her desk, picks it up and begins to weep.

“It’s a farewell card from the children,” she sobs. “I’d no idea they’d done this. They were going to give it to me on graduation day but we never had it because of the events. They must have come back and slipped it on to my desk. I saw them cutting it out last week, but they said it was decorations for the last-day party.”

There are two folded A3 cards – a pink one from the girls, and a blue one from the boys. Both have the class slogan, “One for all and all for one”, in English on the front, and each child has written his or her own message on a yellow circular Post-it note. Tomoki Ogata’s message to Mrs Marakami says: “You made some scary faces, you made some kind faces, some funny faces. I enjoyed them all and I won’t forget you when I go to junior school.”

Taiga spent three days looking for his mother before accepting that she was dead. He went round all the reception centres, checking the names on the lists. Whenever a case is “resolved”, a red line is drawn through the name. Mrs Toba has not been given her red line. She is still officially missing, but nobody has much doubt about her fate.

The strange thing, though, was how upbeat and cheerful the two boys mostly were. They were excited to meet foreigners and wanted to show us their town. Whenever they saw us, they’d run into their usual place, sitting on each other’s laps in the front seat of our car. For the moment, at least, the novelty of exploring their new bombed-out world – paradise for a 12-year-old – seemed to blot out the tragedy that had overtaken them.

We ask Taiga what her mother was like. “She was fashionable,” he says. “She loved ornaments. She loved shopping. She used to call me Taiga-chi.” Then he stopped, and we changed the subject.

Taiga’s father, Futoshi, is Rikuzentakata’s mayor. Clinging to the roof of City Hall, Mr Toba watched his own house across the valley being ripped up by the tide, knowing his wife was inside it. But his responsibility was to his town. Not until 24 hours later could he make time to confirm that she was missing, or to check on Taiga and his younger brother. He was one of the last people in Rikuzentakata to learn the fate of his loved ones.

“I couldn’t go straight to my family. I had to stay at the office,” he says. He still hasn’t set eyes on his kids for more than two minutes at a time. “I’m a human being and a father, and I do have a hard time at the moment,” he says. “But a lot of my staff have lost their families, too. Everyone is holding it back.”

Taiga, too, the politician’s son, is maintaining a public face. “I have to stay strong, I have to stay positive,” he says. But Manabu is quieter. When we wander near his old house, he slows down, covering his eyes, and Taiga tells us he hasn’t been back there yet. We hadn’t realised, and turn in a different direction.

The class photo was taken as a milestone in these children’s school careers. Now it is a memorial, for lives and a world swept away.

Taiga reels off the names of other classmates who have suffered terrible loss; others he just doesn’t know about. He points to Ayumi Murakami, whose father, he says, is missing; and to Takuma Wakasugi, whose father is also feared dead. Natsuki Kanno’s mother is fighting for her life in hospital while Yusuke Nakano and Rui Nagano lost both their parents.

The teacher in the photo is 27-year-old Monty Dickson, an American from Alaska, who had been teaching English in Rikuzentakata for two years. For at least two nights last week, US Embassy staff visited the temporary city hall headquarters in the search for the young man. Just as scores of Japanese turn up there to scour the list of those missing and those found dead, so too did the embassy staff. Monty, a popular member of staff, has not been found.

Like thousands of children across north-east Japan, Taiga is trying to cope with the terrible loss. His mother is dead; his father is busy; but at least he has Manabu to help him get through the days. “We feel we are closer now and we have connected on a much deeper level,” he says.

Why is there no looting in Japan after the earthquake

2011-03-19T23:08:00.000+08:00

18 March 2011 Last updated at 17:45 GMT

Why is there no looting in Japan after the earthquake?

In today's Magazine

During a state of emergency it is not unusual to hear about looting, so why have there been very few reports of this in Japan? Commentators from across the media have their say.

It's not possible to list them all but reports of looting during disasters are commonplace, like current reports from GNN Liberia on Liberian mercenaries being accused of looting in Ivory Coast.

In the UK there have also been incidents, like Exeter's Express and Echo's report of people scavenging motorbikes on the Devon coast back in 2007, when the contents of a container ship were washed ashore. In the same year, police investigated reports of looting at flood-hit properties in West Yorkshire.

The absence of stories of this kind has been noted by writers around the world. Slate's Christopher Beam says there's more to the lack of looting than honesty. He says that Japanese people are more honest than most, but adds the Japanese legal structure rewards honesty more than most.

His other theories why there isn't any looting in Japan include the police presence and organised crime. "Police aren't the only ones on patrol since the earthquake hit," he says. "Members of Yakuza, Japan's organised crime syndicate, have been enforcing order."

“Start Quote

It sounds grotesque to say we should see reasons for hope as we watch in real time while the earth is shaken six inches on its axis”

Johann HariIndependent columnist

The Voice Of America's Steve Herman has been in Japan. He describes the country as "slowly grinding to a halt", which he puts down to traditional Japanese stoicism.

"There's a touch of bitterness in a few voices and some subtle signs of frustration but no show of open anger," he says.

The nearest Mr Herman gets to suggesting anyone taking advantage of the disaster is when he speculates that a black economy in rationed goods may rise up. To back up his prediction, Mr Herman cites the time this happened in the days after Japan's defeat in World War II.

The idea that the Japanese are acting in some way against the grain in an emergency situation is challenged by columnist Johann Hari in the UK's Independent. He says the panicking disaster victim is a myth. He argues that in reality the vast majority of people behave in the aftermath as altruists, saving their fellow human beings and sharing what they have. He goes on to say the same predictions are made about every disaster.

Opportunists made the most of motorbikes washed up on the Devon coast

"Once the lid of a tightly policed civilization is knocked off for a second, humans will become beasts. But the opposite is the case. It sounds grotesque to say we should see reasons for hope as we watch in real time while the earth is shaken six inches on its axis, tsunamis roar, and nuclear power stations teeter on meltdown. But it is true."

This, for Mr Hari, is proof enough to "kill off right-wing ideologies based on the belief that humans are inherently selfish".

But US blogger Andrew Sullivan's readers have been disputing the story there is not looting in Japan. They've been sending in examples.

According to a commenter on Mr Sullivan's blog the Daily Dish, who has been reading Japanese reports, they don't seem to be translated into English or reported on English language news sites.

But, the commenter translates an article in Japan's 47 News citing 40 known cases of looting in Miyagi.

Ice deposits found at Moon's pole

2011-02-24T03:38:00.000+08:00

Page last updated at 05:10 GMT, Tuesday, 2 March 2010

Ice deposits found at Moon's pole

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas

India's Chandrayaan-1 probe carried US equipment to the Moon

A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.

The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice.

But other compounds - such as hydrocarbons - are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another Moon mission called LCROSS.

The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas.

The craters with ice range from 2km to 15km (one to nine miles) in diameter; how much there is depends on its thickness in each crater. But Nasa says the ice must be at least a couple of metres thick to give the signature seen by Chandrayaan-1.

Dr Paul Spudis, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, estimated there was at least 600 million metric tonnes of water-ice held within these impact craters.

The equivalent amount, expressed as rocket fuel, would be enough to launch one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years, he told journalists at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

What all these craters have in common are large areas of their interiors that never see sunlight.

Extreme cold

Temperatures in some of these permanently darkened craters can drop as low as 25 Kelvin (-248C; -415F) - colder than the surface of Pluto - allowing water-ice to remain stable.

"It is mostly pure water-ice," said Dr Spudis. "It could be under a few tens of centimetres of dry regolith (lunar soil)."

This protective layer of soil could prevent blocks of pure ice from vaporising even in some areas which are exposed to sunlight, he explained.

Ice thrown up by the LCROSS impact was in a crystalline form

In February, President Barack Obama cancelled the programme designed to return Americans to the Moon by 2020.

However, Dr Spudis said: "Now we can say with a fair degree of confidence that a sustainable human presence on the Moon is possible. It's possible using the resources we find there.

"The results from these missions, that we have seen in the last few months, are totally revolutionising our view of the Moon."

Chandrayaan-1 was India's contribution to the armada of unmanned spacecraft to have been launched to the Moon in recent years. Japan, Europe, China and the US have all sent missions packed with instruments to explore Earth's satellite in unprecedented detail.

In Nasa's LCROSS mission, a rocket and a probe were smashed into a large crater at the lunar south pole, kicking up water-ice and water vapour.

Spectral measurements of material thrown up by the LCROSS impact indicate some of the water-ice was in a crystalline form, rather than the "amorphous" form in which the water molecules are randomly arranged.

Water source

"There's not one flavour of water on the Moon; there's a range of everything from relatively pure ice all the way to adsorbed water," said the mission's chief scientist Anthony Colaprete, from Nasa's Ames Research Center.

"And here is an instance inside Cabeus crater where it appears we threw up a range of fine-grained particulates of near pure crystalline water-ice."

Overall, results from recent missions suggest there could be several sources for lunar ice.

One important way for water to form is through an interaction with the solar wind, the fast-moving stream of particles that constantly billows away from the Sun.

Space radiation triggers a chemical reaction in which oxygen atoms already in the soil acquire hydrogen nuclei to make water molecules and the simpler hydrogen-oxygen (OH) molecule. This "adsorbed" water may be present as fine films coating particles of lunar soil.

In a cold sink effect, water from elsewhere on the lunar surface may migrate to the slightly cooler poles, where it is retained in permanently shadowed craters.

Scientists have also reported the presence of hydrocarbons, such as ethylene, in the LCROSS impact plume. Dr Colaprete said any hydrocarbons were likely to have been delivered to the lunar surface by comets and asteroids - another vital source of lunar water.

However, he added, some of these chemical species could arise through "cold chemistry" on interstellar dust grains accumulated on the Moon.

In addition to water, researchers have seen a range of other "volatiles" (compounds with low boiling points) in the impact plume, including sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2).

The results from the Mini-Sar instrument are due to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The team is currently analysing results for craters at the Moon's south pole.

Monkeys 'display self-doubt' like humans

2011-02-24T03:01:00.001+08:00

Page last updated at 01:17 GMT, Monday, 21 February 2011

Monkeys 'display self-doubt' like humans

By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

Macaques 'self-doubt like humans'

Monkeys trained to play computer games have helped to show that it is not just humans that feel self-doubt and uncertainty, a study says.

US-based scientists found that macaques will "pass" rather than risk choosing the wrong answer in a brainteaser task.

Awareness of our own thinking was believed to be a uniquely human trait.

But the study, presented at the AAAS meeting in Washington DC, suggests that our more primitive primate relatives are capable of such self-awareness.

Professor John David Smith, from State University of New York at Buffalo and Michael Beran, from Georgia State University, carried out the study.

These results could help explain why self-awareness is such an important part of our cognitive makeup and from whence it came

John David Smith
Lead researcher

They trained the macaques, which are Old World monkeys, to use a joystick-based computer game.

The animals were trained to judge the density of a pixel box that appeared at the top of the screen as either sparse or dense. To give their answer, the monkeys simply moved a cursor towards a letter S or a letter D.

When the animals chose the correct letter, they were rewarded with an edible treat. There was no punishment for choosing the wrong answer, but the game briefly paused, taking away - for a few seconds - the opportunity for the animals to win another treat.

But the monkeys had a third option - choosing a question mark - which skipped the trial and moved on to the next one. This meant no treat, but it also meant no pause in the game.

The scientists saw that the macaques used this option in exactly the same way as human participants who reported that they found a trial too tricky to answer; they chose to "pass" and move on.

Dr Smith presented footage of the animals playing the game at a session that was organised by the European Science Foundation.

"Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to make an error," he told BBC News. "They seem to know when they don't know."

In the same trial, capuchins, which belong to the group known as New World monkeys, failed to take this third option.

Dr Smith explained: "There is a big theoretical question at stake here: Did [this type of cognition] develop only once in one line of the primates - emerging only in the line of Old World primates leading to apes and humans?"

He said that the capacity to think in this way was "one of the most important facets of humans' reflective mind, central to every aspect of our comprehension and learning".

"These results... could help explain why self-awareness is such an important part of our cognitive makeup and from whence it came," he added.

The stigma of Japan's 'suicide apartments'

2011-02-11T00:08:00.000+08:00

10 February 2011 Last updated at 00:20 GMT

The stigma of Japan's 'suicide apartments'

By Roland Buerk BBC News, Sendai

The daughter's photograph is not alongside those of ancestors on the family altar

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and on average nearly 100 people take their own lives every day.

But where those deaths take place has a big impact on families left behind.

In a stuffy apartment in Sendai, the air blue with smoke from cigarettes, a father kneels in prayer.

Lighting incense sticks and ringing a bell before the family altar, an ornate wooden cupboard.

His daughter's photograph is not inside alongside the other ancestors, it is still on the bookshelf.

Putting it there would be a final acceptance that she has gone, that two years ago he found her body in her rented Tokyo flat.

She was only 22 and her father cannot face that yet.

"When I realised she was dead I just could not move and I could not think at all," he says.

"I could not take in what happened. I thought there is really no God in this world at all. That is what I remember from that day."

This father is suffering not just bereavement, but financial hardship too

Only the father, and his former wife, the young woman's mother, know their daughter took an overdose.

Other relatives and friends have never been told it was suicide, so he does not want his name to be used.

It was not long after the death that he got another shock - this time a letter from his daughter's landlord.

"We held her funeral at the end of March," he remembers.

"The bill for renovating the flat came in April, then a demand for compensation for lost rent in May. So it was one after another.

"The only thing I could think about was my lost daughter. So when I was getting those bills, I had no will or strength to negotiate or resist."

In all he paid more than £18,650 ($30,000).

Purification rituals

Japan has a historic tradition of ritual suicide as an honourable way out. But as the number of people killing themselves has risen, public unease has grown.

“Start Quote

We feel the house is not pure and it will bring unhappiness”

End Quote Yoshihiro Kanuma Estate agent

Few would choose to rent an apartment where a previous occupant had taken their own life. So a death is frequently followed by a demand for money.

"There are a lot of them," says Sachiko Tanaka who set up a support group for the families of suicides after her own son died.

"Mostly it's compensation for loss of rent for flats. The biggest was 120m yen (£900,000). The claim was that the entire apartment building was worthless because one person committed suicide there. So they have to pay to rebuild it."

Many families are also required to pay for expensive purification rituals.

The support group is dealing with around 200 complaints of excessive demands from landlords and she is calling for a change in the law.

Already some estate agents are keen to help the bereaved.

Yoshihiro Kanuma has what he calls a difficult house on his books. He was motivated to take it on by his devout Buddhism.

Nine out of 10 people don't want anything to do with the house, says estate agent Yoshihiro Kanuma

It is an ordinary-looking place, a few years old - what the trade in Japan calls a 3LDK; three bedrooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen, in a commuter town outside Tokyo.

The tour takes in the master bedroom, with a view over a paddy field, but then he has to tell potential buyers that the last owner hanged himself on the stairs.

"Nine out of 10 people say I don't want anything to do with the house," he says.

"The Japanese may think the house is stained. I guess some may say it's heroic to take your own life but in terms of a house it's not viewed that way. We feel the house is not pure and it will bring unhappiness. I personally think the house itself has no responsibility but lots of Japanese feel that way."

Mr Kanuma has managed to persuade one family to put in an offer which has been accepted - half the price of other houses in the area.

Back in Sendai the bereaved father sits silently in his chair, and lights up another cigarette.

He admits he has turned into a recluse, and says he would like to die himself.

Compared to the loss of his daughter the money is nothing, but like many Japanese he is suffering not just bereavement, but financial hardship too.

Japan custody heartache for foreign fathers

2011-02-06T00:11:00.000+08:00

6 February 2011 Last updated at 01:40 GMT

Japan custody heartache for foreign fathers

By Roland Buerk BBC News, Tokyo

Thousands of Japanese people marry foreigners every year. Many are happy - but if the marriage breaks down the foreign spouse may end up cut out of the children's lives.

Alex Kahney often visits the places he used to take his children

Alex Kahney, who works for a medical publisher, still lives in what was once the family home, now nearly bare of furniture but full of memories.

There are photographs of his daughters on the walls of the small four-storey town house in one of the nicer Tokyo neighbourhoods.

Their favourite stuffed toys, a dog and a mouse, are on the back of the sofa - reminders of the little girls, aged nine and seven, who he has not seen for months.

His Japanese wife took them with her, along with much of the contents of the house, when their marriage broke down, and is refusing to let him see them.

Mr Kahney first tried the police.

But when he told them that his wife had abducted their children, they laughed at him.

What makes it more painful is that their new home is just down the road.

Pressure for change

"They're on a second-floor apartment," he says. "I can hear them talking inside. I go and stand underneath the balcony listening to them. It's tough.

"For the first few months I cried, I howled. For half an hour sometimes. I hardly sleep. I'm usually awake most of the night. And I have dreams, I dream about my children every night."

Many Japanese parents are also campaigning for change

In Japan, the courts normally give custody to one parent after a marriage breakdown and it is up to that parent if they let the other parent have any access.

Many separating couples come to amicable agreements, but it is not unusual for one parent to be cut out of their children's lives forever.

When the former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi divorced, he got custody of his two eldest sons, who have not seen their mother since.

She was six months pregnant at the time, and Mr Koizumi has never met his youngest son.

But now there is pressure for a change in the law.

Every few weeks Alex Kahney joins a demonstration organised by a group called Left-Behind Parents, Japan.

They have lobbied members of the Diet, and on a recent Sunday they marched, more than 100 strong, through the centre of Tokyo.

Among the demonstrators were many Japanese parents.

Courts defied

There are a quarter of a million divorces in Japan every year, which is relatively low by international standards, but a dramatic increase from earlier generations.

Number of cases

Twelve countries have been urging Japan to sign up to the Hague Convention:

US: 131
Canada: 38
UK: 38
France: 30
Germany 2
Australia, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand and Spain - no figures available
Belgium and Colombia - 0 cases

Joint statement by the 12 embassies

It is the cases involving foreigners, though, that are drawing the most attention.

Japan's customs around divorce have become a diplomatic issue because the country has yet to sign up to the 1980 Hague Convention on child abduction. As a result, Japanese parents who bring their children home after a divorce abroad can defy joint custody orders made by foreign courts.

The British embassy is dealing with 38 cases involving children, other embassies many more.

"There are 12 embassies involved in this," says David Warren, the British ambassador in Tokyo.

"We have been making frequent representations to the Japanese government. We've been saying to them that Japan cannot any longer go on without becoming part of the international legal framework for resolving these cases."

Abusive relationships

Japan is considering ratifying the Hague Convention.

A newspaper report earlier this month said an announcement could come as soon as the spring.

'Women look after the children'

Osamu, who doesn't want to use his full name, got divorced five years ago and his daughters are now 17 and 14. He sees the younger girl once every two months, the older girl about twice a year.

"I thought about their best interests," he says. "So I gave in and let their mother have custody."

Osamu says that at the time of the divorce he thought of splitting up his daughters, with the parents having custody of one each. But he decided it would not be good for them.

"In Japan traditionally men go out to work and women look after children. We tend to think women will be better off taking care of them, especially when they are small.

"Of course, there are exceptions. Maybe the father's family has a business and needs the next generation to take over."

Osamu added that men tend to think they can go on, get married again and start a new family more easily than women. From his experience it's usual for fathers not to see children at all.

But implementation is likely to be a long process.

It would mean a change from the expectation that families should largely work things out for themselves, to the state enforcing agreements on access and child-support payments.

Some people are also worried that the convention could hinder Japanese trying to flee abusive relationships abroad.

Akiko Oshima is a marriage counsellor who has worked as a mediator in the family court.

"These women who come back, do not do it because they want to," she says.

"They feel this is the only way out. They want their child to be brought up in Japan, and not in the host country where the father is abusive and she has no control over her children's education, and so forth. Not even, say, getting a job to support herself. This is the problem."

Alex Kahney spends a lot of time visiting places he went with his children, like the playground near his home.

He says he was a good parent and his daughters were daddy's girls.

If he is to see them again he must only hope their mother takes pity on him.

The number of Japanese men marrying foreign women is higher than the number of Japanese women marrying foreign men. It is rare for a Japanese man to marry a Western woman, but Japanese women frequently marry Western men.
A Japanese man marrying a foreigner is most likely to marry a woman from China, the Philippines or Korea, in that order. A Japanese woman marrying a foreigner is most likely to marry a man from Korea, the US or China.

Liars' brains 'are not the same'

2010-10-31T12:02:00.000+08:00

Last Updated: Thursday, 29 September 2005, 23:40 GMT 00:40 UK

Liars' brains 'are not the same'

A deceitful person's brain is different, the study suggests

Habitual liars' brains differ from those of honest people, a study says.

A University of Southern California team studied 49 people and found those known to be pathological liars had up to 26% more white matter than others.

White matter transmits information and grey matter processes it. Having more white matter in the prefrontal cortex may aid lying, the researchers said,

But the British Journal of Psychiatry said there were likely to be more differences in the brains of liars.

Manipulative behaviour

Participants were volunteers drawn from five temporary employment agencies in Los Angeles.

Three separate groups were studied.

The issue is always how much of our behaviour is under voluntary control and how much is innate

Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, Consultant Psychiatrist

The first consisted of 12 men and women with a history of being pathological liars; the second was 21 people who did not have a history of lying or anti-social behaviour.

The third group consisted of 16 people with anti-social personality disorder but no history of pathological lying. They were studied to see if they showed the same brain make-up as liars.

The researchers drew up a list of criteria for lying, cheating and deceiving, including habits such as conning people or behaving manipulatively, and telling lies in order to obtain sickness benefits.

They also assessed how much grey and white matter people had in the prefrontal cortex areas of their brains, using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Liars were found to have between 22 and 26% more white matter than either those with no history of lying or those in the anti-social group.

Childhood

The findings could not be explained by differences in age, ethnicity, IQ, head injury or substance misuse.

This is the first study to show a brain difference in people who lie, cheat and manipulate others, the researchers said.

They said the study could help research into areas such as people who feign illness.

The findings are in line with previous studies which showed children with autism are less capable of lying than other children.

Brain neurodevelopmental studies of autism show people with the condition have more grey matter than white matter - the opposite pattern to the liars in this study.

The researchers say the link between white matter and a deceitful personality could be that white matter provides a person with the cognitive capacity to lie.

Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the research team led by Dr Yaling Yang, say: "To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a brain abnormality in people who lie, cheat and manipulate others.

"The results further implicate the prefrontal cortex as an important - but not sole - component in the neural circuitry underlying lying, and provide an initial neurological correlate of a deceitful personality."

They add: "Further studies are required to examine changes in brain anatomy during the critical neurodevelopmental period in childhood, alongside changes in lying ability, to test further our preliminary hypothesis on the link between prefrontal white matter and lying."

Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, a consultant psychiatrist in London, said: "The issue is always how much of our behaviour is under voluntary control and how much is innate.

"The finding of brain abnormalities lends weight to the idea that a strong component of such difficulties may well be beyond voluntary control at least in part."

It's good to think - but not too much, scientists say

2010-10-22T19:00:00.000+08:00

17 September 2010 Last updated at 09:52 GMT

It's good to think - but not too much, scientists say

By Katie Alcock Science reporter, BBC News

People who think more about their decisions have more brain cells in their frontal lobes

People who think more about whether they are right have more cells in an area of the brain known as the frontal lobes.

UK scientists, writing in Science, looked at how brain size varied depending on how much people thought about decisions.

But a nationwide survey recently found that some people think too much about life.

These people have poorer memories, and they may also be depressed.

Stephen Fleming, a member of the University College London (UCL) team that carried out the research, said: "Imagine you're on a game show such as 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' and you're uncertain of your answer. You can use that knowledge to ask the audience, ask for help."

The London group asked 32 volunteers to make difficult decisions. They had to look at two very similar black and grey pictures and say which one had a lighter spot.

They then had to say just how sure they were of their answer, on a scale of one to six. Although it was hard to tell the difference, the pictures were adjusted to make sure that no-one found the task harder than anyone else.

People who were more sure of their answer had more brain cells in the front-most part of the brain - known as the anterior prefrontal cortex.

This part of the brain has been linked to many brain and mental disorders, including autism. Previous studies have looked at how this area functions while people make real time decisions, but not at differences between individuals.

Illness link

The study is the first to show that there are physical differences between people with regard to how big this area is. These size differences relate to how much they think about their own decisions.

The researchers hope that learning more about these types of differences between people may help those with mental illness.

Co-author Dr Rimona Weil, from UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: "I think it has very important implications for patients with mental ill health who perhaps don't have as much insight into their own disease."

She added that they hope they may be able to improve patients' ability to recognise that they have an illness and to remember to take their medication.

However, thinking a lot about your own thoughts may not be all good.

Cognitive psychologist Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling, who was not involved in the latest study, said that some people have a tendency to brood too much and this leads to a risk of depression.

More than 1,000 people took part in a nationwide study linking one type of memory - called "working memory" - to mental health.

Working memory involves the ability to remember pieces of information for a short time, but also while you are remembering them, to do something with them.

For example, you might have to keep hold of information about where you saw shapes and colours - and also answer questions on what they looked like. Dr Alloway commented: "I like to describe it as your brain's Post-It note."

Those with poorer working memory, the 10-15% of people who could only remember about two things, were more likely to mull over things and brood too much.

Both groups presented their findings at the British Science Festival, held this year at the University of Aston in Birmingham.

Computers show how wind could have parted Red Sea

2010-10-16T00:01:00.002+08:00

Computer simulations show how the movement of wind could have parted the waters of the Red Sea

New computer simulations have shown how the parting of the Red Sea, as described in the Bible, could have been a phenomenon caused by strong winds.

The account in the Book of Exodus describes how the waters of the sea parted, allowing the Israelites to flee their Egyptian pursuers.

Simulations by US scientists show how the movement of wind could have opened up a land bridge at one location.

This would have enabled people to walk across exposed mud flats to safety.

The results are published in the open-access journal Plos One.

The researchers show that a strong east wind, blowing overnight, could have pushed water back at a bend where an ancient river is believed to have merged with a coastal lagoon.

63mph winds from the east could have pushed the water back at an ancient river bend

With the water pushed back into both waterways, a land bridge would have opened at the bend, enabling people to walk across exposed mud flats to safety.

As soon as the wind died down, the waters would have rushed back in.

The study is based on a reconstruction of the likely locations and depths of Nile delta waterways, which have shifted considerably over time.

"The simulations match fairly closely with the account in Exodus," said the study's lead author Carl Drews, from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

"The parting of the waters can be understood through fluid dynamics. The wind moves the water in a way that's in accordance with physical laws, creating a safe passage with water on two sides and then abruptly allowing the water to rush back in."

The study is part of a larger research project by Mr Drews into the impacts of winds on water depths, including the extent to which Pacific Ocean typhoons can drive storm surges.

By pin-pointing a possible site south of the Mediterranean Sea for the crossing, the study also could be of benefit to archaeologists seeking to research the account.

A way through

In the Book of Exodus, Moses and the fleeing Israelites became trapped between the Pharaoh's advancing chariots and a body of water that has been variously translated as the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds.

The Biblical account says that, as the Pharaoh's army followed, the waters rushed in

In a divine miracle, the account says, a mighty east wind blew all night, splitting the waters and leaving a passage of dry land with walls of water on both sides.

The Israelites were able to flee to the other shore. But when the Egyptian Pharaoh's army attempted to pursue them in the morning, the waters rushed back and drowned the soldiers.

Other scientists have also sought to explain the account through natural processes.

Some have speculated that a tsunami could have caused waters to retreat and advance rapidly. But the scientists behind the latest research point out that such an event would not have caused the gradual overnight divide of the waters or have been associated with winds.

Other researchers have focused on a phenomenon known as "wind setdown," in which a particularly strong and persistent wind can lower water levels in one area while piling up water downwind.

How to say 'Louis Vuitton' and other designers' names

2010-10-15T23:58:00.001+08:00

The hyper-critical gaze of fashionistas around the world focuses on Britain this week for London Fashion Week. But if you're planning to venture an opinion on whether Alexa Chung's liking for long skirts will spark a wider trend, you'd better be able to pronounce the names of the top designers.

It's what separates the dedicated followers of fashion from the casual observers - whether you say Louis Vwee-ton or Louis Vee-ton, or even Lewis Vee-ton.

The international nature of the world of fashion can sometimes complicate researching fashion-related pronunciation for the BBC Pronunciation Unit. Our policy for company names is, where possible, to recommend the pronunciation the company itself prefers.

However, if there is a fashion house with multiple corporate offices around the world (such as Milan, Paris, New York and Tokyo), pronunciations used within the company itself can sometimes differ across languages.

Another point for us to consider is that many companies are named after a particular individual's name, and the pronunciation of the name itself and the company are not necessarily always the same.

With foreign names in general, we consider the opinion of the speakers of the relevant languages and ask them how they pronounce it in the original language and how they might expect it to be anglicised.

For company names, we then consult official sources, such as press offices at the company's headquarters, to enquire about their preferred pronunciation. We also speak to boutiques of the brands in this country to see if there are any established anglicisations that the brands go by in the UK.

A mouthful

(All the pronunciations given below are written in BBC Text spelling; stressed syllables in upper case, -uh as "a" in ago.)

An example of this is the pronunciation of the fashion house Balenciaga. Balenciaga is named after its founder, Basque designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. He was widely know in Spain by the Spanish pronunciation of his name, bal-en-thi-AA-guh (-th as in thin, -aa as in father). The company is now owned by a French company, so a gallicised pronunciation is also a possibility.

Ralph Lauren - easy, or is it?

After speaking to the corporate offices in Paris and the boutique in London, we found the company itself prefers the pronunciation bal-en-si-AA-guh (-s as in sit) in English language contexts.

Miu Miu, part of the Prada fashion house empire, is pronounced MYOO-myoo (-my as in music, -oo as in boot). Other Italian designers with names that can be a mouthful include Ermenegildo Zegna, pronounced air-men-uh-JIL-doh ZEN-yuh (-air as in hair, -j as in Jack, -y as in yes), Giambattista Valli, pronounced jam-bat-EE-stuh VAL-i (-j as in Jack, -al as in pal), Francesco Scognamiglio, pronounced fran-CHESS-koh skon-yam-EEL-yoh (-y as in yes) and Gianfranco Ferre, pronounced jan-FRANK-oh ferr-AY (-j as in Jack, -ay as in say).

Designers based in Paris include Christian Lacroix, pronounced kreest-YAA(NG) laa-KRWAA (-aa(ng) as in French blanc, -aa as in father), Lebanese designer Elie Saab, pronounced ELL-i SAAB (-aa as in father) and influential Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, whose name is pronounced YOH-ji yam-uh-MOH-toh (-oh as in no, -j as in Jack, -established anglicisation). The French fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton is sometimes anglicised as LOO-i VWEE-ton by some native English speakers, but we recommend the company's own preferred pronunciation, LWEE vwee-TO(NG) (-w as in wet, -o(ng) as in French bon).

American designers Anna Sui, pronounced, AN-uh SWEE, Isaac Mizrahi, pronounced IGH-zuhk miz-RAA-hi (-aa as in father), and Ralph Lauren, pronounced RALF LORR-uhn (-orr as in sorry), are familiar faces at London Fashion Week.

And finally, here are the pronunciations of some of our own British designers: Jaeger is pronounced YAY-guhr (-y as in yes, -ay as in say) and Hussein Chalayan is pronounced huuss-AYN chuh-LIGH-uhn (-uu as in book, -ay as in say, -igh as in high).

The BBC Pronunciation Unit writes an occasional 'How to Say' column for the Magazine Monitor. To download the unit's guide to BBC Text Spelling, click here.

Stonehenge boy 'was from the Med'

2010-10-15T23:50:00.000+08:00

28 September 2010 Last updated at 15:34 GMT

Stonehenge boy 'was from the Med'

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News

Chemical tests on teeth from an ancient burial near Stonehenge indicate that the person in the grave grew up around the Mediterranean Sea.

The bones belong to a teenager who died 3,550 years ago and was buried with a distinctive amber necklace.

“Start Quote

The position of his burial, the fact he's near Stonehenge, and the necklace all suggest he's of significant status”

End Quote Professor Jane Evans British Geological Survey

The conclusions come from analysis of different forms of the elements oxygen and strontium in his tooth enamel.

Analysis on a previous skeleton found near Stonehenge showed that that person was also a migrant to the area.

The findings will be discussed at a science symposium in London to mark the 175th anniversary of the British Geological Survey (BGS).

The "Boy with the Amber Necklace", as he is known to archaeologists, was found in 2005, about 5km south-east of Stonehenge on Boscombe Down.

The remains of the teenager were discovered next to a Bronze Age burial mound, during roadworks for military housing.

"He's around 14 or 15 years old and he's buried with this beautiful necklace," said Professor Jane Evans, head of archaeological science for the BGS.

"The position of his burial, the fact he's near Stonehenge, and the necklace all suggest he's of significant status."

Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, of Wessex Archaeology, backed this interpretation: "Amber necklaces are not common finds," he told BBC News.

"Most archaeologists would say that when you find burials like this... people who can get these rare and exotic materials are people of some importance."

Chemical record

Professor Evans likened Stonehenge in the Bronze Age to Westminster Abbey today - a place where the "great and the good" were buried.

Tooth enamel forms in a child's first few years, so it stores a chemical record of the environment in which the individual grew up.

The amber to make the beads almost certainly came from the Baltic Sea

Two chemical elements found in enamel - oxygen and strontium - exist in different forms, or isotopes. The ratios of these isotopes found in enamel are particularly informative to archaeologists.

Most oxygen in teeth and bone comes from drinking water - which is itself derived from rain or snow.

In warm climates, drinking water contains a higher ratio of heavy oxygen (O-18) to light oxygen (O-16) than in cold climates. So comparing the oxygen isotope ratio in teeth with that of drinking water from different regions can provide information about the climate in which a person was raised.

Most rocks carry a small amount of the element strontium (Sr), and the ratio of strontium 87 and strontium 86 isotopes varies according to local geology.

The isotope ratio of strontium in a person's teeth can provide information on the geological setting where that individual lived in childhood.

By combining the techniques, archaeologists can gather data pointing to regions where a person may have been raised.

Tests carried out several years ago on another burial known as the "Amesbury Archer" show that he was raised in a colder climate than that found in Britain.

Analysis of the strontium and oxygen isotopes in his teeth showed that his most likely childhood origin was in the Alpine foothills of Germany.

People were visiting Stonehenge from afar during the Bronze Age

"Isotope analysis of tooth enamel from both these people shows that the two individuals provide a contrast in origin, which highlights the diversity of people who came to Stonehenge from across Europe," said Professor Evans.

The Amesbury Archer was discovered around 5km from Stonehenge. His is a rich Copper Age or early Bronze Age burial, and contains some of the earliest gold and copper objects found in Britain. He lived about 4,300 years ago, some 800 years earlier than the Boscombe Down boy.

The archer arrived at a time when metallurgy was becoming established in Britain; he was a metal worker, which meant he possessed rare skills.

"We see the beginning of the Bronze Age as a period of great mobility across Europe. People, ideas, objects are all moving very fast for a century or two," said Dr Fitzpatrick.

"At the time when the boy with the amber necklace was buried, there are really no new technologies coming in [to Britain]... We need to turn to look at why groups of people - because this is a youngster - are making long journeys."

He speculated: "They may be travelling within family groups... They may be coming to visit Stonehenge because it was an incredibly famous and important place, as it is today. But we don't know the answer."

Other people who visited Stonehenge from afar were the Boscombe Bowmen, individuals from a collective Bronze Age grave. Isotope analysis suggests these people could have come from Wales or Brittany, if not further afield.

The research is being prepared for publication in a collection of research papers on Stonehenge.

Not depressed, just sad, lonely or unhappy

2010-10-15T23:44:00.000+08:00

28 September 2010 Last updated at 23:55 GMT

Not depressed, just sad, lonely or unhappy

Is sad so bad?

Cases of depression have grown around the world. But while awareness of the illness has helped lift the stigma it once attracted, have we lost touch with the importance of just feeling sad, asks Mary Kenny.

In today's Magazine

Looking back on my own reasonably serene childhood in Ireland during the 1950s, I recall quiet murmurs about people who suffered from "nerves".

I remember hearing that a neighbour - a well-to-do woman whose larger house and smart appearance was rather envied in the community - had had a "nervous breakdown".

Although when I repeated this to my aunt and uncle, with whom I was living, I was hushed up with a peremptory word of censure. There was, clearly, something slightly shameful about a "nervous breakdown" and one didn't speak about it.

I can see now, though I did not see then, that these were hidden incidents of depression among family and neighbours. But the stigma over depression, or even mental illness of any kind, must have added to their anguish.

How times have changed. It is an accepted truth, in our time, that depression is an illness with a global reach.

“Start Quote

We are losing old rituals which human beings have practised for eons”

End Quote Mary Kenny

It seems that depression in various guises - whether chronic, uni-polar, bi-polar, clinical, recurrent, major or minor - accounts for a greater burden of disease, world-wide, than war, cancer and AIDS all put together.

This new openness is a good thing. Yet in the process, are we losing something?

Take the word, "trauma," which is now frequently and commonly invoked in conversation today. A person who has suffered a bereavement is said to be "in trauma".

A person who has been subjected to shock is said to be "traumatised". The break-up of relationships - a sad human experience which brings us a sense of loss, and hurts our need for attachment - is, similarly, described as "a traumatic experience".

In his excellent autobiographical study of depression which he so adroitly called Malignant Sadness, Professor Lewis Wolpert employs the concept of "trauma" to describe, for example, bereavement.

Death - part of life

"Trauma" comes from the Greek word for a "wound", and in a medical sense, it is what happens to the body when a wound delivers a shock.

Find out more

Mary Kenny's Medicalising Melancholy is on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 29 Sept at 2045 BST

But bereavement, of which I have much sorrowful experience is, alas, part of the natural course of life's sad events.

As Shakespeare observes, with Hamlet, his father lost a father, and that father lost a father before him, and so on, ad infinitum, through the hinterland of human history.

Grief is desperately upsetting: it hurts you for ages, and the loss of someone you love is emotionally painful, and can be enduringly so. But why not call it by its proper name: bereavement: grief: loss?

One reason may be that we are losing old rituals which human beings have practised for eons.

When I was a young woman in France in the 1960s, you would come across a shop with its blinds drawn, and a notice saying: "Ferme pour deuil": closed for mourning.

Virginia Woolf endured a condition of fatigue, loss of motivation and energy

It is still seen in France, and is also a usual response in Italy. Mourning symbols were widespread in all cultures - widows' weeds, black armbands - and the community was expected to respect those who mourn.

Outward signs of mourning have declined, if not been abolished in more secular societies now: but our sense of sadness and loss endure, and instead of this being called mourning, it is called "trauma".

It might be a start to revive or recapture some of the wider, non-medical vocabulary for the gamut of human experience.

Depression may also be melancholy: it may be discouragement, disappointment, abandonment, sadness, sorrow, mourning, rejection, regret, anxiety, grief, obsession, introspection, loss, separation, loneliness, isolation, alienation, guilt, loss of hope, temperamental woe and simple, pure, unhappiness.

It can be forms of low mood now out of date. The Edwardians were very keen on a condition known as "neurasthenia"; Virginia Woolf was diagnosed with it.

It was also known as "nervous debility", or, in its milder form, being hyper-sensitive and thin-skinned.

Yearning for the past

"Anomie" was another condition once favoured in the 19th Century by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, and from a sociologist, a sociological condition. Anomie was defined as an isolated mood caused by the breakdown of social norms, sense of purpose and rules of conduct.

“Start Quote

There are romantic-sounding forms of melancholy: the German idea of weltschmerz - a yearning sense of 'world-sorrow'”

End Quote

There was also a spiritual form of depression called "accidie" much brooded on by some of the saints - this was "dryness of the soul". The writer Malcolm Muggeridge also complained of suffering from it at times.

There are even, I think, some romantic-sounding forms of melancholy: the German idea of weltschmerz - a yearning sense of "world-sorrow" and unfocused sadness for humanity: or the French nostalgie du passé, that bittersweet Proustian condition of longing for the past, with a rueful sense of regret for missed chances and lost opportunities.

I also rather like mal du pays - the exile's yearning for the country of childhood, and it comes to me in flashes, both in the spring and autumn, when I think of Irish country lanes, and the smell of fields of mown hay. Ah, bonjour tristesse!

No doubt we are better off for shedding much of the stigma surrounding mental illness - but with it, have we lost some of the variety, the dark poetry of the human condition?

Mary Kenny is an author, journalist and public speaker

Ten 'most threatened' buildings in England and Wales

2010-10-15T23:32:00.000+08:00

11 October 2010 Last updated at 14:06 GMT

Ten 'most threatened' buildings in England and Wales

The Unitarian Chapel on Upper Brook Street in Manchester is on the endangered list

The Victorian Society has released a list of what it says are the 10 most endangered buildings in England and Wales.

It follows a public appeal by the charity to find the most threatened Victorian and Edwardian buildings.

The buildings are in Leicestershire, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Sheffield, Grimsby, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Vale of Glamorgan.

Included is a former ice factory, an old fire station and a school.

This is the fourth year the Victorian Society has run its endangered buildings list, which aims to highlight the problems facing historic properties.

In order to be on the list, a building has to be at risk, whether from demolition, insensitive development or years of neglect, the society said.

The list of 10 was drawn up using nominations from members of the public.

Dr Ian Dungavell, director of the Victorian Society, said: "Our heritage is a finite resource and once historic buildings like this are gone they cannot be replaced."

VICTORIAN SOCIETY'S AT RISK LIST

Hammerton School, Ouseburn Road, Darnall, Sheffield
Grimsby's former ice factory, Gorton Street, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire
Wedgwood Institute, Queen Street, Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent
Bradgate House Stables, Bradgate Hill, Groby, Leicestershire
Royal Liverpool Seamen's Orphanage, Newsham Park, Tuebrook, Liverpool
30 Euston Square, London
The Unitarian Chapel, Upper Brook Street, Manchester
Old Fire Station, Court Road, Barry, Vale of Glamorgan
Normansfield Hospital, Kingston Road, Teddington, Greater London
Former Moseley School of Art, Moseley Road, Birmingham

Also on the list is a boarded-up former orphanage in Liverpool, designed by Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse and built in the 1870s, and a former Unitarian chapel on Upper Brook Street in Manchester.

The roof of the Grade II-listed chapel, which dates back to the late-1830s, has been taken off for safety reasons and the Victorian Society wants Manchester City Council to ensure the rest of the building is protected.

"Time is running out for the chapel, as the longer it lies empty and exposed to the elements the harder it will be to save," said Dr Dungavell.

"We urge Manchester City Council to take the lead and bring this eye-catching ruin back into use."

Manchester City Council said it had been working to re-develop the site and was currently in negotiations with a developer to renovate the building.

A council spokesman said: "Discussions are at an early stage but we hope to make an announcement about the future of the chapel within the next few months."

'Eye-catching ruin'

Also on the list is the former Moseley School of Art in Birmingham, built in 1898, which is now the headquarters of the British Association of Muslims.

The Victorian Society is concerned about the building's "deteriorating condition".

Dr Dungavell said: "Even in harsh economic times historic buildings like the former art school need to be cared for or they won't survive for future generations.

"This is a nationally significant building and we urge the council to use its powers and make sure urgent repairs are carried out."

The Moseley School of Art in Birmingham is now home to the British Association of Muslims

The former Wedgwood Institute in Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent has also been included on the list.

Until recently, it was home to Burslem's public library, but closed two years ago due to structural problems, the society said.

The library books have been moved elsewhere but the building remains at risk of further deterioration.

The Victorian Society's list is different to the At Risk Register organised by English Heritage, but some of the buildings, such as the Grimsby former ice factory, features on both of them.

The ice factory was built in 1900/1901 and produced ice for Grimsby's fishing industry for 90 years, before closing in 1990.

Ice-making machinery remains inside the building, even though the factory is now derelict.

Earlier this year, the Great Grimsby Ice Factory Trust was set up to campaign for its restoration.

Vicky Hartung, chair of the trust, said: "It's one of the few remaining buildings from our heritage.

"We were a glorious fishing port at one time, we are no longer that, but it's a spectacular building and we think it can be brought to life again and contribute to the town."

Background noise affects taste of foods, research shows

2010-10-15T23:31:00.001+08:00

14 October 2010 Last updated at 07:57 GMT

Background noise affects taste of foods, research shows

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

This might be the best place for the tastiest meal

The level of background noise affects both the intensity of flavour and the perceived crunchiness of foods, researchers have found.

Blindfolded diners assessed the sweetness, saltiness, and crunchiness, as well as overall flavour, of foods as they were played white noise.

While louder noise reduced the reported sweetness or saltiness, it increased the measure of crunch.

The research is reported in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

It may go some way to explaining why airline food is notoriously bland - a phenomenon that drives airline catering companies to heavily season their foods.

"There's a general opinion that aeroplane foods aren't fantastic," said Andy Woods, a researcher from Unilever's laboratories and the University of Manchester.

"I'm sure airlines do their best - and given that, we wondered if there are other reasons why the food would not be so good. One thought was perhaps the background noise has some impact," he told BBC News.

"Nasa gives their space explorers very strong-tasting foods, because for some reason thay can't taste food that strongly - again, perhaps it's the background noise.

"There was no previous research on this, so we went about seeing if the hunch was correct."

Tasteful

In a comparatively small study, 48 participants were fed sweet foods such as biscuits or salty ones such as crisps, while listening to silence or noise through headphones.

Meanwhile they rated the intensity of the flavours and of their liking.

In noisier settings, foods were rated less salty or sweet than they were in the absence of background noise, but were rated to be more crunchy.

"The evidence points to this effect being down to where your attention lies - if the background noise is loud it might draw your attention to that, away from the food," Dr Woods said.

Also in the group's findings there is the suggestion that the overall satisfaction with the food aligned with the degree to which diners liked what they were hearing - a finding the researchers are pursuing in further experiments.

Hitler's relationship with Germany explored

2010-10-15T13:45:00.000+08:00

15 October 2010 Last updated at 04:07 GMT

Hitler's relationship with Germany explored

By Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin

The new exhibition in Berlin has Adolf Hitler as its focus for the first time

The title is important: Hitler and the German People. The first ever big exhibition in a major German museum to focus on Hitler is not just about him but about his relationship with the people.

And that, of course, makes for discomfort. After all, the people who come to the German Historical Museum in Berlin are the grandchildren and, occasionally, the children of those who participated in the poisonous relationship in the 1930s and early 40s. This is not an exhibition where the visitors view coolly from outside. It is one where they look into themselves, too.

“Start Quote

I find the exhibition of Hitler not a good idea. I believe the neo-Nazis will come”

End Quote Hans Coppi, whose parents were hanged by the Nazis

What they will find as they walk the rooms is that Hitler and the Nazis permeated ordinary German life. There are tiny toys depicting him, children's models of him in uniform with his arm outstretched in salute.

There is a quilt where the inhabitants of a village have depicted their homes in delicate needle-craft - alongside the Nazi symbols also stitched with great care. There is a cup and saucer with a swastika, and a lamp shade with the same symbol. There is a deck of playing cards showing Hitler and other Nazis. There is a gravestone from 1938 with a swastika.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Click to play

Museum director Hans Ottomeyer on why the exhibition was put together

There are also exhibits that give the game away, as it were. There is a very ordinary amateur painting, but on the back you see the Torah, the implication being that the sacred Jewish text was just taken and used for material for a hobby. Who now knows where it came from or what became of the original owners?

As you look, you wonder.

One of the few bits of personal memorabilia is a vast wooden desk with an eagle and snake on the front, and used by Hitler. The conclusion the organisers want you to draw is about his obsession with aggrandisement. It is a desk that is useless except for what it says.

There are paintings of the masses as just that: the masses - regimented, indistinguishable one from the next. There is a painting from before the war which depicts the masses hauling their leader - depicted as a monstrous giant - in adoration. The organisers said they want the viewer to conclude: don't say nobody knew it was coming because here it is foretold.

The depiction of the swastika remains illegal in public places

The exhibition is ground-breaking because it breaks a great taboo in Germany - and remember that the depiction of the swastika or the Nazi salute remain illegal in public places (the museum is exempt because it's technically for research purposes). But previous attempts at exhibitions focusing on Hitler came to naught because of the fear of attracting neo-Nazis.

Six years ago, for example, a similar exhibition entitled Hitler and the National Socialist Regime was rejected because it was felt to be too personalised - too focused on the man.

It's the images of Hitler that remain the problem, and in this current exhibition they are sparse. There are the busts of him, which were turned out industrially for mantelpieces throughout the land. And there are pictures of him in rows on the front covers of today's news magazines, perhaps to make the point that Hitler sells.

But there isn't personal memorabilia. The clothes he wore are not here. The German museum has not, for example, borrowed one of his uniforms from a museum in Moscow.

Simone Erpel, the curator of the exhibition, said: "Something worn by Hitler, even if it was just twice, could become a fetish."

There's no doubt it is all very thoughtfully done, but people remain uneasy. On the one hand, there are people who say that Hitler is not studied enough in schools so the more serious contemplation and sheer information there is, the better.

Busts of Hitler were turned out industrially for mantlepieces

But there are also those who see dangers. Also in the week when the exhibition opens, three small brass plaques on cobble stones were laid in a quiet street a short distance from the museum.

On them were the names of three people executed by the Nazis for organizing resistance and saving Jews. One of the people at the street ceremony was Hans Coppi whose parents were hanged.

"I find the exhibition of Hitler not a good idea. I believe the neo-Nazis will come," he said.

To which the director of the Museum on Unter den Linden, Hans Ottomeyer replies: "We are not haunted by neo-Nazis because we are a place of enlightenment. They don't read books and they don't go to exhibitions".

"Hitler was a poor tramp and it needed the acclaim of the Germans to make Hitler what he became. This the exhibition tries to reflect. It is about propaganda and it is about the means of his attraction."

So does the holding of the exhibition mean that Hitler is now in the past, a person for museums but remote from today's reality?

"He is not past and remote. He is still everywhere to be feared," says Mr Ottomeyer.

"Our cities and our public buildings are still destroyed and not rebuilt - and the same is true of the minds and the values of the people which were heavily hampered by the Third Reich and its effects."

Last 'sin-eater' celebrated with church service

2010-09-20T10:39:00.000+08:00

19 September 2010 Last updated at 03:36 GMT

Last 'sin-eater' celebrated with church service

The Reverend Norman Morris led the service for Richard Munslow

The restored grave of the last known "sin-eater" in England has been at the centre of a special service in a Shropshire village churchyard.

Campaigners raised £1,000 to restore the grave of Richard Munslow, who was buried in Ratlinghope in 1906.

Sin-eaters were generally poor people paid to eat bread and drink beer or wine over a corpse, in the belief they would take on the sins of the deceased.

Frowned upon by the church, the custom mainly died out in the 19th Century.

It was prevalent in the Marches, the land around the England-Wales border, and in north Wales, but was rarely carried out anywhere else.

Believers thought the sin-eater taking on the sins of a person who died suddenly without confessing their sins would allow the deceased's soul to go to heaven in peace.

While most of the sin-eaters were poor people or beggars, Mr Munslow was a well-established farmer in the area.

“Start Quote

This grave at Ratlinghope is now in an excellent state of repair but I have no desire to reinstate the ritual that went with it”

End Quote The Reverend Norman Morris

The Reverend Norman Morris, the vicar of Ratlinghope, a village of about 100 residents on the Long Mynd near Church Stretton, led the "God's Acre" service at St Margaret's Church.

Mr Morris said: "It was a very odd practice and would not have been approved of by the church but I suspect the vicar often turned a blind eye to the practice."

Locals began the collection to restore the grave, which had fallen into disrepair in recent years, believing it would be good to highlight the custom and Mr Munslow's place in religious history.

It took a few months to raise the £1,000 needed to pay for the work, carried out by local stonemason Charles Shaw.

Mr Morris said: "This grave at Ratlinghope is now in an excellent state of repair but I have no desire to reinstate the ritual that went with it."

Avatarocious

2010-09-01T03:17:00.000+08:00

Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks.
BY John Podhoretz
December 28, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 15

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Avatar, we are told, does things with cameras and computers and actors that have never been done before. Its painstaking combination of real-life action and animation has, we are told, taken cinema to a new level. It cost anywhere from $328 million to $500 million, we are told, and took four years to make. It is a breakthrough, we are told, the boldest step into the future of filmmaking, an unparalleled achievement.

What they didn't tell us is that Avatar is blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Avatar is an undigested mass of clichés nearly three hours in length taken directly from the revisionist westerns of the 1960s-the ones in which the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys. Only here the West is a planet called Pandora, the time is the 22nd century rather than the 19th, and the Indians have blue skin and tails, and are 10 feet tall.

An American soldier named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is sent to make friends with the blue people. To effect this, scientists download his consciousness into a 10-foot-tall blue body. Jake discovers that the natives are wonderful in every possible way. They are so green it's too bad their skin has to be blue. They're hunters and they kill animals, but after they do so, they cry and say it's sad. Which only demonstrates their superiority. Plus they have (I'm not kidding) fiber-optic cables coming out of their patooties that allow them to plug into animals and control them. Now, that just seems wrong-I mean, why should they get to control the pterodactyls? Why don't the pterodactyls control them? This kind of biped-centrism is just another form of imperialist racism, in my opinion.

Like the Keebler elves, the Blue People all live in a big tree together and they go to church at another big tree, under which (we learn) lives Mother Earth, only since it isn't earth, she isn't called Mother Earth, but the Great Mother or something like that. Meanwhile, back among the humans at their base camp, there's a big fight. The scruffy scientists, led by Sigourney Weaver, want to learn, learn, learn about the wonders of the planet and the people and Mother Earth and the big tree and the pterodactyls.
But the scientists work for an evil corporation (natch) and the evil corporation is only there because it wants-you can write the rest; but I will, just for the sake of expedience-to exploit the planet's natural resources. In particular, it wants to exploit a mineral called (again no kidding) unobtainium. And it turns out there's a big deposit of unobtainium under the Keebler Elf Tree. They want the elves to move.

Getting them to move is Jake Sully's job. And he does earn their trust, even though the leader of their tribe says, "His alien scent offends my nose!" (The line is translated from their nonexistent language with subtitles that are designed to look like the men's room signs at an Indian casino.) The Blue People, in particular the contemptuous and lovely Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), show him their wondrous ways. But before he can discuss hiring Allied Van Lines with them, the Evil Corporation intervenes.

It is run by an evil Yuppie, and the Yuppie's security is provided by an evil Marine. And for no good reason other than to get the movie into its second act, they decide to stage a military attack on the Elf Tree, thus blowing the zillions of dollars they sank into the project of making Jake Sully into a Blue Person rather than waiting a couple of weeks.

Oy, the suffering that ensues, all for some lousy unobtainium! Oy, the destruction! You can hear writer-director James Cameron weeping over his special-effects computer as the bad humans he created commit this terrible atrocity against the Blue People who don't exist. As for me, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde's immortal crack about Charles Dickens's tears as he killed off the child heroine of his Old Curiosity Shop: "It would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

The only salvation for Pandora lies with our man Jake Sully turning into the leader of the blue-skinned people, rallying them to the cause of protecting their planet against the Evil Corporation. This, too, is unacceptably paternalistic, in my view; after all, why should giant blue people have to learn these things from a shrimpy white guy who doesn't even have a tail or built-in Skype?

Eventually, it falls to Jake to plug his fiber-optic cables into a plant and ask the Great Mother to do something. And she does. She rallies the pterodactyls, not to mention some rhinoceroses and dogs, to join with an army of blue people to take down the EC. In the end, it's Jake Sully vs. the Evil Marine, who is dressed up to look like (again, not kidding) a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot, one of those ludicrous toys from the late 1960s that gave toys a bad name.

You're going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie's politics-about how it's a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq, and so on. The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of.

The thing is, one would be giving James Cameron too much credit to take Avatar-with its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe and the tribe's adorable pagan rituals, its hatred of the military and American institutions, and the notion that to be human is just way uncool-at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard-issue counterculture clichés in Hollywood have become by now. Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance. He wrote it this way not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.

Will it be? Aside from the anti-American, anti-human politics, the movie is nearly three hours long, and it doesn't have a single joke in it. There is no question that Avatar is an astonishing piece of work. It is, for about two-thirds of its running time, an animated picture that looks like it's not an animated picture.

On the other hand, who cares? It doesn't count for much that the technical skill on display makes it easier to suspend disbelief and make you think you're watching something take place on a distant planet. Getting audiences to suspend disbelief isn't the hard part; we suspend disbelief all the time. It's how we can see any movie about anything and get involved in the story. The real question is this: If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention?
The answer is, unquestionably no. There's no chance anybody would even have put it into production, no matter that Cameron made the box-office bonanza Titanic. So the question is: Does the technical mastery on display in Avatar outweigh the unbelievably banal and idiotic plot, the excruciating dialogue, the utter lack of any quality resembling a sense of humor? And will all these qualities silence the discomfort coming from that significant segment of the American population that, we know from the box-office receipts for Iraq war movies this decade, doesn't like it when an American soldier is the bad guy?

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary,is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic.

25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers)

2010-07-17T20:40:00.001+08:00

25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers)

Every year, English teachers from across the U.S. can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. Here are last year’s winners:

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had it’s two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six foot, three inch tree.
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
The little boat drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality to it, like when you’re on vacation in another city and “Jeopardy” comes on at 7 PM instead of 7:30.
Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
The hailstones leaped form the pavement, just like grubs when you fry them in hot grease.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 PM traveling 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 PM at a speed of 35 mph.
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met.
He fell for her like he was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
Shots rang out, as shots are known to do.
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
He was lame as a duck. Not a metaphorical duck, either but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.
The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

source

NHS money 'wasted' on homeopathy

2010-07-13T22:56:00.000+08:00

Page last updated at 14:41 GMT, Monday, 22 February 2010

The NHS should stop funding homeopathy, MPs say.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said using public money on the highly-diluted remedies could not be justified.

The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

But manufacturers and supporters of homeopathy disputed the report, saying the MPs had ignored important evidence.

It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS, helping to fund four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and numerous prescriptions.

Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of treatment that uses highly diluted substances - sometimes so none of the original product is left - that are given orally in the belief that it will stimulate the body's self-healing mechanism.

HOMEOPATHY

Homeopathy involves giving people very dilute amounts of a substance that in larger amounts might produce symptoms similar to the condition being treated

For example, one remedy which might be used in a person suffering from insomnia is coffea, a remedy made from coffee

Homeopathy: Your views

Supporters believe the remedies help relieve a range of minor ailments from bruising and swelling to constipation and insomnia.

But the MPs said homeopathy was basically sugar pills that only worked because of faith.

In medicine it is recognised that some people will get better because they believe the treatment they take is going to work.

The MPs said the NHS should not fund treatments on this basis.

They argued the effectiveness was often unpredictable and involved a deception by the medical establishment.

They also warned it could lead to a delay in diagnosis if symptoms were cured but the underlying reason for them was not tackled.

The MPs also criticised the drugs regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, for allowing medical claims to be made.

The bar for licensing for homeopathic remedies is not set as high as for medical treatments, partly because they have been used since the NHS was set up in 1948 before the current system of regulation was brought in.

Committee chairman Phil Willis said this approval and the fact they were funded by the NHS in the first place lent the remedies "a badge of authority that is unjustified".

But the report acknowledged there was a public appetite for homeopathy with surveys showing satisfaction rates of above 70%.

But the report was disowned by one of the committee's MPs. Labour's Ian Stewart said he was dissenting from the report because the MPs had refused to take into account that homeopathy worked for some people and he also said he was concerned by the "balance of witnesses".

'Disappointed'

Paul Bennett, superintendent pharmacist at Boots, on homeopathy

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said the government would give a full response to the report in the coming months.

But she added: "In the meantime we would reiterate that we appreciate the strength of feeling both for and against the provision of homeopathy on the NHS.

"Our view is that the local NHS and clinicians, rather than Whitehall, are best placed to make decisions on what treatment is appropriate for their patients - this includes complementary or alternative treatments such as homeopathy."

Robert Wilson, of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers, said he was "disappointed" by the findings.

He said the MPs had ignored evidence that homeopathy was effective.

"There is good evidence that homeopathy works, for example in animals and babies, neither of which experience placebo effects."

And Dr Michael Dixon, medical director for the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, set up by Prince Charles to promote complementary medicine, disputed the findings, saying homeopathy still had a role in the NHS.

"We should not abandon patients we cannot help with conventional scientific medicine.

"If homeopathy is getting results for those patients, then of course we should continue to use it."

The British Medical Association said it was concerned about NHS funds being used on homeopathy and called for an official review into its effectiveness.

Happy moments 'protect the heart'

2010-07-09T18:30:00.000+08:00

Last Updated: Monday, 18 April, 2005, 15:20 GMT 16:20 UK

Happy moments 'protect the heart'

Happiness was more commonly linked to leisure, rather than work

Every moment of happiness counts when it comes to protecting your heart, researchers have said.

A team from University College London said happiness leads to lower levels of stress-inducing chemicals.

They found that even when happier people experienced stress, they had low levels of a chemical which increases the risk of heart disease.

The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their bodies

Professor Peter Weissberg, British Heart Foundation

It showed that those who were happy less often had higher levels of a bloodstream chemical called plasma fibrinogen, which shows if there is inflammation present.

It is an indicator of how great a risk a person has of developing heart disease in the future.

Daily happiness

Researchers tested 116 men and 100 women who were taking part in a major study of thousands of London-based civil servants recruited between 1985 and 1988 when 35-55 years old to investigate the risk factors for coronary heart disease.

They carried out tests on people at work, during leisure periods and in the laboratory.

People were also asked whether or not they were happy at 33 moments during the day.

The researchers then evaluated how often people were happy in the course of the day.

Leisure was, unsurprisingly, linked with more happy moments than work.

It was found that some people reported they never felt happy, while others reported feeling occasional happiness and those who felt happy most of the time.

The results were adjusted for gender, age, employment status, weight, smoking habits and psychological distress.

Levels of cortisol - a stress hormone - were 32% lower in people who reported more happy moments.

Cortisol has been related to abdominal obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and autoimmune disorders.

The researchers also discovered happy people have had lower levels of fibrinogen when they were stressed.

Emotional state

Professor Jane Wardle, who worked on the study, said: "All the research to date has been on unhappiness, rather than happiness.

"This research suggests we should aim to maximise the happiness of the population."

Professor Andrew Steptoe, who led the study, said: "It has been suspected for the last few years that happier people may be healthier both mentally and physically than less happy people.

"What this study shows is that there are plausible biological pathways linking happiness with health."

He added: "What we find particularly interesting is that the associations between happiness and biological responses were independent of psychological distress.

"We already know that depression and anxiety are related to increased physical health risk. This study raises the intriguing possibility that the effect of happiness may be somewhat separate."

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation said: "The results of this study build upon this team's work, which we are delighted to have supported.

"Evidence that emotional state is important for good heart health is growing and this shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their bodies."

A Life Revealed

2010-03-22T00:40:00.000+08:00

A Life Revealed

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

By Cathy Newman

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. "I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day," he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan's refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.

In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film's EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn't her.

No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.

It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.

Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.

Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. "She's had a hard life," said McCurry. "So many here share her story." Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.

"There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war," a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat's photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.

"We left Afghanistan because of the fighting," said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. "The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice."

Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.

"You never knew when the planes would come," he recalled. "We hid in caves."

The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.

"Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp," explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. "There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people." More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. "The Russian invasion destroyed our lives," her brother said.

It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? "Each change of government brings hope," said Yusufzai. "Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors."

In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.

Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.

Her husband, Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a lantern at dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she was 16. The match was arranged.

He lives in Peshawar (there are few jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery. He bears the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns vanishes like smoke. Her asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and pollution of Peshawar in summer, limits her time in the city and with her husband to the winter. The rest of the year she lives in the mountains.

At the age of 13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into purdah, the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once they reach puberty.

"Women vanish from the public eye," he said. In the street she wears a plum-colored burka, which walls her off from the world and from the eyes of any man other than her husband. "It is a beautiful thing to wear, not a curse," she says.

Faced by questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face, as if by doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash anger. It is not her custom to subject herself to the questions of strangers.

Had she ever felt safe?

"No. But life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order."

Had she ever seen the photograph of herself as a girl?

"No."

She can write her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her children. "I want my daughters to have skills," she said. "I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave."

Education, it is said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula said. The two younger daughters still have a chance.

The reunion between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look—and certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes.

Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?

The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude.

"It was," said Sharbat Gula, "the will of God."

Was this man the first terrorist of the modern age?

2010-03-21T16:21:00.000+08:00

Page last updated at 11:08 GMT, Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:08 UK

Was this man the first terrorist of the modern age?

Emile Henry's attack on a cafe in 1894, which killed one person

It's eight years to the day since the first shots were fired in America's War on Terror. But can the terrorism tactics it sought to crush be traced back to a single attack on a Parisian cafe more than 100 years ago, asks Professor John Merriman.

On February 12, 1894, a young intellectual anarchist named Emile Henry went out to kill. And, in doing so, he arguably ignited the age of modern terrorism.

As he had looked down on Paris from near his miserable lodgings in the plebeian 20th arrondissement on the edge of Paris, he vowed war on the bourgeoisie. His specific goal was to avenge the execution of Auguste Vaillant a week earlier.

Unable to feed his family, Vaillant had thrown a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, slightly wounding several people. His goal: to call attention to the plight of the poor.

Unlike previous anarchist bombers, Henry was an intellectual

Now, armed with a bomb hidden under his coat, Henry walked up the Avenue de l'Opera, pausing at several elegant cafes, but he moved on because they were not full enough. He entered the Cafe Terminus, which is still there, near the Gare St Lazare, ordered two beers, and a cigar.

With the latter he lit the fuse of his bomb, and threw it into the cafe, leaving carnage behind. Amid thick, acrid smoke, marble tables, metal chairs, and mirrors had shattered. The screams and shouts of those wounded joined the smoke.

Henry ran away, before being wrestled to the ground after a fierce struggle. In the cafe, 20 people had been wounded, some very seriously, one of whom would die.

Along with the bombing of the Liceo theatre in Barcelona, the attack on the Cafe Terminus signalled a marked change in targets of terrorists.

Where before it was policemen or heads of state - the French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated the same year - who were the targets of violent anarchists, now it was ordinary people. The bourgeois.

Guillotine

At his trial, Henry described how his love for humanity had been transformed into hatred for the ruling classes. Fifteen months earlier, one of his bombs had killed five policemen. Now he had gone out to kill bourgeois because they were who they were.

Henry was executed, by guillotine, three months after his attack

He had "no respect for human life, because the bourgeois themselves have absolutely none".

Emile Henry was guillotined at age 21.

There are of course salient differences between the terrorists of the 1890s and those in our world. For one thing, the role of religious fundamentalism, such as so-called jihadists who subscribe to al-Qaeda's world view, was not a part of anarchist attacks.

However, can we find useful parallels between Henry's bomb, or "deed" as the violent anarchists used to call such attacks, and terrorism today?

Then, as now, terrorists targeted anyone identified with their enemies. Moreover, both cut across social boundaries. Unlike the notorious French anarchist bombers Ravachol and Vaillant, who were decidedly down and out, Emile Henry was an intellectual.

Both groups have used weapons that levelled the playing fields. Dynamite, invented in 1868 by Alfred Nobel, represented as one contemporary put it "a modern revolutionary alchemy".

Kamikaze pilots

An American anarchist crowed, before being hanged in Chicago following the famous police riot at Haymarket, "in giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work."

Both share a fervent belief in ideology, and confidence that eventually they will win - providing an apocalyptical, even millenarian aspect to terrorists

Likewise, road-side bombs in today's world have emerged as a weapon of choice. And then, as now, terrorist practitioners seek "revolutionary immortality" - hoping to inspire others with their heroic demise. Suicide bombers, however, with the exception of Kamikaze pilots, are a new phenomenon.

Both sets of terrorists target a powerful enemy, a structure they set out to destroy. For the anarchists, the enemy was the state, and the pillars that supported it - capitalism, the army, and the Church, with Henry adding the bourgeoisie.

For the anarchists, only the destruction of the state could bring equality and thus happiness.

In the case of jihadists today, the West and particularly the power of the United States stand as the target.

Moreover, both share a fervent belief in ideology, and confidence that eventually they will win. This provides something of an apocalyptical, even millenarian aspect to terrorists, many of whom are young, intent on changing the world.

In dealing with terrorism, both the French government more than 100 years ago and American officials in the early period of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, had a tendency to look for a centrally organised, massive conspiracy. Instead, they ought to have acknowledged the role of small groups or even isolated individuals undertaking locally organised, or freelance operations undertaken by "self-starter" terrorist groups.

Torture

Yet, there remains a fundamental difference between revolutionary violence and resistance violence, although they may well share tactics. The latter has in the 20th Century and beyond, been directed at occupying powers, for example, Israel, French forces in Algeria, and the US in Vietnam and Iraq.

Revolutionary and resistance terrorism, however, have in common that their violence is directed against states that they view as oppressive and whose presence they consider unjust.

The Madrid bombs of 2004 - an attack on civillians, not police or military

The anarchist attacks in the 1890s remind us of another dimension of terror where some people accuse the state itself of terrorism, undertaken often violently by a repressive state against its own people (or against those in places it invades or occupies).

This variety of terrorism is often conveniently forgotten or overlooked.

Indeed, one theory has it that "terrorism" began with the state, during the radical phase of the French Revolution.

Henry had been deeply affected by the state's increased repression of all dissidents. His father had seen state terror up close, condemned to death in absentia for having been a militant in the Paris Commune of 1871, after which at least 20,000 Parisians perished.

The over-reaction of state authorities in France, as well as in Italy and Spain, during the heyday of anarchist attacks did not work. Anarchists arrested in the systematic repression by the police in 1894, including a number of anarchist intellectuals put on trial that same year, accused of being in an "association of evil-doers," were not terrorists.

The French government used the panic that the anarchist bombs understandably brought to crack down on dissidents. The repression undercut the government's claim on moral authority. The French government in the 1890s did not torture prisoners - their Spanish counterpart did - public revulsion turned against the government and indeed the wave of attacks ended.

More than 100 years later, it is a policy from which today's elected leaders could, perhaps, learn.

John Merriman is the Charles Seymour professor of history at Yale University and author of The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-De-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror, published by JR Books.

Did the discovery of cooking make us human?

2010-03-10T19:44:00.000+08:00

Page last updated at 11:30 GMT, Tuesday, 2 March 2010

Did the discovery of cooking make us human?

By Clare Kingston
BBC Horizon

Learning to cook created 'big brains'

Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing.

Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive.

The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.

It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase.

Meat - a more concentrated form of energy - not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels.

As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop.

'Accident'

Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham believes there is more to it than simply discovering meat.

Australopithecus was ape-like but walked upright like humans

He thinks that it is not so much a change in the ingredients of our diet, but the way in which we prepare them that has caused the radical evolution of our species.

"I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he says.

"Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidently. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction."

To understand how and when our bodies changed, we need to take a closer look at what our ancestors ate by studying the fossil records.

Our earliest ancestor was the ape-like Australopithecus.

Australopithecus had a large belly containing a big large-intestine, essential to digest the robust plant matter, and had large, flat teeth which it used for grinding and crushing tough vegetation.

None the less, it was Australopithecus that moved out of the trees and onto the African savannah, and started to eat the animals that grazed there.

And it was this change of habitat, lifestyle and diet that also prompted major changes in anatomy.

Bigger brain

The eating of meat ties in with an evolutionary shift 2.3 million years ago resulting in a more human-looking ancestor with sharper teeth and a 30% bigger brain, called Homo habilis.

The brain consumes 20% of a person's energy while sitting

The most momentous shift however, happened 1.8 million years ago when Homo erectus - our first "truly human" ancestor arrived on the scene.

Homo erectus had an even bigger brain, smaller jaws and teeth.

Erectus also had a similar body shape to us. Shorter arms and longer legs appeared, and gone was the large vegetable-processing gut, meaning that Erectus could not only walk upright, but could also run.

He was cleverer and faster, and - according to Professor Wrangham - he had learned how to cook.

"Cooking made our guts smaller," he says. "Once we cooked our food, we didn't need big guts.

"They're costly in terms of energy. Individuals that were born with small guts were able to save energy, have more babies and survive better."

Professor Peter Wheeler from Liverpool John Moores University and his colleague, Leslie Aiello, think it was this change in our digestive system that specifically allowed our brains to get larger.

Energy transfer

Cooking food breaks down its cells, meaning that our stomachs need to do less work to liberate the nutrients our bodies need.

This, says Wheeler, "freed up energy which could then be used to power a larger brain. The increase in brain-size mirrors the reduction in the size of the gut."

Significantly Wheeler and Aiello found that the reduction in the size of our digestive system was exactly the same amount that our brains grew by - 20%.

Professor Stephen Secor at the University of Alabama found that not only does cooked food release more energy, but the body uses less energy in digesting it.

He uses pythons as a model for digestion as they stay still for up to six days while digesting a meal. This makes them the perfect model as the only energy they expend is on digestion.

His research shows that pythons use 24% less energy digesting cooked meat, compared with raw.

So being human might all be down to energy.

Cooking is essentially a form of pre-digestion, which has transferred energy use from our guts to our brains.

According to Professors Wheeler and Wrangham and their colleagues, it is no coincidence that humans - the cleverest species on earth - are also the only species that cooks.

Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed

2010-03-10T19:34:00.000+08:00

Page last updated at 23:49 GMT, Thursday, 4 March 2010

Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas

The dinosaurs were one of many groups to go extinct

An international panel of experts has strongly endorsed evidence that a space impact was behind the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

They reached the consensus after conducting the most wide-ranging analysis yet of the evidence.

Writing in Science journal, they rule out alternative theories such as large-scale volcanism.

The analysis has been discussed at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the US.

A panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, around 65 million years ago.

The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, bird-like pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.

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