Governments across Europe dream of finding a magic solution to rising unemployment. But, in the hardest-hit parts of the EU, joblessness rates continue to creep up and the rhetoric does little to shorten the dole queue.
Now, in a struggling corner of Italy, one mayor thinks he has found an answer to his town’s chronic lack of work – although, rather than a solution, it appears to some to be more of an admission of defeat. Valter Piscedda, the centre- left mayor of Elmas, a small town near Sardinia’s capital, Cagliari, wants to pay residents to leave. The council will pay for ten unemployed locals to take intensive English lessons, board a cheap flight and look for jobs elsewhere in Europe.
“This is, above all, an idea born of common sense and experience,” he told the Guardian. “Over the past year and a half – especially in the past few months – I have been receiving young people, almost every day, who are despairing about their search for work. Some are looking here and ask for a hand in finding it here. Others have tried everything and are so discouraged that they no longer want to stay and wait. And they want to go and gain work experience abroad; life experience, too.
“So, my reasoning was this: put everything in place that the council administration can put in place so that those who want to gain experience abroad are able to,” he said.
As the national economy continues to falter, Sardinia, along with much of southern and central Italy, is grappling with high unemployment, with the overall joblessness rate at 17.7% in the second quarter of 2014, according to Italy’s National Institute of Statistics, Istat. More than 54% of people under 25 are out of work.
For the Adesso Parto (Now I’m leaving) programme, Elmas’s council has allocated €12,000 on a first-come, first-served basis to applicants aged between 18 and 50. As long as they are out of work and have lived in the town for three years, they are eligible. They do not have to be university educated and their annual income must be no more than €15,000.
The idea of encouraging people to up sticks is sensitive at a time when floods of Italians – many of them bright young graduates – are leaving their country every year. But Piscedda, who belongs to the Democratic Party of the Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, denies he is facilitating a brain drain and believes that the people he is sending away may well return “and give me back 100 times what they were given”. More importantly, he wants the scheme to give a leg-up to those most in need.
“It’s a programme for those with no other resource; it’s the last-chance saloon. It’s about allowing them the dignity of not having to ask a friend for money or place burdens on families that cannot do it,” he said.
Earlier in 2014, he added, the council launched a scheme whereby businesses were given financial incentives to hire young workers from Elmas. “We advertised 20 of these positions,” he said. “We got 120 applications.”
In Elmas, the scheme has provoked mixed reactions. “The reality is that there is little work here,” said Alessandro Macis. “The opportunity to go abroad to learn about the workplace and experience other cultures can be very worthwhile. The son of a friend of mine who didn’t study much has ended up in London and he’s really finding his way. He started as a waiter. Now, he’s a cook and he’s learning English.”
Others were perplexed. “I heard about it but I thought it was strange. If you have that money to pay for people to go away, why don’t you use that money to keep them here?” said Consuelo Melis, who works behind the bar in a local café. On Twitter, one of many reactions was disbelief. “The state’s admission of defeat,” commented Marco Patavino. “Institutions are raising the white flag,” remarked Carlo Mazzaggio.
Piscedda, however, is undeterred, remarking of his online critics: “Probably, they are people that aren’t in need ... Every day, I deal with people’s problems and I have to do something to try to solve them. These people, if they had an alternative, they wouldn’t be asking for help.
“The work I can create, as mayor, is temporary. I can have a piazza cleaned. I can have it cleaned again. I can have the streets cleaned. But these are all temporary things that give nothing beyond that little bit of money for a few months. I want to go beyond that.”


An octopus has escaped from the National Aquarium in New Zealand. It escaped from its tank, slid down a 50-metre drainpipe and disappeared into the sea. Inky – a common New Zealand octopus – escaped after someone left the lid of his tank open. Staff at the aquarium believe that, in the middle of the night, when there was no-one in the building, Inky climbed down the side of the tank and travelled across the floor.
Rob Yarrell, national manager of the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier, said: “Octopuses are famous for their ability to escape. I don’t think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, because octopuses like to live alone. But, he is such a curious boy. He would want to know what’s happening on the outside. That’s his personality.”
One idea is that Inky crossed the aquarium floor – a journey of three or four metres – and then, he realized that freedom was very near so he entered a drainpipe that led directly to the sea. The drainpipe was 50 metres long and opened into Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
It is also possible that Inky escaped through an open pipe at the top of his tank, which led under the floor to the drain. “When we came in the next morning and his tank was empty, I was really surprised,” said Yarrell, who has not started looking for Inky. “The staff and I have been sad. But then, this is Inky and he’s always been a bit of a surprise octopus.”
Reiss Jenkinson, a keeper at the National Aquarium, said he was absolutely certain Inky was not stolen. “I understand octopus behaviour very well,” he said. “I have seen octopuses on boats escape through waste pumps. And, the security here is too good for anyone to take Inky and why would they?”
Because octopuses have no bones, they can fit into very small spaces and can squeeze through gaps the size of coins. They are also very intelligent and able to use tools. At the Island Bay Marine Education Centre in Wellington, an octopus visited another tank every night to steal crabs, then return to its own tank. Another octopus at the centre, Ozymandias, broke a world record for opening a jar.
Inky was brought to the National Aquarium several years ago by a local fisherman who found him in a fishing pot. Yarrell said, “He lived on the reef and fought with fish so he was quite ill.” According to Yarrell, Inky – who is about the size of a rugby ball – was an “unusually intelligent” octopus. “He was very friendly and a popular attraction here. We have another octopus, Blotchy, but he is smaller than Inky and Inky had the personality.”
The aquarium has no plans to increase security as a result of the escape but the staff now know “what octopuses can do” so they will be more careful. The aquarium is not looking for another octopus but, if a fisherman brought in another octopus, the aquarium might take it. “You never know,” said Yarrell. “There’s always a chance Inky will come home to us.”


Intermediate
Angela Erdmann never knew her grandfather. He died in 1946, six years before she was born. But, on Tuesday April 8th, 2014, she described the extraordinary moment when she received a message in a bottle, 101 years after he had thrown it into the Baltic Sea. The bottle is believed to be the worlds oldest message in a bottle and it was presented to Erdmann by the museum that is now exhibiting it in Germany.
It was very surprising, Erdmann, 62, said, describing how she found out about the bottle. A man stood at my door and told me he had post from my grandfather. He then told me that a message in a bottle had been found and that the name that was on the card was that of my grandfather. Her visitor was a genealogical researcher who had managed to find her in Berlin after the letter was given to a museum in the northern port city of Hamburg.
The brown beer bottle, which had been in the water for 101 years, was found by a fisherman, who had been out in the Baltic Sea off the northern city of Kiel. Holger von Neuhoff, a curator at the museum, said this bottled message was the oldest he had come across. There are documents that have been found without the bottle that are older and are in the museum, he said. But, with the bottle and the document, this is certainly the oldest at the moment. It is in extremely good condition.
Researchers believe Erdmanns grandfather, Richard Platz, threw the bottle in the sea while on a hike in 1913. He was 20 years old at the time. A lot of the message on the postcard was impossible to read, although the address in Berlin on the front of the card was legible. Also legible was the authors polite request that the person finding it should send it to his home address.
He also included two stamps from that time that were in the bottle, so the finder would not have to pay for postage, Erdmann said. But he did not think it would take 101 years.
She said she was moved by the arrival of the message, although she had not known her grandfather because he died, at the age of 54, six years before she was born.
I knew very little about my grandfather, but I found out that he was a writer who was very open-minded, and believed in freedom and that everyone should respect each other, she said. He did a lot for the young and later travelled with his wife and two daughters. It was wonderful because I could see where my roots came from.
Erdmann said she also liked culture and travelling around the world, just like her grandfather. She described herself as open-minded, too. What he taught his two daughters, my mother taught me and I have then given to my sons, she said. She was very happy to receive the bottled message, she said, but she hoped other people would not do what her grandfather had done and throw bottles with messages into the sea. Today, the sea is so full of so many bottles and rubbish that more shouldnt be thrown in there, she said.
The message and the bottle will be on display at Hamburgs Maritime Museum until the beginning of May 2014, after which experts will attempt to decipher the rest of the text. It is not clear what will then happen to the bottle, but Erdmann hopes it will stay at the museum.
We want to make a few photos available to put with the bottle and give it a face, so visitors can see the young man who threw the bottle into the water, she said.


Setting aside epic disaster-movie moments such as volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, there are two key natural factors that can make a city vulnerable to gradual disintegration or even total disappearance – water and sand.
Were climate change making the planet colder rather than hotter, we could add ice to the list – for nothing obliterates a city like a billion-tonne glacier grinding its way down a valley. The impact of a rare “ice tsunami” in 2013 on the Canadian municipality of Ochre Beach was just a taster: a wall of melting iceberg on Dauphin Lake was blown by winds on to the shore, splintering every house in its path.
But Ochre Beach was an anomaly. Elsewhere, the planet’s melting ice is making cities vulnerable by the less dramatic route of raising sea levels. A century ago, Venice – one of the most beautiful and low-lying cities in the world – used to flood around ten times a year. Nowadays, its lowest point, Piazza San Marco (only three feet above sea level) is inundated with water approximately 100 times annually.
But rising sea levels are not entirely to blame. In many parts of the world, the land is also sinking – in Venice’s case, subsoil compaction (a result of industrial exploitation of the surrounding area) lowered the city by 20cm between 1950 and 1970. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is also sinking by about 2cm a year – but that’s nothing compared to Jakarta, which is dropping 10 to 20cm annually. In the past three decades, the city has sunk roughly four metres, rendering its 40-year-old seawall ever less effective. Unfortunately for the Indonesian capital, it has pumped out so much groundwater to support its population that the land above is drying out and compacting, thereby creating a bowl. Rivers that used to flow through the city down to the sea have had to be diverted because they cannot drain uphill.
While there are many plans to save Venice – and Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are taking the problem seriously – the same cannot be said for Miami, where politicians refuse to admit the city has a severe environmental problem.
Miami’s difficulties are threefold. The Florida resort lies less than ten feet above sea level; an increasing number of tropical storms are inundating the city; and it is built on porous limestone, which is absorbing the rising seawater. This water then fills the city’s foundations and bubbles up through drains and pipes, forcing sewage upwards and polluting its fresh water. There is every chance Miami may one day become uninhabitable.
In the Maldives, the populations of whole islands are now looking to abandon their homes. The capital, Malé, population 153,379 and only four feet above sea level, has used Japanese investment to build a ten-foot sea wall at a cost of $63 million – but, long term, only a stabilization of rising sea levels will save it and the rest of the islands.
And it’s not just the sea – rainfall is also endangering cities across the world. Recently, an entire summer’s worth of rain fell in one morning on Detroit, overwhelming its outdated sewerage systems. Impoverished by the collapse of America’s car industry, the city is struggling to build a system to cope. Drinking water is also affected because Detroit is particularly vulnerable to water-borne pathogens.
In Africa, desertification is causing the Sahara to spread south at a rate of 30 miles per year, threatening settlements in northern Mauritania. Over the past 20 years, for example, the desert has grown by more than 260 acres around the trading and religious centre of Chinguetti, which has seen its population decline from 20,000 people in the mid-twentieth century to just a few thousand now. Trading has all but ceased as sand piles up in the streets.
Likewise, the Californian resort of Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, may have to be abandoned in the next decade. This city is just one example of a problem caused not so much by global warming as human over-expansion in the face of finite resources. California’s dream of farming the desert made sense while its total population remained around half a million (in 1870) – but, now, the state is home to 38 million people, who, between them, own 32 million vehicles and expect to be surrounded by lawns and golf courses.
The daily water use in Rancho Mirage is more than 200 gallons per person, which is giving rise to a man-made drought. A 25% cut in water consumption has been implemented but this is unlikely to stabilize the resort, which is surrounded by sand and dust. The long-term answer in California’s desert is likely to be the abandonment of some cities while consolidating the populations of others.
Human flight is the final proof of a city’s disintegration. Once we stop maintaining a city, nature takes over very quickly. Japan’s Hashima Island was turned into a concrete city in 1887 to exploit undersea coal reserves – but, in 1974, with coal supplies nearing depletion, the mine was closed and Hashima was abandoned. Now, the sea spray is causing its concrete walls to collapse.
Fire is a growing threat to urban settlements in America – in fact, forest fires cause the most damage after severe storms, with 800 major fire disasters having been declared there between 1953 and 2014. A newly released report by the USDA Forest Service maps the increasing number of urban locations that are particularly vulnerable to wildfire.
Similarly, in Australia, some of Victoria’s resorts and several Melbourne suburbs have been placed on a list of the state’s 52 most vulnerable bushfire spots because long-term droughts are making trees highly combustible. It’s unlikely that a forest fire will ever destroy an entire city but a succession of fires could render it uninhabitable – and abandonment remains one of the most powerful causes of urban collapse.
Many cities are fighting a losing battle against the ravages of nature but is it possible to identify the world’s most vulnerable metropolis? Natural events are notoriously hard to predict but the prospects for Malé do look particularly grim for, even if its new sea wall continues to be effective, the islands around the Maldives capital are going to disappear before too long. And, if they disappear, so does Malé’s raison d’être.


It has been called 'the hotel of mum and dad' but few guesthouses have such favourable terms. As the housing crisis bites, a fifth of young adults are staying in the family home until they are at least 26 and the same proportion are not paying a penny towards their keep. A recent survey found that the proportion of adults living at home varied around the country, from just under 9% in the East Midlands to more than double that in London, where house prices and rents are highest. While many around the country contributed financially, the survey found that 20% were paying nothing at all.
Young adults are being squeezed by low wages and rents, which have hit record highs, while those who want to buy a property are finding the monthly cost of renting is preventing them from saving enough to get on the housing ladder. Research published by the homeless charity Shelter showed half of tenants were unable to save a penny towards a deposit, while a quarter could only put by £100 or less each month. Mortgages are cheaper than ever before thanks to record low interest rates but the best deals are still reserved for borrowers with large deposits.
Faced with this, young adults are increasingly returning to the family home in order to save money and parents who cannot afford to offer their offspring a lump sum seem willing to help. The survey found that 28% of adults were living at home because they were trying to save for a deposit. However, it also found that 30% were not saving any money.
A spokesman for the company conducting the survey commented: “The hotel of mum and dad is often staying open for longer than many anticipated, our latest research shows. Rental costs and deposits or the need to save for a mortgage deposit mean that some children understandably have to wait before flying the nest. And, for some, moving out may never be an option.”
Michael Day, 30, who lives with his parents in Bristol, says he has been caught between paying high rents and saving for a mortgage deposit. Rents for a one-bedroom home in the city are between £500 and £800 a month, while buying a similar property would cost about £130,000. “I don’t really want to move out to rent as it’s more than a mortgage but you need such a big deposit to get a mortgage so it’s been a bit of a vicious circle.”
Day does not want to share with strangers so his options are limited. At home, he pays a nominal rent to cover bills and is able to keep the rest of his earnings from his job at a candle retailer. He plays golf at county level and he admits that, instead of saving, he spends his spare cash on golf and holidays. “You need so much money that I will have to save for the foreseeable future,” he said. “Because it’s been so difficult, I’ve been going on holiday and enjoying it.”
Sue Green, of Saga, a business that sells insurance and products to the over-50s, said the majority of parents may not have planned to have their children living with them well into their 20s or 30s. “Most will be more than happy to house them in the family home rent-free because it might help their kids get on the property ladder sooner,” she said. “Children who don’t pay rent may contribute in other ways like buying groceries, family takeaways or doing odd jobs around the home.”
Angus Hanton, co-founder of a thinktank called the Intergenerational Foundation, said older generations were “the architects of the housing crisis” and children should not be blamed for staying at home. “The under-30s have suffered a fall in average incomes of about 20% since the 2008 downturn. Rents and car insurance have never been so high and mortgage lending rules have been tightened for the young but not for older buy-to-let investors, who squeeze out the young,” he said. “Student-fee debt is rising rapidly yet many jobs on offer – zero- hour and short-term contracts – are turning younger workers into second-class citizens. Rather than blaming the young, we should be standing up for their interests so they can afford to build lives of their own.”
Jenna Gavin, 29, lives in Southport, Merseyside, in the family home where she grew up. She moved out for a year to go to university but has been living with her parents ever since. She works as a medical receptionist nearby so she wants to stay in the area. But renting a one-bedroom flat would cost more than £420 a month before bills, which would take up a lot of her earnings. “I don’t want to rent – I don’t want to spend all that money and have nothing at the end,” she said. “I’ve looked at buying and seen mortgage advisers but I just can’t borrow enough to get on the property ladder.”
Gavin is trying to save but is struggling to amass the necessary funds. “You don’t really see it building up as much as you need – even a 5% deposit is such a lot of money and I would like to put down more,” she said. Her parents are happy not to charge her rent. “They want me to try to save up and I contribute in other ways – I bring food in and I do things around the house.”
Gavin gets on with her parents and has her own space in a room that she moved into when she was 14 but she said she had always imagined she would have her own place by the time she was 30. “I don’t see that happening as it’s next year. But, hopefully, in a couple of years, I’ll have moved out.”


Ninety-six people died at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough Stadium in 1989. During an extraordinary day 23 years later at Liverpool Cathedral, where the families of the victims met to see a report on the disaster, the most important words were: the truth. This was the headline in The Sun newspaper. We now know that the story in the newspaper was false and that the police gave them the story.
Margaret Aspinall’s son James, then 18, died at the match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. She said the families had to fight for 23 years for the truth. She said that the families’ sadness will never go away, but she is very pleased that the Prime Minister said sorry for Hillsborough.
An independent panel looked at 450,000 documents written by the police, Sheffield Wednesday and all the other groups involved. The panel then wrote a 395-page report. In the report they criticize official mistakes and say that the victims and other fans were not to blame. We already knew the cause of the disaster but we didn’t know that the police cover-up was so big. It is shocking how the police blamed the football fans for the disaster.
The panel found that the South Yorkshire Police, led by the Chief Constable, Peter Wright, told their story that drunken fans or those without tickets caused the disaster. They tested the victims’ blood for alcohol. When victims had alcohol in their blood, the police then checked to find if they had criminal records. The police said that many Liverpool fans were very drunk, were without tickets and were very violent, but the report found “no evidence” for this.
The report said that Wright met with police in a Sheffield restaurant to prepare “a defence” and “a story ”. The meeting happened just four days after the disaster. It was the day that The Sun newspaper published its headline “The Truth” and the story by four senior South Yorkshire police officers.
The panel found that officers’ statements were changed to remove criticism of the police and emphasize bad behaviour by fans. The panel found that 116 of 164 statements were changed “to remove or change negative comments about South Yorkshire police”. The police said this was done only to remove “opinion” from the statements, but the panel said they did more than that. “It was done to remove criticism of the police,” the report said.
The original inquiry did not believe this propaganda. It decided in August 1989 that the police stories of fan drunkenness and violence were false, and it criticized the police for telling lies. It said that Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium was unsafe, that the Football Association chose that stadium for the match without even checking if it had a safety certificate. It did not have a certificate.
But “the main cause” of the disaster was the way the police controlled the crowd. The police lost control outside the stadium, where 24,000 Liverpool fans had to go through just 23 small entrance gates. So police opened a large exit gate and lots of people were allowed in. They did not close one of the tunnels and, the inquiry said, this was their big mistake.
But the police still repeated their lies at the inquest. The coroner decided not to take evidence of what happened after 3.15pm on the day of the disaster, so he did not look at the chaotic behaviour of the police and the ambulance service. The panel found that if the police and ambulance service had done their jobs better, they could have saved 41 of the 96 lives lost.
There may now be a new inquest. There may be prosecutions too, after all these years, of Sheffield Wednesday, South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield City Council, which was responsible for the safety of the stadium. Trevor Hicks, whose two daughters died in the disaster, said: “The truth is out today,” Hicks said. “Tomorrow is for justice.”


Until the last, David Bowie, who has died of cancer, was still capable of springing surprises. His latest album, Blackstar, appeared on his 69th birthday on 8 January 2016 and proved that his gift for making dramatic statements as well as challenging, disturbing music hadn’t deserted him.
Throughout the 1970s, Bowie was a trailblazer of musical trends and pop fashion. Having been a late-60s mime and cabaret entertainer, he evolved into a singer-songwriter, a pioneer of glam-rock, then veered into what he called “plastic soul”, before moving to Berlin to create innovative electronic music. His capacity for mixing brilliant changes of sound and image underpinned by a genuine intellectual curiosity is rivalled by few in pop history.
Bowie was born David Robert Jones in south London. In 1953, the family moved to Kent, where David showed aptitude in singing and playing the recorder. Later, he studied art, music and design. In 1961, David’s mother bought him a plastic saxophone, introducing him to an instrument which would become a recurring ingredient in his music.
At 15, David formed his first band, the Kon-rads. It was clear that David’s talents and ambition dictated that he should go solo. David adopted the name Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees.
Bowie’s first album, released in June 1967, was titled simply David Bowie . In July 1969, Bowie released Space Oddity, the song that would give him his initial commercial breakthrough. Timed to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing, it was a top five UK hit.
In March 1970, Bowie married art student, Angela Barnett. Artistically, Bowie was powering ahead. The Man Who Sold the World was released in the US in late 1970 and in the UK the following year, and with its daring songwriting and broody, hard-rock sound, it was the first album to do full justice to his writing and performing gifts. The album’s themes included immortality, insanity, murder and mysticism, evidence that Bowie was a songwriter who was thinking way beyond pop’s usual boundaries.
He followed it with 1972’s Hunky Dory, a mix of wordy, elaborate songwriting. It was an excellent collection that met with only moderate success but that all changed with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars later that year.
This time, Bowie emerged as a fully fledged science-fiction character – an intergalactic glam-rock star visiting a doomed planet Earth – and the album effectively wrote the script for his own stardom. The hit single Starman brought instant success for the album, while Bowie’s ravishing stage costumes and provocative performances triggered fan enthusiasm unseen since Beatlemania.
Everything Bowie touched turned to gold. He had his first UK number 1 album with Aladdin Sane (1973), which generated the hit singles The Jean Genie and Drive-in Saturday . But Bowie was already planning fresh career moves.
His increasing interest in funk and soul music came to the fore on the deliciously listenable Young Americans (1975), which gave him a US chart-topper with Fame (featuring John Lennon as a guest vocalist).
Station to Station (1976) introduced a new persona, the Thin White Duke, which Bowie had carried over from his headlining performance as a melancholy space traveller in Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Bowie’s relationship with his wife had been disintegrating under the pressures of success and the couple divorced in 1980. This was a year of further creative triumph, bringing a fine album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and its spin- off chart-topping single, Ashes to Ashes, followed by Bowie’s well-received stint as John Merrick in The Elephant Man on the Broadway stage. He achieved a number 1 single with his 1981 partnership with Queen, Under Pressure while becoming increasingly involved in crossovers between different media. He appeared in the German movie Christiane F (1981) and wrote music for the soundtrack. He had another chart hit with Cat People (Putting Out Fire) from Paul Schrader’s movie Cat People (1982). Bowie continued to make progress as a screen actor with appearances in The Hunger and the second world war drama Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, both released in 1983.
Musically, this was the year in which he put his energy into an all-out commercial onslaught with the album Let’s Dance and follow-up concerts. Let’s Dance moulded Bowie into a crowd-friendly global rock star, with the album and its singles Let’s Dance, China Girl and Modern Love all becoming huge international hits.
This was the heyday of MTV and Bowie’s knack for eye-catching videos fuelled this commercial splurge, while the six-month Serious Moonlight tour drew massive crowds. It was to be the most commercially successful period of his career. His profile gained another boost from his appearance at the 1985 Live Aid famine relief concert at Wembley Stadium, where he was one of the standout performers. In addition, he teamed up with Mick Jagger to record the fundraising single Dancing in the Street, which sped to number 1. A few days after his appearance at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in April 1992, Bowie married the Somalian model Iman and the couple bought a home in New York. This new start in his private life coincided with a search for fresh musical inspiration.
For the album Black Tie White Noise (1993), he sprinkled elements of soul, electronica and hip hop into the mix. It topped the UK album chart and yielded a top 10 single, Jump They Say . New media and technology influenced his recordings, too. His 1999 album Hours … was based around music he had written for a computer game called Omikron, in which Bowie and Iman appeared as characters. The birth of Bowie and Iman’s daughter, Alexandria, followed in August 2000.
As an adopted New Yorker, Bowie was the opening act at the Concert for New York City in October 2001, where he joined Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, the Who and Elton John in a benefit show six weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Bowie was back in the studio the following year for Reality . However, in the midst of his Reality tour in 2004, Bowie was stricken with chest pains while performing in Germany and underwent emergency surgery in Hamburg to clear a blocked artery.
He took the medical emergency as a warning and reduced the pace of his activities. In 2006, he announced he would be taking a year off from touring and recording. In February that year, he was given a Grammy lifetime achievement award, having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
The Next Day (2013) was his first album of new material in a decade. It contained the single Where Are We Now?, which gave him his first UK top 10 hit since 1993. The album topped charts in Britain and around the world. In 2014, Bowie was given the Brit Award for Best British Male, making him the oldest British recipient in the awards’ history. He is survived by Iman, their daughter, Alexandria, his stepdaughter, Zulekha, and his son, Duncan, from his first marriage.


At Addis Ababa airport, visitors are greeted by pictures of golden grains, minute ochre-red seeds and a group of men gathered around a giant pancake. Billboards boast: “Teff: the ultimate gluten-free crop!”
Ethiopia is one of the world’s poorest countries, well known for its precarious food security situation. But it is also the native home of teff, a highly nutritious ancient grain increasingly finding its way into health-food shops and supermarkets in Europe and America.
Teff’s tiny seeds – the size of poppy seeds – are high in calcium, iron and protein, and boast an impressive set of amino acids. Naturally gluten free, the grain can substitute for wheat flour in anything from bread and pasta to waffles and pizza bases. Like quinoa, the Andean grain, teff’s superb nutritional profile offers the promise of new and lucrative markets in the west.
In Ethiopia, teff is a national obsession. Grown by an estimated 6.3 million farmers, fields of the crop cover more than 20% of all land under cultivation. Ground into flour and used to make injera, the spongy fermented flatbread that is basic to Ethiopian cuisine, the grain is central to many religious and cultural ceremonies. Across the country, and in neighbouring Eritrea, diners gather around large pieces of injera, which doubles as cutlery, scooping up stews and feeding one another as a sign of loyalty or friendship – a tradition known as gursha.
Outside diaspora communities in the west, teff has flown under the radar for decades. But a growing appetite for traditional crops and booming health-food and gluten-free markets are breathing new life into the grain, increasingly touted as Ethiopia’s “second gift to the world”, after coffee.
Sophie Kebede, a London-based entrepreneur who owns a UK company specializing in the grain, says she was “flabbergasted” when she discovered its nutritional value. “I didn’t know it was so sought after. I am of Ethiopian origin; I’ve been eating injera all my life.”
Growing demand for so-called ancient grains has not always been a straightforward win for poor communities. In Bolivia and Peru, reports of rising incomes owing to the now-global quinoa trade have come alongside those of malnutrition and conflicts over land, as farmers sell their entire crop to meet western demand.
Ethiopia’s growing middle class is also pushing up demand for teff and rising domestic prices have put the grain out of reach of the poorest. Today, most small farmers sell the bulk of what they grow to consumers in the city.
This may have helped boost incomes in some rural areas but it has had nutritional consequences, says the government, as teff is the most nutritionally valuable grain in the country. Estimates suggest that, while those in urban areas eat up to 61kg of teff a year, in rural areas, the figure is 20kg. The type consumed differs, too: the wealthy almost exclusively eat the more expensive magna and white teff varieties; less well-off consumers tend to eat less-valuable red and mixed teff, and more than half combine it with cheaper cereals such as sorghum and maize.
The Ethiopian government wants to double teff production by 2015. Its strategy, published in 2013, argues that the grain could play an important role in school meals and emergency aid programmes, and help reduce malnutrition – particularly among children and adolescents.
Though Ethiopia has a fast-growing economy, it remains on the UN’s list of least-developed countries. An estimated 20% of under-fives are malnourished or suffer stunted growth.
The government’s Agricultural Transformation Agency aims to boost yields by developing improved varieties of the grain, along with new planting techniques and tools to reduce post-harvest losses.
Government restrictions, instituted in 2006, forbid the export of raw teff grain, only allowing shipments of injera and other processed products. But this could change: the goal is to produce enough teff for domestic consumption and a strong export market, according to the government’s strategy.
Mama Fresh is a family firm that has been selling injera to top restaurants and hotels in the Ethiopian capital for years. It also ships the flatbread to Finland, Germany, Sweden and the US, primarily for consumption by diaspora communities. But, the company has its eye on the gluten-free market. It aims to double exports to America in 2014 and will soon start producing teff-based pizzas, bread and cookies.
“Typically, these products are going to go through many hands before they reach the shelves of Sainsbury’s or wherever. There are profit margins at every step and small farmers are not necessarily well placed to bargain with the bigger traders,” says David Hallam, trade and markets director at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. He sees quinoa’s popularity as a cautionary tale of how export opportunities can be a mixed blessing for poor countries.
Regassa Feyissa, an Ethiopian agricultural scientist and former head of the National Institute for Biodiversity, warns that, without careful planning, increased teff production for export may displace other important crops for farmers. And, efforts to boost production could benefit business interests at the expense of small farmers.
With little Ethiopian teff on the international market, farmers in the US have started planting the crop. Farmers in Europe, Israel and Australia have also experimented with it.
Kebede says she gets her grain from farms in southern Europe, though she would prefer to source it from Ethiopia. “Teff is second nature to an Ethiopian, so who better to supply it? We have this sought-after grain being grown in the country, so why can’t an Ethiopian farmer benefit from this?”


We talked to five people who do some unusual jobs about how much they are paid, what the worst parts are and why they enjoy their work.
1. Dog-food taster
The job: To taste dog food to make sure it is good quality
What this person does: Opens tins of dog (or cat) food, smells it and eats it. “Tasting is an important quality check to make sure each different ingredient is perfectly balanced,” says Philip Wells, the chief taster for Lily’s Kitchen pet food.
Typical salary: £20,000 for a job in the quality department
Worst part of the job: The deadlines. Wells says he likes the food. The meat in pet food must come from animals that humans can safely eat. He also says: “There are some terrible pet foods. I don’t taste them but just the smell makes you feel sick.”
Job satisfaction: “Every day is different.” Wells likes knowing that he “helps pets to become happier and healthier”. But he says that someone else in the tasting team is also a very important member: Lily, the dog.
2. Hygiene technician
The job: To clean areas that might be dangerous to humans
What this person does: Cleans up crime scenes, road accidents and suicides. Clears houses full of rubbish, rats and excrement … and other things, too. “The job is to keep people safe,” says Richard Lewis, a hygiene technician for Rentokil. “We work in some very, very dirty places.”
Typical salary: When you start, the salary is usually around £14,500. A top salary can be up to £22,000.
Worst part of the job: Cleaning up after suicides. “You get used to the job being disgusting. But the emotional side of the job is still hard,” he says. “You also need to have a sense of humour because some days can be difficult.”
Job satisfaction: Lewis finds the variety of tasks exciting. “One day, I’m cleaning up after a dead body; another day, I’m in a prison cell. It’s satisfying to make a dangerous place safe again.” he says.
3. Biogas engineer
The job: To set up biogas plants in developing countries What this person does: Helps poor people produce biogas from their excrement and other waste products. This is done by linking a system to toilets. Poor people can use the gas for cooking and lighting.
Typical salary: When you start, the salary is around £10,000. A typical salary for a chief technical officer is £30,000.
Worst part of the job: For Baburam Paudel, chief technical officer in Nepal for the charity Renewable World, the worst part is seeing people struggling to survive on very little money. “Unsurprisingly, the smell of the waste products can be disgusting. It smells like rotten eggs.”
Job satisfaction: “I find it very satisfying to know that I am helping people to earn more money and also allowing girls to go to school because they don’t need to collect firewood,” says Paudel. “My work improves the health and hygiene of whole communities.”
4. Eel ecologist
The job: To help the critically endangered European eel to survive
What this person does: Checks the size of the endangered eels. They do this by walking into the Thames and other London rivers, which are full of eels. In the rivers, they put their hands into a net filled with up to 20 adult eels and pull an eel out. “Adult eels can be a metre long, or even larger, and weigh up to 2kg. They’re not dangerous but they are almost 100% muscle and they can be a little bit slimy,” says Stephen Mowat, an eel ecologist for the Zoological Society of London. “We have to weigh and measure them and they wriggle … a lot. I look silly when I’m crawling on the ground chasing an eel across the grass.”
Worst part of the job: “Eels are really difficult animals to work with” says Mowat. But, for Mowat, the worst part of the job is not the eels – he believes baby eels are “as cute as pandas”: “The worst thing about the job is seeing how much damage humans do to the environment.”
Job satisfaction: “Working outside and seeing British wildlife really close is the best part of the job,” says Mowat. “Eels are beautiful animals and working with eels helps whole river systems. That is a great thing to do.”
5. Shopping channel presenter
The job: To sell and demonstrate lots of different products on live TV
What this person does: Presents hours and hours of boring TV and, at the same time, demonstrates the products and looks enthusiastic about everything that they are selling. “I prepare and research as much information as possible on every product,” says Shaun Ryan, presenter for Ideal World TV. Typical salary: When you start, the salary is a minimum of £30,000. An experienced presenter can get over £55,000.
Worst part of the job: “Working at unusual hours of the day,” says Ryan. “An experienced presenter like me has to work weekends and very late evenings. And, sometimes, I have to start work at five in the morning.”
Job satisfaction: “I love presenting live TV and having to think quickly,” says Ryan. “I also love knowing that, at times, thousands of people are buying the product that I have just presented.”


Intermediate
All six numbers match, so its time to buy that Audi, book the holiday in the US and phone the estate agent. At least, thats what most lottery millionaires do, according to a study of spending and investment by jackpot winners.
Since it started in 1994, the UK national lottery has created 3,000 millionaires who have won more than 8.5bn in total, at an average of 2.8m each. Between them, they have created a further 3,780 millionaires among their children, family and friends, according to the authors of the study, Oxford Economics.
Most winners (59%) give up work straight away, but 19% carry on working and 31% do unpaid voluntary work. The good news for the economy is that 98% of the money the winners spent remained in the UK. Through their spending on property, vehicles and holidays, it is estimated that each winner keeps six people in a full-time job for a year.
Winners have contributed almost 750m to gross domestic product (GDP), and generated more than 500m in tax for the Exchequer. The bulk of the money went on property, with 2.72bn spent on winners main properties, and 170m in paying off existing debt and mortgages.
2.125bn was spent on investments. Gifts to family and friends accounted for 1.17bn, and 680m was spent on cars and holidays.
The study was based on research from 100 1m-plus winners. It found that in total the 3,000 winners have purchased 7,958 houses or flats in the UK, or 2.7 each, spending 3.3bn. Most winners (82%) changed their main home, spending an average 900,000.
The new home is likely to have a hot tub, with almost a third (29%) putting that on their shopping list. A walk-in wardrobe was absolutely necessary for 28%, almost a quarter (24%) chose a property behind electric gates, and 22% had a games room, with 7% installing a snooker table.
Larger properties need maintaining, and 30% of winners employed a cleaner and 24% a gardener. A small proportion (5%) employed a beautician.
Audis were the favourite cars of 16% of winners, with Range Rovers and BMWs also popular purchases (11% each), as well as Mercedes (10%) and Land Rovers (5%). Winners spent 463m on 17,190 cars, with the average price of their favourite being 46,116.
Holidays were also a priority. The majority (68%) choose five-star hotels overseas. The US was the favoured destination for 27%, followed by the Caribbean (9%). Closer to home, however, UK caravan sales have benefited. Over the past 18 years, 10% of millionaires have bought a caravan, generating sales worth about 7.4m.
Some winners (15%) have started their own businesses, 9% have helped others to do so, and 6% have invested in or bought other peoples businesses. Businesses started or supported by lottery winners employ 3,195 people, according to the study.
Andy Logan, author of the report, said: The effect of a win spreads much further and wider than we expected. Not only does it change the lives of friends and family, but each win has an effect on the UK economy, especially with so much of it being spent in the UK.


Intermediate
The mass collection of telephone records by government surveillance programmes poses a threat to the personal privacy of ordinary people, say US researchers. They used basic phone logs to identify people and find out confidential information about their lives.
With metadata on peoples calls and texts, but not the content of the communications, two scientists at Stanford University worked out peoples names, where they lived and the names of their partners. But, that was not all.
The same metadata led them to discover confidential information about some people. They discovered that one man had a gun and that another man had a heart problem. Other data told them about a new pregnancy and a person with multiple sclerosis.
The results show the extraordinary power of telephone metadata  that is, the number called, when and for how long  particularly when you use it together with public information from services such as Google, Yelp and Facebook. Security services know how important this data is. Stewart Baker, the former general counsel at the US National Security Agency (NSA), said Metadata tells you everything about somebodys life.
Patrick Mutchler, a computer security researcher at Stanford, said that the power of metadata was understood by people who collect the information but the public was in the dark. That made it difficult for people to fight these programmes. Now, we have hard evidence we can point to that we didnt have in the past, he said.
For the study, 823 people agreed to have metadata collected from their phones through an Android app. The app also received information from their Facebook accounts, which the scientists used to check the accuracy of their results. In total, the researchers collected metadata on more than 250,000 calls and over 1.2m texts.
Mutchler describes how, with very little money, he and Jonathan Mayer, discovered a lot of personal information, some of it confidential, about people who took part in the study. They could find out 82% of peoples names. The same technique gave them the names of businesses the people had called. When these were marked on a map, they showed groups of local businesses, which the scientists speculated surrounded the persons home address. In this way, they named the city people lived in 57% of the time and were nearly 90% accurate in placing people within 50 miles of their home.
Then, using a simple computer program to analyse peoples call patterns, the scientists could see who was in a relationship. Once they knew the owner of a particular number had a partner, it was easy to find out who the partner was, they said.
For the final part of the study, the researchers looked even deeper, to see what private information they could find out from telephone metadata. They collected details on calls made to and from a list of organizations, including hospitals, pharmacies, religious groups and legal services. From these, they put together some extraordinary pictures of peoples lives.
One person in the study made frequent calls to a local gun shop and later made long calls to the customer support hotline of a major gun manufacturer. The metadata from two others suggested one had multiple sclerosis and the other had just become pregnant.
All of this shows what is possible with two graduate students and limited resources, said Mutchler. He says that the results should make policymakers think twice before allowing mass surveillance programmes. Metadata surveillance programmes, like the NSAs, will reveal highly confidential information about ordinary people, the scientists said.


The vice-president of Google has warned that digitized material from blogs, tweets, pictures, videos and official documents such as emails could be lost forever because the programs we need to view them will no longer exist. Our first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. He said that we might become a “forgotten generation or even a forgotten century” because of “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.
Cerf said we should develop digital methods to preserve old software and hardware to read old files. “So much of the information about our daily lives is in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets and all of the world wide web. So it’s clear that we could lose a lot of our history,” he said. “If we want to keep it, we need to make sure that people can still see the digital objects we create today in the future,” he added.
What is ’bit rot’ and is Vint Cerf right to be worried? His warning highlights an irony about modern technology: we digitize music, photos, letters and other documents so that they survive for centuries but the programs and hardware people will need to read those files don’t survive.
“We are throwing all of our data into an information black hole. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them. But what we don’t understand is that, if we don’t do something, those digital versions may not be any better than the things that we digitized. In fact, they may be worse,” Cerf says. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
Ancient civilizations did not have these problems because people wrote histories down and we need only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future historians will have to read PDFs, Word documents and hundreds of other file types, using special software and sometimes hardware, too.
The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was normal to save documents on floppy disks and buy computer games on cassettes. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, we can now only find the equipment to view them in museums.
Cerf warns that we will also lose important political and historical documents because of bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln. She went to libraries around the US and found the paper letters of the people involved. “In today’s world, those letters would be emails and it will be almost impossible to find them one hundred years from now,” said Cerf.
He admits that historians will try to preserve important material. But he says that people often don’t understand the importance of documents until hundreds of years later. Historians have learned how Archimedes thought about infinity in 3BC because they found his writings hidden under the words of a thirteenth-century book. “We’ve been surprised by what we’ve learned from objects that have been preserved by accident,” he said.
Researchers in Pittsburgh are trying to find a solution to bit rot. They are creating a computer that can read old files.
Inventing new technology helps but it is only part of the solution. It could be even more difficult to get the legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies. “To do this properly, we might need to think about things like copyright. We’re talking about preserving documents for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Cerf.


When you enter a department store, cameras are watching you. If you pick something up, a camera will make sure you don’t put it into your bag. Cameras will follow you around the store. But new technology is less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, gender and shopping habits.
A few months ago, IT company Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) wrote a report that said around 30% of stores use facial recognition technology to track customers in shops. Facial recognition is a technology that can identify people – it analyses and compares people’s faces. Shops use special cameras for this, like the Intel RealSense camera.
Joe Jensen, who works for Intel, says that the aim of using RealSense technology in shops is not to get information about specific people’s lives but to understand, in general, people’s lifestyles and shopping habits. “We don’t need to know a particular shopper. We need to know what characteristics this shopper has and that, when those characteristics are present, this is what a person usually does.”
This technology makes it possible to predict what a person may or may not do in a shop. If, for example, a woman is walking quickly towards the sock section, a store can automatically put ads on screens specifically for that person. If she looks like the type of person who wants to buy socks, they will show her adverts for socks.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because the internet has been using techniques like these for years. If you search for something on Amazon, you’ll get ads for similar products on other sites. But it’s not easy to use these systems in shops. People do not react to cameras in the same way as they do to cookies on websites.
One company, Hoxton Analytics, has developed a technology that puts people into categories based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of people’s shoes, the system can identify a customer ’s gender with 75-80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, says that they wanted the system to be different from facial recognition. “I thought, why don’t we simply look at the clothes someone’s wearing? ” he said. “If I just showed you a photo of someone’s body, you could probably tell me what gender they are. But pointing a camera at someone’s body feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was – what about people’s shoes?”
People use the word “creepy” a lot during discussions of tracking in stores. Stores need to find a way of getting information without seeming intrusive.
McCormack says, “Right now, shops are doing lots of intrusive things but we just don’t know about it. We tell the shops that, if you know someone’s a male or a female, your advertising will work better. If you know that everyone in your shop right now is a male, you’ll advertise PlayStations not hairdryers.”
It is easy to understand that stores want some of the information online stores collect. We allow this to happen online so why not in shops? But shopping centres are different from websites – you walk from one shop to another without a computer asking you if it’s ok to collect information about you.
But young people who are growing up with online shopping do not think online advertising is invasive. In the CSC report, a survey showed that 72% of people aged 55 or more said they were very uncomfortable with these types of technologies in real shops. But only 51% of 16-24 year olds said they were uncomfortable. In any case, there are more and more eyes watching you and they care a lot about what you’re wearing.


Intermediate
Passing clouds One of the pleasures of flying is seeing clouds close up. Even though they seem to be light, they carry a lot of water  around 500 tonnes in a small cloud. And water is heavier than air. So why dont clouds fall out of the sky like rain? They do, but they take a very long time. An average cloud would take a year to fall one metre.
On cloud nine Most of us are happy to call clouds fluffy ones or nasty black ones, but meteorologists identify more than 50 cloud types. These fit into categories given the numbers one to nine. Cloud nine is the vast, tall cumulonimbus, so to be on cloud nine means that you are on top of the world.
Around the rainbow Theres no better place to see a rainbow than from a plane. Rainbows are produced when sunlight hits raindrops. We see a bow because the Earth gets in the way, but, from a plane, a rainbow is a complete circle.
Mr blue sky Sunlight is white, containing all the colours of the spectrum, but, as it passes through air, some of the light is scattered when it interacts with the gas molecules. Blue light scatters more than the lowerenergy colours, so the blue looks like it comes from the sky.
Theres life out there Apart from clouds and other planes, we dont expect to see much directly outside a flying aircrafts window, but the air is full of bacterial life  as many as 1,800 different types of bacteria have been detected over cities and they can reach twice the cruising height of a plane.
Turbulence terror Turbulence can make even the most experienced flyer turn green. The violent movements of air can cause anything from repeated bumping to sudden, dramatic plunges. The good news for nervous flyers is that no modern airliner has ever been brought down by turbulence. People have been injured and occasionally killed when they are not strapped in, or get hit by falling luggage  but the plane is not going to fall out of the sky.
In-flight radiation When body scanners were introduced at airports, there were radiation scares, but the level produced by the scanners is the same as passengers receive in one minute of flight. The Earth is constantly hit by cosmic rays, natural radiation from space that is stronger at altitude.
You cant cure jet lag The world is divided into time zones. The result is that long-haul travel results in a difference between local time and your bodys time, causing jet lag. However, its effects can be reduced by keeping food bland for 24 hours before travel, drinking plenty of fluids and living on your destination time from the moment you reach the aircraft.
Supersonic 747s Many of us have travelled faster than sound. There are a number of jet streams in the upper atmosphere, especially on the journey from the US to Europe, where a temperature inversion causes a stream of air to move as fast as 250 miles per hour. If an airliner with an airspeed of 550mph enters a jet stream, the result can be that it flies at 800mph, faster than the speed of sound.
Flying through time Time zones provide an artificial journey through time  but special relativity means that a flight involves actual time travel. However, its so minimal that crossing the Atlantic weekly for 40 years would only move you 1/1,000th of a second into the future.
Terrible tea Dont blame the cabin attendant if your tea isnt great. Water should be just under 100C when it is poured on to tea leaves  but that isnt possible on a plane. Its impossible to get water beyond 90C during flight  so choose coffee.
I cant hear my food Airline food is often said to be bland and tasteless. Some of the problem may not be poor catering, though. A plane is a noisy place and food loses some of its taste when we are surrounded by loud noises.
Needle in a haystack With modern technology, it seems strange that Malaysian flight MH370 could disappear  but finding a missing aircraft is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. The plane knows where it is but this information is not sent elsewhere in real time. That would be possible. Ships have had tracking since the 1980s  the problem is not technology but that there is no law saying that it is required.
Volcanic fallout Air travel can be cancelled by volcanic activity. Glass-like ash particles melt in the heat of the engine, then solidify on the rotors. Cancelling all flights in an ash cloud may be inconvenient  but the risks of ignoring the ash are clear.
The wing myth For many years, we taught the wrong explanation for the way wings keep planes in the air. In fact, almost all a planes lift comes from Newtons Third Law of Motion. The wing is shaped to push air downwards. As the air is pushed down, the wing gets an equal and opposite push upwards, lifting the plane.


David Cameron, Barack Obama and Pamela Anderson have refused. George W Bush, Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Hawking have taken part. As the Ice Bucket Challenge notched up $100m for a US motor-neurone- disease charity and £4.5m for a British one, as well as thousands more for charities in Hong Kong and Australia, the bracing cold water of a backlash has quickly followed.
Narcissistic celebrities showing off toned bodies, people having all the fun without donating, complaints about the waste of water – the attacks have come from commentators, animal-rights groups and environmentalists. And the US Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association – which is not related to Britain’s MND Association – also came under fire for the six-figure salaries being paid to its top staff.
Meanwhile, the challenge continues to grow. For anyone unaware of how it works, someone gives a short speech to camera about the charity, then dumps a bucket of ice cubes in water over their head, or gets a friend to do it, before nominating three people to either do the same or donate.
It began in the US in July, although whether it was on a golf course or a baseball field depends on which version you prefer, and first appeared on mainstream American television on 15 July. But the ALS Association has now been forced to withdraw an attempt to patent the phrase “Ice Bucket Challenge” after criticism. “We understand the public’s concern and are withdrawing the trademark applications,” spokeswoman Carrie Munk said. The ALS has yet to respond to criticism of its high overheads and wage bills.
The unfortunate coincidence that 31 August to 5 September was World Water Week, with international delegates arriving in Stockholm to discuss the planet’s water crisis, has not been lost on some. The charity WaterAid is asking people to use recycled water from bathtubs or garden butts or to douse people with sea water.
Douglas Graham, the MND Association’s fundraising director, said: “The backlash is to be expected but, really, this is just a wonderful windfall and we’re so grateful. We didn’t see it coming but, suddenly, the donations just started.” The boost is an enormous help to a small charity looking after sufferers of a debilitating, little- understood disease that has no cure and kills five people a day in the UK.
Former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, a longstanding animal-rights activist, wrote an open letter to the ALS Association, saying she could not support its record on animal experimentation. A few US stars have rejected the challenge because of California’s drought. Actor Matt Damon got around the problem by pulling up water from his toilets – pointing out that much of the world had less clean drinking water available. Actor Verne Troyer used milk, again citing environmental reasons. And the challenge has been blamed for causing a water shortage on the Scottish island of Colonsay after its 135 inhabitants picked up on the craze.
In Australia, a TV anchorman apologized over his robust “no, thanks” response to being nominated. Lincoln Humphries had said: “Instead of pouring fresh water over your own head and wasting ice, here is a list of charities helping communities in desperate need of money across the world. I’d like to nominate everyone, everywhere, who has more than they need, to donate what they can to the people who need it most … because that is what charity is about, not putting yourself through mild discomfort with a bucket of icy water.”
Another criticism has been that small charities won’t be able to cope with the extra cash, but the MND Association rejected this. “Oh, we can cope here,” said Graham. “We fund world-class research into the causes and, ultimately, to find a treatment or cure. We provide care and support for 3,500 people and they need it because this is such a rapidly progressing disease and it’s a costly one to manage. Over 50% die within two years of diagnosis. It’s heartbreaking to see the decline in people we work with over just a few months.”
But, for many people with a connection to the disease, the awareness that the challenge has created is as valuable as the cash. Graham says it is priceless. Normally, the MND Association gets around 300,000 hits a year on its website. On a single day recently, it had 330,000.
“We couldn’t have created this if we’d tried. Charities are all worthwhile causes and I understand even that some people might want to donate to a different one. In 2013, British people gave £62bn to charity – we should be proud of that. It’s fabulous for us to get this windfall. We’ll be sitting down over the next few weeks to work out how to spend it in the best way but, I assure you, every penny will count for good.”


Intermediate
Male bosses are paid bonuses double the size of those given to female colleagues in identical jobs. This means that men get salary top-ups of 141,500 more than women over their working lives.
The figures, released by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), reveal that men in UK management roles earned average bonuses of 6,442 in 2012 compared with 3,029 for women.
In the most senior roles, female directors received bonuses of 36,270 over the past 12 months, compared with 63,700 awarded to male directors.
The latest figures show that pay in British business is still not equal. This has led to calls for action from campaigners on workplace equality.
Ann Francke, the CMIs chief executive said: Its time to move this issue into the mainstream management agenda.
This is about changing our approach to management. There should be greater flexibility, less masculine cultures, more emphasis on outcomes rather than time in the office and greater transparency around performance and rewards.
In solving this issue, we would actually raise the performance of organizations and the well-being of individuals at work. What are we waiting for?
While some of the data may be affected by factors such as women doing jobs where there is less of a culture of bonus payments, the differences in the sizes of bonuses do appear to make Britains pay gap worse. The government says the pay gap is closing but that full-time male employees still earn 10% more than women.
Maria Miller, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said: The CMI figures are another example from the world of work showing that women still lose out to their male counterparts.
Changes in the workplace are happening and its good that the pay gap is closing  but there is still more to do before we see full equality in the workplace.
The government is playing its part. We have signed up 120 companies to our Think, Act, Report scheme, which encourages companies to improve the way they recruit, promote and pay women.
Weve also looked at other pay gap causes, such as having to juggle work and family responsibilities. We have introduced shared parental leave and the right to request flexible working to all employees.
Large companies such as Tesco, BT, Unilever and the international law firm Eversheds are among those signed up to Think, Act, Report. The scheme has only attracted 120 supporters in nearly two years of existence.
However, the CMIs data did provide some evidence to support Millers statement that the overall pay gap is narrowing: the difference between the average salaries earned by male and female bosses appeared to shrink from 2012.
A sub-set of 17,000 individual managers, whose salaries and bonuses have been followed over a number of years, showed that male managers earnings are rising faster than womens for the first time in five years. Mens earnings increased by 3.2% compared with a 2.8% increase for women, when salaries and bonuses are combined.
At the most senior level, male directors earnings rose by 5.3% over the past 12 months, compared with just 1.1% for female directors.


The bestselling book on Amazon in the US is a colouring books for adults by Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford.
Basford’s pictures of animals and plants in Secret Garden have sold more than 1.4 million copies around the world and her next book, Enchanted Forest , has sold 226,000 copies already. The books have celebrity fans like Zooey Deschanel, who shared a link about the book with her Facebook followers, and the South Korean pop star Kim Ki-Bum, who posted an image on Instagram for his 1.6 million followers.
“It’s been crazy. The last few weeks have been madness, but fantastic madness,” said Eleanor Blatherwick, head of sales and marketing at the books’ publisher, Laurence King. “We knew the books would be beautiful but we didn’t realize they would be such a big success.” and calm”.
And it is not just Basford’s books that adults want to colour in. In the UK, Richard Merritt’s Art Therapy Colouring Book is in fourth place on Amazon’s bestseller lists, Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom – detailed pictures of animals to colour – is in seventh place and a mindfulness colouring book is in ninth place. Basford’s books are in second and eighth place – so half of Amazon. co.uk’s top ten is filled by colouring books for adults.
Independent UK publisher Michael O’Mara has sold around 340,000 adult colouring books. Ana McLaughlin works for them. She says the craze has happened because they are telling people that the books will help them to relax. “The first book we did was in 2012, Creative Colouring for Grown-Ups . It sold well but it was in 2014 that adult colouring books became really popular with Art Therapy . We tell people they are anti-stress books so people are allowed to enjoy something they thought was childish before,” she said.
The Mindfulness Colouring Book says that it is filled with beautiful scenes and intricate, sophisticated patterns. This makes you relax “as you fill these pages with colour”. The book suggests that people “take a few minutes, wherever you are, and colour your way to peace
“I think it is really relaxing to unplug,” said Basford. “And it’s creative. For many people, a blank sheet of paper is very daunting; with a colouring book you just need to bring the colour. Also, people do it because they feel nostalgia for their childhoods. So many people have said to me that they used to do secret colouring in when their kids were in bed. Now, people don’t feel silly. These are books for adults. The art in my books is super intricate.” The illustrator, who lives in Aberdeenshire, is creating a third book.
“The pictures are all over Twitter and Instagram. People are really proud of them – they are so intricate,” she said. “People send us pictures of them,” said McLaughlin.


Poorer countries will be most affected by climate change in the next century.
Sea levels will rise, there will be stronger cyclones, warmer days and nights, more rainfall, and larger and longer heatwaves, says a new report.
The last big United Nations (UN) report, in 2007, said there would be temperature rises of 6°C or more by the end of the century. Scientists now think this will not happen, but average land and sea temperatures will probably continue rising during this century, possibly becoming 4 °C hotter than now. That rise would ruin crops and make life in many cities too hot.
As temperatures rise and oceans become warmer, there will be big changes in annual rainfall in tropical and subtropical regions, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in Stockholm and published online in September 2013.
East Africa can expect more short rainfalls and west Africa should expect heavier monsoons. Burma, Bangladesh and India can expect stronger cyclones; elsewhere in southern Asia, there will probably be heavier summer rainfalls. Indonesia may receive less rainfall between July and October, but the coastal regions around the south China Sea and Gulf of Thailand can expect more rainfall when cyclones hit the land. 'Rainfall patterns will change. Northern countries, for example in Europe or North America, will probably receive more rainfall, but many subtropical, dry regions will likely get less rain,' said the report.
The report also said that the monsoon season will probably start earlier and last longer.
Scientists in developing countries are happy with the report. “The IPCC says that climate change is real and happening much more strongly than before. We are already seeing the effects of climate change in Bangladesh and across south Asia. It’s not news to us.
Most developing countries are experiencing climate change now. They do not need the IPCC to tell them that the weather is changing,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development.
Scientists have also lowered their predictions for sea-level rises. Sea levels will probably rise an average of 40 –62 cm by 2100. But many millions of people living in the developing world’s great cities, including Lagos and Calcutta, are in danger.
Weather disasters are also more likely in a warmer world, the report says. The number of tropical cyclones will probably not change, but they may become more intense, with stronger winds and heavier rainfall.
Life in many developing country cities could become very difﬁcult, especially because city temperatures are already higher than those in the countryside. Much higher temperatures could reduce the length of the growing period in some parts of Africa by up to 20%, the report said.
The charity Oxfam said that world hunger would get worse because climate changes hurt crop production. They said the number of people at risk of hunger might increase by 10% to 20% by 2050.
“The changing climate is already hurting the ﬁght against hunger, and it looks like it will get worse,” said Oxfam. “A hot world is a hungry world”.


A new scientiﬁc study says that global warming might make temperatures rise more than people think. The scientist who led the research said that, if emissions of greenhouse gases are not reduced, the planet will be at least 4C warmer by 2100. This is twice the level the world’s governments consider to be dangerous. The research shows that fewer clouds form as the planet warms. This means that less sunlight reﬂects back into space and this makes temperatures even higher. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery in the study of future climate change.
Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who led the research, said that their work was new in two ways. First, it found what controls the cloud changes and, second, it did not accept the lowest estimates of future global warming; it believed the higher, more damaging estimates.
“4C would be catastrophic, not simply dangerous,” Sherwood said. “For example, it would make life difﬁcult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics and it would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet.” And, if the ice sheets melt, sea levels will rise by many metres.
The research helps to show how much warming is caused by rises in carbon emissions, say scientists who have commented on the study, published in the journal Nature.
Experts at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies said the explanation of how fewer clouds form as the world warms was a good one. They also agreed that this showed future climate change would be bigger than people think. To measure the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate, scientists estimate what the rise in temperature would be with twice as much CO in the atmosphere as in the pre-industrial age – and this will probably happen within 50 years. For twenty years, those estimates have been from 1.5C to 5C: a wide range. The new research has reduced that range to between 3C and 5C, by studying the biggest cause of uncertainty: clouds.
Researchers use computer climate models to predict future temperatures and it was important to include the way clouds form in those models. When water evaporates from the oceans, the vapour can rise over nine miles to form rain clouds that reﬂect sunlight; or, it may rise just a few miles and fall slowly back down without forming clouds.
In reality, both things happen and climate models that include the second possibility predict much higher future temperatures than the models that only include the nine-mile-high clouds. “Climate sceptics like to criticize climate models because they are sometimes wrong, and we know that they are not perfect,” said Sherwood. “But we are ﬁnding that the mistakes are being made by the models that predict less warming, not the models that predict more warming.” He added: “Sceptics may also point to the pause in the rise of temperatures since the end of the 20th century, but there is more and more evidence that we cannot see this pause in other measures of the climate system.
And the pause is almost certainly temporary. ” The world’s average air temperatures have increased quite slowly since a high point in 1998, which the ocean phenomenon El Niño caused. But, greenhouse gases are trapping more and more heat and over 90% disappears into the oceans. Also, a recent study suggested that it may seem there is a “pause”, but this is only because we did not have temperature readings from polar regions, where there is the most warming. Sherwood accepts that his team’s work on the role of clouds does not mean for sure that temperature rises will be in the higher range. He added that a 4C rise in the world’s average temperatures would have a serious effect on the world and the economies of many countries if we do not reduce emissions.


Intermediate
For 85 years, it was just a grey blob on classroom maps of the solar system. But, on 15 July, Pluto was seen in high resolution for the first time. The images show dramatic mountain ranges made from solid water ice as big as the Alps or the Rockies.
The extraordinary images of the former ninth planet and its large moon, Charon, were sent back 4bn miles to Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft. They are the climax of a mission that has been quietly underway for nearly ten years.
Alan Stern, the missions principal investigator, said New Horizons is returning amazing results. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind-blowing.
One of the biggest surprises was the discovery that there are mountains in the Kuiper belt, the solar systems mysterious third zone where Pluto is, with about 100,000 smaller icy objects. John Spencer, a mission scientist, said the mountains appear to be around 3,000 metres high and several hundred miles across.
The detailed image of one edge of the dwarf planet showed not a single crater. This tells scientists that there has been recent geological activity on the surface, which could include dramatic geysers throwing ice into the atmosphere or cryo-volcanoes that erupt in explosions of ice.
Pluto used to be the ninth planet but, since 2006, it has been known as a dwarf planet. The NASA press conference began with spectacular images of the sun and the eight official planets. Weve brought what was previously a blurred point of light into focus, said Dwayne Brown, NASA spokesman, as scientists and journalists waited for the image to be shown.
Stern said that there would be many more images and that we would learn a lot more about the planet during the coming year. The images have already produced some surprises. Scientists believe the mountains are made from water ice with just a thin cover of exotic ices, methane and nitrogen.
Water ice is strong enough to hold up big mountains and thats what we think we can see here. This is the first time weve seen this. The methane and nitrogen are just a coating. The mountains on Pluto probably formed no more than 100m years ago  extremely recently in the 4.56bn-year-old solar system. This suggests the region, which covers about 1% of Plutos surface, may still be geologically active. The images are the first to show ice mountains, except those found on the moons of giant planets.
The images are so detailed that, if the craft were flying over London, we would be able to see the runways at Heathrow airport.
The distance to Pluto  5bn km  means it takes New Horizons hours to send back a picture and it will take 16 months to send back all the data. The team also announced that the heart-shaped feature visible on Pluto will now be known as the Tombaugh Regio, after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the dwarf planet in 1930.
The new view of Charon reveals an area of cliffs stretching about 1,000km. This suggests cracks in Charons surface, which could also be the result of geological activity. The image also shows a dramatic canyon about 7 to 9km deep.
Cathy Olkin, a mission scientist, said: Charon just blew our socks off when we saw the new image today. The team has just been abuzz. There is so much interesting science in this one image alone. Scientists think that Pluto is two thirds rock surrounded by a lot of ice, with surface temperatures of about minus 230C. As the 460m mission continues into the Kuiper belt, scientists hope that it will help us to see and understand more of the ancient solar system and the origins of planets. It may even help to explain the formation of the Earth itself.
Andrew Coates, head of planetary science at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: These Kuiper belt objects are the building blocks of the outer solar system. Theyre all very cold  its like a cosmic deep freeze. Its the best way of preserving solar system history. That is what is so fascinating about this. Its a really thrilling time for solar system exploration.
In August 2015, mission scientists will choose which of two objects to visit next. NASA estimates that the spacecraft will be able to keep recording and sending back data until the mid-2030s. Then, its plutonium power source will run out and it will drift outwards towards the edge of the solar system and deep space.
New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos. New Horizons is a true mission of exploration, showing us why basic scientific research is so important, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASAs Science Mission Directorate.
The images also suggest that Hydras surface is probably coated with water ice. Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this, and the other moon, billions of years ago.


In typical bad-boyfriend style, Dan Sullivan was late to breakfast with the Guardian because he got pulled over on his motorcycle.
Sullivan works too much, he says. He misses dinner dates. He forgets to give presents.
And so, like seemingly everyone in Silicon Valley, the 27-year-old venture capitalist has come up with a start-up to fix it: BetterBoyfriend.me, a service that sends girlfriends and wives a present every month for about $70.
Sullivan, who works in finance, has been quietly testing the program and has signed up about 350 boyfriends generating about $17,000 revenue every month. Most members, he says, are from his collection of Harvard and investor friends: venture capitalists, founders and employees of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, whose girlfriends have been getting presents from Sullivan for the last year.
Each month, Sullivan’s members choose from a list of seven possible gifts (chocolate, tea sets, manicures). The package is sent to the boyfriend unbranded and unlabelled.
He tests his ideas by buying Facebook ads just to see what kind of traction they get. BetterBoyfriend.me took off. “BetterBoyfriend hit something,” Sullivan said. “It’s a pain point everyone has.”
BetterBoyfriend.me was not Sullivan’s first idea. For a couple of days, he thought about a dog-sharing pitch: “I see all these rich guys looking just miserable walking dogs and I realized: a dog is only valuable 5% of the time,” he said. “So, what if we got a guy who would babysit the dogs and other people could rent them out?”
Another start-up, called InvisibleBoyfriend, allows users “to design and build a believable social partner who is everything you want and is always available to talk, whenever you want”. The end result is a “boyfriend” who can text with you all day.
Founder Kyle Tabor launched it to give users a faux boyfriend to deter unwanted advances but has found people have grown attached to their algorithmic partners: “Many more users are seeking companionship through conversation rather than external 'proof' of a relationship to get people off their back.”
For Sullivan and Tabor, the surprise was the real relationships that have formed with their customers. Sullivan says he has begun to see himself as a sort of relationship consultant for the boyfriends.
Sullivan admits he’s made mistakes. Early on, the packages included receipts that had his name on them, Dan Sullivan. “One of the boyfriends wrote to me and said, 'Listen, dude, she’s not mad but Cynthia found out'.”
About 50% of the women BetterBoyfriend.me deliver packages to know about his involvement in their relationships: “It’s correlated with age. I think, after you’ve been married a while, you don’t keep many secrets.”
And over the year, the young founder says he’s got to know the boyfriends really well. They’ve even done a delivery to a hospital delivery room. The key, he said, is to remember that his relationship is with the boyfriend.
When he first launched his company, he attached tags that said BetterBoyfriend.me to flower bouquets and set off for Dolores Park, a popular lounging spot in the tech- and youth-heavy Mission District.
“I looked for couples and gave the bouquet to the girl but that didn’t go down well with the boyfriend. Like, not at all. It made sense, though. It was cool,” he said. “So, I reconsidered and started handing them out to the boyfriends.”


A mirror that sends heat into the frigid expanse of space has been designed by scientists to replace air-conditioning units that keep buildings cool on Earth.
Researchers believe the mirror could slash the amount of energy used to control air temperatures in business premises and shopping centres by doing away with power-hungry cooling systems.
Around 15% of the energy used by buildings in the US goes on air conditioning, but the researchers’ calculations suggest that, in some cases, the mirror could completely offset the need for extra cooling.
In a rooftop comparison of the device in Stanford, California, scientists found that, while a surface painted black reached 60C more than ambient temperature in sunlight and bare aluminium reached 40C more, the mirror was up to 5C cooler than the surrounding air temperature.
“If you cover significant parts of the roof with this mirror, you can see how much power it can save.
You can significantly offset the electricity used for air conditioning,” said Shanhui Fan, an expert in photonics at Stanford University, who led the development of the mirror. “In some situations, the computations say you can completely offset the air conditioning.”
Buildings warm up in a number of different ways. Hot-water boilers and cooking facilities release heat into their immediate surroundings. In hot countries, warm air comes in through doors and windows. Then, there is visible light and infrared radiation from the sun, which also heat up buildings.
The Stanford mirror was designed in such a way that it reflects 97% of the visible light that falls on it. But, more importantly, it works as a thermal radiator. When the mirror is warmed up, it releases heat at a specific wavelength of infrared light that passes easily through the atmosphere and out into space.
To make anything cool requires what engineers call a heat sink: somewhere to dump unwanted heat. The heat sink has to be cooler than the object that needs cooling or it will not do its job. For example, a bucket of ice will cool a bottle of wine because it becomes a sink for heat in the liquid. The Stanford mirror relies on the ultimate heat sink: the universe itself.
The mirror is built from several layers of wafer-thin materials. The first layer is reflective silver. On top of this are alternating layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide. These layers improve the reflectivity but, also, turn the mirror into a thermal radiator. When silicon dioxide heats up, it radiates the heat as infrared light at a wavelength of around ten micrometres. Since there is very little in the atmosphere that absorbs at that wavelength, the heat passes straight out to space. The total thickness of the mirror is around two micrometres or two thousandths of a millimetre.
“The cold darkness of the universe can be used as a renewable thermodynamic resource, even during the hottest hours of the day,” the scientists write in Nature. In tests, the mirror had a cooling power of 40 watts per square metre at ambient temperature.
Writing in the journal, Fan puts the installed cost of mirrors at between $20 and $70 per square metre and calculates an annual electricity saving of 100MWh on a three-storey building.
Fan said that the mirror could cool buildings – or other objects – simply by putting it in direct contact with them. Coating the roof of a building with the mirror would prevent heating from sunlight but do little to remove heat from its interior. More likely, the mirror would be used to cool water or some other fluid that would then be pumped around the building.
He ruled out the idea of using the mirrors to slow down global warming. “Roof space accounts for only a small portion of the Earth’s surface so, at this point, we don’t think this would be a geoengineering solution. Rather, our contribution on the greenhouse-gas-emission issue is simply to reduce electricity consumption,” he said.
“I’m really excited by the potential it has and the applications for cooling,” said Marin Soljačić, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You could use this on buildings so you have to spend much less on air conditioning or maybe you wouldn’t need it at all. You could put it on top of shopping malls. With a large enough surface, you could get substantial cooling.”


It could be the best thing since Trevor Baylis’s wind-up radio in the pre-internet 1990s – a cheap light that draws free power from gravity and could end the use of dangerous kerosene-fuelled lamps in Africa and India.
But when British designer, Patrick Hunt, went down the conventional route of bank or venture capital finance to get his invention kickstarted commercially, he hit a problem. “We tried to get funding to make it happen, but it’s slow and complex and it’s unproven and nobody wants to take a risk,” he said.
So he tried crowdfunding on a US website, Indiegogo, which had recently opened up in the UK. Within five days, he had hit his target and raised £36,200. So popular was his campaign at the end of 2012 to entice donations from the public that within 40 days he had raised a colossal £400,000.
The LED light is powered by a dynamo driven by the descent of a 10kg bag of rocks. The weight is attached to the light, lifted to a height of about 2m, and while it is allowed to slowly fall to the ground it will generate enough power for half an hour of light.
Hunt is preparing for production in China and will test the market again by delivering 1,000 of the lights to Africa before the full mass production of what he hopes will be millions of units.
He is one of a new wave of entrepreneurs turning to the fast-growing crowdfunding industry for finance. Another new site is InvestingZone, which matches wealthy individuals with start-up entrepreneurs.
Indiegogo does not offer shares but allows users to offer “perks” for different levels of donation – those helping to fund Hunt’s innovative light not only got to feel good about helping the less well off but also got their own light.
For Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of Indiegogo, the “gravity light” is a perfect example of how meritocratic crowdfunding can be and how it can test an entrepreneur’s idea. “It is the first time that finance has been fast, efficient and meritocratic, because it is not about 'How do I get access to the decision makers in that bank?' or 'Who do I know in that venture capital outfit?' This is all about proving your worth to your customers and fans, getting them to validateyour idea and fund it.
“Even ideas that aren’t deemed worthy to get funding are worth testing, because you will have saved yourself a whole bunch of time finding out it wasn’t a good idea and getting smarter faster,” she says.
Ringelmann, who is based in the US, started her career as a Wall Street analyst. In 2008, she decided to quit and use her skills to try and help friends who worked in the arts to raise money.
The site was originally focused on the film business and launched at the Sundance Film Festival that year.
Five years on and it is raising about $2m a week for new businesses in start-up and growth stages. In December 2012, it launched a euro and a sterling service to get a foothold this side of the Atlantic and says Britain is its third biggest market. International activity is up 41% since December.
There is no shortage of competitors, be it Kickstarter, Seedrs or Funding Circle, but, unlike rivals, says Ringelmann, Indiegogo is the only crowdfunder where anyone can launch a campaign. No project is deemed too wacky.
The site levies a 4% fee for successful campaigns. For those that fail to raise their target amount, users have the option of either refunding all money to their contributors at no charge or keeping all money raised but with a 9% fee.
A British woman, Lauren Pears, raised £100,000 to open a “cat café” in London through the site.
Known as Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium, it is yet to open but is billed as somewhere people can “come in from the cold to a comfortable wingback chair, a hot cup of tea, a book and a cat”.
“We’ve seen campaigns that go to venture capitalists get rejected because the venture guys say, 'Great idea but no idea if the market actually wants it; it could be a gadget that no one cares about,'” said Ringelmann.
“The entrepreneurs do an Indiegogo campaign – they don’t even actually launch the project, but the campaign itself is enough market proof for venture capitalists to say there is a market for this.
“It allows you to test your market, test your pricing, test your features, discover new revenue streams, get vital feedback,” says Ringelmann.
With her Wall Street background and the experience of helping 100,000 businesses and services raise finance, Ringelmann has fine-tuned her advice for the budding entrepreneur.
“Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about the execution and, if you are afraid that your idea will be stolen by someone who could execute it better and faster than you, then you are not the right person to execute that idea. It’s all about confidence to move fast and to learn,” she says.
For Ringelmann, the expansion into Europe and a deal with a web transaction provider, which will allow payments to be made through local card services like Maestro in the UK and Carte Bleue in France, as well as PayPal, are part of a dream to democratize finance. More than 7,000 campaigns for finance are live on the site.
While crowdfunding as an alternative to banks has grown, it has limited appeal to big-bucks investors, who don’t settle for anything less than a stake in a promising business. That could start to change in the UK with the launch of InvestingZone.