November 30th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1995: Clinton kindles hope in Northern Ireland Bill Clinton, the first serving US president to visit Northern Ireland, gets a rapturous welcome by both Catholics and Protestants.
	1994: Blazing liner abandoned off east Africa Almost 1,000 people are forced to abandon the Achille Lauro in the Indian Ocean after it catches fire.
	1982: Animal activists bomb Downing Street A letter bomb explodes inside the British Prime Minister's London residence injuring a member of staff.

Beer prices will more than DOUBLE!

By Pete Robinson

To all those who have been saying we're stuck with the smoking ban so let's stop moaning and get on with business, I'd like to say: "I told you so!"

My warning has always been that the smoking ban isn't the end of the matter. It was the beginning. The vicious onset of a war on pubs.

A war that stepped up a gear last week with the ominous inauguration of the Health Alliance which threatens to be the pub's most powerful enemy yet witnessed.

Of course there's been a 'health alliance' for donkey's years. ASH, the WHO, CRUK, Alcohol Concern, along with factions of the DoH and NHS, have always been in cahoots because they share a common bond.

They are all made up of antis - misguided, illiberal sociopaths with a pathological aversion to individuals having fun in any form. Coupled with an utter contempt for the majority view.

But the 'new' Health Alliance consists of the most dangerous antis, those with letters after their name. Well paid career-antis with over-inflated egos. Antis who take themselves so seriously they believe they have a God-given right to control the liberties and social habits of us lesser mortals.

Like the Borg all antis have but one aim - to assimilate us all into their utopian, healthy, and arse-wipingly boring way of life.

Pubs can play no part in that agenda. They must be removed because they are mere assembly rooms for unhealthy living, unhealthy thinking and dangerous dissent. Keep the proles at home where they can only meet in tiny numbers. It's the classic 'divide and conquer' strategy.

And I use the words "agenda" and "strategy" quite deliberately because you can rest assured these clever people have plans for us that they aren't prepared to share at this stage. They've adopted the Nu-Labour philosophy of lies, spin, and paranoiac guarded secrecy. Don't let 'em know what's in store until it's about to be passed and there's bugger-all they can do about it.

But there's one consistent flaw in the veneer that holds these neo-puritanical prohibitionists together. You'll always find one who's sufficiently over-opinionated to let the cat out of the bag.

In this case it's Professor Sir Michael Marmot of University College London, who advises the government on many health issues.

His sphere of influence includes the all-powerful WHO from whence he fights obesity and alcohol consumption with equally rabid gusto, having chaired the infamous World Cancer Research Fund study that says eating bacon gives you cancer.

A fact not so well publicized is that the same study claims to have found a direct link between alcohol intake and the likelihood of falling victim to cancer.

Sir Michael insists that the price of drink must be DOUBLED in real terms in order to stop young people and heavy drinkers consuming so much. This comes from the man who has Gordon Brown's ear, at a time when greedy Gordon is desperate for any scheme that will top up the coffers of his ailing client state.

Forget the 10% tax hike on booze seemingly under discussion.

That's just an illusion, a sleight of hand. Government targets will be set at 100% whether you like it or not. Statistics will appear suggesting most of the public support these measures and in budget stages it will be phased in over the next two years, with a generous pre-election announcement of a freeze at that level. Whoopie.

Add to that the potential 60% rise in beer prices forecast by industry experts and you are seriously looking at the £6 pint. How many of your regulars will remain so when you are forced to demand six squid a throw, for something similar to that they can get at the supermarkets for as little as 30p?

By that time the new rules will be coming in banning smokers from lighting up OUTSIDE your premises. The majority of pubs will face going out of business. Good. That's what they want.

Like post offices they anticipate pub closures on a wide scale. 50% less pubs would be a good start, anything above that a positive bonus.

Let it finally sink in - the trade as we know it has no future under these circumstances. It's war on pubs.

Comment on this story

Did you know that the Publican can send you regular updates about the stories that matter?
Register now (for free!) to receive regular email newsletters.

What can't be named Muhammad?

A teddy on sale in Sudan

British teacher Gillian Gibbons stands accused of insulting Islam's Prophet after allowing her pupils in Sudan to name a teddy bear Muhammad. What are the rules on using the name?

The Arabic name Muhammad is now the second most popular name for baby boys in Britain, adding together its 14 different spellings in English.

Muslim families - of which there are an increasing number in the UK - often choose names which honour the Prophet or show a link to their religion in another way.

THE ANSWER Opinion is divided Some say Muhammad can only be given to boys, others are less strict

But is it acceptable to name a toy Muhammad? The arrest of Ms Gibbons has sparked debate in Islamic circles. As is the case in so many religious matters, the question is open to interpretation.

The issue has been a vexed one for Muslims through the ages. Some believe that the name can only be given to boys - to give it to an object is idolatry. Others say that pets and toys can bear the name.

Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's interfaith relations committee and an imam in Leicester, says the name should be reserved for boys. "Some of us believe we are assured of heaven if we name our children Muhammad."

But he says it's ridiculous that Ms Gibbons is being punished for a "miscalculation".

Gillian Gibbons asked her class to name the bear

"If someone clearly intends to insult and cause offence with a toy in the form of a pig, for example, and someone knowingly and intentionally names it Muhammad, we know exactly where they're going with it - the idea is to cause offence. If it's just a miscalculation, we don't need to go overboard."

Dilwar Hussain, of the Islamic Foundation, has no problem with a teddy bear called Muhammad. For some years, the Islamic Society sold a soft toy made for British Muslim children named Adam the Prayer Bear. "Adam is also the name of a Prophet."

Would it be acceptable to give a religious name to a pet? In much of the Muslim world, he says, animals are seen as functional and so are rarely given names.

Idolatry

But Adel Darwish, the political editor of The Middle East magazine, says that Muslim children - "like children everywhere" - give their pets the names of characters they liked, be it a religious figure, sports hero or pop singer.

WHO, WHAT, WHY? A regular part of the BBC News Magazine, Who, What, Why? aims to answer some of the questions behind the headlines

"Millions of Muslim children in Muslim nations give their dolls, pets and teddies Muslim names of the Prophet and his mother, daughters and wives."

Gill Lusk, the associate editor of Africa Confidential and a specialist on Sudan, says the incident will have offended many in the country. As Sudan is a place where religion is never mocked or satirised, it's "unthinkable" that a toy or pet could be given a religious name.

"You're not supposed to give a religious name to any objects - it could be seen as idolatry."

But the majority of Sudanese people won't want to see Ms Gibbons in trouble for the naming of the teddy bear.

"People are very forgiving of foreigners, particularly Europeans. Nobody would think she was trying to offend them - they would just think she was ignorant."

'Supermouse' bred to beat cancer

Mice appeared immune to cancer

Mice carrying a gene which appears to make them invulnerable to cancer may hold the key to safer and more effective treatments for humans.

The new breed, created with a more active "Par-4" gene, did not develop tumours, and even lived longer, said the journal Cancer Research.

University of Kentucky researchers said a human cancer treatment was possible.

Cancer Research UK said that more research would be needed to prove it didn't just work in mice.

We are thinking of this as a holistic approach that not only would get rid of the tumour, but not harm the organism as a whole Dr Vivek Rangnekar University of Kentucky

Par-4 was originally discovered in the early 1990s working inside human prostate cancers, and is believed to have a role in "programmed cell death", the body's own system for rooting out and destroying damaged or faulty cells.

The Kentucky team used an existing mouse breed known to be more vulnerable to cancers to test whether Par-4 could be used to fight them.

They introduced the gene to mouse eggs, and it was active in both the resulting pups - and their own offspring.

The mice with active Par-4 did not develop cancers, and lived slightly longer than those without the gene.

Dr Vivek Rangnekar, who led the research, said that the gene offered a potential way, unlike most other cancer treatments, of destroying cancer cells without harming normal cells.

"When a cancer patient goes to the clinic, they undergo chemotherapy or radiation and there are potential side effects associated with these treatments.

"We are thinking of this as a holistic approach that not only would get rid of the tumour, but not harm the organism as a whole."

Early stages

He said that much more research would be needed, however, before a human treatment could be launched.

A spokesman for Cancer Research UK said: "Although at an early stage, research like this allows us to understand more about the faulty genes involved in cancer and throws open new avenues to explore for cancer treatment.

"It's important to remember that this work has only been done using genetically engineered mice, and more research is needed before we'll know if it can be translated to humans."

Venus offers Earth climate clues

Venus' atmosphere is composed chiefly of carbon dioxide (CO2)

Observations of the planet Venus might assist efforts to tackle the threat of climate change here on Earth.

Data from a European probe orbiting Venus paints a picture of a planet that may once have been like Earth, but later evolved in a very different way.

Venus has undergone runaway greenhouse warming, where trapped solar radiation has heated the surface to an average temperature of 467C (872F).

New results from the Venus Express mission appear in Nature journal.

In size, mass and composition, Earth and Venus are remarkably similar. Venus is closer to the Sun, but this alone does not explain the differences with Earth.

Venus lacks the Earth's magnetic shield, which means that its atmosphere feels the full onslaught of the solar wind - a stream of charged particles from our star - and cosmic radiation, and has done so for billions of years.

Lost water

The absence of this shield means that hydrogen, helium and oxygen are blown away by the solar wind much faster than happens on Earth.

The scientists think that Venus may once have held copious amounts of water on its surface.

Mission guide: Venus Express

But the solar wind removed most of it during the first billion years or so after the formation of the Solar System.

Professor Fred Taylor, from the University of Oxford and a scientist on the mission, said: "It is now becoming clear why the climate on Venus is so different to Earth, when the planets themselves are otherwise quite similar.

"Our new data make it possible to construct a scenario in which Venus started out like the Earth - possibly including a habitable environment, billions of years ago - and then evolved to the state we see now."

Mitigating the threat

Ian Pearson, the UK minister for science and innovation, said: "Understanding the influencing factors of global warming on Venus could help us in mitigating the threat here on Earth."

British scientists and engineers are playing a leading role on the European Space Agency (Esa) mission.

Venus Express arrived at the planet in April 2006

Venus Express has also confirmed the presence of lightning on the planet. The idea of lightning on Venus was once considered controversial, but the magnetometer instrument on Venus Express has now put all doubts to one side.

Indeed, the data suggests that lightning is more common on Venus than it is on Earth.

Previous observations have revealed a vast rotating vortex of clouds with a "double-eye" feature at Venus' north pole. Researchers have now found evidence for similar features at the south pole, but these rotate slightly faster.

Researchers do not yet have any evidence for active volcanism on the Venusian surface, something that has been proposed in the past.

Venus Express was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahstan in November 2005. It reached orbit around Venus in April 2006.

Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files

Adobe is one of the world's leading PDF software producers

Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format.

The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.

It is Yahoo's latest way of expanding the places it can advertise online following deals with the auction site Ebay and the cable TV group Comcast.

The advertisements will not appear if the PDF document is printed.

It is the first time that Adobe has allowed dynamic adverts into its PDF (Portable Document Format) files.

Dynamic adverts can be changed for particular audiences or rotated to make sure that a particular user never sees the same advertisement twice.

PDF files can be created by a range of software and can then be read by people who have a PDF reader, such as Adobe's Reader.

The PDF format has proved popular with both companies and home users, and has been used to produce large reports and shorter newsletters, as well as preparing documents for printers.

November 29th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1963: Canadian air disaster kills 118 More than 100 people are killed when a Canadian jet crashes into a field minutes after take-off.
	1975: Graham Hill killed in air crash One of Britain's greatest motor racing drivers is killed in a plane crash in south-east England.
	1993: Secret meetings with IRA revealed The government comes under attack in the Commons over revelations that it has had secret contacts with the IRA.

Voice of the Tube silenced by LU

Emma Clarke has been working for LU for eight years Spoof messages

The woman who became the "Voice of the Tube" has been sacked after allegedly criticising London Underground (LU).

Voiceover artist Emma Clarke, 36, is the woman millions of Tube travellers hear warning them to "mind the gap".

Ms Clarke, from Altrincham, Greater Manchester, upset her paymasters by allegedly saying she did not use the Tube because it was "dreadful".

LU said it would not be offering her further work but Ms Clarke said she had been "wildly misquoted".

'Creepy experience'

She told BBC News: "What I actually said was that travelling in a Tube train would be dreadful for me, listening to my own voice and seeing the haunted faces of commuters being subjected to me telling them to 'mind the gap'.

"I would find it quite an uncomfortable experience in the same way that when I call a company when I'm their on hold voice and it's me saying - please press 2 for accounts - it's a creepy experience to be honest."

We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly Spoof announcement by Emma Clarke

Ms Clarke also made a series of spoof announcements on a website promoting her voiceover work.

An LU spokesman said: "It's not because of the spoof announcements. It's because she has criticised the Underground system."

"Some of the spoof announcements are very funny. But Emma is a bit silly to go round slagging off her client's services."

In one announcement, Ms Clarke, a mother of two who has worked for the Underground since 1999, says: "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

She said she was "disappointed and perplexed" that LU had not contacted her but instead had decided to dismiss her via the media.

"I can't get in touch with anyone at LU to explain I was wildly misquoted," she said.

Star Wars

It appears George Lucas has a formula for working out those weird and wonderful names.
Like Jar Jar Binks etc.

To find your star wars name do the following:

First Star Wars Name:

1st 3 Letters of your Last Name
1st 2 Letters of your First Name

(Mine is - MILCH)

Next

Second Star Wars Name:

1st 2 letters of your MOTHERS Maiden Name
1st 3 letters of Town or City where you were born.

(Mine is - SESOU)

So in Star Wars I would be: MILCH SESOU!!!!

Weird!!

Dazzling delights go on display

Latrobe nugget

Some of nature's most remarkable and unique treasures are set to dazzle the public when they go on display.

The Vault, a new gallery at London's Natural History Museum, will showcase a collection of gems, crystals, metals and meteorites from around the world.

Museum curator Alan Hart said the specimens were chosen for "their beauty, rarity and history".

They include a hefty gold nugget, a Martian meteorite and 296 coloured diamonds.

Mr Hart described the collection as "the creme de la creme" of the mineral world.

He said: "We designed this exclusive gallery so we could showcase the best of our collections and include in that some dazzling loans."

Aurora Collection

One of these loans includes the famous Aurora Collection, which consists of hundreds of exceptionally rare diamonds, ranging in colour from blood red to emerald green.

"Gems like these were not meant to be imprisoned in a dark underground safe for the momentary pleasure of a few eyes," said Alan Bronstein, the co-owner of the collection.

The Vault's team said the gallery would reveal some of the fascinating stories behind the treasures, from Heron-Allen's cursed amethyst to the Latrobe gold nugget, which was unearthed during Australia's "gold rush".

Cursed amethyst

Mr Hart told the BBC News website: "Each specimen has a great narrative - whether it is a scientific narrative, cultural dimension or historical fact."

The team also said the array would give an insight into the science behind the specimens.

Displayed next to many of the glittering gems, including a vivid pink beryl from Madagascar, are the crystals or crystalline material from which they were cut.

This will give visitors a better idea of the Earth processes that yield such remarkable items.

Madagascan beryl

Mr Hart said: "We wanted to celebrate some of the rarest and unique gemstones, metals, meteorites and crystals as a natural substance.

"I think many people may have gemstones and they may not realise where the raw materials come from."

He added: "Many of these are like nature's artwork- they are just so spectacular."

The curator said it was impossible to place a value on the Vault's display.

Nakhla meteorite

He explained: "Some of the items are so unique; they are literally priceless, especially in terms of their scientific value."

One such item is the Nakhla, a rare Martian meteorite which crashed to Earth in Egypt in 1911.

Mr Hart said: "By studying these meteorites we can find out about the origins of the Solar System and maybe even the origins of life itself."

November 28th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1990: Tearful farewell from Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher formally tenders her resignation to the Queen and leaves Downing Street for the last time.
	1994: Norway votes 'no' to Europe Norway has for a second time rejected membership of the European Union in a referendum after a closely-fought campaign.
	1999: Nude swordsman attacks churchgoers Eleven people are injured in a sword attack at a church in south London after a naked man wielding a Samurai sword bursts in during Sunday Mass.

TV rivals form on-demand service

Channel 4's Ugly Betty is one of the shows likely to be on the service

The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are to launch a joint on-demand service, which will bring together hundreds of hours of television programmes in one place.

The service is set to go live in 2008 and will offer viewers access to current shows and archive material.

Plans will have to be approved by the BBC Trust and the other broadcasters' boards, and a name for the service will be unveiled ahead of its launch.

The three broadcasters currently offer their own separate on-demand services.

The BBC's iPlayer, ITV's catch-up service and Channel 4oD will continue to exist along the new online "aggregator", which will provide a complement to the established providers.

Programming from all three broadcasters will be available for free download, streaming, rental and purchase via the internet, with expansion on to other platforms planned.

The joint service has the potential to become an important shop window for UK broadcaster content and a great destination for viewers Michael Grade, ITV executive chairman

John Smith, the chief executive of BBC Worldwide, said the venture was a "historic partnership" between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

"The new service will contain some of the very best of the UK's content for consumers to view in one place, which will be both easy to use and great fun," he added.

Michael Grade, ITV's executive chairman, described the project as having the potential to become "an important shop window for UK broadcaster content and a great destination for viewers".

For Channel 4, chief executive Andy Duncan said further innovation in the area of on-demand would "give viewers ultimate control over what they watch and when they watch it".

"Partnering and sharing expertise is the best way of doing this," he added.

The BBC and ITV's on-demand services launched earlier this year, with the commerical broadcaster initially concentrating on soap opera catch-ups.

Channel 4's service offers hundreds of hours of programming from current series such as Ugly Betty to classic shows including Father Ted.

Other on-demand services are offered by other providers including Five, Sky, BT Vision and Tiscali.

November 27th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1975: TV presenter Ross McWhirter shot dead The BBC TV presenter and co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records is killed outside his home.
	1967: De Gaulle says 'non' to Britain - again The French President, Charles de Gaulle, says he will veto Britain's application to join the Common Market for a second time.
	2000: Schoolboy Damilola Taylor dies in stabbing A 10-year-old schoolboy dies after being stabbed in the leg by a gang of hooded attackers near his home.

'Super' scanner shows key detail

The scanner could pave the way for improved diagnosis

A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by some 80%.

The new CT machine takes large numbers of X-ray pictures, and combines them using computer technology to produce the final detailed images.

It also generates images in a fraction of the time of other scanners: a full body scan takes less than a minute.

The Philips machine was unveiled at the Radiological Society of North America.

Because the images are 3D they can be rotated and viewed from different directions - giving doctors the greatest possible help in looking for signs of abnormalities or disease.

All images also can be accessed on any computer in a hospital or by colleagues and researchers remotely, to make it easier for the whole team to share information.

The heart in fine detail

The scan is much quicker than current technology, as the machine's X-ray emitting gantry - the giant ring-shaped part that surrounds the patient - can rotate four times in a single second - 22% faster than current systems.

The cost of the equipment - known as the Brilliance TC - is unclear.

At present, it is only being used in one hospital: the Metro Health medical centre in Cleveland, Ohio, which has been using it for the past month.

"This scanner allows radiologists to produce high quality images and is also designed to reduce patients' exposure to X-rays," Steve Rusckowski, chief executive of Philips Medical Systems, said.

"It is so powerful it can capture an image of the entire heart in just two beats."

The record company EMI was behind the first commercially viable CT scanner, which was invented by Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield in Hayes, United Kingdom at the company's laboratories and unveiled in 1972.

At the same time, Allan McLeod Cormack of Tufts University independently invented a similar machine, and the two men shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

"This is a quantum shift from the first CT scanners as it gives a lot more detail," says Dr Keith Prowse, Chairman of the British Lung Foundation.

"It seems to be another step beyond what we were previously able to do. The high resolution enables you to see smaller things in both the lungs and the airways and then decide whether there is anything there and how best to get at it.

"In the case of cancer, it will help us see how far it has spread. It will also help us pick up new patterns of abnormality. It promises to be a significant advance."

UK 'slow' on ultra-fast internet

Ministers say broadband is not fast enough

Broadband industry leaders are to meet ministers to discuss how to stop the UK dropping into the internet "slow lane".

More than half of all UK homes now have a broadband connection, at an average speed of four megabits a second (Mbps).

But the broadband summit will hear other countries are moving more quickly to build ultra-fast networks that can deliver speeds of as much as 100 Mbps.

Ministers say ultra-fast broadband will be a key to helping UK businesses "innovate, grow and create wealth".

Average speed

"We need to be discussing how we can put this new network into place, because delay could be a barrier to the future success of our economy," said Stephen Timms, minister for competitiveness.

The broadband summit will discuss how industry, government and regulators can make sure Britain gets the next-generation network that will be needed as services like internet video take off.

See top 20 countries for broadband speed

Copper lines

BT - Britain's biggest broadband provider - has already warned that it may struggle to pay for an ultra-fast network.

But cable company Virgin says it will deliver 50 Mbps broadband by the end of next year - more than twice the maximum speed it currently offers.

Virgin's 50 Mbps service will be available to more than 70% of the 12.5m homes its cable network covers by the end of 2008, the firm said.

The company is not digging up streets or laying new fibre to homes, but is installing new equipment at the hubs and bundling together spare channels on the line.

Most of Britain's broadband access is delivered through existing copper telephone lines, which were never designed to deliver ultra-fast broadband.

BT is due to roll out ADSL2+ in the coming years but speeds will be limited to a maximum of 24 Mbps.

In the US, companies such as Verizon have invested billions of dollars in fibre to the home, providing hundreds of video channels and high-speed broadband.

BT is investing £10bn in speeding up the existing network, which includes some fibre, and will be able to deliver download speeds of 24 Mbps by 2011.

Speeds advertised are often the maximum possible, coverage may not be nationwide

November 26th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1983: £25m gold heist at Heathrow An armed gang carries out Britain's largest-ever robbery from the Brinks Mat warehouse, at London's Heathrow Airport.
	1992: Queen to be taxed from next year The Queen is to become the first British monarch since the 1930s to pay income tax.
	1953: Lords vote for commercial television Peers back the Government's proposals for commercial television - despite fierce opposition from some rebels who fear the influence of advertisers.

November 25th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1963: John F Kennedy is laid to rest The funeral of the assassinated President, John F Kennedy, takes place in Washington.
	1973: Army deposes 'hated' Greek president The Greek government is toppled by the armed forces after weeks of unrest.
	1998: 'Corrupt' Turkish government falls The government of Turkey collapses after losing a no-confidence motion over corruption allegations.

10 things we didn't know last week

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. The word Blighty comes from "bilayti", the Urdu for homeland.
More details

2. Spotting a bargain releases "happy chemicals" like serotonin and adrenalin in the brain.
More details

3. Babies make moral judgements about people.
More details

4. Japan’s population will fall by 30% in 50 years.
More details

5. The Queen took her corgi on honeymoon.
More details

6. The brains of migraine sufferers are thicker in part of the cortex than those free of the severe headaches.
More details

7. Radiohead's Thom Yorke paid nothing to download his latest album (just like the two-thirds of his fans who also got it for free).
More details

8. The presence of kingfishers indicate that a waterway is in a healthy ecological state.
More details

9. Beer has fewer calories than a similar measure of wine, milk or fruit juice.
More details

10. Each economically active person is on 700 databases on average.
More details

November 24th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1963: Kennedy 'assassin' murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of murdering President Kennedy, is himself shot dead in a Dallas police station.
	1985: Commandoes storm hijacked plane The hijacking of an EgyptAir passenger jet ends in violence and further bloodshed after the plane is stormed by Egyptian commandoes.
	1991: Giant of rock dies Freddie Mercury dies aged 45, just one day after he publicly announced he was HIV positive.

BurnAware Free 0.2

Burn data discs with ease

Platform Windows 98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer GloryLogic Software Company
Size 2.56MB
Free download

We go out and buy media suites thinking that we’ll create our own home movies, add effects, then burn them to DVD and give to our friends and family. These media suites easily cost up to £50 and are everything we’ll ever need for producing and burning our disc media.

However, how many times have you just launched the disc burning part of your media suite, to create your own audio CD or to back up files to bring to the office? Face it, the plain old burning part of any media suite is the part you use most often, so why go out of your way to pay £50 for the suite on your laptop and taking vital space on your hard drive?

An alternative is a tool such as BurnAware Free Edition which is designed to burn your data discs, as quickly as possible. It will support just about every burning media from a single 700MB CD through to a Blu-ray writable disc. Assuming you have a Blu-ray burner.

BurnAware is so simple that it’s only designed to burn data discs. You can’t use it to create your own audio discs, so you might need to look elsewhere for this function. It’s also still in beta.

The new 0.2 now contains the facility to burn a disc from an ISO image.

Portable Start Menu 1.2

Launch your portable applications

Platform Windows 98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Martin Aignesberger
Size 1.03MB
Free download

We’re becoming far more portable in recent times. Whether this is down to employees working from home, the rise in WiFi connections made available in public places, or the fact that our modern mobile phones enable us to surf the web and access email outside of the office. The problem is though, unless we drag our heavy laptop everywhere we go, we do not always have access to our favourite applications, bookmarks, passwords and other information.

The secret is to leave the laptop behind and take a USB stick or external drive on the road, then install various portable applications that will work from the USB stick, without having to be installed on the host computer. Better still, any preferences and personal information will be stored on the USB stick, rather than the host. You can apply this to an iPod, so there’s no reason why you couldn’t turn your iPod (or other MP3 device) in to a portable hard drive, with all your info securely stored in an encrypted partition.

Portable Start Menu is a tool that you can use to launch applications from this portable USB stick or external drive. You can configure it on your computer, so it will quickly launch the applications you’ve got installed on the USB stick.

UK broadband use reaches new high

Broadband has taken over UK net use in a few short years

Almost nine out of 10 UK net users are connecting via broadband services, official figures reveal.

Information gathered by National Statistics (ONS) for September show that 88.4% of Britons are choosing to use broadband rather than dial-up.

The statistics show that 49.2% of those connections are for services advertised at two megabits per second or faster.

But analysis of the figures suggest the broadband market is static, which could mean tough times for service suppliers.

Tough times

The figure for September is only slightly up on the June total of 86.2%, but indicates a 26% rise over the last 12 months.

The statistics show that broadband has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity among net users since services started to be available and affordable.

As recently as March 2003, ONS reports, 84.7% of people went online via dial-up modems and only 15.3% had broadband.

The statistics also offer a breakdown of the speeds that people have signed up to, and show that the proportion of people on higher speeds - between two and eight megabits per second (Mbps) - has grown. Only 4% of those questioned were using services faster than eight Mbps.

Analysts Point-Topic say there is evidence for a slowdown on broadband take-up as the pool of dial-up users diminishes.

Broadband net firms have relied on converting people from dial-up for most of their growth over the last 12 months, said Tim Johnson, chief analyst at Point-Topic.

Mr Johnson said this could spell tougher times for net firms.

Not only were dial-up users resisting being converted, but households without net access, estimated to number about 10 million, were also declining to sign up in large enough numbers to sustain growth.

"With almost 40% of British households on the wrong side of the digital divide, the social and economic progress of the UK will be stalled unless the great majority of these homes can be brought on to the internet," said Mr Johnson.

Undersea slide set off giant flow

Sediment from the landslide was funneled through an undersea canyon

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth.

The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days.

The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment.

The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature.

It was at least as big as many volcanic eruptions Peter Talling, University of Bristol

The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period of 10 years.

After blocks from the original landslide disintegrated, the sand and mud travelled hundreds of kilometres suspended in the water, without depositing any sediment on the sea floor that it had passed over.

The study used sediment cores drilled from the sea bed

Dr Talling likened this to avalanches in which the snow travels downslope in huge clouds.

A tiny drop in the sea-floor gradient (from 0.05 degrees to 0.01 degrees) eventually forced the flow to settle into a cohesive mass.

In places, the flow was over 150km (93 miles) wide, spread across the open sea floor.

"If you look at the distance it travelled and how much material it moved, it was at least as big as many volcanic eruptions," co-author Peter Talling from the University of Bristol, UK, told BBC News.

The discovery came from an analysis of shallow sediment cores drilled from the sea bed during a cruise in the research ship Charles Darwin off the north-west African coast.

Dr Talling worked on the project with colleagues from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, including Russell Wynn and Doug Masson.

The researchers had to brave rough seas during the cruise

The study also involved researchers from the universities of Aberdeen, UK, and Bremen in Germany.

The landslide which triggered this flow was not itself the biggest known. Several that occurred off the coast of Hawaii involved the movement of more material.

The Storegga slip off the coast of Norway was also larger.

But the scale of the flow that resulted from the African slip amazed the scientists.

Understanding the cause and evolution of these infrequent undersea flows could help exploration of the sea floor.

It could, for example, assist researchers to assess hazards posed to installations for recovering subsurface oil and gas reserves - which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Parkinson upset as filming ends

Michael Parkinson moved his show from the BBC to ITV in 2004

Michael Parkinson fought back tears as he interviewed the final guests on his long-running TV chat show.

The veteran interviewer had a "wish list" of star names on his penultimate ITV1 show, where he filmed encounters in the studio for the last time.

David Beckham, Sir Michael Caine, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Edna Everage, Billy Connolly and Peter Kay were among the guests on the two-hour special.

The 72-year-old will end his last ITV1 series with a lifetime retrospective.

Lollipop man

The star-studded two-hour Parkinson - the second of three specials bringing down the curtain on his talk show career - airs on ITV1 on 15 December.

"Over the years it has been a privilege to meet some of the most intelligent and interesting people," Parkinson said as filming of the show drew to a close.

Other guests were jazz star Jamie Cullum and Sir David Attenborough.

Beckham spoke in the wake of England's defeat

Comedian Kay presented Parkinson with a buttoned alarm to wear around his neck and made him dress up as a lollipop man, telling him he should take the job now that he was going to be unemployed.

Beckham told of his disappointment at England's football defeat against Croatia and received a huge cheer from the audience.

Dame Judi sang a song for the host and jazz singer Cullum performed Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone as a tribute to Parkinson.

Sir Michael Caine, who has been on the show more than any other actor, asked Parkinson if he was going to sign on for benefits now that the show was ending.

Parkinson announced this current series would be his last earlier this year.

He is also to end his weekly programme on BBC Radio 2 so he can pursue other projects and write his autobiography.

November 23rd

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1996: Hijacked jet crashes into sea At least 100 passengers die after a hijacked passenger jet runs out of fuel and crashes into the Indian Ocean.
	1984: London tube fire traps hundreds Almost 1,000 passengers are trapped in smoke-filled tunnels for three hours after a fire at Oxford Circus underground station.
	2002: Riots force Miss World out of Nigeria Miss World organisers cancel the controversial beauty pageant that has sparked violence among Christians and Muslims.

Goodbye to all that

No flag draping, face painting or penalty shoot-out histrionics - what on earth are we to do next summer when Euro 2008 kicks off without any British team?
Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Take the tattered and greasy flag of St George from your smudged white van. Delete the Fat Les (feat. Leona Lewis) official team anthem from your iPod. Football, for the duration of next summer at least, is dead. As of Wednesday night, England have failed to qualify for the 2008 European Championships, the team's fate sealed by a truly dismal 3-2 defeat to Croatia in torrential rain at Wembley Stadium. The bad news doesn't stop there. Joining England in non-qualification are Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. There will be no British or Irish presence in Austria and Switzerland next June, no British or Irish anthem parped across the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna or the Wankdorf in Berne. No official players' suits with official players' pointy brown shoes, as captured in official player photos posing next to the official British Airways jet. No plastic flags on car windows. No month-long tabloid fixation with the language and imagery of the second world war (or, more specifically, television sitcoms about the second world war). No sniffy broadsheet Wag pastiches (with accompanying juicy colour photos). England have failed to qualify for Euro 2008. Football, as of next summer, has been cancelled. The obvious question is, does it really matter? The answer, like it or not, appears to be yes.
The widespread preoccupation with the two-yearly beano of football's summer tournaments is a relatively recent thing. It is common to identify Euro 96, staged in England, as the point where an unusually all-pervading hysteria began to attach itself to these occasions. The first tournament in the post-Premiership gold rush of the mid-1990s, Euro 96 was above all a marketing triumph. Never had football, or pretty much anything else for that matter, been so successfully sold to the British public. It turned out that we had an insatiable hunger for this kind of stuff. Football had been rebranded as an excitingly expansionist leisure product and suddenly everybody was a fan. Television played its part, and the flag-draped hordes bawling Three Lions became part of the spectacle: mass jubilation when the team scuffed one in against Denmark, ritual mourning at the inevitable tournament exit, and the wonderfully unifying sense of injustice at some terrible wronging on a foreign field (Beckham's red card in 1998, Brazil's fluky winner in 2002, Rooney's red card in 2006). Supporting England, in particular, had become a kind of mainstream consumer lifestyle choice, with a ready-made set of accessories and expectations.

We seem to have become more dependent on the biannual rhythm of these summer affairs than we might have realised. A significant micro-economy has sprung up around them, and the cost of missing out on Euro 2008 has already been the subject of much speculation. Simon Chadwick, professor of sport business strategy and marketing at Coventry Business School, has been quoted as saying: "A successful run to the 2008 final would have led to a £2bn bonanza for the economy." This might seem rather fanciful, until you reflect on the fact that something called "sport business strategy and marketing" even exists, let alone that it's possible to become a professor in it. Sport, leisure, advertising, entertainment: these are the kind of things that we do these days. And it's not just the usual suspects - pubs, bookies, the manufacturers of sticker books - who budget around a huge spike in their sales when England are doing their summer thing. The 2006 World Cup was a boon for sales of flat-screens and plasmas, a golden age of high definition, not to mention a bonanza for ferry operators, airlines, bus companies and police officers doing overtime.

Of course, it's not just this kind of thing we'll miss, the fortunes never earned and bonuses never toasted. There's the emotional import of these communal sporting occasions: undeniable, embarrassing and still vaguely mystifying. Say goodbye, for another couple of years, to the surprisingly resilient sense of optimism and excitement that takes hold as England scuffle, wrestle and swear their way across the grass of some foreign land. It seems to be the little things that matter here. Next summer will be notable for the absence of people with painted faces drinking 12 pints of Hoegaarden while watching England play Sweden in the back room at their local Wetherspoons. The ongoing will-they-can-they-should-they-it's-a-bleeding-disgrace dialogue that circulates through every office, train carriage, school, building site and blog in the country, like a gigantic viral Chinese whisper, will be stillborn. For a large number of people, brought together by work or circumstance, there simply won't be anything to talk about. Sainsbury's won't be selling chocolate Three Lions coins bearing the faces of David James and Wayne Bridge. There will be no half-day football holidays on the hottest Thursday of the year, no staff TV in the third-floor conference room, no penalty shoot-out histrionics where you can hear the cries of anguish from four houses down as some cocksure, demonically handsome Mediterranean stopper palms away a succession of shanked and toe-poked English spot-kicks.

And then there's how football makes us feel about national identity. More so than pretty much anything else, these big summer tournaments bring into unusually intense focus the notion of being English - or Scottish, or Welsh or whatever you might happen to be. This is perhaps the most distinctly sui generis aspect of what we'll all be missing out on next summer. The England football team, in particular, remains an undeniably potent presence. The mere mention of it inspires a range of responses, from chanting songs about the IRA, to putting on a Portugal shirt, hanging out in a Clerkenwell table football bar and affecting an air of groovy internationalism. Either way, you can be assured, you're simply acting like an Englishman.

Which seems like a good moment to point out that there is another side to all this. It remains the case that England's failure to qualify for a major football tournament is invariably a signal for celebration in other countries, chiefly the host nations. The news that England are coming - England, with their travelling army of good-time boys, the red-faced, singlet-wearing, oddly middle-aged bruisers with their bum-bags and white ankles and insatiable appetite for tray after tray of fizzy lager, ensconced volcanically in the cafes and bars of your sleepy market town - has sent a chill through the heart of successive rural European communities. Because, at some point or other, it always kicks off. There will be grainy footage of men in long shorts and sunglasses giving it the come-on to a platoon of twitchy Mediterranean riot police. There will be plastic chairs - always the chairs - hurled across a sleepy square. There will be pissing in the fountain. So good news for Europe, then. We're not coming.

Although not all England fans are like this. Carrying on a grand British colonial tradition, the English football fan travels abroad not just to fight you, but also to proselytise at you. A new breed of friendly, culturally aware England fan has mobilised itself in recent times. When England played in Israel recently they organised a kind of cultural exchange heal-the-world-through-football Israeli-Palestinian supporters' game. They send friendly delegations. They dress as ironical crusaders and wave blow-up fish and chips. So even more good news for Europe. They won't even have to engage in a ceremonial exchange of goodwill pennants with us.

What are we going to do instead? The emotion, the tears, the tabloid newspaper bile and clumsily xenophobic posturing: it's all real. It's all ours. And now it has got to go somewhere else instead. Next summer has suddenly started to look weirdly empty. Without football, what have we got? There's the Beijing Olympics, of course, although the games take place in August, just as the solid ground of the Premier League season heaves into view. And somehow you can't really imagine the nation uniting as one over Britain's outside hopes of a bronze in the archery; or an unofficial celebrity-voiced theme song to the 5,000km walk going top 10. Athletics is simply too individual, too introverted, too focused and too tainted to nurture true sporting hysteria. Perhaps we might be in for a bumper Wimbledon instead: the tournament overlaps nicely with the football and might provide an unexpected alternative attraction. It would, at least, make for an interesting sociological experiment watching thousands of dispossessed travelling England football fans decide to "take" Murray Mount from its native Surrey housewives, university students and middle-aged American tourists.

Or perhaps it's time to turn away from the essentially pointless carnival of international sport and devote all this trapped energy to something more meaningful. Next summer offers plenty of opportunities for direct action. As Euro 2008 kicks off, the fifth meeting of the EU-Opec Energy Dialogue will be in full swing in Brussels. What better way to capture the world's attention at a potentially momentous round-table chinwag than sending over six ferryloads of testy and disgruntled plasterers from Watford to spend an entire 72 hours chanting aggressively about the need for a mutually agreed global sustainable energy drive?

More pressing, and certainly more realistic, is the issue of who else the English might support next summer. This is a much more interesting question than it might look at first. There's plenty of choice: every major mainland nation is going to be competing. Historically, in a tournament without British teams, the tendency would be to adopt either an appealingly skilful underdog or the most attractive, and least historically troublesome, of the favourites. During the missed World Cups of the 1970s this tended to be Holland. In 1994, teams such as Romania and Nigeria had their backers. This time around the world feels like a slightly different place. Football has always been noticeably tribal; plenty of fans of the bigger English clubs don't follow England at all, particularly in London, where the fan base in unusually international in any case. Indeed, international football itself can seem increasingly outmoded, particularly when set against the cosmopolitan carnival of the Premiership and Champions League. So next summer we can expect to find Manchester United fans supporting Portugal, because their club is currently fielding a pair of charismatic Portuguese wingers. Arsenal remains a noticeably Francophile club: four first-team players have hopes of playing for France in Austria and Switzerland. Chelsea fans will probably have more of an eye on Didier Drogba, of Ivory Coast, and Michael Essien, of Ghana, at the African Nations Cup this winter. England might not have qualified for Euro 2008, but our club football at least remains reassuringly international. Many point to the diverse the nature of the Premier League as the reason why our national teams are in decline, but it's also our consolation prize: the richest, most varied league in the world, and a breeding ground for new kinds of loyalties.

Of course, no one really knows what the long-term effects of British teams not qualifying might be. We've failed to make it before, after all, but then we've never been quite so football-daffy before, or quite so culturally and economically bound up with the round ball game. History suggests things can go two ways from here. England failed to qualify for both the 1974 and 1978 World Cups, a period that coincided with economic depression, urban decay, social unrest and ultimately a near-death experience for a sport beleaguered by poor infrastructure, fan violence and the enmity of Margaret Thatcher. On the other hand, England's non-qualification for USA '94 was followed by the crazed hyperinflation of the Premiership, a huge boom in our leisure and sporting economy and the catharsis of Euro 96 two years later.

So you can take your pick from either of those really. One thing is for sure. If missing out on Euro 2008 really is costing 50 million English people a total of £2bn, we could always just stump up £40 a head and throw a massive party instead next June. Just think what we'd save on little plastic flags alone.

Moth-spotting instead of football?
Other things to do next June

For England fans, the 23 days from June 7 2008 will be emptier than Steve McClaren's international trophy cabinet. But do not despair: there is a world of things to do during Euro 2008 that are infinitely more pleasurable than watching England foul up another major football tournament.

June 7

Greece, Russia and all those other great footballing nations will be at the opening ceremony in Austria and Switzerland as the first two matches kick off. We'll be stuck at home with Liechtenstein and Andorra. So why not turn your telly off, step outdoors, and take part in National Moth Night? It's a celebration of moths and moth recording organised by the UK charity Butterfly Conservation.

June 10

Greece might be thrashing Germany and France could be sharing a 10-goal thriller with Sweden as the group stages hot up. At least we can raise three cheers for the Duke of Edinburgh, who celebrates his 87th birthday. If you don't get invited to the Buck House bash, there are plenty of other ways to forget about the football in the next week or so, from the Beverley folk festival to the Glasgow jazz festival.

June 11

England's footballers would be wise to steer clear of the Legends of Sport charity dinner in London, scheduled for their summer holidays. It will only bring back memories of '66. But England's back four could usefully spend June 10-12 at the international undersea defence technology conference in Glasgow, while the squad's Hummer-drivers should be forced to attend the annual conference of the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership.

June 14

The group stage continues to unfold without us. For addicts of British sporting underachievement, there are the usual pleasures of the cricket, with five one-day international tests against New Zealand on June 15, 18, 21, 25 and 28. But chances of domestic success are surely stronger at the World Nettle Eating Championships, which will take place at the Bottle Inn, near Bridport in Dorset on June 14. (It all stems from a farmer's rash boast that he had the biggest nettles.)

June 15-18

The final group games are played, deciding if talented Spain and Portugal pass into the quarter finals. The absence of England's hoof-it-to-Crouch tactics may help the tournament look cultured but there are some real cultural alternatives back in Britain. The Royal Academy of Arts' summer exhibition opens during the championships and the Society of Portrait Sculptors' annual exhibition, National Architecture Week and London Sculpture Week also take place during Euro 2008.

June 25-26

In a parallel world where England were half decent, we would be watching their agonising defeat on penalties in the Euro 2008 semi-finals. In the real world, June 26 is the not particularly cheerful but important International Day Against Drug Abuse and International Day in Support of Torture Victims.

June 27-28

While the hard-working and successful international footballers of the two Euro 2008 finalists enjoy a deserved rest day, our holidaying soccer multimillionaires might like to visit the scene of their humiliation - Wembley, where they can pick up tips on integrity and leadership at a special concert planned to celebrate Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday.

June 29

The Euro 2008 final handily clashes with the climax of Glastonbury, which will at least distract 150,000 of us. But what about poor old McClaren? How should he spend his summer? It's tempting to suggest he pass Euro 2008 at CrimeFest in Bristol, or Nudefest, British Naturism's summer event at Newperran in Cornwall. But they could be too much fun. Perhaps the ex-England manager can stumble across a winning formation at the National Patchwork Championships, the UK's largest quilting competition at Sandown Park racecourse in Surrey.

Today's Quote for the Day:

"We apologise for the late arrival of the train this morning.
This is due to the large number of passengers boarding at each station."
Announcement at Waterloo Station, London.

Cutty Sark rises from the ashes

Six months ago, there were fears a ferocious blaze could have put an end to an ambitious conservation project to return the Cutty Sark to its former glory. Now a £14m funding shortfall is causing concern.

But a look behind the scenes at the famous ship's dry dock in Greenwich, south-east London, reveals work to resurrect the historic tea clipper is continuing apace - and shows no signs of slowing down.

Salvage and repair In pictures

In its heyday in the late 19th century, the Cutty Sark was crewed by hardy seamen who guided the craft halfway across the world to collect a lucrative cargo of fresh tea from China.

Now it is men and women in luminous jackets, hard hats and steel toe-capped boots who are responsible for the craft.

They can be seen everywhere inside the scaffolding-and-tarpaulin enclosure that surrounds the vessel.

Building site

As they clamber up and down ladders and along the multiple levels of steel walkways constructed around the hull of the ship, it is clear a determined and tireless team effort is under way.

The noise around the ship is reminiscent of a building site with shouted instructions punctuated by the roar of heavy duty power tools and the throb of a large crane manoeuvring.

The blaze that tore through the Cutty Sark in the early hours of Monday, 21 May 2007, set the project's estimated completion date back a year to 2010 and has caused a multi-million pound funding shortfall.

But the team behind its refurbishment say it could have been much worse.

It's very physical, dirty work.... but it's great fun as well Ben Delap Conservation technician

At the time the fire struck, half of the ship's timbers, fixtures and fittings had already been removed and taken to Chatham's historic dockyard in Kent as part of the conservation project.

This meant they escaped the furnace-like blaze, which reached temperatures as high as 1,000C.

And as Stephen Archer, of Cutty Sark Enterprises, explained, the ship's construction - teak timbers mounted on an iron frame - ensured the remainder of the vessel survived relatively unscathed.

He said: "If it had been an entirely iron ship, or made only of timber, we might have lost it. An iron ship would have distorted; timber would have burned.

"Being a composite meant the whole iron frame - the 'birdcage' - expanded and contracted again. It returned to within a couple of millimetres of its original shape."

Mr Archer said three decks were reduced to ashes by the fire but two of them were not made of the original wood and one was rotten and in need of replacement anyway.

"We only lost five percent of original material. And the fire is now going to be part of its future story," he said.

Painstaking process

That story is already unfolding.

To put it at its most simplistic, the conservationists are dismantling the Cutty Sark piece by piece, repairing every last timber, nut, bolt and furnishing, ahead of putting the whole vessel back together again.

A new plank is used to brace one of the hull's timbers before removal

Ben Delap is one of the conservation technicians working on the ship.

His day consists of scraping old tar and felt from the hull's timbers.

He and his colleagues then remove the huge teak planks one by one; a painstaking and tiring process involving the loosening of up to 50 rusty nuts and bolts - and heavy lifting.

Mr Delap said: "It's back-breaking work, pretty much what you would find in a Victorian shipyard but in reverse - we are deconstructing this massive beast.

"I certainly sleep well, there's no doubt about that. It's very physical, dirty work - crawling around in tiny spaces and working with heavy industrial tools - but it's great fun as well."

Braced by new timber, each aging plank is carefully eased into specially-made wooden casings.

A worker scrapes old tar from the Cutty Sark's hull timbers

They are then lifted by crane into a steel container for transportation to a warehouse in Greenwich.

Once there, reclaimed Teak is used to repair any damage to the original wood and specialist epoxy resin adhesives are used to bind cracks and fissures.

Of a total of 500 hull planks, 250 had already been removed when the fire struck. A further 75 planks have since been taken away.

Eventually they'll be brought back and reattached to the Cutty Sark's iron frame after it has been specially treated for rust.

Once the masts, coach-housing, sails and rigging are back in place, the Cutty Sark will once again look like the majestic ship it was before rust, age and fire took their toll.

Mr Delap said: "The incredible thing is this is the easy part. Putting it back together is going to be the challenge but we have a great team and we are well up to it. "

Clare Durrant is a documentation assistant for the conservation team.

It is her job to make a note of all the pieces of this most complex of jigsaw puzzles.

"It's a job but you stop sometimes and think, 'It's amazing working on something like this, it really is'."

November 22nd

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1963: Kennedy shot dead in Dallas The president of the United States has been assassinated by a gunman in Dallas, Texas.
	1995: Life sentence for Rosemary West Britain's most prolific female serial killer, Rosemary West, is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 10 young women and girls.
	1990: Thatcher quits as prime minister Margaret Thatcher is to stand down as prime minister after her cabinet refuses to back her in a second round of leadership elections.

Five reasons beer sales have slumped

Beer sales are falling

Beer sales in pubs are at their lowest level since the 1930s, say brewers. But how has this happened?

The humble pint used to be the backbone of the local pub, it was what they were all about.

But seven million fewer pints per day are now being sold in Britain than in 1979 - the beer market's peak. It's a drop of 22%.

But why is it happening? The Magazine asks experts for their views.

HEALTH

Beer has an image problem and there is a "common misconception" that it is less healthy than other alcoholic drinks, says Adam Withrington, drinks editor of the Publican magazine.

It's what he refers to as the "beer-belly notion". People assume that drinking pints will lead to weight gain, making the drink less appealing at a time when people are increasingly health conscious.

But beer is about 96% water and made up of natural ingredients, unlike many other alternatives, says Mr Withrington. When comparing it to other alcoholic drinks, it's wrong to label it as unhealthy.

It's a view which is echoed by Dr Martin Bobak, an epidemiologist at University College London.

He conducted a study of 2,300 drinkers in the Czech Republic, where beer is the tipple of choice, and found they put on almost no more weight around the abdomen than non-drinkers.

Is this the end of the humble pint?

Dr Bobak agrees that beer has an image problem, an issue he says is essentially a lifestyle argument.

In the West, the better educated someone is, the less obese they are likely to be. Lower educated people tend to drink more beer while the higher educated tend to drink more wine, he says.

"People from higher socio-economic groups are more likely to be wine drinkers, so they are more likely to appear to be healthier, whereas people in lower groups are more likely to drink beer."

The fact that less educated people are more likely to be obese is largely related to diet and that they are less likely to exercise regularly.

Beer appears to be less fattening than wine, according to the British Beer and Pub Association. A glass of beer with a typical 4.6% alcoholic volume has fewer calories not only than a similar measure of wine, but also milk or fruit juice, it says.

Spirits, meanwhile, contain more than six times the calories of beer and when mixed with a soft drink, the calorie-count soars even higher.

FOOD

The reputation of pub grub has been transformed in recent years. The rise of the gastro pub has resulted in an increasing number of drinking establishments considering themselves as much a restaurant as a place to get a pint.

While our stomachs are the winners, the traditional pint is not as most people drink wine with their meal.

There is no straight answer as to when and why emphasis shifted towards food, but experts say it goes hand in hand with slumping beer sales.

Pub food has moved on

"It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing as to what came first but as beer sales have declined publicans have had to look elsewhere to make up for the drop in revenue," says Mr Withrington.

"In the 1990s they started to realise food was where the money was."

The Michelin Guide now lists pubs with good food and talented chefs are choosing to run a pub kitchen rather than one in a restaurant.

Drinking is no longer the main reason people go to the pub.

"There are no pubs any more, they are restaurants with bars," Paula Greenway from Surrey told the BBC.

WOMEN

There was a time when the pub was not considered the "proper" place for a women to be seen - or a place she wanted to be. But times have changed, women are now earning more than ever before and publicans want them to spend that cash in their establishment.

As a result many pubs have been made more "female-friendly". Gone is the flock wallpaper in favour of more stylish decor, even fresh flowers on the bar in some cases.

But while the pub industry has managed to get more women through the doors, it's not beer that they're drinking. Industry figures show 36% of women in pubs drink wine but only 14% drink lager.

Pubs are more 'female-friendly'

This is mainly down to cultural reasons, says the British Dietetic Association. There is no difference between men and women when to comes to taste detection, but there is when it comes to what they prefer to drink.

"One thing is a physiological thing and the other is a cultural thing," says a spokeswoman.

"What you prefer to drink comes down to what you have grown up drinking. There are clear cultural and psychological patterns when it comes to what we order down the pub."

In short beer has an image problem and is seen as a drink for men. Attempts have been made to repackage it for women, like the introduction of smaller glass sizes, with little success.

The increase in female trade has also had an impact on what men drink, says Mr Withrington. If a couple go to the pub for a night and the woman wants wine they are quite likely to get a bottle to share.

CULTURAL CHANGES

Generational shifts in the way people work and socialise mean they are less likely to drink beer.

The decline of manual labour in the UK is the "key point" in the decline of beer sales over the last 40 years, according to Mr Withrington.

"When we had a major industrial culture manual workers came out of factories and mines to drink eight pints, to replenish fluids and socialise. That culture died, which meant publicans lost customers who drank large amounts every night," he says.

He also highlights changing social habits, such as the drink driving campaign of the 1980s which made this practice "socially unacceptable" for drinkers.

Changing social habits have hit beer sales

"In the 60s and 70s people were driving to the pub, drinking and driving home, but people aren't doing that anymore," he says. "That's had a big impact, particularly in country pubs which you need a car to reach.

"In the past going to the pub for a beer was a nice way to catch up with your mates. Now drink is cheaper in supermarkets and people have satellite TV, so staying in is more fun than it used to be."

Meanwhile, the rise in club culture in recent decades appears to have made the use of recreational drugs - such as ecstasy and cocaine - more widespread among young people.

This trend has seen some young people eschew the pub altogether, while those who go often drink non-alcoholic drinks.

Earlier this year the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC) - set up to analyse drug policy in the UK - said about a quarter of people in the 26-to-30 age group had tried a Class A drug on at least one occasion.

The value of the illegal drugs market in the UK is put at £5bn a year and, in a report, the body stated: "Prices of the principal drugs in Britain have declined for most of the last 10 years."

While taking Class A drugs are still largely associated with the under-25 age group, it is rising most swiftly among the next age group up.

One theory is that people who grew up in the rave culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s have continued to use drugs.

FASHION

The increasing amount of choice available to drinkers has played a large part in falling beer sales in pubs, with a heightened sense of adventure and the pursuit of the next fashionable drink informing many people's habits.

For example, the amount of wine drunk in pubs since 1979 has increased six-fold, as the quality and range available has improved.

Phil Tate, research manager at licensed trade research consultancy CGA Strategy, says the main spirits categories - such as vodka, gin and rum - are all "enjoying growth" because "spirit categories appeal to the younger audience".

According to trends identified by CGA, vodka is increasingly popular primarily at the expense of alcopops, but also beer. Meanwhile, cider has taken sales from standard lager, in both male and female drinkers in the last year.

Certain drinks are seen as 'fashionable'

"Packaged cider volume has increased 31% in the last 12 months," says Mr Tate.

"The research also points to trends which suggest people are moving away from mainstream cider brands, such as Magners, towards more niche brands," he adds.

But the increase in choice has also led to a wider variety of beers, which has seen the UK's real ale scene flourish in recent years.

"The major trend is premiumisation," says Mr Tate. "Although overall volumes are down, new categories such as the world lager categories and premium 4% lager brands are enjoying volume growth."

Some of the most successful new beers in recent years are those from Poland.

Tesco sales of Tyskie, Lech and Zywiec grew by 250% in six months this year. It's not good news for the humble pint.

---

Here is a selection of your comments.

There are no 'pubs' any more. They are restaurants with bars. You used to be able to nip in the local after work, have a quiet pint, chat to a neighbour. They were 'havens'. No kids screaming and shouting and throwing their bread rolls all over the place, as now. It should be an adult place. I love children, but they shouldn't be in a pub. A pub should feel comfortable, home from home for adults, but I can't smoke, can't sit at the bar, can't wear work clothes and have to watch my drink in case kids bang into the table, I might just as well go home, which is what I and many other people are doing. It's not the cost, It's the no 'pub' to go to.
Paula Greenway, Sutton, Surrey

The reason I rarely drink in a pub now is less to do with the price of beer but much more to do with the unpleasantly loud music that blares out in almost every pub on the highstreet. If pubs would lower the volume I think they might find 30 and 40 somethings would return.
Rachael Hamblin, Carlisle

The biggest killer of the pubs was the smoking ban. Yeah, it works in america and various other places, but it's been around 2.5 degrees outside this week, when did they last have that in California?
Gumbo Briggs, Sheffield, UK

Premium lagers are available in the supermarkets at an equivalent 70p a pint, less than a quarter of the pub price here in Oxfordshire, enough said ?
Calum Ferguson, Abingdon

Pubs have changed from being social to profit making establishments where it has all backfired. Modernisation is not working, since my local pub changed from the traditional 20 years ago, every owner has struggled and gone under. The no smoking ban has not helped at all, I have many friends who smoke and they all visit pubs less now. The prices of drinks are far too excessive, they cannot compete with supermarkets, why go to a pub when you can have lots of friends round drinking cheaply and having a cigarette whenever they want one? No trouble from binge drinkers or crackpot doormen. No contest is there?
Mark Elmy, Lowestoft Suffolk

Man-sized sea scorpion claw found

How the creature compares for size with a human Animated images

The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers.

The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports.

The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.

The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.

The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human.

Overall, it exceeds the record for any other sea scorpion (eurypterid) find by nearly 50cm.

The eurypterids are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of modern land scorpions and possibly all arachnids (the class of animals that also includes spiders).

"The biggest scorpion today is nearly 30cm so that shows you how big this creature was," said Dr Simon Braddy from the University of Bristol, UK.

It was one of Dr Braddy's co-authors, Markus Poschmann, who made the discovery in the quarry near Prum in south-west Germany.

"I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realised there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab," he recalled.

"After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw. Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out.

"The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilise it."

Super-sized meals

The species existed during a period in Earth history when oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher than today.

The fossil was locked in a siltstone from the Carboniferous Period

And it was those elevated levels, some palaeo-scientists believe, that may have helped drive the super-sized bodies of many of the invertebrates that existed at that time - monster millipedes, huge cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies.

But Dr Braddy thinks the large scales may have had a lot to do with the absence early on of vertebrate predators. As they came on the scene, these animals would have eaten all the biggest prey specimens.

"The fact that you are big means you are more likely to be seen and to be taken for a tastier morsel," he told BBC News. "Evolution will not select for large size; you want to be small so you can hide away."

The scorpions are thought to have made their first scuttles on to land about 450 million years ago.

While some would have taken up a fully terrestrial existence, others like Jaekelopterus rhenaniae would have maintained an aquatic or semi-aquatic lifestyle.

November 21st

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1974: Birmingham pub blasts kill 19 Two bombs explode in central Birmingham pubs, killing 19 and injuring over 180.
	1995: Balkan leaders agree to peace The United States brokers a peace settlement for Bosnia Herzegovina in Dayton, to be enforced by 60,000 Nato troops.
	1979: Mob destroys US embassy in Pakistan A mob in the Pakistani capital Islamabad burns the US Embassy to the ground in a five-hour attack in which a US marine is killed.

Price of a pint 'could rise 60%'

The average price of a pint of beer could hit £4 after poor weather forced up the price of hops.

Scottish & Newcastle today forecast "material price increases" next year. The brewer, which sells three of the top 10 beer brands in Europe including Kronenbourg and Foster's, is also reviewing its supply chain in a bid to cut costs.

Industry experts say the cost of an average pint will rise by at least 15p, although some are now predicting rises of up to 60%.

According to the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), the average price of a pint of lager is £2.50, with bitter fans paying around £2.20. A 60% hike would take the average cost of lager to £4 and that could be even higher in some bars.

"It is a bleak time for everyone," said Iain Lowe, research and information manager at Camra. "These price rises have been predicted for a long time. Hop farmers have not seen any price rises for years, but the appalling summer has finally forced the prices up.

"Prices at the pump could easily go up by 60%."

S&N, which is fighting a hostile bid from Carlsberg and Heineken, today reported a 3.1% drop in first-half profit – blaming the record rainfall and a strike in France which dented sales.

In February, the Edinburgh-based company said England's smoking ban, which took effect in July, would cut £10m from annual profit.

Britain's wash-out summer has been blamed for price rises in bread, fruit, milk, cheese and eggs, as well as for heavy discounting on the high street.

The warning of a rise in the cost of a pint coincides with news from the BBPA, which represents the brewing and pub industry, revealing that 14m fewer pints are being sold in pubs each day.

Major British brewers saw their profits fall by 78% between 2004 and 2006. The BBPA says the industry is being further hampered by the Treasury which claims 33p out of the cost of every pint.

Last week a source at S&N warned that the price increases would be "way above the rate of inflation" as it tries to recoup losses from higher cereal, crude oil and aluminium prices, according to pub trade paper the Morning Advertiser.

November 20th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1945: Nuremberg trial of Nazis begins Twenty of Germany's Nazi leaders go on trial in Nuremberg charged with war crimes.
	1995: Diana admits adultery in TV interview Diana Princess of Wales speaks openly for the first time about her separation from the Prince of Wales in a frank interview for BBC Television.
	1975: Spanish dictator Franco dies Hopes for democracy run high as Prince Juan Carlos prepares to take the reins of power following the death of General Franco.

CSI 'does not reflect forensics'

Marg Helgenberger and William Petersen star in CSI

Hit TV crime shows like CSI and Law and Order do not give a true depiction of the real work carried out by forensic experts, a leading scientist has said.

Dr Sheila Willis, director of Ireland's Forensic Science Laboratory, said TV gave unrealistic expectations of how quickly crimes could be solved.

In a lecture in Dublin, Dr Willis said the shows wrongly suggested they could be cracked within the space of an episode.

She said all partners in the criminal justice system needed to reach a shared level of understanding with regard to the role of forensic science.

Dr Willis was speaking as part of Ireland's Science Week.

A clear appreciation of the potential and limitations of forensic science was made difficult by the popularity of shows like CSI.

CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) is one of the United States' most popular programmes and the Emmy award-winning franchise has produced the spin-offs CSI: Miami and CSI: New York.

Pattern evidence

However, Dr Willis said such shows lead people to mistakenly believe only one forensic investigator handled evidence on a specific case.

They also wrongly suggested the forensic scientist always comes to a conclusive determination which would make or break a case by the end of the episode.

The leading scientist said such representations fostered a presumption that "the answers we supply are black and white, but of course there's a grey area".

Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes star in CSI:NY

In reality, "we don't fit it in (in) 47 minutes, and the roles are not all rolled into one", she said.

Many forensic scientists specialised in chemistry, biology, DNA, drugs or pattern evidence, she told delegates.

Dr Willis also said that a lack of a DNA database in Ireland "means we're not getting the maximum value from science in this country".

Last year, a senior policeman in Malaysia said US crime drama CSI was helping criminals escape justice.

"CSI and a few other series teach how to remove traces of crime," said Deputy Inspector General Musa Hassan.

He told the country's Bernama News Agency such television programmes provided insights into how police work and made them more efficient.

Queen celebrates diamond wedding

Family members are among the 2,000-strong congregation

The Queen and Prince Philip are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary with a service featuring a reading from Prince William.

Prayers will be said and the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a blessing, will ask the couple to "renew in your hearts promises you made to one another".

More than 30 family members are among 2,000 people at Westminster Abbey.

Other guests include five choristers from the 1947 service, as well as 10 couples who married on the same day.

The Queen is the first British monarch to reach a diamond wedding anniversary.

We can give special thanks for the very public character of the witness and the sign offered to us by this marriage and what it has meant to nation and Commonwealth over the decades Dr Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will say in his sermon that every marriage is a public event but that "some couples have to live more than others in the full light of publicity".

"We are probably more aware than ever these days of the pressures this brings," he will add.

"But it also means that we can give special thanks for the very public character of the witness and the sign offered to us by this marriage and what it has meant to nation and Commonwealth over the decades."

He will ask the congregation to pray "for her majesty and his royal highness - for their life together as husband and wife".

Prince William, in his reading of 1 John 4: 7-16, will tell the congregation to "let us love one another, because love is from God".

Dame Judi Dench, meanwhile, will read the poem Diamond Wedding - written especially for the occasion by poet laureate Andrew Motion - which speaks of "a life remote for ours because it asked reach day, each action to be kept in view".

Original compositions

There will also be a procession of representatives from different religions including the Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh faiths.

Congratulations to them both. However I can't remember voting for them. Jehricou99 Send us your comments

As was the case in 1947, a setting by EC Bairstow of Psalm 67 - God Be Merciful Unto Us And Bless Us - will be sung by the abbey choir.

Other elements that will remain the same include the introit, We Wait For thy Loving Kindness O God, composed for the original ceremony by then-organist Dr William McKie.

Similarly, the hymn Lord's My Shepherd - set to the Scottish tune Crimond - will be sung.

The royal couple's actual 60th wedding anniversary is on Tuesday when they will travel to Malta where they lived as a young married couple from 1949 to 1951, while Prince Philip was stationed there as a serving Royal Naval officer.

Royal family members turned out for a wedding anniversary dinner at Clarence House. Enlarge Image

On Sunday, members of the Royal family attended a celebration dinner hosted by Prince Charles at Clarence House.

The wedding on 20 November 1947, according to one of the couple's friends, was a moment of "blissful brightness and happiness" after World War II.

The couple received gifts from around the world 60 years ago.

These included a thoroughbred horse, 131 pairs of nylon stockings - a rare commodity at a time of rationing and austerity - and 500 tins of pineapple.

However, BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt says Mahatma Gandhi's present caught the disapproving eye of Queen Mary, Princess Elizabeth's grandmother.

She told a friend the piece of hand-spun lace was "indelicate", mistaking the tray cover for the Indian leader's loincloth.

The maths of sport

How your team can reach Euro 2008

By Tom Geoghegan BBC News Magazine

The England football team's hopes of reaching Euro 2008 lie in a complicated permutation of results over the next few days. For while sport prides itself on noble virtues, it's actually all about arithmetic.

Among the greatest attractions of sport are its simplicity and immediacy; a game's beauty and a player's artistry.

The action that unfolds before the eyes is all that matters, and the twists and turns of play are met with cheers or disappointment from the spectators.

Such spontaneity governs knock-out matches, where the only sum that matters is that one score is greater than the other.

But league tables have dealt players and fans a more complicated hand, one governed by more advanced mathematics that arguably dilute the notion of competition.

ENGLAND'S FATE Russia beat Israel and Andorra: England need Croatia to lose to Macedonia and then themselves beat Croatia by three goals (2-0 would also suffice but not 3-1) Russia draw with Israel: England must beat Croatia, assuming Russia beat Andorra Russia lose to Israel: England need to draw against Croatia The lowdown on your team

This is the position some of the home nations find themselves in this weekend as they hope to qualify for football's Euro 2008. The video above, featuring commentary from BBC Five Live's Alistair Bruce-Ball, explains what each team needs to do.

England's qualification is the hardest to work out. While Owen and Gerrard won't be donning the three lions badge competitively until next Wednesday, their fate could be in the hands of Russia or Croatia who play on Saturday. Northern Ireland's fortunes also depend on complicated arithmetic.

It's a familiar scenario to club football supporters who are intimate with the drama of the last day of the season, when promotion and relegation battles are won and lost, often by events elsewhere. It makes for the rather surreal sight of half a football ground erupting in joy for reasons that have nothing to do with what is happening on the pitch.

Hard sums

But, salaries aside, your average footballer doesn't tend to boast a head for figures. In 2004, Tony Adams was manager of Wycombe Wanderers and after an Easter Monday defeat he mistakenly thought his team could still stay up.

"It's not mathematically over, so we'll keep going," he said. Someone else informed him that his team was actually relegated.

The maths went like this:

• If Wanderers won their remaining games, they would get 46 points, the same as Oldham and Brentford
• But what Adams hadn't taken into account was that both those sides had to play other teams in the bottom four
• So defeats for Oldham and Brentford would mean Chesterfield and Grimsby could get to 47 points

Teresa Slevin, who has supported Wycombe for 52 years, says fans had "worked it all out a couple of weeks before because there wasn't any way that we could do it. Even level on points we didn't have a good goal-difference.

If someone said to me they lived at number 16, I'd think 'double 8' Phil ' The Power' Taylor

"I think he was clutching at straws. I don't think he had really worked it out."

In the 1982 World Cup, West Germany and Austria got their sums right when they shamefully conspired to a 1-0 win containing 80 minutes of no-risk football after the Germans scored. The result sent both teams through the groups stages at the expense of Algeria.

But however arcane the maths of football, cricket is even tougher. If rain curtails play in one-day cricket, there is a notoriously complex way called Duckworth-Lewis of calculating the target score for the team batting second.

In the 2003 cricket World Cup, South Africa failed to progress to the second round of the tournament on home soil after they miscalculated the score they needed to secure their passage, but this was because of their own failings rather than the formula being wrong.

In snooker and darts, however, players are constantly turning numbers over in their heads as they adjust strategies.

16 = double 8

Phil "The Power" Taylor, 11 times world darts champion, knows many a great thrower who has been undone by having poor maths.

"When you're doing it over and over again, it just develops. If you asked me what was five times 17, I'd think 'Oh, Crikey', but if I think of it as double 17 and treble 17 then it's easy.

"If someone said to me they lived at number 16, I'd think 'double 8'.

"I say to people at schools, if the kids are struggling with mathematics, get them a dartboard and make it fun."

OFFICIALS GET IT WRONG TOO A race official in Osaka at the world athletics championships miscalculated the number of laps of the street circuit a competitor had completed at the end of the 50km walk The walker entered the stadium for the end of the race, crossed the line and collapsed exhausted He thought he had come ninth but was disqualified for coming in one lap early

Veteran golf commentator Peter Aliss will always be reminded that he did not realise Phil Mickelson had won the US Masters with his final putt, thinking it was going to a play-off.

But one of the most famous miscalculations featured the late Alan Ball when managing Manchester City.

In May 1996, on the final day of the season, City needed to do better than Southampton and Coventry to survive.

Ball mistakenly thought Coventry, who were playing elsewhere, were losing and instructed his players to play out time.

As Steve Lomas kept the ball near the corner flag, Man City substitute Niall Quinn ran on to the pitch to tell his team mates a draw was not enough. It was too late, they failed to win and went down.

It seems there's only one way to avoid getting the sums wrong. Play every match to win.

November 19th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1977: Egyptian leader's Israel trip makes history The president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, becomes the first Arab leader ever to visit Israel.
	1994: Britain braced for first lottery draw Britain's first national lottery draw is about to be shown live on a flagship BBC One show.
	1992: Hillsborough victim allowed to die Doctors treating Hillsborough victim Tony Bland can disconnect feeding tubes keeping him alive, a judge at the High Court in London rules.

Singer Lewis grabs record debut

Leona Lewis won ITV1 talent contest The X Factor last year

Singer Leona Lewis has set a British record for the fastest-selling debut album with Spirit.

Spirit sold more than 375,000 copies in seven days, some 12,000 more than the Arctic Monkeys' 2006 release Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not.

But Oasis still have the overall record for the fastest selling British album, selling 813,000 copies in 1997.

As well as having the top album, the 22-year-old X Factor winner's track Bleeding Love is still the No 1 single.

Spirit is now the fourth fastest-selling album of all time, beneath Be Here Now, Coldplay's X&Y, and Dido's Life For Rent.

In a week of new entries in the album chart, the Spice Girls' Greatest Hits compilation made its debut at number two, while Led Zeppelin collection Mothership entered at number four.

FASTEST-SELLING ALBUMS 1. Be Here Now Oasis (1997) 2. X&Y Coldplay (2005) 3. Life For Rent Dido (2003) 4. Spirit Leona Lewis (2007) 5. Intensive Care Robbie Williams (2005) 6. Whatever People Say... Arctic Monkeys (2006) 7. Rattle & Hum U2 (1988) 8. Bad Michael Jackson (1987) 9. (What's The Story) Morning Glory Oasis (1995) 10. The Immaculate Collection Madonna (1990) Source: Official UK Charts Company

Celine Dion's Taking Chances came into the chart at number five, and US band Killers made their entrance at number seven with Sawdust.

Opera star Andrea Bocelli's "best of" collection, Vivere, was a new entry at number eight.

The top 10 singles saw two new entries, with Bloc Party's Flux coming into the chart at number eight.

And folk-rock veterans Runrig are enjoying their first ever top 10 single, after a new version of Loch Lomond, released for Children in Need, entered at number nine.

It features the sound of over 50,000 Scottish football fans singing along to the track at Hampden Park last month, before the national side's victory over Ukraine.

However, the Spice Girls' official Children in Need single dropped three places to number 23 on its second week in the chart.

November 18th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	2000: Hollywood meets Wales in 'wedding of year' The film world celebrates the celebrity wedding of the year as film star Michael Douglas marries Welsh actress Catherine Zeta Jones.
	1987: King's Cross station fire 'kills 27' Twenty seven people are dead after a fire at King's Cross station in central London.
	1991: Church envoy Waite freed in Beirut Church envoy Terry Waite is freed by the Islamic extremists who kidnapped him in Beirut in 1987.

10 things we didn't know last week

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. Superstitious people in rural India sometimes organise weddings to animals in the hope of warding off curses.
More details

2. Janet and John were named Alice and Jerry in the United States.
More details

3. Until the late 1990s, the RAF's nuclear bombs could be activated using a bicycle lock key.
More details

4. Qwerty is a regular on lists of most-popular passwords.
More details

5. Residents of Middlesbrough are 25% more likely to suffer from heart disease than the UK average.
More details

6. There is an average of 90 suicides a day in Japan.

7. Landfill rubbish sites in the UK cover in total an area of 109sq miles.
More details

8. Twelve per cent of people with no religion pray sometimes.
More details

9. Cats can be police constables.
More details

10. The next generation of chip will pack more than four hundred million transistors into an area the size of a postage stamp.
More details

November 17th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1997: Egyptian militants kill tourists at Luxor More than 60 people die in an attack on a group of foreign tourists visiting a temple in southern Egypt.
	1989: Police crush Prague protest rally Riot police arrest hundreds of people taking part in the biggest show of public dissent in Czechoslovakia for 20 years.
	2003: Washington sniper convicted An ex-soldier who served in the Gulf War is found guilty of at least one of the Washington sniper killings in October 2002.

November 16th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1983: England fans rampage in Luxembourg More than 20 English football supporters are arrested in Luxembourg after a night of violence.
	1979: Blunt revealed as 'fourth man' Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher names Sir Anthony Blunt, a former security service officer, as the "fourth man" in the Philby affair.
	1976: Bank robbers jailed for 100 years Seven men who took part in an £8m bank robbery receive jail terms totalling nearly 100 years.

Colossus loses code-cracking race

Bletchley's code-breaking effort shortened the war by many months

A closer look at the Colossus computer

An amateur cryptographer has beaten Colossus in a code-cracking challenge set up to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.

The competition saw Colossus return to code-cracking duties for the first time in more than 60 years.

Radio problems meant delays in getting Colossus deciphering three messages that were transmitted from Germany.

But before it got going Bonn-based amateur Joachim Schuth revealed he had managed to read one of the messages.

"He has written a suite of software specifically for the challenge," said Andy Clark, one of the founders of the Trust for the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where Colossus is sited.

News of Mr Schuth's success reached Bletchley Park on Thursday night, said Mr Clark.

The re-built Colossus Enlarge Image

The target messages, enciphered with a Lorenz S42 machine as used by the German high command, were transmitted by a team of radio enthusiasts in Paderborn, Germany.

However, radio reception problems throughout the day on Thursday meant that the British code-cracking team did not get a full copy of the enciphered messages until 1700 GMT.

"For that all credit must go to Milton Keynes Amateur Radio Society," said Mr Clark. "They worked tirelessly yesterday."

A copy of the ciphertext in the messages was loaded onto the re-built Colossus at 0855 GMT on Friday morning, said Mr Clark.

"The wheels are spinning right now," said Mr Clark, adding that the team hopes to have the message cracked by midday on Friday.

At the same time as Colossus is cranking through the messages a separate team will use modern PC technology to read the scrambled messages.

Find out how Colossus worked

The ciphertext from the messages will also be placed on the museum's website so amateur code-crackers who do not have access to radio can have a go at breaking the signals.

Colossus is widely recognised as being one of the first recognisably modern computers in that it could be programmed. It was the size of a small lorry and used more than 2,000 valves.

Tony Sale led the 14-year Colossus re-build project and it took so long because all 10 Colossus machines were broken up after the war in a bid to keep their workings secret. When he started the re-build all Mr Sale had to work with were a few photographs of the machine.

In its heyday Colossus could break messages in a matter of hours and, said Mr Sale, proved its worth time and time again by revealing the details of Germany's battle plans.

"It was extremely important in the build up to D-Day," said Mr Sale. "It revealed troop movements, the state of supplies, state of ammunition, numbers of dead soldiers - vitally important information for the whole of the second part of the war."

Timeline: Find out how Colossus fits in the history of computers

This, and the other information revealed by the code-cracking effort at Bletchley, helped to shorten the war by at least 18 months, said Mr Sale.

The Cipher Challenge is also being used to mark the start of a major fund-raising drive for the fledgling National Museum of Computing. The museum will be based at Bletchley and Colossus will form the centre-piece of its exhibits.

Colossus has a place in the history of computing not just because of the techniques used in its construction.

Many of those that helped build it, in particular Tommy Flowers, went on to do work that directly led to the computers in use today.

The museum said it needed to raise about £6m to safeguard the future of the historic computers it has collected.

Doomsday vault begins deep freeze

The seed vaults are at the end of a 120-metre long tunnel

Engineers have begun the two-month process of cooling down a "doomsday vault", which will house seeds from all known varieties of key food crops.

The temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will drop to -18C (0F) in order to preserve the seeds.

Built deep inside a mountain, it aims to safeguard the world's crops from future disasters, such as nuclear wars, asteroids or dangerous climate change.

The first seeds are scheduled to arrive at the Arctic site in mid-February.

The Norwegian government is paying the $9m (£4.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house 4.5 million seed samples.

See inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The collection and maintenance of the seeds is being co-ordinated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has responsibility of ensuring the "conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity".

"The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries," said Cary Fowler, the Trust's executive director.

"At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 1,000 years."

Future proof

The seed vault will be built 120m (364ft) inside a mountain on Spitsbergen, one of four islands that make up Svalbard.

The site, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project.

The vast collection is intended to act as insurance against disasters so food production can be restarted anywhere on the planet following a regional or global catastrophe.

"It is very satisfying to see the vault evolve from a bold concept to an impressive facility that has everything we need to protect crop biodiversity," said Terje Riis-Johansen, the Norwegian Agriculture and Food Minister.

Engineers are using the surrounding rock and permafrost as a "cold store", an energy efficient approach that has become popular in Norway.

"We believe the design of the vault will ensure that the seeds will stay well preserved even if forces such as global warming raise temperatures outside the facility," explained project manager Magnus Tveiten.

Scientists harvest fish oil crop

Crops such as oilseed rape have been engineered to produce fish oil

Plants genetically engineered to make fish oils offer a new approach to improving diet, say UK scientists.

Experiments have proved that crops containing genes from marine organisms are able to produce omega 3 fatty acids normally found in oily fish.

Adding the oil to animal feed would create omega 3-rich meat, milk and eggs.

Researchers from the EU-wide Lipgene project say such food would help tackle public health issues like obesity.

'Good' fats

Concerns over dwindling fish stocks and marine pollution has led researchers to seek an alternative source of long chain omega 3 fatty acids; fats that have important health benefits, especially for the heart. The best source is oily fish, such as salmon, mackerel and herring, but most people do not get enough in their diet.

Most people don't eat enough oily fish

Omega 3 fatty acids are made not by the fish themselves but by the marine microbes they consume.

Scientists at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, Herts, isolated key genes from a species of microscopic single-celled marine algae known as Thalassiosira pseudonana.

They inserted the genes into crops such as linseed and oil seed rape and found that the plants were able to synthesise omega 3 fatty acids in their seed oils.

"We know that this works, we've done proof of concept studies in model plants and also in crop plants and we can see the accumulation of some of the fish oils we're interested in," said research group leader Professor Johnathan Napier.

"We're still at the stage where we'd want to optimise and improve the levels that we see so I think we're probably three or four years away from the point where we have something ready for regulatory approval for some sort of limited field release," he added.

The eventual aim is to feed GM-enhanced oils to animals such as chickens and cattle, to produce omega 3 enriched meat, milk and eggs.

This would provide a sustainable source of fish oil amid concern over dwindling fish stocks.

"The big problem is that fish (and fish oils) is a very seriously diminishing natural resource," said Professor Napier.

"There are big problems with the sustainability of natural fish stocks and there are also concerns about pollution of the marine environment so we're interested in trying to produce a sustainable alternative source with these fish oils."

Consumer issues

Professor Ian Givens from the Nutritional Sciences Research Unit at the University of Reading said he believed that consumers would see the benefit of such foods, despite the fact they come from transgenic crops.

There is concern over dwindling fish stocks

"There has been a lot of concern and resistance about the whole GM technology in the food chain," he said.

"Things move on. When people are able to see more clearly what the benefits to them are from these sorts of approaches, rather than the benefits to others, I suspect that mindsets will change but it will take time."

New figures released by Lipgene show that only 30% of the UK population is consuming the recommended 450mg/day intake of omega-3 fatty acids.

Teenagers, especially males, and low income groups eat the least of all, said Professor Givens.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) recommends that everyone should eat two portions of fish a week, including one portion of oily fish.

But because fish can contain pollutants such as dioxins and PCBs, there are limits to the amount that should be consumed, particularly for women who are pregnant and breast feeding.

An FSA spokesperson said an expert committee reviewed the evidence on the relationship between long chain omega 3 fatty acids and cardiovascular disease in 2004.

"Two portions of fish per week, one white and one oily, provides the amount of long chain omega 3 fatty acids that can help prevent heart disease," said the spokesperson.

"The Agency recommends that it is better to eat fish, especially oily fish, rather than fish oil supplements or fish oil fortified foods because as well as being rich in long chain omega 3 fatty acids, fish also contains essential vitamins and minerals and is a good source of protein."

Quiztime's Cold 25 Quiz

1. Which is colder the North Pole or the South pole?
South
2. What is the name of the Spanish tomato-based soup served cold?
Gazpacho
3. Jenny, Karen, Rachel, Pete, Adam and David are the central characters in which award-winning TV series?
COLD Feet
4. Which river flows under the bridge linking Scotland and England at Coldstream
River Tweed
5. What letter is on the cold water taps in French hotels?
F
6. In which novel by Stella Gibbons does Ada Doom see "something nasty in the woodshed"?
Cold Comfort Farm
7. In which 19th century conflict were the battles of Cold Harbour, Pea Ridge, and Cross Keys fought?
American Civil War
8. Coldplay’s Chris Martin is married to which famous actress?
Gwyneth Paltrow
9. 'Its Cold Outside There's No Kind Of Atmosphere' Is The Opening Line To Which TV Show's Theme Tune?
Red Dwarf
10. The coldest capital city in the world is Ulan Bator which is in which country?
Mongolia
11. Who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film “Cold Mountain”?
Renee Zellweger
12. What term is given to the fear of the cold?
Frigophobia
13. INTO COLD SWEAT is an anagram of which famous actor & director?
Clint Eastwood
14. What name is traditionally given to the process of being weaned off hard drugs?
Cold Turkey
15. "It is cold at six-forty in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad" are the opening lines of which famous novel, by Frederick Forsyth?
The Day of the Jackal
16. Which is the coldest planet in our solar system?
Pluto
17. What is the study of matter at temperatures much colder than than those which occur naturally on earth called?
Cryogenics
18. What word connects COLD, CIVIL, LOCK, and LORD?
War
19. According to the proverb, what R is a dish best served cold?
Revenge
20. Which is colder -40C or -40F?
At this point they are both the same
21. Who Wrote The Novel 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold?
John Le Carre
22. herpes labalias is another name for what?
A Cold Sore (Acute Nasopharyngitis is a cold)
23. From which song doe these lyrics come - You here a door slam and realise there’s nowhere left to run, you feel the cold hand and wonder if you’ll ever see the sun, you close your eyes and hope that this is just imagination”?
Thriller – Michael Jackson – 1983
24. What term describes an animal which cannot control its body temperature and has to rely on its environment? Cold blooded
25. If you only have one match and it is freezing cold in a room with an oil lamp, a wood burning stove and a candle, which should you light first?
The match!

November 15th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1940: Germans bomb Coventry to destruction The German Luftwaffe bombs Coventry in a massive raid leaving much of the city devastated.
	1985: Anglo-Irish agreement signed Britain and the Republic of Ireland sign a deal giving Dublin a role in Northern Ireland for the first time in more than 60 years - unionists accuse Mrs Thatcher or treachery.
	1998: Iraqi climbdown averts air strikes Britain and America call back their bombers after Iraq agrees to allow UN weapons inspectors back into the country.

Waterloo sunset

Inaugural journey... note the flags on the front

With the champagne and hype overflowing for the new St Pancras international station, it's easy to overlook another more poignant side of the high-speed continental rail link - the closure of Britain's first international rail terminal.

The night before the first services run from the new St Pancras, the last trains will run from Waterloo International - 13 years after the first fare-paying Eurostar passengers set off from London to Paris in a blaze of publicity.

It's easy to forget, back in November 1994, how much of a startling innovation this international station represented. People stopped to look at the sleek, futuristic Eurostar trains, that seemed so exotic on the dowdy suburban lines running through south London.

This was the "end of an island race" announced The Times.

"From today Britain's railways are linked to Europe," said the Guardian. To demonstrate this remarkable fact, a reporter was despatched to a Polish town punningly named Hel so that the newspaper could say that for the first time in history rail travellers from Britain had been "to Hel and back".

Princes Charles and Harry prepare to board the Eurostar at Waterloo

Was it any good?

"Compared to planes and ferries, it was sensational: the most brilliant way of going abroad ever invented," gushed the Guardian.

If that sounds a little "calm-down, calm-down", then you have to remember that back in the mid-1990s, in John Major's Britain, before budget airlines, before dot-com travel, we were much less brash about international visits.

The idea of getting on a train in south London and getting off in the centre of Paris really caught the imagination.

"It sent a shiver down my spine to see 'Paris' on the destination board," says Roger Kemp, now a retired civil servant, who on 14 November 1994 was a passenger on the inaugural train from Waterloo to Paris.

"People have got very blasé about travel, but at the time there was a definite air of excitement. That particular moment is one I'll never forget. There was something so symbolic about it."

Sheer disbelief

And he makes an observation that was often repeated by the first train travellers to Paris when they arrived at Gare du Nord.

EUROSTAR-T TO FINISH Eurostar services launched same week as National Lottery London to Paris air fares in 1994 £80 to £245 Average UK house price in 1994, £65,000 Four Weddings and a Funeral released in cinema 81 million passengers have used Waterloo International Journey times in 1994 were 2hr 55min to Paris - will become 2hrs 15min Fastest previous rail and sea journey, the Fleche d'Or, in 1929, 6hrs 30min Transformation of St Pancras

"We couldn't believe we were there. It took a second glance. Did we really cross the Channel? It used to take most of a day to get to Paris. Now we were there already."

The architecture of the new £130m station was also something of a triumphant oddity. The snaking glass roof was widely-admired - and the international terminal, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, won that year's best building prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects for its "power and elegance".

But at the same time, this gateway to the continent was rather strangely tucked away in a corner of Waterloo Station. Alongside suburban workhorses to Woking and Windsor were these international thoroughbreds, trains a quarter of a mile long, carrying more passengers than two jumbo jets.

"It was a shock to the system for some people. You had these huge European trains, these strange monsters in Waterloo Station. There were bi-lingual staff and everything was in three languages (that's English, French and Flemish). This was all new. You got the impression that you were entering a different world, " says Mr Kemp.

On the trains, you could buy French food, ordered in French, spend French money (still francs back then), while looking through the window at the back-gardens of Brixton and Herne Hill rolling slowly by. OK, the food was a heated-up croque monsieur, but this was sophisticated stuff.

Arise Euro-commuter

Once the novelty value had passed, the existence of Waterloo International also created a new type of commuter - the Euro-commuter.

Ulric Jerome, managing director of online retailer, Pixmania, regularly uses the train for work, travelling between Paris and London.

One thing arriving passengers will miss... the view

"It makes the two cities accessible to each other, it brings them closer together. It's extremely convenient, going to the city centre. For a business person, it works."

Mr Jerome, a 29-year-old cross-border e-tailer, shuttling back and forth between the two capitals, is a kind of creation of the Waterloo International era. The high-speed train made it quicker to get from central London to downtown Paris than London to Manchester. The international boundary is a blur through the window.

Won't there be a few tears shed when the lights get turned off at Waterloo for the last time? There will be no more trains pulling in from Paris, Brussels or Provence, no more packs of skiers, no more crowds of kids from Eurodisney.

Even now, people at Waterloo station still peer at the waiting European trains, the way that people used to look up at Concorde. Once the service is transferred to St Pancras, these platforms will - after 12 months of conversion work - be turned over to local rail services.

"It's like moving house, you do look back. Waterloo has been a great home - and many of the staff have been working here since day one," says Eurostar spokesman Gareth Headon.

The rail firm has been trying to gather its own memories of Waterloo International - not least because all the official photos of the first day in 1994 were destroyed in a flood.

Leaving Waterloo for St Pancras will also mean a different set of first impressions of London for new arrivals.

Travel writer and television presenter, Simon Calder, says it means passengers won't have all the sights and diversions of the nearby South Bank.

Arriving in St Pancras, he says, "you don't find a great view of Big Ben and a dozen eating experiences, you find six lanes of traffic on the Euston Road and a distant Burger King beckoning".

The last ever train to depart from Waterloo International, fittingly with the Napoleonic associations, will be the 18.12. Then this pocket-sized patch of the continent will be closed forever.

Colossus cracks codes once more

Bletchley's code-breaking effort shortened the war by many months

For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer will be cracking codes at Bletchley Park.

The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.

It will be used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command during World War II.

The Colossus will be pitted against modern PC technology which will also try to read the scrambled messages.

War work

Colossus is widely recognised as being one of the first recognisably modern digital computers and was developed to read messages sent by the German commanders during the closing years of WWII.

It was one of the first ever programmable computers and featured more than 2,000 valves and was the size of a small lorry.

The re-built Colossus Enlarge Image

The re-built Colossus will be put to work on intercepted radio messages transmitted by radio amateurs in Paderborn, Germany that have been scrambled using a Lorenz SZ42 machine - as used by the German high command in wartime.

The German participants in the code-cracking challenge will transmit three enciphered messages - one hard, one very hard and one ultra hard.

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones said there was a "busy and business-like" atmosphere at Bletchley as the code cracking attempts got underway.

"We've seen webcam video of the Germans preparing to send the first signals," he said.

Colossus too had been cranked into action to test that everything was working prior to the first attempt to break the codes and read the messages.

The Colossus machine will be pitted against modern computer technology that will also be used to decipher and read the transmitted messages.

Tony Sale led the project to re-build the Colossus machine

Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes.

"A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does," he said.

It was so fast, he said, because it was a single purpose processor rather than one put to many general purposes like modern desktop computers.

Mr Sale it could be Friday before the teams find out if they have managed to read the enciphered messages correctly.

Re-building the pioneering machine took so long because all 10 Colossus machines were broken up after the war in a bid to keep their workings secret. When he started the re-build all Mr Sale had to work with were a few photographs of the machine.

In its heyday Colossus could break messages in a matter of hours and, said Mr Sale, proved its worth time and time again by revealing the details of Germany's battle plans.

"It was extremely important in the build up to D-Day," said Mr Sale. "It revealed troop movements, the state of supplies, state of ammunition, numbers of dead soldiers - vitally important information for the whole of the second part of the war."

Timeline: Find out how Colossus fits in the history of computers

This, and the other information revealed by the code-cracking effort at Bletchley helped to shorten the war by at least 18 months, said Mr Sale.

The Cipher Challenge is also being used to mark the start of a major fund-raising drive for the fledgling National Museum of Computing. The Museum will be based at Bletchley and Colossus will form the centre-piece of its exhibits.

Colossus has a place in the history of computing not just because of the techniques used in its construction. Many of those that helped build it, in particular Tommy Flowers and Tommy Kilburn, went on to do work that directly led to the computers in use today.

The Museum said it needed to raise about £6m to safeguard the future of the historic computers it has collected.

Scribbles

Dutch police are rounding up a group of teenagers for stealing virtual
furniture in teenage virtual world Habbo Hotel. The digital burglars
were hacking into other users' accounts to then nick their cool
virtual objects to kit out their own 'rooms' online. A bit of
pointless cyber-theft it may seem - except that the objects, bought
with real cash using virtual credits - were worth the not
insignificant sum of 2,800 pounds.

November 14th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1991: US accuses Libyans of Lockerbie bombing America demands Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi hand over Libyan intelligence officers indicted over the Lockerbie bombing.
	1973: IRA gang convicted of London bombings Two women and six men are found guilty of exploding car bombs outside the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard.
	1977: Firefighters strike over pay claim Firefighters claim widespread support for their first national strike, over a 30% pay demand.

Caring and sharing

It's long been a High Street fixture

From one shop in Rochdale the Co-operative movement grew to be a bedrock of British life, before wilting in the face of big business. But David Cameron's plans to set up a co-operative movement are another sign of its revival.

Ten years ago, few would have predicted that a Tory leader would seek to embrace the ideals of the Co-operative Movement, as David Cameron did on Thursday. Indeed, for much of the 1990s, commentators were queuing up to predict the movement's demise.

The Co-op - and the divvy, or dividend, that its customer-members received as their share of trading profits - were once central to the fabric of British daily life. At its peak in 1955, there were 30,000 British co-operative retail shops, with a 20% share of the retail food market, 12% of the non-food retail market and 13 million members.

But by the 70s the iconic Co-op shops were in the doldrums, suffering at the hands of chain stores like Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer. Complacent management failed to ensure that the shops kept up with consumer tastes in a more affluent society.

CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT Business in which members share decision-making... And profits with 'divvy' (dividend) paid to each member Includes Co-operative Bank, food stores and funeral homes Now has 4.5 million members Cameron's 'co-op movement'

One newspaper described the average Co-op store window as being reminiscent of a shop in a suburb of Kharkov. Their market share shrank. As profit margins were squeezed, many Co-ops allowed the divvy to lapse, forgetting its importance in differentiating Co-op stores from privately owned supermarkets.

Other mutuals too were on the defensive. As the 80s wore on, building societies were de-mutualising and becoming banks. In the era of management consultants and privatisation, the co-operative model was written off by City analysts and mainstream politicians and pundits alike as a 19th Century anachronism.

But just when it looked like expiring forever, the movement began to rejuvenate in the 1990s, led by the Co-operative Bank. And in 2004, for the first time for decades, sales at Co-op stores held firm against the supermarket giants. By 2002, the divvy - of which loyalty reward card schemes are a pastiche - had been restored as a method of returning profits and benefits to members.

Phoenix-like

Mr Cameron's speech is also a testament to the resilience of the ideas that underpin the movement. Those ideas, rooted in the success of the Rochdale co-operative shop opened in 1844, were about practical self-help.

Neville Chamberlain ignored protests and taxed the divvy

"Here was a genuinely co-operative effort in thrift, born of necessity," said a supporter in 1947. "A device to stretch one's miserable weekly pittance as far as it would go. It was practical, it was canny, it was essentially realistic."

It was co-operation, and its symbolic and practical embodiment was the divvy.

It was the hostility of Conservative governments over the years that spurred the movement to set aside its historic reluctance to engage in politics and found its own party.

Neville Chamberlain first found infamy as the Conservative chancellor who slapped a tax on the divvy, despite the millions of signatures on a National Co-operative Petition. Led by Kettering MP Sam Perry, father of Wimbledon star Fred - once an enthusiastic Co-op political activist - the Co-operative Party proved too small on its own to reverse the divvy tax. By the 30s it had signed an electoral pact with Labour, an alliance that continues to endure and currently sees 29 Co-op MPs in parliament, including Ed Balls.

For its part, old Labour will be mindful that the word "socialist" first appeared in November 1827 in the Co-operative magazine - a vehicle for the ideas of Robert Owen, who sought to run his textile mill in Lanark on co-operative lines.

Follow the leader

Yet while Labour for many years advocated nationalisation, the Co-operative Party maintained a quiet dissent, arguing even at the height of the nationalisation fervour in the 40s that the co-operative model was a better option.

Nor was Margaret Thatcher a fan of the movement

For the past decade, the Co-operative Party has been discreetly permeating the Labour government - Gordon Brown is a member, making Mr Cameron the second, not the first, of the main party leaders to sign up to co-operative ideals. Labour itself has laid the groundwork for co-operative-sponsored specialist schools.

Nor is it clear how the creation of Conservative Co-operative Movement will differ from the existing Co-operative Party and its think-tank Mutuo - apart from the fact that it is Conservative.

Once there was a non-political body which also sought to set up co-ops to deliver local public services, just as Mr Cameron envisages. It was called the Co-operative Development Agency and was launched in 1978 by the Callaghan government at the behest of the Co-operative Party.

It was abolished in the 80s by Margaret Thatcher. The Conservative Co-operative Movement must hope it will not ultimately share its fate.

Spring forward, fall back

We think of time as tied to the seasons, but politicians have been tinkering with clocks and calendars for centuries. George Bush is the latest to do so.

For the past 40 years, my mother - now 90 - has lived in California. These days we try to talk to one another on the telephone several times a week, in the middle of the morning her time, which - eight hours on - is the end of my working day.

Last week the reassuring routineness of our regular calls suffered a small but significant confusion. This year the United States, without any particular fanfare, put its clocks forward three weeks earlier than those of the European Union, on the second Sunday in March, and put them back a week late last Sunday - on the first Sunday in November, rather than (as we did here) on the last Sunday in October.

Sweet manufacturers wanted an extension so that the clocks were turned back after Halloween Hear Radio 4's A Point of View

So when my mother phoned at her usual time, she found me only seven hours ahead of her, barely home from work, rather than comfortably settled in the living room awaiting her call.

These changes in dates for Daylight Saving Time are part of the Energy Policy Act, signed into law by President Bush in August 2005, which came into force in 2007. And there were political motives behind President Bush's tinkering with the clocks.

The Energy Policy Act is a set of measures ostensibly aimed at reducing the US's emission of greenhouse gases, and countering global warming - a set of what to me at least seem like token gestures on the part of the Bush administration, to make up for their steadfast refusal to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol with its targets for industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing Daylight Saving Time supposedly makes a significant contribution to energy conservation.

Lighter longer

It was rumoured, too, that the extension of Daylight Saving Time beyond the end of October came in response to lobbying by the US confectionary industry.

More light for trick or treat this year

Sweet manufacturers wanted a Daylight Saving Time extension so that the clocks were turned back after Halloween. The extra hour of daylight on 31 October would mean more time when parents could safely let their children go trick or treating, with resulting enhanced sales for the basketfuls of candy traditionally handed out to them.

The most overtly political aspect of the act, though, is that in its entirety it has so little regard for its impact on the rest of the world. Its measures were introduced with scant evidence of consultation outside the US. Yet several of them - including the alteration of Daylight Saving Time - have had knock-on effects beyond North America.

The act offers tax incentives to US farmers to change from growing grain for human consumption, to planting maize, sugar cane, palm oil and oil seed rape instead - all of which can be turned into biofuels. Tax incentives are also offered to fuel providers, if they can offer higher percentages of clean fuels on the filling station forecourt.

Daylight Saving Time was only seriously proposed in Britain exactly a century ago, as a politically acceptable means of extending the working day

But the altered pattern of crop-growing produced by this US legislation - enthusiastically embraced by rural farmers - has already helped drive up the price of bread in Britain, pasta in Italy and tortillas in Mexico.

We tend to think of time as tethered to the seasons and governed by the inexorable movement of the planets. Yet in spite of the fact that we behave, in general, as if the variations of clocks, time and time zones were natural and inevitable, politicians have tampered with time on many occasions in the past.

The idea of Daylight Saving Time itself was only seriously proposed in Britain exactly a century ago, as a politically acceptable means of extending the working day. William Willett, a keen early-morning horseman, noticed as he rode near his home early on a summer's morning, how many of the local residents were still asleep. In 1907 he published a pamphlet entitled The Waste of Daylight, in which he pointed out how many more hours could be got out of labourers if clocks went forward in summer time. Summer time as we know it was introduced in 1916.

Religious rivalry

In October 1582, it was politics that decided the English not to follow suit when Catholic Europe complied with a papal edict decreeing that 10 days be removed from the calendar to bring it back in line with that in use in 325, at the time of the first Council of Nicaea, thereby helping the vexed question of how to calculate the date of Easter.

Catholic Europe removed 10 days from the calendar, Elizabeth I didn't

Across Catholic Europe that year, 4 October was followed by 15 October, apparently without much fuss. But in spite of the fact that the learned English mathematician Dr John Dee counselled that calendar reform was essential, Queen Elizabeth I's Protestant administration chose not to comply.

It was not until 1752 that the English calendar (and that of her American colonies) was finally brought into line with that of the rest of Europe. By then the change necessitated the removal of 11 days - to account for the fact that the new calendar, but not the old, made 1700 a leap-year. When Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September, there was rioting on the streets of London, vividly captured in a painting by William Hogarth, in which the angry mob carries a banner with the slogan "Give us our 11 days".

Recent research has established that the change produced no widespread unrest. But it did cause social and economic confusion. In spite of assurances to the contrary, labourers lost 11 days' pay, and many annual contracts were adjusted downwards financially to take account of the shortened period. And King George II chose to move his birthday from 11 to 22 June, so as not to shorten the length of his reign.

To ensure consistency of financial record-keeping, the official English fiscal year was never shortened, with the result that in the UK alone, the tax year begins on a uniquely odd date. Add 11 days to the traditional 25 March start to the financial year and you get to 6 April - which has been the beginning of our tax year ever since.

Calendar confusion

My favourite calendar-driven piece of political finessing is less well-known, though hardly less historically significant. In late autumn 1688, the Protestant ruler of the Netherlands, William of Orange, embarked from the naval port of Hellevoetsluis to invade England and claim the throne on behalf of himself and his wife Mary, the reigning Catholic King James II's eldest daughter.

The landing of William of Orange

His invasion force consisted of an astounding 500 ships, an army of more than 20,000 highly trained professional troops, and a further 20,000 mariners and support staff.

The vast Dutch fleet was swept by a "providential wind" along the south coast of England, miraculously avoiding the English fleet in the Thames estuary, arriving off Torbay on 3 November - or rather, on what William's advisors considered to be 13 November, since they, along with the rest of Continental Europe (but not England), used the "new" Gregorian calendar.

William of Orange's birthday was 14 November. Many in his entourage urged him to take advantage of the significance of that day to launch his invasion. Such a landing date would, they argued, strike the English as propitious. But as far as the English were concerned, the date on which William's birthday fell was still 10 days away. So Prince William and his fleet decided to lay to off the English coast just two more days before landing, commencing disembarkation on what according to the English calendar was 5 November 1688 - known today as Guy Fawkes Day.

Thus it was that the landing which began the so-called Glorious Revolution took place on the anniversary of another great triumph of English Protestantism over the hostile forces of Catholicism - the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The convenient match with the familiar date meant that Catholic threats were uppermost in Englishmen's minds. The annual bonfires lit across the country to celebrate James I's narrow escape from a terrorist plot also announced the arrival of the man who would drive the Catholic King James II from the throne of England.

So whenever politicians turn their attention to calendars and clocks, we should take a long hard look beyond the apparently innocuous practical benefits proposed. There is bound to be something more considerable at stake than an extra hour in bed.

What makes a good password?

We are leaving ourselves open to fraud online because of the passwords we use, says a campaign group. So what makes a good password?

By their very nature passwords are problematic. Easy to remember often means easy to guess and hard to guess often means hard to remember.

But people are leaving themselves open to identity fraud and one of the reasons is their password, according to Get Safe Online (GSO), a government-backed campaign group.

Problems include using passwords that are easy to guess and using the same one all the time. With "password" often cited in surveys as one of the most common passwords, GSO has a point.

THE ANSWER Long, mixing letters, numbers and punctuation and including non-alphanumeric characters

So what makes a good password? It's all about having a difficult word and a good system, say experts.

A good password will mix letters, numbers and punctuation, but the strongest contain non-alphanumeric characters or symbols.

Never use a word that is in the dictionary, says Ken Munro, managing director of SecureTest. Online fraudsters have written programs that can try thousands of different passwords and try every word in the dictionary.

Phrases and systems

Avoid using anything personal like a birthday, a son or daughter's name, a partner's name or a pet's name. Also, the longer a password is the harder it is to crack.

Don't use consecutive keys on the keyboard. Qwerty is a regular on lists of most-popular passwords, just look at your keyboard to find out why.

A good suggestion is to use a phrase you can easily remember, says Mr Munro. Use something like "I went to the pub last night" and take the first letters of each word. You can mix upper and lower case and throw in random symbols, like a dollar sign.

WHO, WHAT, WHY? A regular part of the BBC News Magazine, Who, What, Why? aims to answer some of the questions behind the headlines

But as well as having good passwords, having a system when it comes to using them is also advised.

"Have one password for high security things that really matter, like online banking, and a low security one to use on things that don't really matter," says Barry Fox, contributing editor for Europe Consumer Electronics Daily.

People are often advised to change passwords regularly. But experts argue that this isn't always necessary.

"It's a common misconception," says Mr Munro. "It's better to have one good password than lots of bad ones."

The other essential when it comes to protecting your personal details is also having a good user name. People tend to just use their names, which is leaves them vulnerable.

10 things we didn't know last week

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. King Tut had buck teeth.
More details

2. Britons send as many text messages in a week now as they did in the whole of 1999.
More details

3. The defining measure for a kilogram is "Le Grand K", a cylinder of platinum and iridium held in Paris.
More details

4. Using camera traps to count tigers - differentiated by their stripe patterns - was pioneered in the 1920s by Englishman FW Champion.
More details

5. There are 29 "Labour and the Co-operative Party" MPs in Parliament, including Ed Balls.
More details

6. The Italian Mafia have commandments.
More details

7. Gun ownership per person in Finland is the third highest in the world.
More details

8. Dinosaurs breathed like penguins.
More details

9. The brain can turn down its ability to see in order to listen to complex sounds like music.
More details

10. For every one millibar decrease in pressure the sea rises 1cm.
More details

They Banned Smoking - What Next?

Campaigners want alcohol tax rise

Excessive drinking is as serious as drug use, the Alliance says

Taxes on alcohol should be increased and advertising restrictions should be tightened, according to a new group of 24 leading health organisations.

The Health Alcohol Alliance says 13 children are admitted to hospital every day as a result of Britain's growing alcohol misuse.

It wants TV adverts for alcohol banned before 9pm and stronger health warnings to be placed on promotional material.

Ministers said concerted action was planned to address alcohol problems.

If you look at the burden of damage to society, it's hugely greater for alcohol than for drugs. Professor Ian Gilmore Royal College of Physicians Young addicts beat the bottle Send us your comments

The Alliance has been formed by medical organisations and charities to increase pressure on the government to curb excessive drinking and provide more resources for alcohol-related health problems.

It calls for the government to adopt a twin strategy of increasing tax and reducing the easy availability of alcohol.

The Alliance says increasing tax by 10% could cut all alcohol-related deaths by between 10% and 30%.

Its get tough on alcohol message is echoed in a report published on Tuesday by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which also proposes raising prices and restricting pub opening hours.

Too cheap

The charity Alcohol Concern said the price of all alcohol in shops has barely changed since the mid-1990s - with some wines and lagers becoming cheaper.

You have got to have strong messages, making sure that people understand the harm it causes to them Dawn Primarolo Public health minister Expert tips on drinking safely Nuffield Council call for action

At the same time licensing laws have been relaxed, allowing longer opening hours for many pubs and bars.

Any move to increase taxes on alcohol is likely to meet with strong resistance from industry groups.

Even before the launch of the Alliance, five drinks industry bodies have written a joint letter warning that the campaign could make matters worse, based on the experiences of other countries.

And the British Beer and Pub Association says the UK has the second highest level of taxation on alcohol in Europe, and raising prices through higher taxes would restrict consumer choice.

But Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chairman of the Health Alcohol Alliance, said it was time to treat alcohol in a similar way to drugs.

"If you look at the burden of damage to society, it's hugely greater for alcohol than for drugs," he said.

"But the majority of money has always gone on drugs, partly because of the strong link to crime."

Hard to get help

Professor Gilmore said that, in some parts of the country, doctors find it hard to get help for patients with alcohol-related problems, even though two thirds of people with a drug problem can access specific services.

He said the Finnish experience - where health problems soared after alcohol tax was cut by 40% - showed a hike in taxes was likely to have a positive effect.

The number of alcohol-related deaths has more than doubled from 4,144 in 1991 to 8,386 in 2005.

There has also been a substantial increase in the number of people suffering serious disease, such as the permanent scarring of the liver known as cirrhosis.

The Alcohol Health Alliance says the government should no longer rely on voluntary agreements with the alcohol industry to curb potentially harmful practices.

Government strategy

The government has recently beefed up its Home Office target for reducing harm from alcohol.

It has also introduced a cross-departmental Alcohol Strategy.

This includes a public information campaign to promote sensible drinking, an independent review of alcohol pricing and promotion, toughened enforcement of underage sales by retailers and plans to introduce more help for people who want to drink less.

Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, said the government had introduced a comprehensive strategy to tackle problem drinking.

She said tax on alcohol in the UK was already the second highest in Europe, and only about 1% of pubs had extended opening hours since extended licensing laws were introduced.

A bigger problem was the discounting of prices by supermarkets and off licences.

She said: "We're looking at where it's available, who it's available to, how it's being marketed, what the targeting is and what we can do to give clear messages and to make those who are selling it responsible."

November 13th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1985: Volcano kills thousands in Colombia About 20,000 people are feared dead after a volcanic eruption in northern Colombia.
	1995: Ecstasy pill puts party girl in coma An 18-year-old student is on a life-support machine after taking an ecstasy tablet at her 18th birthday party.
	1971: American probe orbits Mars Pioneering space probe Mariner 9 reaches Mars and goes into orbit, but scientists have to wait for clear pictures because of a Martian dust storm.

Call for US to re-open UFO file

The group says the alleged sightings cannot be ignored

A group of former pilots and government officials has called on the US government to re-open an investigation into claims of UFO sightings.

Project Blue Book, run by the US Air Force, was stopped in the late 1960s.

The group, which includes former military officers from seven countries, all say they have seen a UFO or have conducted research into the phenomenon.

However, the Air Force says nothing has happened in the past four decades to justify resuming investigations.

Every year thousands of people say they have seen UFOs in the United States and their claims are usually met with scepticism.

We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms Fife Symington Ex-Governor of Arizona

But this panel of former military, government and aviation personnel from countries around the world has urged the US government to take such claims seriously.

The group say the apparent sightings of hovering orbs, glowing lights and high-speed spacecraft are a national security concern and should no longer be dismissed.

After the attacks of 11 September, the group said in a statement, it was no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns that could not be associated with existing helicopters and other aircraft.

The panel has called on the US military to re-open an investigation dormant since 1969, called Project Blue Book, in which more than 12,500 UFO claims were investigated by the Air Force.

For now, it seems their pleas have fallen on deaf ears - the US Air Force says nothing has changed that would support a resumption of the investigation.

But those who believe they have seen UFOs, know they have influential supporters.

Among those on the panel is the former governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, and last month, the Democrat presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich, said during a televised debate that he'd seen a UFO.

Pre-dating the love of chocolate

The bottles were found in the area known as "the cradle of chocolate" (Image courtesy of PNAS)

Chemical and archaeological evidence has pushed back the earliest known use of cacao, the key ingredient of chocolate, by 500 years.

The chemical compound, theobromine, which only occurs in the cacao plant, has been found on pottery vessels dating back to as early as 1000 BC.

Experts say the vessels were used to serve a fermented cacao drink that was made from the sweet pulp of the plant.

The vessels were unearthed at sites in Puerto Escondido, Honduras.

"The earliest use of cacao in Mesoamerica is likely to have been for a fermented drink," lead author Professor John Henderson wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Such drinks may contain up to 5% alcohol in volume," the Cornell University, US, academic added.

Frothy chocolate

As well as chemical evidence, a change in pottery vessel shape allowed scientists to pre-date the use of cocoa.

It had been known that the seeds were used to make a frothed chocolate drink which became central to social life throughout Mesoamerica. It was drunk at important ceremonies to mark weddings and births, especially by elites.

As the drink was frothy, it was served in a spouted bottle with a flaring neck. However, long-necked bottle samples that pre-date the spouted bottle were also found to contain cocoa residues.

The researchers suggested that this vessel type was inappropriate for frothing but better for pouring.

This led the authors conclude that "early cocoa was consumed as a fermented beverage made from pulp", rather than seeds.

During the time of the Aztec empire, chocolate seeds were used as an early form of money.

UK 'landfill dustbin of Europe'

The UK could run out of landfill space in nine years' time

The UK is officially the "dustbin of Europe", according to figures.

The UK dumps more household waste into landfill than any other country in the European Union, research by the Local Government Association shows.

UK households sent 22.6 million tonnes of rubbish to landfill in 2004/5 - the most recent year for which comparable figures are available across the EU.

However, government figures for 2006/7 show households recycled record amounts and levels of landfill waste fell.

Space issue

Between 2005/6 and 2006/7, the proportion of household waste which was recycled or composted rose from 27.1% to 30.7%, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

And the amount being sent to landfill fell from 17.9 million tonnes to 16.9 million tonnes.

For decades people have been used to being able to throw their rubbish away without worrying about the consequences. Those days are now over Paul Bettison Local Government Association Recycling around Europe

The LGA said that indications were that other European countries had also cut their landfill amounts since 2005, leaving the UK still "at the top of the rubbish heap".

It warned that an area the size of Warwick - 109 square miles - was already used as landfill in the UK.

The association, which represents councils in England, said that if the current trend continued, the UK could run out of landfill space in under nine years.

The figures for 2004/5 show the UK sent the same amount of rubbish to landfill as the 18 EU countries with the lowest landfill rates combined, despite those countries having almost twice the population.

The other countries with the highest amount of household rubbish thrown into landfill were Italy at 17.6 million tonnes and Spain at 14.2m.

France sent around 12 million tonnes to landfill, Poland 8.6m and Germany 7.3m.

Overhaul urged

The LGA said bold reforms on rubbish disposal were needed otherwise recycling rates will not rise fast enough to meet the EU Landfill Directive.

The directive sets the UK a number of targets, including that by 2020 the amount of biodegradable municipal waste, including household rubbish, sent to landfill should be no more than 35% of the amount produced in 1995.

In the future, councils, and consequently the taxpayer, are facing fines of up to £150 per tonne of rubbish over their "allowance" that is sent to landfill sites.

Paul Bettison, chairman of the LGA's environment board, said: "For decades people have been used to being able to throw their rubbish away without worrying about the consequences. Those days are now over.

"Local people, businesses and councils all have a vital role to play to protect our countryside before it becomes buried in a mountain of rubbish."

He said it was encouraging to see that people were recycling more, but added: "The fact remains other countries on the continent are still recycling up to twice as much."

Shrinking chips use novel recipe

Other firms are also working on chips with 45nm features

The chip industry's unrelenting quest to build smaller, faster microchips has taken another step forward.

Chip-maker Intel has launched a range of processors, known as Penryn, which will power the next generation of PCs.

The tiny chips contain a novel material and have features just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide.

The only PC processor in the line-up of 16 chips packs 820 million of the tiny switches into an area little bigger than a postage stamp.

"Had we used the same transistors that we used in our chips 15 to 20 years ago, the chip would be about the size of a two-storey building," said Bill Kircos of Intel.

Paul Otellini, head of Intel, described the challenge of building the chips as "awe-inspiring".

Although the chip-maker is the first company to make microprocessors with such tiny features, other companies, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), are producing other types of silicon chip.

"We have 45nm designs in production," said Chuck Byers of the firm.

TSMC manufactures chips on behalf of other companies.

Material world

The launch of the new multi-core chips comes nearly 60 years after the transistor was invented.

The brainchild of three scientists working at the research labs of the US Bell System telephone company, the tiny switches have gone on to underpin the silicon age.

HOW A PROCESSOR WORKS

Microprocessors use a three-step process. Fetch gets an instruction from the computer's memory. Decode decides what the instruction means. Execute involves carrying out the instruction. A microprocessor can carry out these steps millions of times a second.

The simple calculation 2+3 involves all three steps

1. When the user presses the "2" key new data enters the microprocessor. This is assigned the code 2 equals x
2.This code is then converted into binary, a numeric system that uses "1s" and "0s"
3.The binary code for 2 ­ 10 - is stored and awaits further instructions

1. The process is repeated when the 3 key is pressed but this time 3 = y. The binary code for 3 ­ 11 - is stored.

1. When the + key is pressed the microprocessor asks the computers main memory for instructions
2.The code x+y=z is sent to the decode unit to be translated into binary
3.The ALU - a set of circuits dedicated to numerical calculations - adds the numbers The ALU adds 10 and 11 to get 101, the binary equivalent of 5
4.The answer is stored and awaits further instructions

1. When the = key is pressed the microprocessor retrieves the answer ­z - and sends it for output
2.The task is complete.

BACK

NEXT

1 of 6

The first transistors were crude devices made of several different materials and many centimetres tall.

Over the last six decades, scientists have refined the devices and can now pack millions of them on to a square of silicon.

The onward progression of the silicon industry is known as Moore's Law, and states that the numbers of transistors on a chip will double every two years.

However, as the industry devices have shrunk, researchers have been forced to confront major technical obstacles.

In the latest generation of Intel chips, critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well.

As a result, currents passing through the transistors leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip.

To overcome this, Intel has replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with a material based on the metal hafnium.

Hafnium is a so-called high-K material, which refers to its dielectric constant, and has a greater ability to store electrical charge than silicon dioxide.

See how the hafnium transistors work

The exact recipe for the new material has not been revealed but Intel says that it offers greater performance at such tiny scales.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has described the inclusion of hafnium as "one of the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years".

Tiny tweaks

In contrast, TSMC has said that its chips do not use the new material.

"We have an alternative process that we believe has even more performance value," said Mr Byers.

"One of the strategies we employ is to make it [a manufacturing process] accessible as possible and one of the ways you do that is to change the process as little as possible."

Rather than changing the design of the chips, TSMC has tweaked the manufacturing process to produce the tiny features.

"We work very hard to maintain performance levels with existing materials," said Mr Byers. "For instance, at 45nm there are only a couple or three changes."

"There are several ways to skin this cat," added Gareth Jones, also of TSMC.

However, other companies have signalled their intention to start production of microchips using similar hafnium technology.

IBM, which has developed rival technology with Toshiba, Sony and AMD, intends to incorporate the transistors into its chips in 2008.

Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and Dell have already said that they will use the new Penryn processors in top of the range PCs.

TRANSISTORS COMPARED Transistors are tiny switches and consist of a source, drain and gate When a voltage is applied to the gate and drain electrons flow from the source to the drain and the transistor is switched on If the voltage to the gate is removed the transistor is switched off As transistors have shrunk the insulating layer has got so thin that electrons leak, making chips inefficient High-K materials such as hafnium have a greater ability to store charge and prevent leaks Using high-K materials allows chips to be made smaller and more efficient

November 12th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1982: Solidarity leader Walesa released The Polish government frees the leader of the outlawed Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, after 11 months of internment.
	1984: Quid notes out - pound coins in The English pound note is to disappear after more than 150 years.
	1954: New York's Ellis Island closes New York's main immigration point, Ellis Island, shuts its doors after 62 years.

Social networkers warned of risk

Users are being warned not to post personal details on their profiles

A quarter of the 11 million Britons who use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook may be leaving themselves open to identity fraud.

Get Safe Online, a government-backed campaign group, is warning against posting personal details online.

Its research also showed eight million people leave home wireless networks unprotected against intruders.

And more than half of the over-65s polled use a single password for every website they visit, the group said.

The group is advising older internet users to change their passwords more often.

'Rich pickings'

Tony Neate, managing director of GetSafeOnline.org, said a date of birth and address details were enough for someone to set up a credit card in another name.

"Although some of these details may seem harmless, they actually provide rich pickings for criminals," he said.

People need to take care when using public wi-fi

Cabinet Office minister Gillian Merron said the risks can be easily fixed and did not mean people should stop using social networking sites and wireless networks.

The poll of 2,000 adults also showed that nearly 30% admitted searching for former girlfriends and boyfriends on the sites ,and almost one in three used them to find out about their boss, colleagues or a job candidate.

The survey also found 13% of social networkers had posted information about or photos of other people without their consent.

While 80% of people now have firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware products installed on their PCs, the usage of wireless networks is far more lax.

At part of the campaign, Get Safe Online and the Serious Organised Crime Agency demonstrated how easy it was to break into an unsecured wireless network.

High profile cases

It showed that not only was it easy to freeload on an unsecured network but also to hack into it and 'steal' potentially valuable information.

SECURING WIRELESS NETWORKS Refer to the documentation that came with your hardware to find out how to protect the machine Set up encryption to prevent eavesdropping Make sure that every machine on the network has a firewall Use public access points with care Switch off SSID broadcast - this is the name of your wireless network Use a unique, obscure password to access the wireless network Restrict access to the machines you want to access the network by using its MAC address More tips about staying safe Take the online safety test

A SOCA officer, taking part in the mocked-up demonstration for the BBC, took just quarter of an hour to access and "steal" passwords and other personal information from a nearby laptop.

According to a survey conducted by the government and SOCA-backed Get Safe Online campaign, over 7.8 million people in the UK have left their internet access open for anyone to use.

"It took just 15 minutes to break into the network but it would take less than that to make the machine safe," said Tony Neate, managing director of the Get Safe Online campaign.

There have been several high profile cases this year of individuals piggybacking on other people's unsecured wireless connections.

Such freeloading is generally harmless and invisible to the user, unless the person stealing it is using large amounts of bandwidth which will noticeably slow the network down.

Stealing passwords

The mocked up SOCA demonstration showed that anyone with a wireless-enabled laptop could scan for unsecured networks and, if one was found, use it to surf the internet and send emails at someone else's expense.

The demonstration also showed that it only takes a limited amount of technical know-how to take the free usage of someone else's network to a different level.

"I am running a tool which is freely available from the internet which will scan the computer to see if it is vulnerable to any exploitation," explained the SOCA officer, who was only known as Stuart.

"A red X on the screen shows that a Microsoft patch for a known vulnerability [in this case, the Sasser worm] hasn't been applied so now I just need to use this information with another program - also freely available - which will allow me to input commands and gain control of the machine," he said.

In this particular demonstration, Stuart was able to access the victim's My Documents' folder which contained a document listing passwords for banking, e-mail accounts and social networking sites.

A Get Safe Online campaign earlier in the year found that 12% of the UK's net users had experienced online fraud during 2006 with an average loss of £875.

As part of this week's campaign the Get Safe Online team will be travelling around the country offering advice on how to stay safe and secure when using the internet.

November 11th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	2004: Veteran leader Yasser Arafat is dead Yasser Arafat dies in hospital in Paris, aged 75, bringing to an end more than 40 years of rule over the Palestinian people.
	2000: Skiers die in train tunnel inferno At least 150 skiers, many of them children, die in an intense fire on board a funicular railway in the Austrian Alps.
	1965: Rhodesia breaks from UK The Rhodesian Government, led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, illegally severs its links with the British Crown.

November 10th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1995: Nigeria hangs human rights activists The writer and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, is executed in Nigeria despite worldwide pleas for clemency.
	1997: British au pair freed after appeal A British child-minder is freed from jail in the United States after her conviction for murdering a baby is reduced to manslaughter.
	1980: Michael Foot is new Labour leader Outspoken left-wing MP Michael Foot defeats Denis Healey in a shock result to the Labour leadership contest.

Black Powr - Energy Saving Search

When your screen is white - an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts, and when its black it consumes only 59 watts.

Mark Ontkush wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.

In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Black Powr, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with a lower energy consumption, check it out.

Songbird 0.3.1

Play & manage web-based audio

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer POTI, Inc
Size 13.10MB
Free download

Songbird is developed by a band of experienced, dedicated software developers and designers called the ‘Pioneers of the Inevitable’. Previous software includes Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine.

The mission of Songbird is to become the first complete web player, to play back audio and video content made available by different medial players across the Internet. You can play back any audio from MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA formats.
It doesn’t just support online music. You can manage your offline (audio ripped from your audio CDs), too. It enables you to search and import your audio and then, once imported, you can mix and create new tracks.

Songbird is highly customisable, shipping with two themes. You can download or create your own extensions and, as it is cross-platform compatible, you can use the same application on Windows, Mac OS or Linux operating systems. Our download here is for Windows users.

Lotus Symphony beta 2

Preview the free office suite from IBM

Platform Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer IBM
Size 135MB
Free download

Up until fairly recently, Microsoft Office was the primary choice for anyone who wanted to purchase an office suite. Office is about as compatible as you can get, as other suites attempt to match compatibility so they can read and write from Microsoft Office documents. This is essential for any competitive office suites from integrating within the office environment.

Not only are there a range of competitive commercial office suites, such as Sun Star Office, Ashampoo Office and Ability Office, there are free equivalents, such as Open Office and the most recent release from IBM, Lotus Symphony.

Lotus Symphony ships with three modules: Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets, which means you’ll be able to write documents, produce presentations and calculate your basic finances. Although Symphony supports and pro-actively encourages you to use the new Open Document Format (ODF), all modules enable you to read and write to Microsoft Office documents.

The user-interface is a departure from the normal Office 2003 format you find across most Office suites (as they can’t use the new Office 2007 ribbon interface). It’s somewhere between the two and is certainly fairly easy to use.

Note that Lotus Symphony is still in beta and a Linux version is also available. The download here links to the location on the IBM website where you'll need to either register or enter your information to download Lotus Symphony.

November 9th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1985: America welcomes Charles and Diana The royal couple end their first day of a four-day visit to the States at a gala dinner in Washington hosted by President Reagan.
	1960: Narrow victory for John F Kennedy Senator John F Kennedy has won the election to become the youngest elected president of the United States.
	1979: Paperboy's killers convicted Four men are found guilty of killing paperboy Carl Bridgewater. Eighteen years later their convictions were quashed.

What Is It Called?

The practice of eating insects is called entomophagy
Most insects are edible. According to eatbug.com, there are 1,462 recorded species of edible insects. And they're quite nutritious. For instance, 100 grams of cricket contains only 121 calories, less than half of beef. A cricket contains only 5,5 grams of fat, compared to 21,2g of beef. Beef contains more protein (23,5g - a cricket 12.9g) but the 100g of cricket also contains 5,1g of carbohydrates, 75,8 mg calcium, 185,3 mg phosphorous, 9,5 mg iron, thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin.

Mid-men, the male versions of mid-wives, are called accouchers.

The working section of a piano is called the action.

The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

The distance that a place holder falls from a glass when it is lifted (you know, place holders sometimes get stuck to the bottom of a cold glass when you lift the glass) is called a bevemeter.

The study of creatures such as Bigfoot, the chupacabra, and the Loch Ness monster is called cryptozoology. Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans coined the term to describe his investigations of animals unknown to science.

The apparatus used in alcohol distilleries for freeing the spirit from water is called the dephlegmator.

One that speaks two languages - is bilingual - can be said to be diglot.

Ducks are never male. The males of the species are called drakes.

Shoemakers are commonly called cobblers but correctly speaking a cobbler is a shoe repairmen. A shoemaker is a cordwainer.

The device at the intersection of two railroad tracks to permit the wheels and flanges on one track to cross or branch for the other is called a frog.

A specific length of thread or yarn according to the type of fiber is called a hank. For linen, a hank is 274 metres (300 yards); for cotton, it is 768 metres (840 yards).

The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.

The thin line of cloud that forms behind an aircraft at high altitudes is called a contrail.

A depth of 2 fathoms (3,6 metres) is called a Mark Twain. Originally a fathom was the space reached by with two arms outstretched.

In the early days of film making, people who worked on the sets were called movies. The films were called potion pictures.

The tendency of the leaves or petals of certain plants to assume a different position at night is called nyctitropism.

The back of the human hand is the opisthenar.

Someone who uses as few words as possible when speaking is called pauciloquent.

The pin that holds a hinge together is called a pintle.

The gland responsible for producing the hormone that regulates growth is called the pituitary gland. It is the size of a pea.

In early France the distance a man could walk while smoking one pipeful of tobacco was called a pipee.

The central shaft of a bird's feather which bears the vane or web of the feather is called a rachis.

The hairless area of roughened skin at the tip of a bear's snout is called the rhinarium.

Someone who habitually picks their nose is called a rhinotillexomaniac (rhino=nose, tillexis=habit of picking at something, mania=obsession with something). See Useless Information

A building in which silence is enforced, like a library or school room, is referred to as a silentium.

The ear-splitting sound produced by the high notes of a bagpipe is called a skirl.

The fleshy projection above the bill on a turkey is called a snood.

People who chase after rare birds are called twitchers.

4 gills of ale and beer is 1 pint, 2 pints = 1 quart, 4 quarts = 1 gallon, 9 gallons = 1 firkin, 2 firkins = 1 kilderkin, 3 kilderkins = 1 hogshead, 2 hogsheads = 1 butt.

November 8th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1987: Bomb kills 11 at Enniskillen Eleven people are killed after a bomb explodes during a Remembrance Day service at Enniskillen in County Fermanagh.
	1974: Police hunt Lord Lucan after murder Detectives are searching for British aristocrat Lord Lucan following the death of his children's nanny last night.
	2000: Bush and Gore fight to the finish The result of the American presidential election is still hanging in the balance hours after the polls officially closed.

Give The Band A Beer!

China begins world-record wheel

China has started to build what will be the world's biggest wheel, dwarfing its rivals, including the London Eye.

The observation wheel, due to open in 2009, will stand at 208m (686ft) - the third-tallest structure in Beijing.

Designed to commemorate the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Great Wheel is expected to hold about 1,920 people.

Officials say visitors will get "an unsurpassed view of the city", although some analysts have joked that pollution might stop visitors from seeing much.

When completed, the $99m (£50m) structure will eclipse the Star of Nanchang - the current highest wheel, also in China, which stands at 160m.

The next-closest competitor, the London Eye, is more than 70m shorter, standing at a mere 135m.

The Great Wheel Company, which is also building another giant wheel in Singapore, originally intended the Beijing wheel to begin turning on 1 August 2008, just days before the start of the Olympic Games.

But the firm said it had pushed the opening back to allow time for design improvements.

There are expected to be 48 capsules on the Beijing wheel, each of them capable of carrying up to 40 people.

The UK family: in statistics

Families are changing shape and facing up to new lifestyle challenges. The facts and figures below give an idea of what the typical UK family looks like in the early 21st century.

WHAT IS A 'TYPICAL' FAMILY?

There were 17.1 million families in the UK in 2006 - up from 16.5 million in 1996.

Most were still headed by a married couple ( 70%), although the proportion of cohabiting couple families had increased to 14%, from 9% 10 years earlier.

But the average number of children per family has dropped - from 2.0 in 1971 to 1.8.

WHERE FAMILIES LIVE

More young people are living at home for longer. In 2006, 58% of men and 39% of women aged 20-24 in England still lived at home with their parents.

Most single people live in London, whereas married couples and families tend to be concentrated in the centre of the country and around the outskirts of major cities, according to research by Professor Danny Dorling of Sheffield University.

His map is based on data drawn from the 85 constituencies used for the European parliamentary elections in 1999, each containing roughly half a million people over the age of 18 in a similar geographical area. Figures were not available for Northern Ireland.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

In most families with dependent children, the father is still the main wage earner and the mother often works part-time.

According to the BBC/ICM poll, 33% of women still do the bulk of household chores, but 35% of respondents said both parents shared childcare duties.

SPENDING HABITS

The average family income is £32,779 before tax.

According to ONS figures, an average family of two adults and two children spends £601.20 a week, compared with a couple's average spend of £527.30. In other words, a family spends £155.60 per head, compared with a couple's spend of £263.60 per head.

November 7th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1956: Eisenhower re-elected with record vote Eisenhower is returned to the White House with the biggest share of votes for 100 years.
	1975: IRA kidnappers release industrialist Dr Tiede Herrema, a Dutch industrialist kidnapped by the IRA more than a month ago, is freed.
	1989: Protests force out East German rulers East German leader Egon Krenz prepares to choose a new government after mass resignations of Communist ministers.

And The American Public Said....

The transformation of St Pancras

The development brings high speed train links to the UK Tour of the station

It is easy to forget quite how unloved London's St Pancras station once was.

Today it is due to be officially opened by the Queen after an £800 million refurbishment, but in the early 1960s it was considered by many to be frankly grotesque - a hideous neo-Gothic folly, ridiculously fussy, not to mention grimy and impractical.

It represented everything mid-20th Century Britain hated about the 19th Century - at once obsolete, pompous and absurd.

It was considered a shame that Hitler's bombs had not done more damage. It was time to tear it down and start again, with something sleek and modern and efficient - like Euston Station, just along the road.

These were not irrational opinions.

Like virtually every other building in London, St Pancras was indeed filthy, its red bricks covered in a layer of soot laid down by decades of exposure to the smoke from the coal fires that powered railway locomotives and heated the capital's homes, offices and factories.

St Pancras was also impractical - not so much the station itself, as St Pancras Chambers, designed by George Gilbert Scott and facing the Euston Road.

The chambers were built as the luxurious Midland Grand Hotel for the Midland Railway, for which St Pancras acted as its London terminus.

The station's refurbishment comes at a time when railways are back in fashion In Pictures: St Pancras Guide to the Channel Tunnel Send us your stories

But the rooms had no bathrooms and the building's internal walls of load-bearing brick and iron resisted cost-effective conversion.

In the 1930s the hotel closed, to become railway offices, and in the subsequent three decades gradually sank into dilapidation.

But St Pancras had its champions, chief among them the future poet laureate, John Betjeman.

An enthusiast for all things Victorian and Edwardian, and a former architectural journalist, Betjeman could see the place had merits.

He helped lead a campaign to save the building, which culminated on 2 November 1967 when St Pancras was listed Grade 1, 10 days before it was due to be demolished and redeveloped as a sports hall and social housing.

That was 40 years ago to the month.

Four decades in which Britain's railways went into steady decline, the British Rail officials moved out of their offices in St Pancras Chambers, leaving them semi-derelict, and the station itself survived as a quiet haven for pigeons and dossers, the calm interrupted only by an occasional train to Nottingham or Sheffield.

It is hoped the site will be a popular gateway to mainland Europe

The station's refurbishment comes at a time when railways are back in fashion.

There have been record numbers of travellers in the UK, and Britain now has its first complete high-speed line linking St Pancras with Paris and Brussels - not to mention the rest of the European high-speed rail network.

Gilbert Scott's Gothic masterpiece is undergoing separate renovation.

It reopens as a hotel in 2009, with its top two floors converted into luxury flats by the Manhattan Loft Co.

Behind it the vast train shed completed in 1868 and designed by the Midland Railway's engineer, William Barlow, has been reglazed and its cast-iron girders repainted a fetching sky blue to house the Eurostar trains.

To the north a new flat glass canopy has been built to cover separate platforms for Midland Mainline domestic services and a planned new high-speed commuter service into Kent.

'Victorian gem'

A second new station has been built deep below ground for the Thameslink cross-London commuter service, replacing the scruffy King's Cross Thameslink station 200 metres away.

And a third station has in effect been built by London Underground to improve access to the Circle and Metropolitan line stations under Euston Road.

We will have to see whether fashionable Londoners really do flock to William Barlow's restored masterpiece to while away their evenings sipping champagne Eyesore or gem: St Pancras

The architect, Alastair Lansley, is a survivor of the old British Rail architect department, where he worked on the rebuilding in the 1980s of Liverpool Street station.

There too a grimy, unloved, workaday building was stripped back to reveal a Victorian gem, with glass roofs and decorative cast-iron columns.

At Liverpool Street the space thus revealed was promptly filled up again with shops.

At St Pancras Lansley and his team have been able to keep the main concourse free of clutter, tucking most of the retail space away downstairs in the "undercroft" below the platforms, along with all the Eurostar check-in facilities and departure lounge.

Future poet laureate John Betjeman helped lead a campaign to save the building

The undercroft is there because Barlow chose to take his tracks on a bridge over the Regent Canal, just to the north, rather than underneath it.

That meant raising the platforms on more than 700 cast-iron columns, and filling the space underneath with barrels of beer from the breweries of Burton-on-Trent and with the drayhorses to deliver them to London pubs.

Now St Pancras is being promoted as a trendy destination in its own right. We are promised the longest champagne bar in Europe, a regular farmer's market and upmarket shopping.

We will have to see whether fashionable Londoners really do flock to William Barlow's restored masterpiece to while away their evenings sipping champagne and watching the long Eurostar trains gliding in and out.

But there is no question that the new St Pancras is an impressive gateway to the Continent.

And, fittingly, just next to the champagne bar is a memorial to the man without whom St Pancras would long ago have vanished - a statue of the always shambolic John Betjeman, gazing up at that magnificent roof.

November 6th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1952: Landslide victory for Eisenhower General Dwight D Eisenhower sweeps to victory in the American presidential elections with the largest number of popular votes ever recorded for a presidential candidate.
	1991: Publisher Robert Maxwell dies at sea The body of the millionaire newspaper publisher, Robert Maxwell, is found in the sea off the coast of Tenerife.
	1967: Forty die in Hither Green rail crash At least 40 people are killed and 80 hurt after a train derails in south-east London.

November 5th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1956: Soviet troops overrun Hungary Soviet troops pour into the city in a massive dawn offensive in repsonse to a national uprising led by Prime Minister Imre Nagy.
	1995: Israeli PM shot dead The Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, is assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
	1979: Militants storm US embassy in Tehran Militant Islamic students in Iran storm the US embassy in Tehran taking 90 people hostage.

November 4th

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	2004: George W Bush wins second term George W Bush is elected president of the United States for the second time, beating his Democratic rival by a comfortable margin.
	1957: Russians launch dog into space The Soviet Union sends the first ever living creature into the cosmos aboard Sputnik II.
	1975: North Sea oil begins to flow The Queen has formally begun the operation of the UK's first oil pipeline at a £500,000 ceremony in Scotland.

10 things we didn't know last week

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. Dogs can have blood of any type if it's just one transfusion, but cats need to be blood type matched.
More details

2. Trick or treating was first noted as arriving in England by the Times in 1986.
More details

3. The sculptor of the giant spider at the Tate is 95 and still working.
More details

4. Sniffer dogs can smell out a termite.
More details

5. Clams can get very, very old.
More details

6. Of the waste in UK landfills, 0.1 is plastic carrier bags.
More details

7. Dogs occasionally shoot their owners in the US.
More details

8. IP addresses will run out in 2010.
More details

9. People carrying the OR11H7P gene are hypersensitive to the smell of sweat.
More details

10. One fungal disease has made 40 frog species extinct since 1980.
More details

November 2nd

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1986: US hostage freed in Beirut David Jacobsen, an American held hostage in Beirut by Muslim fundamentalists, is released after 17 months in captivity.
	1988: Dead heat in Israel elections The general election in Israel returns a hung parliament, prompting feverish negotiations between the right-wing Likud party and ultra-orthodox religious groups.
	1995: Ex-minister charged with apartheid murders The former South African defence minister, General Magnus Malan, is arrested and charged with murder.

November 1st

ON THIS DAY NEWS FROM THE BBC ARCHIVES
	1984: Indian prime minister shot dead Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, is killed by two assassins believed to be her own bodyguards.
	1955: Princess Margaret cancels wedding Princess Margaret calls off her plans to marry divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend.
	1971: Bomb explodes in Post Office tower A bomb explodes in the Post Office tower causing extensive damage but no injuries.

Giant telescope's double vision

The telescope has been built on the 3,200m-high Mount Graham

Almost 20 years after it was first conceived, what will become the world's most powerful optical telescope is about to open its eyes.

Lying beneath the clear skies of Arizona, the $120m (£55m) Large Binocular Telescope will allow astronomers to probe the Universe further back in time and in more detail than ever before.

"The LBT is a very exciting step forward for astronomy," said Professor Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK.

"Not only is it big, but it is proving the practical implementation of some of the new technologies which will be critical for all next-generation large telescopes."

Unlike most telescopes today, which consist of one light collecting mirror, the binocular telescope will consist of two 8.4m (27.5ft) discs used in tandem.

"Astronomers are looking for two things in a telescope," explained Dr John Hill of the University of Arizona and the technical director of LBT.

"They want a big collecting area so they can look at really faint objects far, far away; and they want high resolution images because they want sharp images of those faint fuzzy things far, far away."

Super-sized

Hence, astronomers crave the largest mirrors they can get their hands on, as the larger the disc, the more light they are able to gather.

But constructing these giant reflectors is a, difficult, expensive and time-consuming task.

Each mirror weighs nearly 16 tonnes

With present technology, the largest mirrors that can realistically be constructed are about 8m (26ft). And even they come with their own difficulties.

"Handling and shipping become a big problem," said Dr Hill. "Already an 8.4m mirror in its box takes up two lanes of an interstate highway."

As a result, scientists have had to come up with clever ways of maximising the potential of today's mirrors.

One way of doing this is by using multiple reflectors in tandem.

This has been done before. For example, the now retired Multiple Mirror Telescope, also in Arizona, contained six mirrors each with a diameter of 1.8m.

However, scientist have never tried to combine them on the scale of the LBT.

"Everything about this is a first time experiment," said Dr Richard Green, director of the instrument.

It will work like two 8m telescopes working together to look to the very ends of the Universe Richard Green

Using two mirrors will give LBT the equivalent light-gathering capacity of a single 11.8m (39ft) instrument and the resolution of an even bigger telescope.

"It acts like a single telescope of 22.8m (75ft) in diameter," said Dr Green.

"That will give us a resolution - a sharpness on the sky - which is 10 times greater than Hubble."

The space-based Hubble telescope has taken some of the clearest images yet of the Universe with its 2.4m (8ft) mirror.

Sun-shade

But Hubble has a significant advantage over ground-based instruments.

"The bubbling and windy air in the Earth's atmosphere creates distortions and blurs the stars," said Dr Green. "We need to un-blur them in order to combine both sides and make them work like one unit."