Costa Concordia: The rules of evacuating a ship

By Tom de Castella BBC News Magazine

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Cruise disaster

• Profile of captain
• Industry 'undented'
• In pictures
• Underwater search

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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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“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.

The only living master of a dying martial art

By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service

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In today's Magazine

• The myth of the War of the Worlds panic
• The challenges of doing business in Venezuela
• Scientists glimpse inside a Peruvian mummy
• Population control: Is it a tool of the rich?

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.

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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

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.

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“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.

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.

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."

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

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."

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

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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

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

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.

Continue reading the main story

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.

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

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.

Continue reading the main story

“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

By Caroline Bayley Producer, In Business, BBC Radio 4

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

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Related Stories

• Why do the German and UK economies differ sharply?
• German economy rebounds in 2010
• Germany 'nearing full employment'

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.

Continue reading the main story

“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.

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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

• Faber-Castell
• 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.

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Find out more

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

• Listen via the BBC iPlayer
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"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'

By Paul Rincon and Jonathan Amos Science reporters, BBC News

Researchers report almost 16,000 items

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• Early man was 'ancient mariner'
• Faeces hint at first Americans
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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.

Continue reading the main story

“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.