Writing in the journal Nature, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation Roger McKinlay argues that our reliance on GPS (global positioning system) technology is misplaced and could be eroding our innate way-finding abilities. “If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation abilities will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices,” he wrote.
McKinlay believes huge investment will be needed before navigation systems will be good enough to allow technologies such as autonomous vehicles to take off. In the meantime, he argues, we need better research into systems for navigation while children should be encouraged to learn how to find their way around by more traditional means. “Schools should teach navigation and map reading as life skills,” he wrote.
According to Ofcom (the Office of Communications), around 66% of adults in the UK owned a smartphone in 2015, up from 39% in 2012, making GPS technology widely available. But McKinlay, a satellite communication and navigation consultant, believes that we should be wary of leaving our navigational needs to our devices. “Navigation is a use-it-or-lose-it skill,” he wrote.
While few scientific studies have explored the issue, research from 2009 supports the notion. “What we did was to look at a set of current London taxi drivers and a set of London taxi drivers that had been retired for about four years,” said neuroscientist Dr Hugo Spiers, head of the Spatial Cognition Group at University College London, who is an author of the study. The results showed that the retired taxi drivers performed worse on navigation tests than those still behind the wheel. “We were able to show that their abilities did drop away if they weren’t using their knowledge on that particular test.”
Spiers also believes there is a danger in relying on technologies like GPS but he is quick to point out that the biggest risk lies in users being unwittingly led into perilous situations. Among the fatalities blamed on satnavs (satellite navigation devices) was the death of a driver who, in 2010, plunged into a reservoir in Spain. “There is a genuine potential for risk in relying on a satnav,” said Spiers. “But the actual health risk of not using your brain effectively is not known.”
The way in which navigational technology is used could also affect its impact on our own abilities, says Spiers. While audio instructions to drivers remove the need to think about navigation, he says, the use of smartphone apps as digital maps is very different. “In the old days, you had to print out or take an A to Z map in your pocket – what we are doing now is just using computer- aided information and you are having to think really quite hard about where you are going and interact with this device,” he said. “The modern technology isn’t just dumbing us down completely.”
McKinlay remains convinced that navigation technologies have a long way to go before futuristic scenarios involving driverless cars and smart cities become a reality. “For really critical applications – safety applications like landing aircraft or navigating aircraft – GPS is still not good enough,” he said.
Though Spiers believes the development of artificial intelligence based on machine learning could lead to a new wave of navigational aids, McKinlay remains sceptical. “We will see ever- smarter machines which are very, very task specific, but the big breakthrough will be when they are able to tune in to what you might be thinking and what you might be wanting to achieve,” he said.
Ultimately, McKinlay believes, it’s essential that humans remain able to take control of their navigation. “Do you really want to encourage people to get to a point where, when it disappears or when the battery goes flat, they are in total shock and can do nothing?” he said. “Technology isn’t magic – it is just a tool.”


BB King was most famous for blues music but he was always interested in other types of music and different cultures. Perhaps it is too early to say he is “the last of the bluesmen” but it is hard to imagine that any future blues artist will have the influence as BB King. He influenced thousands of musicians and millions of music fans in a career that lasted 65 years.
Riley B King was born in Mississippi, the son of African-American farm workers. He learnt the guitar from a family friend and learnt to sing with a quartet of gospel singers. In his early 20s, he moved to Memphis.
He was soon playing regularly at a bar in West Memphis and he also became a disc jockey, with a show on a local radio station. He was known as “The Beale Street Blues Boy” but this was shortened to “Blues Boy King” and then to “BB”. In 1950, King began recording for Modern Records.
He had his first hit in 1952 with Three O’Clock Blues. It was number one in the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it was the first of many hits. King developed a style that was new and different but had its roots in blues history. He often praised the musicians who influenced him and he usually mentioned T-Bone Walker first. He also mentioned the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
He once explained that his guitar technique was partly the result of his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” During the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist in many series of concerts. In 1956, he played 342 concerts. In 1962, he tried to change that working pattern by signing with a major label, ABC. But the first records under that contract were not very successful with his fans or with the record company.
But his 1965 album, Live at the Regal, has become famous and influenced many younger musicians. He had more R&B hits with blues songs and, in 1969, he was near the top of the pop charts – where no blues artist had been for many years – with a song called The Thrill Is Gone.
It was a long time before he became known to a rock audience but musicians who admired him brought him to the attention of rock fans. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “kids suddenly started saying to me, ‘You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.’ And I’d say, ‘Who told you that?’ And they’d say, ‘Mike Bloomfield’ or ‘Eric Clapton’. These young musicians made me popular again.”
From then on, King was well known as a leading blues artist. He went on international concert tours to Japan, Australia, China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners in Chicago and at San Quentin.
In 1990, doctors told King he had diabetes and he reduced his touring. He now had to play sitting down but his singing and playing were almost as good as ever. The celebrations for his 80th birthday, in 2005, included an award-winning album with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, tributes from Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “goodbye tour” that was not a goodbye at all.
In 2009, King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012, he performed at a concert at the White House, where the US President, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago. King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others died before him.


1 Flappy Bird
Dong Nguyen, the inventor of the mobile game Flappy Bird, removed it from app stores. It was downloaded more than 50 million times and was making him around £30,000 each day. He said its success ruined his simple life. On Twitter, he said: “I cannot live like this anymore.”
Nguyen is the latest inventor who wishes he hadn’t created a monster:
2 The labradoodle
The labradoodle isn’t a monster – it’s lovely. But what’s monstrous is the way people sell crossbreed dogs since the labradoodle’s inventor, Wally Conron, ﬁrst created the dog in the 1980s. “I’ve created a lot of problems”, he said. “There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs now.” Conron invented the labradoodle when he was working for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia. He invented it as a dog for a blind woman. Her husband was allergic to dog hair. He didn’t know that the labradoodle would become so popular.
3 The AK-47
Six months before his death in December 2013, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the assault riﬂe, wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and asked: “If my riﬂe killed people, am I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, 93 years old, the son of a poor farmer, Christian and Orthodox, responsible for people’s deaths, even if they were enemies?”
4 Electronic tagging
The electronic tag was ﬁrst made in the 1960s to check if ex-prisoners went to school or work, and to reward them for good behaviour. Its inventors, Bob Gable and his brother Kirkland, were later horriﬁed that the tag became a form of control and punishment. “It’s not pleasant,” Kirkland Gable said in 2010, “but I’m not in control of the universe. I have to realize there are some things out of my control.”
5 Pepper spray
After police sprayed peaceful protesters with pepper spray at a University of California campus in 2011, Kamran Loghman, one of the scientists who helped develop the spray in the 80s said, “I have never seen such an inappropriate use of chemicals.”
6 The ofﬁce cubicle
In the late 60s, a new kind of ofﬁce was made to give workers privacy and increase how well and how quickly people work by giving more work space. But the cubicle became a way for companies to put employees into smaller spaces. The inventor, Bob Propst, said, in 1997, “the use of cubicles in modern companies is crazy.”


The beginning of the year is probably prime-time for feeling glum about work: it’s ages until the next holiday, and it’s dark in the morning and when you get home. And, if you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, it could be enough to have you reaching for your CV.
But, before you start hunting through the job ads, try to put things in perspective. So, what else could you be doing instead? We asked ﬁve people doing some unusual jobs how much they are paid, what the worst parts are and why they enjoy their work.
1. Dog-food taster
The job: Tasting dog food to make sure it meets a premium brand’s quality standards
What it involves: Opening sample tins of each freshly made batch of dog (or cat) food, smelling it and eating it. “Although dogs’ palates are different from ours, taste is an important quality check to ensure each different ingredient is perfectly balanced in just the right way,” says Philip Wells, the chief taster for Lily’s Kitchen pet food. “Trying the food is also a good way to pick up on the nuances of the cooking; this works especially well on the dry food.”
Typical salary: £20,000 for an entry-level job in the quality department. However, Wells says £50,000 or more is “easily achievable” for an experienced technical director who, as well as tasting products, is also likely to be responsible for developing new recipes and advising the business on technical and regulatory matters. Worst part of the job: The deadlines, for Wells, who admits he quite likes the food. The meat used in pet food has to be derived from animals passed as ﬁ t for human consumption, under the Animal Feed Regulations 2010, and he says the ﬁrm uses “human-grade freshly prepared raw food” in its recipes. He adds: “There are some pretty gruesome pet foods out there and, although I don’t taste them, the smell is enough to turn the stomach when I do a bit of market research.”
Job satisfaction: “No two days are ever the same.” It’s rewarding, Wells says, that a project he has worked on will “help pets to become happier and healthier”. However, he acknowledges that some of the credit must go to another “key member” of the tasting team: Lily, the border terrier.
2. Hygiene technician
The job: Disinfecting areas that have potentially been exposed to bio-hazardous situations
What it involves: Cleaning up crime scenes, road accidents and suicides. Clearing hoarders’ houses full of rubbish, rats and excrement … among other things. “The job is about keeping people safe,” says Richard Lewis, a hygiene technician for Rentokil. “We deal with some very disturbingly dirty sites.”
Typical salary: The entry-level salary is usually around £14,500 and 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 it is still hard.” You learn not to take your work home with you, he says. “You also need to have a sense of humour, as some days can be tough.”
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 or 100 feet in the air being lowered down into a silo to clean it.” He also takes pride in the transformation he brings about: “It’s satisfying to return a potentially hazardous site back to a safe environment. And it bene ﬁts society.”
3. Biogas engineer
The job: Setting up biogas plants in developing countries
What it involves: Linking a system of digesters – which can be ﬁlled with human excrement, animal dung and other waste products – to toilets to produce a biogas that can be used for cooking and lighting. “You have to know what size and shape the mixing pit needs to be, how to create the optimum temperature for digestion and where to situate the biogas plant,” says Baburam Paudel, chief technical ofﬁcer in Nepal for the charity Renewable World. “You also have to convince poor communities that poo can be productive – many are repelled by the idea of connecting their toilets to their kitchens.”
Typical salary: An entry-level salary is around £10,000, while a typical salary for a chief technical ofﬁcer is £30,000. Worst part of the job: For Paudel, it’s seeing people struggling to survive on very little income. But, he admits, anyone who won’t change a nappy would struggle. “You have to be willing to get your hands dirty during the build process and inspections. Unsurprisingly, the anaerobic digestion (the process that takes place when bacteria eat the decomposing waste and produce methane) smells like rotten eggs. It can be disgusting and there is no room for mistakes.”
Job satisfaction: “I ﬁnd it immensely satisfying to know that I am helping people to increase their incomes and allowing girls to attend school by replacing the need to collect ﬁrewood,” says Paudel. “My work improves the health and hygiene of whole communities.”
4. Eel ecologist
The job: Conserving the critically endangered European eel
What it involves: To monitor the size of the endangered eels, ecologists wade into the Thames and other London rivers and marshes full of eels, sometimes up to their armpits, and reach into a net ﬁlled with up to 20 adult eels to grab one with their bare hands. “Adult eels can be a metre long, or even larger, and weigh up to 2kg. They’re not at all dangerous but they are almost pure muscle and they can be a little bit slimy,” says Stephen Mowat, an eel conservationist and ecologist for the Zoological Society of London. “We have to weigh and measure them, and they wriggle … a lot. It’s difﬁcult to look professional while crawling on the ground chasing an eel across the grass.”
Worst part of the job: “Eels are really tricky creatures to work with – and getting outsmarted by an eel can be quite embarrassing,” says Mowat. “You also have to be ready to jump from one project to the next. I once had to dissect a tub of dead eels to examine parasites living in them, moments before jumping into a suit for a meeting with government ofﬁcials. I remembered to wash my hands.” But, for Mowat, the worst part of the job is deﬁnitely not handling the eels – he believes baby eels (known as elvers) are “as cute as pandas”: “The worst thing about the job is regularly learning how much damage we, the British population, are doing to the environment.”
Job satisfaction: “Getting to work outdoors and seeing British wildlife up close is the best part of the job,” says Mowat. “Eels are beautiful creatures and working with eels doesn’t just bene ﬁ t the eel: it helps whole river systems, estuaries and coastal habitats. That is something worth working on.”
5. Shopping channel presenter
The job: Selling and demonstrating a wide range of products on live TV
What it involves: Presenting hours and hours of monotonous content, while simultaneously demonstrating the products and appearing to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about everything that you’re selling. “I prepare and research as much technical and practical information as possible on every single product beforehand,” says Shaun Ryan, presenter for Ideal World TV. “But you also need the ability to relate to every genre of products and to every viewer.”
Typical salary: A trainee presenter would start on a minimum of £30,000, while an experienced presenter can expect over £55,000.
Worst part of the job: “The unsociable hours,” says Ryan. “An experienced presenter like myself generally gets to work prime-time hours, which means all weekends, bank holidays and very late evenings, plus the occasional 5am shift.” His worst task ever, he says, was singlehandedly having to sell some female slimming pants: “It was a very tricky hour and not my ﬁ nest.”
Job satisfaction: “I love the rush of live presenting and having to think on my feet every second,” says Ryan. “I also get an adrenaline rush from knowing that, at times, I have thousands of viewers ordering the product that I have just been presenting.”


Unveiling a car with a top speed of 25mph, two seats and no pedals or steering wheel might not make much of an impression at a motor show. But Google, in the US, sent a minor earthquake through the car and taxi industries as it unveiled the latest version of its driverless car.
The electrically powered vehicle, which Google has begun testing around its headquarters in Mountain View, California, dispenses with all the normal controls, including foot pedals. Instead, it has a smartphone app that summons it and tells it the destination, and a single STOP button mounted between the two front-facing seats in case the occupants need to override the computer.
The car, in fact, takes over all the tasks of navigation, steering, acceleration and braking.
The company is building about 100 prototypes for a two-year test. The company’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, told a conference in California that the vehicle was “still in the prototype stage” but that the project was “about changing the world for people who are not well served by transportation today ”.
He said of the car: “You’re just sitting there; no steering wheel, no pedals. For me, it was very relaxing. About ten seconds after getting in, I forgot I was there. It reminded me of catching a chairlift by yourself – a bit of solitude I found really enjoyable.”
Google says that the principal aim of the project is to improve safety and that, because the car is constructed with impact-absorbing foam at the front and a plastic windscreen, “it should be far safer than any other car for pedestrians”.
The cars, which have been built specially by a company (as yet unnamed) in Detroit, will be used to investigate further how best to make driverless vehicles work. Google will run a pilot programme using the cars, which are not yet for sale.
One challenge is creating high-definition scans of the roads and surroundings before the cars can drive along them because they cannot gather and process enough information in real time.
So far, there are high-detail maps of about 2,000 miles of California’s roads, but the state has more than 170,000 miles of public roads.
Google says it is interested in licensing the technology to traditional vehicle manufacturers once it has refined it sufficiently. Members of the team had been working on the project even before joining Google, for more than a decade.
But the prospect of driverless cars replacing human-driven taxis has been the cause of some alarm.
“If you get rid of the driver, then they’re unemployed,” said Dennis Conyon, the south- east director for the UK National Taxi Association. “It would have a major impact on the labour force.”
London has about 22,000 licensed black cabs and Conyon estimates that the total number of people who drive taxis for hire in the UK is about 100,000.
However, Steve McNamara, general secretary of the 10,500-strong London Taxi Drivers’ Association, said: “You won’t get these driverless cars in London for 20 or 25 years. Maybe, by then, they’ll have a charge point – because there isn’t a single one in London now.”
Other car makers, including Volvo, Ford and Mercedes, are working on driver-assisted vehicles, which, unlike Google’s version, do not dispense with the driver controls.
But Chris Urmson, director of the self-driving car project at Google, said that the new prototypes dispensed with the steering wheel and brakes because there was no guarantee that a human occupant would be able to take over in an emergency, and that it was simpler just to have an emergency stop button.
Urmson said: “The vehicles will be very basic. We want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible. But they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And, that’s an important step towards improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.”
So far, the Google versions of the self-driving cars have covered 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the computer. The company points out that thousands of people die each year on the roads and that about 80% of crashes can be ascribed to human error.
But, they could have some way to go to match Conyon at the National Taxi Association. Aged 79, he has been driving a taxi for 50 years and claims never to have had an accident.


Google has made maps of the world’s highest mountains, the ocean floor, the Amazon rainforest and even shown us a bit of North Korea. They want to make maps of the whole world, but they have mostly stayed away from the Arctic.
Now, however, Google is starting a very important update to hundreds of years of polar map making – and it hopes that the map will help give a better understanding of life on the permafrost for millions of web users. A small Google team has flown to Iqaluit, the largest town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. They have taken their warmest winter clothes, many laptop computers and an 18kg telescopic camera that they can fix to their backpacks.
The team spent four days collecting the images and information that will give the isolated community on Baffin Island something that people across the world who live in cities now take for granted. An Inuit mapping expert helped the Google team and curious locals followed them around.
The town of 7,000 people will go on display via Google’s popular Street View application in July 2013.
When Google made maps of other parts of the world it used a special camera on a car roof. In Iqaluit that was not possible, so Google’s map makers walked the town’s snowy roads and trails. Some roads are made of ice and disappear in the short summer months.
The team also walked along part of a 15km road known as the Road to Nowhere, despite warnings about meeting polar bears.
The online map that Google had already created using satellite images was mostly correct, but one road was missing that had been built in the last year.
One difficulty was how to place on the map many businesses and homes that have mail sent to the local post office and not delivered to their address. Putting the PO box addresses on the map would mean the new map would show all the companies, banks and schools in the same place, around the Canada Post building in the centre of town.
About 30 Inuit elders, business people and high-school pupils helped Google to correct this problem. They were given a laptop computer and told how to make sure their homes, shops and meeting places would show up correctly on the map.
The project is more than a novelty. Arif Sayani, the town’s Director of Planning, said that people who are thinking of visiting or moving to the area would be able to use the maps to see the area. It may also help planning decisions in Iqaluit happen more quickly.
The project leader for Google said he hoped to see the work continue in other northern towns. But moving people and equipment around the vast Arctic territory is very expensive. So, in the future, Google might send equipment to the area and ask volunteers to complete the map.


In the West, people do not usually eat insects. But in some parts of the world, insects are an important food and in spring 2013 there will be an effort to show people that eating insects is not disgusting. And we may soon be able to buy insects in supermarkets.
In April, there will be a festival in London, Pestival 2013, where there will be a discussion about the question of eating insects. The festival will include a restaurant by the Nordic Food Lab, the Scandinavian team behind the Danish restaurant Noma, which brought extremely popular insect dishes to Claridge’s hotel in London in 2013. Noma has been named the best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine for three years. Its chef, René Redzepi, says that ants taste like lemon, and a mixture of grasshoppers and moth larvae tastes like a strong fish sauce. Bee larvae make a sweet mayonnaise used instead of eggs and scientists find new ways to use insects all the time.
In March, a BBC documentary will show a food writer eating deep-fried locusts and barbecued spiders. But, behind all the jokes there is a very serious message. Many experts believe that if humans eat insects, it will be very good for the environment. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) gives money to projects that show people they can eat and farm insects in south-east Asia and Africa. In these places about two billion people already eat insects and larvae as a normal part of their diet. In 2012, the FAO published a list of 1,909 edible species of insect and plans a major international conference on “this valuable food source” in 2013.
There are lots of insects – there are 40 tonnes of insects for every person in the world – so they will not become endangered. “I know it’s taboo to eat bugs in the West, but why not?”, Redzepi said. “You go to south-east Asia and this is a common thing. You read about it from all over the world, that people are eating insects. We eat honey, and honey is the vomit of a bee. Think of that next time you put it into your tea.”
He said that the basic idea behind Nordic Food Lab is that you can eat everything.
Insects are very important to life on Earth and they are the most diverse group of animals on the planet: there are more than a million species. But most people hate them and often kill them.
In the next 30 years, the planet’s human population will increase to nine billion. Already one billion people do not get enough food. The increase will put more pressure on agricultural land, water, forests, fisheries and resources, and also food and energy supplies.
The cost of meat is increasing – it costs more money now, but also people have to destroy a lot of rainforest to make fields or to grow food for cows. Cows also make methane. The farming of cows, pigs and sheep makes very big amounts of greenhouse gases – 35% of the planet’s methane, 65% of its nitrous oxide and 9% of the carbon dioxide.
Edible insects make fewer gases, contain high-quality protein, vitamins and amino acids, and only need a quarter of the food that sheep need to make the same amount of protein. You can grow them on organic waste. China is already building huge maggot farms. Zimbabwe is growing caterpillars and Laos is developing an insect-harvesting project. One study says that eating crickets and locusts, and not eating pork and beef, could help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95%.


“If we don’t win, it doesn’t mean anything,” said billionaire Donald Trump in South Carolina. He hopes to be the Republican presidential nominee. He is worried he might not win but he shouldn’t be worried because he has been at the top of the opinion polls for four months. “I want to pick my date for the election. I want it next Tuesday,” he told a crowd of 11,000 people. He needs their support to continue until March 2016 so he is chosen as the presidential candidate in November 2016’s general election.
Strangely, recent controversy has only made him more popular.
First, he shocked prisoners of war when he said that he didn’t believe Vietnam veteran John McCain was a hero because he allowed the enemy to capture him. Then, in the first television debate, he was rude to a woman who asked him difficult questions.
Trump has also insulted Mexican immigrants to the US and said that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently thrown out of a political meeting deserved to be attacked. He seemed to laugh at a New York Times journalist for his disability and said Muslim Americans supported the 9/11 attackers.
Some people still hope that, eventually, even Trump’s supporters will get tired of his attacks on minorities. One poll shows his support among Republicans has reduced by 12 points – although, at 31%, he is still winning.
“He’s not a conservative, he’s not a liberal – he believes in himself,” former presidential rival, Bobby Jindal, told the Guardian.
Trump tells his supporters that the three things that he is most against – immigration reform, freetrade deals and Barack Obama’s national security policy – have become the most important issues of the election.
He believes that every undocumented immigrant in the US should be sent back to their country and he wants to ask Mexico to pay for a border wall – “A real wall. A very tall wall, taller than that ceiling.” This might not sound possible but these ideas have possibly destroyed the campaign hopes of Jeb Bush, who wants immigration reform.
So what can stop Trump? Often, polls this far away from election day can be incorrect because most people have not made up their minds. Among Americans who say they are Republicans, current polls say that he has 25-30% of the vote.
Steve Deace, an Iowa conservative, said that Trump’s behaviour is “both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it creates loyal supporters who love Trump’s personality. On the other hand, it means he cannot change that personality.”
Republican Frank Luntz believes Trump speaks for voters who, for the first time, feel as if they have a mouthpiece and like the fact that they feel like they are heard. He says, “Trump says what they’re thinking and, the more outrageous he is, the more they agree with him. He’s saying what no politician would say and that’s another reason they like him.”
That is certainly the feeling among ordinary supporters who go to his very crowded campaign events.
“I like the way he speaks,” says Sandra Murray of Dubuque, Iowa. “This country is a big mess and he could be the man to help us.”
Other supporters offer a simpler explanation. “He’s not afraid of anybody or anything. That’s cool.”


Dr Ben Brabon of Edgehill University teaches a MOOC – a massive open online course. The course is one of only two accredited MOOCs in the UK at the moment. Brabon says that many students enrol on MOOCs because they are free and they enjoy communicating with other students. MOOCs have no entry tests and no fees, so MOOC students behave very differently from students on normal higher education courses.
MOOCs are the newest idea to try to make higher education available to everyone. Companies are investing a lot of money in new websites that offer sophisticated and interactive courses to tens of thousands of students. Investors hope to find a business model for MOOCs that will make them profitable. They could earn money by finding out why and when millions of students enrol, interact with their material, submit their assignments, message each other and stop the course.
Nobody can say exactly who MOOCs are for. Universities that want to attract fee-paying international students onto postgraduate courses by showing them their best programmes online? Students in developing countries who really want access to first-world universities? Employees who wish to develop their professional knowledge? People without qualifications who want to use MOOCs as a bridge to higher education? Or hobby learners, who want to learn about a subject they find interesting?
MOOCs may be popular at the beginning but very few people complete them, says Dr Brabon. His literature course had 1,000 enrolments but only 31 people completed the course. “And almost all of those had a first degree or had been educated to degree level,” he says. “So it seems MOOCs do not make higher education available to people who couldn’t go into higher education before.”
“Learning online is a different thing and needs quite advanced learning skills,” says David Kernohan, an expert in digital technology. “With MOOCs, there’s very little support: the student does not get any individual attention.” Students get support from other students in online discussions. This may mean that online study is unattractive or difficult for someone without high-level qualifications, but it suggests that MOOCs could be “a really good tool for continuing education,” he added.
The number of part-time students has reduced as the cost of studying at university increases, so could open and free courses provide a new path to university education? Could you teach a whole degree via MOOCs? “I don’t think that’s how MOOCs work,” says Brabon. Instead, he suggests “blended learning that combines a campus experience with a MOOC; also, perhaps, using MOOCs to create a global degree, with students taking courses from across the world, might be possible.”
But that’s in the future. At present, the course content and assessment standards of MOOCs have no quality assurance, so employers will not be impressed by them. Accreditation is now essential for MOOCs so academics and employers will believe they are of good quality, says Brabon.
Some people hope that MOOCs will bring the best of first-world teaching to students in less developed countries. Others believe that universities could use MOOCs to advertise their campus courses to bigger numbers of fee-paying students from outside the EU.
Mike Sharples, chair of Educational Technology, doesn’t agree. MOOCs are mainly a way to publicize and share universities’ best teachers. They also encourage interaction and feedback from students around the world, he says. He believes that attracting international students onto university courses is not the main aim of MOOCs. But they could certainly be a very clever marketing idea, as he says that “if 20,000 people enrol on a MOOC – well, you only need 20 of those to enrol afterwards to have a master’s course.”
“In South America, China and countries in Africa, there are many people who want to learn and some of the world’s best courses are now online,” adds Sharples. “If people are fascinated by learning, then why not? The real challenge is to allow those countries not just to study MOOCs, but also to create them. ”


You probably know a vaper – someone who smokes e-cigarettes. But has vaping started to become less popular? Statistics suggest that smokers and recent ex-smokers (the majority of vapers) may already be using e-cigarettes less. The big e-cigarette companies will study the ﬁgures carefully because they have spent millions of pounds on a technology that they thought was becoming more popular.
E-cigarettes do not contain tobacco and produce vapour, not smoke. In 2014, the health charity Action on Smoking and Health published ﬁgures that showed that the number of British users of electronic cigarettes has increased three times from 700,000 users in 2012 to 2.1 million in 2014.
But ﬁgures from the Smoking Toolkit Study show vaping may be becoming less popular. The number of vapers who are smokers and ex- smokers rose until the end of 2013, when 22% of smokers and ex-smokers were vaping. But this percentage stopped rising in 2014. Then, it dropped to 19% at the end of the year. Professor Robert West, who collected the data for the Toolkit, described the ﬁgures as statistically important.
Smokers are the key group for e-cigarette companies because seven out of ten vapers are smokers. Only around 1% of people who have never smoked have tried an electronic cigarette. “The number of people who use e-cigarettes while continuing to smoke is going down,” West said. “We’ve only been studying vaping for just over a year, so it’s a short time period, but we are not seeing growth in the number of long-term ex-smokers or ‘never ’ smokers using e-cigarettes. The number of people vaping might change but, at the moment, it looks like it’s staying the same.”
Experts believe that vaping will probably not become fashionable with young non-smokers.  Only 1.8% of children are regular e-cigarette users. But e-cigarettes seem to be most popular with adults who want to quit. “The ﬁgures published this month show that the use of electronic cigarettes by smokers has stopped rising. But the ﬁgures also show the huge increase in use since May 2011,” said James Dunworth, of ecigarettedirect.co.uk. “Our customers are still very happy with the product and technology is improving their experience and helping them to switch from traditional cigarettes.”
“E-cigarettes are like a sort of nicotine patch,” West agreed. “They are more popular than nicotine patches but we do not know if they are more effective. One-third of people who want to quit smoking use e-cigarettes. They are the most popular method of stopping.”
The European Commission (EC) wants to increase taxes on e-cigarettes, which could make them less popular. A new EC tobacco directive becomes law in 2016. It will limit the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes to below their current levels. This may mean vapers will have to increase the number they smoke to get the same effect. This is another thing that may make e-cigarettes more expensive.
West suggested that politicians should see e-cigarettes as something that helps people stop smoking. He doesn’t think they should follow the same laws as smoking. “Some local authorities and organizations treat e-cigarettes like cigarettes – they ban them in public places and outdoors,” he said. He thinks we should support vapers not attack them.


Valdevaqueros is one of the last remaining unspoilt beaches in southern Spain, where the sky above the golden sands is filled with kites hauling surfers over the waves. Currently the beach has little more than an access road lined with camper vans from Germany, France, Italy and Britain, filled with windsurfers and kitesurfers lured by the area’s strong winds.
For decades it has been a world apart from the concrete-lined beaches of Torremolinos and Marbella along the coast, yet on 29 May the local council in Tarifa approved plans to build a tourist complex right next to the beach, with 1,400 hotel rooms and 350 flats. Environmental and conservation groups have protested that the project will harm the habitats of protected species, but for most councillors here the issue is simple: jobs. In this town of 18,000 inhabitants, 2,600 are out of work as Spain faces its worst economic crisis in at least half a century, one that has cast doubt on the future of the euro.
“Traditional sources of income such as fishing are dying out, now that fleets are being dismantled and fish stocks are depleted, so tourism is the only way out, as long as it is sustainable,” said Sebastián Galindo, a councillor from the Socialist Party, which is in opposition in Tarifa but voted with the governing People’s Party to give the project the green light.
Tarifa’s Mayor, Juan Andrés Gil, declined to comment on the project, but Galindo said it complies with environmental standards.
The complex would be 800 metres from the coast, comfortably beyond the minimum of 200 metres stipulated by a law designed to prevent more ugly developments like those that blighted much of Spain’s coastline when mass tourism first descended on its shores in the 1960s and 1970s.
Opponents of the complex say the last thing anyone needs is more housing in a country that already has a million empty homes, although the central government last week proposed a sell-off by granting non-Spaniards residency permits in return for buying property worth at least €160,000.
The Socialist opposition in Madrid attacked the proposal, and Galindo said it discriminated against migrant workers who flocked to Spain during the boom years, many of them from Morocco, whose coastline is just 14km away and can be seen from Tarifa. “It favours moneyed classes rather than those who came here to help Spain get ahead,” he said. Surfers fear that new buildings in Valdevaqueros would reduce the strength of the famous local Levant wind but fail to lure traditional package holidaymakers. “It’s not really a family spot. Just wait until they see what a Levant is like,” said Henning Mayer, who has regularly made the journey from Augsburg in Germany for 20 years. “Ten years ago they said they would build a new highway here. It didn’t happen, so I think it will be impossible to build new hotels.”
At the southernmost tip of Spain, Tarifa is the strategic crossroads between Africa and Europe, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic. Campaigners say it also has a vital role in the animal world as a crossroads for migrating species.
The campaign to save the beach was launched hours after the Tarifa council voted for the project. The campaign has a Facebook page and is supported by groups including Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Spanish branch of conservation network Birdlife. “It’s the environmental equivalent of putting a shopping centre right in the middle of the Alhambra,” said Noelia Jurado, who uses her multimedia expertise to campaign against the complex. She also noted that the resort would be near the ancient Roman town of Baelo Claudia. “They could be building on top of more Roman ruins here. Nobody knows.”
Also joining the opposition to the planned resort is the Andalusian College of Geographers, which, in a preliminary study charted on its website, concluded that “free areas ”, including car parks if not actual buildings, will overlap part of the Alcornocales National Park. The geographers also estimate that the site intrudes on two wildlife conservation areas. One of the areas in Valdevaqueros is home to two species of bat whose survival is threatened.
“Money is once again being put before urban laws and European environmental directives,” said Raúl Romeva, a member of the European Parliament who is Vice-President of the Greens group. In Romeva’s view, the project is also at fault because the proposed site has too little water in a town that already suffers from shortages in the summer weather that scorches the southern Spanish region of Andalusía. Lack of water recently led the Andalusía Supreme Court to uphold an appeal against plans to build a complex elsewhere in the region, which would have included golf courses, hotels and luxury homes.
Many locals are also wondering why a resort should be built 10km away, rather than on wasteland near Tarifa’s picturesque old centre, with its typically Andalusian whitewashed walls and winding streets, dominated by a 10th-century Moorish castle. “My opinion and that of catering workers is that we agree with the complex as long as it creates jobs in the town, which is what is needed, but we are against it being for the benefit of a few,” said Cristóbal Lobato, who has worked at the same beachside bar in Tarifa for 30 years. “If they put it in the centre of Tarifa, where there is space, then clients could visit shops, tapas bars and restaurants.”
Overlooking the green fields earmarked for building, biologist Aitor Galán, who conducts environmental impact studies for a living, pointed at one of only two seaside breeding grounds for vultures in Europe. “Anywhere else in Europe, this place would have the utmost protection, but here they want to get rid of it all and cover it with buildings,” he said. “What they want to do is turn this into Benidorm, but what draws people here is wildlife and the wind. But by taking advantage of the current crisis and unemployment, builders and mayors who agree with them can justify any amount of destruction.”


A new computer-assisted autopsy system is becoming more and more popular in European hospitals. Its inventor says that the system could mean that now there will be no such thing as a 'perfect murder'.
The method, called 'Virtopsy', is being used at some forensic medical institutes in Europe. It was invented by a group of scientists at the University of Zurich. Instead of cutting the chest, like in a traditional autopsy, pathologists are now able to examine the dead body in 3-D via computer screens.
Michael Thali, the Director of Zurich’s Institute for Forensic Medicine in Europe, and one of the inventors of Virtopsy, said it could completely change criminal investigations. “Basically there will be no such thing as the perfect murder any more because a virtual autopsy allows you to find every piece of evidence,” he said.
“In order to analyze the colour of the blood, the thickness of body fluids or smells, we’ll need to use traditional autopsy methods,” said Lars Oesterhelweg, Deputy Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, which is using a version of the Virtopsy.
Virtopsies use powerful machines. Together, the machines are called a 'Virtobot'. Virtopsies can find injuries that are not seen during a traditional autopsy, as well as air pockets, heart attacks and even cancer.
“The Virtopsy could replace the autopsy one day,” said Richard Dirndorfer, one of the first people to use DNA analysis in criminology. “I think we’ll see it happen slowly, just like DNA analysis slowly replaced blood group analysis”.
The method allows doctors to see deep inside dead bodies. It can see things that cannot be found during traditional autopsies.
Criminologists from around the world have been travelling to Switzerland over the past few years to see the new method. Forensic scientists and pathologists think the method can be used together with the traditional autopsy.
He added that the new method was very helpful in re-examining cases where the cause of death was unclear. “It means that investigations can be re-examined and we can try again to find the murderer,” he said.
Scientists said that relatives of the dead prefer the Virtopsy method because, during a traditional autopsy, scientists have to cut and damage the dead body.


Intermediate
According to American researchers, a nasal spray containing the Love hormone oxytocin could help children with autism behave more normally in social situations. Scans of autistic children showed that a single dose of the chemical improved brain responses to facial expressions. This is something that could make social interactions feel more natural and rewarding for them.
The researchers said oxytocin might increase the success of behavioural therapies that are already used to help people with autism learn to cope with social situations. Over time, what you would expect to see is more normal social responding, being more interested in interacting with other people, more eye contact and more conversation, said Kevin Pelphrey, of Yale University.
Autism is a developmental disorder that more than one in 100 people have. The condition affects people in different ways, but leads to difficulties in social interaction and communication. So far, there is no established treatment for the social problems caused by autism.
Researchers at Yale have studied the brain chemical oxytocin as a possible treatment for the social problems caused by autism because it plays an important role in bonding and trust. Results have been mixed, though: one recent study found no significant benefit for young people given the chemical over several days. But Pelphrey said oxytocin might help the brain learn from social interactions; it would work best when used with therapies that encourage people with autism to interact more socially, he said.
The scientists scanned the brains of 17 young people aged eight to 16 with autism while they looked at images of cars or the eyes of people expressing different emotions. The scans were given 45 minutes after the young people inhaled a placebo or oxytocin through a nasal spray.
The scans showed that the reward circuits in the childrens brains behaved more normally after a dose of oxytocin: that is, they were more active when the person was looking at faces and less active when looking at the inanimate cars. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
The study suggests that oxytocin might treat something for which we dont have a treatment in autism, and thats the core social motivation, said Pelphrey. He warned that it was too early to use oxytocin as a treatment for the social difficulties caused by autism and said people should not buy oxytocin online. We dont want them trying oxytocin at home. Its impossible to say what they are buying. We are nowhere near thinking this is a ready treatment. It needs more follow-up, he said. This is an important new study in identifying changes in brain activity in key areas of the brain, said Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University.
A surprising finding, however, is that oxytocin nasal spray did not change performance in social recognition tasks. And, it is also not yet clear if oxytocin only has benefits for people with autism or has any unwanted side effects. Finally, oxytocin effects only last about 45 minutes, so there may be practical considerations as to whether this could be used as a treatment.
From a scientific perspective, this study has a lot of evidence from animal and human work to justify serious attention, but more research is needed. Doctors should be cautious about the potential of this hormone until we know much more about its benefits and risks, in much larger studies. Said Simon Baron-Cohen.
Uta Frith, who studies autism at University College London, said: According to this study, oxytocin may have the effect of making faces more interesting. Disappointingly, this effect is seen only in brain activity and not in behaviour. Demonstrating an effect on behaviour will be critical if nasal spray treatment is to be of any value.


James Bond films are one of the world’s oldest and most successful film series. Twenty-three Bond films have been made so far. They have earned more than $6 billion at cinemas around the world. James Bond is not slowing down. In fact, the films are more popular than ever – Skyfall, which broke all records and became the biggest ever film at UK cinemas in 2012, earned a total of $1.1 billion.
So, there was a lot of interest when they announced more details about the 24th Bond film – especially its title, Spectre. The number one question is: can Spectre be as successful as Skyfall?
Charles Gant, film editor for Heat magazine, thinks it can. “They were very clever when they made Skyfall,” he says. “It was both modern and retro. Daniel Craig fans liked it and, also, older, more nostalgic Bond fans, who lost interest over the previous few films. With the new title,” he adds, “it is certain to be a success.”
Eon Productions is the company, started in 1961, that made Dr No and all the “official” Bond films. The company really wants the next film to be successful so it is using the same people that worked on Skyfall in the new film. Daniel Craig will play Bond and the same people have written the script. Most importantly, Sam Mendes will again be the director. According to Gant, Mendes is the best Bond director. Gant says: “Mendes attracted top actors like Ralph Fiennes. Actors like Fiennes will only be in a film if they like the director.”
The Bond series was not in trouble before the arrival of Mendes – and Craig – but the films were becoming a bit boring towards the end of Pierce Brosnan’s time as Bond. There were no longer any more original Bond stories to adapt and the films no longer had enough energy.
This was nothing new: the history of the Bond series has been one of constant change, especially of the lead actor: first, Sean Connery; then, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Brosnan and, now, Craig. Each new actor has been different and some have been better than others.
Lazenby only did one Bond film. Dalton’s two films, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, were during a period in the late 80s when more aggressive Hollywood action movies were more popular. According to Gant, “the period of Roger Moore’s last films and Dalton’s films didn’t excite audiences. Brosnan was more successful but Craig is the best. On the other hand, the early Bond films were sexy and exciting.”
Skyfall made more money than all the other Bond films. But some of the 1960s Bond films were almost as successful. With figures adjusted for inflation, the 1965 film Thunderball is only a little bit below Skyfall. And Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice both did better than the other Craig films. Licence to Kill made the least money of all Bond films and Moore’s final film, A View to a Kill, the second least.
Martin Campbell is an experienced British director and he planned one of the most elaborate stunts in Bond history. In the famous first scene of Goldeneye (released in 1995), Bond falls into a light aeroplane without a pilot. This scene helped to make the Bond series more modern and popular. Also, a very successful Goldeneye video game created new, younger fans of Bond and made people think that the Bond film was no longer boring and old-fashioned.


Intermediate
There are many quirky solutions to help make our cities more livable, such as glow-in-the-dark trees, underground bike sheds and solar-powered bins. City living has many upsides but a sustainable lifestyle is not always one of them. Pollution, traf c and loss of green spaces are just some of the daily problems that city-dwellers have to deal with. We look at ten quirky solutions to making our cities better places to live.
Pop-up parks Todays cities sometimes look like theyre built more for cars than people. The pop-up park is a simple idea. Take an empty car park, a small amount of money and a pot plant or two, and make yourself your own private park. The PARK(ing) project started as an arts experiment in San Francisco. It has since spread across the world. Temporary urban farms and ecology demonstrations are just some of the ideas that have come out of the project, which celebrates a day of action every September.
Subterranean storage Not all urban dwellers have cars. Bikes are becoming more and more fashionable. The question is: where to keep them safe? Tokyo-based engineering company Giken has a solution: an underground bicycle park. Just seven metres wide, the cylindrical storage facility buries deep into the ground and can hold 204 bikes. Owners can retrieve their bike at the touch of a button  the automated system delivers it back above ground in around 13 seconds.
Glow-in-the-dark trees When most people think of trees that glow in the dark, Christmas trees usually come to mind. Not Daan Roosegaarde. The Dutch designer-artist has invented a bioluminescent plant. The experimental technology joins DNA from luminescent marine bacteria with the chloroplast genome of a plant to create a glow like a jelly sh. They are trying to create a version of the technology that Roosegaarde hopes could one day replace normal street lighting.
Footfall harvesting Every day, hundreds of commuters and shoppers in the east London neighbourhood of West Ham cross the elevated pedestrian walkway close to the underground station. Few people probably notice the springiness beneath their feet. Even fewer realize that the springy rubber surface powers the streetlights above. The  oor has smart tiles that capture the energy from pedestrians footsteps and convert it into electricity. Pavegen, the UK company who had the idea, has installed a similar system at Londons Heathrow Airport and other international locations.
Supertrees It had to happen eventually: man-made trees. Singapores Gardens by the Bay has a group of them. Up to 50 metres high, these steel-framed supertrees not only have  owers growing up them  their metallic canopies absorb and disperse heat, too. And they collect rainwater, as well as provide air ventilation for two large conservatories below. Eleven of the 18 trees also have solar panels on their branches.


Scientists have created an “atlas of the brain” that reveals how the meanings of words are arranged across different regions of the organ. Like a colourful quilt laid over the cortex, the atlas displays in rainbow hues how individual words and the concepts they convey can be grouped together in clumps of white matter.
“Our goal was to build a giant atlas that shows how one specific aspect of language is represented in the brain, in this case semantics or the meanings of words,” said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
No single brain region holds one word or concept. A single brain spot is associated with a number of related words. And, each single word lights up many different brain spots. Together, they make up networks that represent the meanings of each word we use: life and love, death and taxes, clouds, Florida and bra. All light up their own networks.
Described as a “tour de force” by one researcher who was not involved in the study, the atlas demonstrates how modern imaging can transform our knowledge of how the brain performs some of its most important tasks. With further advances, the technology could have a profound impact on medicine and other fields.
“It is possible that this approach could be used to decode information about what words a person is hearing, reading or possibly even thinking,” said Alexander Huth, the first author on the study. One potential use would be a language decoder that could allow people silenced by motor neurone disease or locked-in syndrome to speak through a computer.
To create the atlas, the scientists recorded people’s brain activity while they listened to stories read out on The Moth Radio Hour, a US radio show. They then matched the transcripts of the stories with the brain activity data to show how groups of related words triggered neural responses in 50,000 to 80,000 pea-sized spots all over the cerebral cortex.
Huth used stories from The Moth Radio Hour because they are short and compelling. The more enthralling the stories, the more confident the scientists could be that the people being scanned were focusing on the words and not drifting off. Seven people listened to two hours of stories each. Per person, that amounted to hearing roughly 25,000 words – and more than 3,000different words – as they lay in the scanner.
The atlas shows how words and related terms exercise the same regions of the brain. For example, on the left-hand side of the brain, above the ear, is one of the tiny regions that represents the word “victim”. The same region responds to “killed”, “convicted”, “murdered” and “confessed”. On the brain’s right-hand side, near the top of the head, is one of the brain spots activated by family terms: “wife”, “husband”, “children”, “parents”.
Each word is represented by more than one spot because words tend to have several meanings. One part of the brain, for example, reliably responds to the word “top”, along with other words that describe clothing. But, the word “top” activates many other regions. One of them responds to numbers and measurements, another to buildings and places. The scientists have created an interactive website where the public can explore the brain atlas.
Strikingly, the brain atlases were similar for all the participants, suggesting that their brains organized the meanings of words in the same way. The scientists only scanned five men and two women, however. All are native English speakers and two are authors of the study published in Nature. It is highly possible that people from different backgrounds and cultures will have different semantic brain atlases.
Armed with the atlas, researchers can now piece together the brain networks that represent wildly different concepts, from numbers to murder and religion. “The idea of murder is represented a lot in the brain,” Gallant said.
Using the same data, the group has begun work on new atlases that show how the brain holds information on other aspects of language, from phonemes to syntax. A brain atlas for narrative structure has so far proved elusive, however. “Every time we come up with a set of narrative features, we get told they aren’t the right set of narrative features,” said Gallant.
Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, praised the work. Unlike many studies that looked at brain activity when an isolated word or sentence was spoken, Gallant’s team had shed light on how the brain worked in a real- world scenario, he said. The next step, he added, was to create a more comprehensive and precise semantic brain atlas. Ultimately, Hasson believes it will be possible to reconstruct the words a person is thinking from their brain activity. The ethical implications are enormous. One more benign use would see brain activity used to assess whether political messages have been effectively communicated to the public. “There are so many implications and we are barely touching the surface,” he said.
Lorraine Tyler, a cognitive neuroscientist and head of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University, said the research was a “tour de force in its scope and methods”. But, the brain atlas in its current form does not capture fine differences in word meanings. “While this research is path-breaking in its scope, there is still a lot to learn about how semantics is represented in the brain.”


Intermediate
The view from the visitors centre at the southern edge of Donana National Park in southern Spain is an ornithologists dream: 200,000 hectares of wetlands vital for the birdlife of western Europe. Dozens of Britains most loved migratory birds rest here every year on their migrations from Africa. Donana is also home to some of Europes rarest birds, including the Spanish imperial eagle.
It is a glorious, vibrant landscape but it exists on a knife-edge. In 1998, almost two billion gallons of acidic water, mixed with waste metals, poured into the park from the Los Frailes mine 45km away. A toxic tsunami of waste poured down the Guadiamar river into the park. More than 25,000 kilos of dead  sh were collected afterwards and nearly 2,000 adult birds, chicks, eggs and nests were killed or destroyed.
It was Spains worst environmental disaster and the clean-up cost 90m. Suddenly aware of Donanas status as the nations most important natural site, Spain decided to spend a further 360m, some of it EU money, on restoring the landscape. In the 1950s and 60s, some parts of this landscape had been drained to create rice and cotton  elds. Some of this farmland is now being returned to its original wetland state.
It has been a costly but positive process. But Donana is still in trouble thanks to the increasing pressures of modern life. There are plans to build an oil pipeline through Donana and other developers want to build new hotels and golf courses, which would need enormous water supplies. Sand and soil washed from nearby farms is also blocking the channels that cross Donana.
However, the real body blow for conservationists has been the recent decision of the Andalucian government to reopen the Frailes mine that nearly destroyed Donana in 1998. This is Europes most precious bird sanctuary, for indigenous species and also as a resting place for birds that migrate between Africa and Britain and other parts of north-west Europe, says Laurence Rose of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Donana already faces a large number of threats, but now they want to bring back the very cause of the disaster 16 years ago. It is extremely worrying.
The state of the local economy provides an explanation for the governments decision. The crash of Spains banks in 2008 had a catastrophic effect on the region and unemployment in some parts of Andalucia is now more than 30%. Reopening the mine would provide more than 1,000 jobs.
There are riches here, riches that are badly needed by local inhabitants, said energy spokesman Vicente Fernandez Guerrero. We think mining is a good way to make it possible to allow local people to continue to live in the area. This is a mining area. People have been digging metals here since Roman times.
Fernandez said that the mine licence would only allow modern mining techniques, which avoid the creation of poisonous wet waste. Also, the Canadian company that ran Los Frailes when the disaster happened cannot run it again. The best technology in the world will be used here, Fernandez insisted. Liquid will not be used. We are going to insist on that.
The plan has some support in the area, but it also has a lot of opposition. Carlos Davila, who works for the Spanish Ornithological Society in Donana, was also alarmed at the plan. This is a very, very bad idea, he said. They say the new mine will be safe, but they said it was safe in 1998 and look what happened. We got the worst ecological disaster in the history of Spain.
Almost every visitor at a local restaurant had a camera and telescopic lens or a pair of binoculars. There is a big tourist trade because of the birdlife of Don_ana. This is not surprising because this is a very special place. A huge sky hangs over this  at but certainly not boring landscape. Birds of every shape and size  ll the air and sometimes the road. At one point on my visit, a stork calmly stood in front of our car until it felt ready to  y off.
The trouble is that Spain does not have the public resources it had 16 years ago. A repeat of the toxin spill today would have a much, much more damaging impact, said Rose. This point is supported by Davila. After the disaster, Spain realized that it had a place of real ecological importance and did a lot to clean it up and protect it, he added. Now, we seem to be forgetting that lesson. It is very depressing.


A Canadian man who sprang to fame after offering a free round-the-world trip to a woman with the same name as his ex-girlfriend has returned from the jaunt with his chosen namesake, although, to the dismay of those following the story, love did not blossom between the pair. Jordan Axani, a 28-year-old Toronto real-estate developer turned charity founder, made it back to Canada with Elizabeth Quinn Gallagher but said the pair had “forged a brother-sister-like relationship”.
Axani had made headlines in 2014 after offering an air ticket to any Canadian named Elizabeth Gallagher. He had booked a three-week vacation with his ex-girlfriend but, after they split up, he was unable to change the name on the flights.
That’s where Axani’s new travelmate, a 23-year-old student from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, came in. Gallagher, who goes by the name Quinn, replied to a Reddit post Axani had submitted – along with other hopeful Elizabeth Gallaghers – and was selected. Gallagher had made it clear before the trip that she had a “pretty serious” boyfriend but that had not stopped romantics, and journalists, from hoping the globetrotters might fall for one another. Unfortunately, it was not to be.
“It wasn’t easy and it certainly wasn’t immediate. It took us about a week to really figure each other out,” Axani said. There was a certain amount of “natural stumbling” around “the dos and don’ts of travelling together” as the pair got to know each other.
“I’m going to be explicitly clear,” Axani said, shortly after the pair returned to Toronto. “This was never a romantic endeavour. It was strictly platonic. I do not think of Quinn in a romantic light in the least. There is no future for us romantically. She is a good friend. I think of her as a little sister but that will be it. And her feelings are entirely mutual in that regard.” It took work to establish that brother-sister, good-friend, no-future-for-us-romantically relationship, however. other. “At the end of it, we’d developed a really great rhythm of, one second, having really funny inside jokes, and, the next second, knowing when the other needed space.”
Although the pair failed to fall for one another, Axani said the trip, which took in Milan, Venice, Vienna, Prague, Khao Lak (in Thailand) and Hong Kong, was “fantastic”. A favourite place was Prague, Axani said, where they “had the largest groundswell of people reaching out”.
“Over the course of two and a half days, I think we met about two dozen people. So that’s a lot of stories, that’s a lot of individuals and that’s a lot of love for their home city of Prague.”
People were following the pair on Twitter and Instagram, Axani said, and they were even recognized in the street in Hong Kong. “It was a real adventure. We had a blast. We learned a lot about ourselves and about each other. I think, coming out of it, I can’t imagine it going much better than it did.”
Axani made it back to Toronto at 3am on Monday, 12 January, when the holiday came to an abrupt halt. He went straight into a board meeting with fellow board members at his charity, A Ticket Forward. Axani started the non-profit organization after his Reddit post went viral and intends to offer round-the-world-trips to survivors of abuse, cancer and war.
Alongside that, Axani is also in talks to spin his story into a television show or film, although he would not comment on what form those productions might take. “Suffice to say there’s been significant interest from many production companies. We’re well advanced.” In terms of his love life, Axani said he was not looking for his next Elizabeth Gallagher just yet. “I’m not looking for anything, per se, but life happens and we’ll see,” he said. “As always, life’s a journey.”


Intermediate
A girl born today in the UK can expect to live nearly to the age of 82 on average and her brother will live to 78. They would have a longer life in Andorra (85 and 79 respectively) but will live a little longer than in the US (81 and 76). If they lived in the Central African Republic, they would die in middle age (49 and 44). However, almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of countries such as Lesotho, which have experienced HIV and violence, lifespans are lengthening. And the best news is that small children are much less likely to die than they were forty years ago. There has been a drop in deaths in under-fives of nearly 60%, from 16.4 million in 1970 to 6.8 million in 2010.
This last statistic provides justification for the enormous project that the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle has led over the past five years, involving nearly 500 researchers, to assess the global effects of disease. Knowing how many children die and from what cause allows the world to focus its efforts and resources on keeping them alive. There are many lessons to be learnt from the enormous database they have put together, which will help global organizations and individual governments to better care for us all.
The project was a big task and is not without controversy. IHME has been very radical in some of its methods. Where they did not have death registries or medical records, for instance, they have taken evidence from verbal autopsies  deciding the cause of death by an interview with the family. The most surprising result has been the malaria figure. IHME said 1.2 million die of the disease every year  twice as many as previously thought. The big increase is in adult deaths. It is commonly believed that malaria kills mostly children under five.
The way I was taught as a doctor and everybody else is taught is that, in malarial areas, you become semi-immune as an adult, said Dr Christopher Murray, IHME Director. We originally went with that opinion but there has been a change as we have become more empirical, following the data. African doctors write on hospital records that adults are dying of malaria a lot. But, he adds, their fever could be something else. The findings have led to further studies.
Although Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, gave the IHME study a warm official welcome, some of the staff are cautious. We need to be very careful in assessing the validity [of the figures], said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist. We need to wait to be persuaded by evidence. His colleague Dr Tiers Boerma, Director of one WHO department, added: People should understand that some of the numbers are very different and the WHO cant go with any academic publication that states a different number. However, said Mathers, IHME has pushed the envelope with some of these analyses and that is stimulating. One of the main themes, said Murray, was incredibly rapid change in the main causes of death and the speed of that change is a lot faster than we expected it to be.
Reduced fertility and longer life have led to a rise in the average age of the worlds population in a decade from 26 years old to almost 30. The change has been dramatic in Latin America, for instance, where countries like Brazil and Paraguay had life expectancy of below 30 in 1970 and almost 64 in 2010. That is a 35-year increase in the average age of death over four decades. In a place like Brazil, the speed of change is so fast that most institutions are not able to deal with it, Murray said.
A second factor is the move outside Africa from communicable diseases and the common causes of mother and baby deaths to what are sometimes termed lifestyle diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer  some of which have significant genetic triggers. That change has been particularly marked in Latin America, the Middle East and south-east and even south Asia, he said.
The third big finding was, Murray said, a surprise to us. There is a lot of disability and it has a big effect on people who are living longer but not healthier lives. The main causes of disability are different from the ones that kill you, he said. They were mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, and disorders, such as arthritis and lower back pain, anaemia, sight and hearing loss and skin disease. In addition, there was substance abuse. The numbers for these are not going down over time, he said. We are making no progress in reducing these conditions.


A nasal spray laced with the 'Love hormone' oxytocin could help children with autism learn to handle social situations better, US researchers claim. Scans of children with autistic spectrum disorder showed that a single dose of the chemical improved brain responses to facial expressions, a shift that could make social interactions feel more natural and rewarding for them.
The scientists behind the research said a course of oxytocin might boost the success of behavioural therapies that are already used to help people with autism learn to cope with social situations. “Over time, what you would expect to see is more appropriate social responding, being more interested in interacting with other people, more eye contact and more conversational ability,” said Kevin Pelphrey, director of the Child Neuroscience Lab at Yale University.
Autism is a developmental disorder seen in more than one in 100 people. The condition affects individuals in different ways, but is characterized by difficulties in social interaction and communication. So far, there is no established treatment for the social problems caused by autism. Researchers at Yale have studied the brain chemical oxytocin as a potential treatment for the social impairments caused by autism because it plays a crucial role in bonding and trust. Results have been mixed, though: one recent study found no significant benefit for youths given the chemical over several days. But Pelphrey said oxytocin might help the brain learn from social interactions; it would work best when used with therapies that encourage people with autism to engage more socially, he said.
“Our study shows that oxytocin affects the brain and opens up the possibility that, when combined with behavioural treatments, it works like a social enhancer,” he said. The scientists used a technique called functional MRI to scan the brains of 17 youths aged eight to 16 with autism while they looked at images of cars or the eyes of people expressing various emotions. The scans were given 45 minutes after the participants inhaled a placebo or oxytocin through a nasal spray.
The scans showed that reward circuitry in the children’s brains behaved more normally after a snort of oxytocin, being more active when the person was looking at faces and less active when viewing the inanimate cars. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. “If this is replicated, it suggests that oxytocin might treat something for which we don’t have a treatment in autism, and that’s the core social motivation,” Pelphrey told the Guardian.
He warned that it was too early to use oxytocin as a treatment for the social difficulties caused by autism and cautioned against buying oxytocin from suppliers online. “We don’t want them running out on the basis of this study or any other and trying oxytocin at home. There is no telling what they are buying. We are nowhere near thinking this is a ready treatment. It needs more follow-up,” he said. “This is an important new study in identifying changes in brain activity in key regions of the brain involved in social cognition in autism following oxytocin administration,” said Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. A surprising finding, however, is that oxytocin nasal spray did not change performance on the social cognitive task. Nor is it clear yet if oxytocin only has benefits for people with autism or has any unwanted side effects.
Finally, oxytocin effects only last about 45 minutes, so there may be practical considerations as to whether this could be used as a treatment.
“From a scientific perspective, this study has a lot of evidence from animal and human work to justify serious attention, but more research is needed. Doctors should be cautious about the clinical potential of this hormone until we know much more about its benefits and risks, in much larger studies.” Said Simon Baron-Cohen.
Uta Frith, who studies autism at University College London, said: “According to this study, oxytocin may have the effect of making faces more interesting as assessed by greater activity in brain structures concerned with reward evaluation. Disappointingly, this effect is seen only in brain activity and not in behaviour. Demonstrating an effect on behaviour will be critical if nasal spray treatment is to be of any value.”


Intermediate
Well-known British author David Mitchell is used to the critics analysing his novels in detail. So, its a relief, he says, that his latest work wont be seen by anyone until 2114. He completed it at 1am one Tuesday morning before a car arrived to take him to the airport to catch a flight to Norway.
Mitchell is the second contributor to the Scottish artist Katie Patersons Future Library project, for which 1,000 trees were planted in 2014 in Oslos Nordmarka forest. The first author, Margaret Atwood, handed over the manuscript of a text called Scribbler Moon in 2015. Each year for the next 100 years, an author will deliver a piece of writing that will only be read in 2114, when the trees are chopped down to make paper on which the 100 texts will be printed.
Each author  their names revealed year by year and chosen by a panel of experts and Paterson, while she is alive  will travel to the spot in the forest high above Oslo, where they will hand over their manuscripts in a short ceremony.
Its a little glimmer of hope in a season when there has been lots of very depressing news, which shows that we are in with a chance of civilization in a hundred years, said Mitchell. Everything is telling us that were doomed but the Future Library brings hope that we are more resilient than we think: that we will be here, that there will be trees, that there will be books and readers, and civilization.
Mitchell said he found writing the book quite liberating because I wont be around to take the consequences of this being good or bad. But, Im sandwiched between Margaret Atwood and no doubt some other brilliant writer. So, it had better be good. Id look such a fool if they opened it in 2114 and it wasnt any good.
Mitchell says that he usually polishes and polishes his writing. Actually, I over-polish. But, this was very different  I wrote till the final minute. So, the first two-thirds were polished and the final third I didnt have time. And, it was a liberation.
Future Library creator, Paterson, asked the writers to write on the theme of imagination and time, which they can take in so many directions. Mitchell revealed only the name of the manuscript, From Me Flows What You Call Time, during a ceremony in the Norwegian woods next to where Patersons 1,000 trees are planted. The title is taken from a piece of music by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. But, other than admitting that its more substantial than I was expecting, the author would say nothing more.
Handing over his text in the forest, Mitchell read his audience of children and adults a short story and William Wordsworths A slumber did my spirit seal. Its ending, Rolled round in earths diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees, felt appropriate in this small section of forest, which will be carefully tended to for the next 98 years before it is turned into Future Librarys manuscripts.
How vain to think that my scribblings will be of enduring interest to future generations. Yet, how low-key and understated, to slave over a manuscript that nobody will ever congratulate you for and say: Nice one or God, I loved the bit where she did that and he did this ... Mitchell wrote in a piece for the Future Library.
His manuscript, now delivered, will be sealed and placed alongside Atwoods in a wood-lined room in Oslos new public library, which will open in 2019. Watched over by a panel of experts until it is finally printed, it is now, says the novelist, as gone from me as a coin dropped in a river.


Intermediate
Flappy Bird Be careful what you wish for, especially if you want to invent something new. Recently, Dong Nguyen, the designer of the mobile game Flappy Bird, removed it from app stores. He said its success  it had been downloaded more than 50 million times and was making him around 30,000 from advertising each day  had ruined his simple life. On his Twitter account, he said: I cannot take this anymore. OK, so regretting making Flappy Bird isnt quite the same as regretting making a rifl e, but Nguyen is just the latest inventor who wished he hadnt created a monster.
The labradoodle The labradoodle isnt a monster  its adorable. But whats monstrous is the way crossbreed dogs have been sold since the labradoodles inventor, Wally Conron, fi rst created the breed in the 1980s. Ive done a lot of damage, he told the Associated Press. Ive created a lot of problems. There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there. Conron came up with the labradoodle when he was working for the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia to provide a dog for a blind woman whose husband was allergic to dog hair. What he didnt expect was that the labradoodle  and other types of poodle-cross dogs, many of which have health problems  would become so popular.
The AK-47 Six months before his death in December 2013, Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the assault rifl e, wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church: My spiritual torment is unbearable. If my rifl e killed people, does that mean that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, 93 years of age, the son of a poor farmer, Christian and Orthodox by faith, am responsible for peoples deaths, even if they were enemies?
Electronic tagging The electronic tag was originally made in the 1960s as a way of tracking former prisoners attendance at school and work, and rewarding them for good behaviour. Its inventors, Bob Gable and his brother Kirkland, were later horrifi ed that the tag had become a form of control and punishment. Its not pleasant, Kirkland Gable told the Guardian in 2010, but Im not in control of the universe. I have to realize there are some things out of my control.
Pepper spray After police sprayed peaceful protesters with pepper spray at a University of California campus in 2011, one of the scientists who helped develop it in the 80s denounced its use. I have never seen such an inappropriate use of chemicals, Kamran Loghman told The New York Times.
The offi ce cubicle In the late 60s, a new form of offi ce was designed to give workers privacy and increase productivity by providing more work space. Instead, it became a way for companies to put employees into tighter spaces. These days, the cubicle is often connected with uniformity and soulless work. Its inventor, Bob Propst, said, in 1997, the use of cubicles in modern corporations is crazy.


As colourful fish were swimming past him off the Greek coast, Cathal Redmond was convinced he had taken some great photos with his first underwater camera. But, when he looked at the results on dry land, the images were brown and murky. Having taken the pictures while holding his breath underwater, he blamed the limited time he had to set up the shots. All he needed, the industrial designer thought, was a little more time to properly capture the fish in their natural environment.
He vowed to make the little extra time needed a reality and the result is his invention of the Express Dive – a refillable air storage device, held in the mouth, that lets users swim underwater for two minutes. It is aimed at bridging the gap between snorkelling, with its limited scope, and scuba diving, which gives divers the freedom to breathe underwater but at the cost of using cumbersome and expensive gear. The prototype of the invention – which is still in the initial stages of testing individual parts – looks like a cross between a scuba mouthpiece and a water bottle.
“I wanted to enable people to do more. So, rather than just get in underwater and spend 30 seconds holding their breath, I wanted to do a little bit more than they were able to do,” says Redmond, 27. In 2006, the Irish designer completed a scuba-diving course and loved the feeling of being able to breathe underwater and observe fish in their natural environment. Less enjoyable, however, were the fins, the weight belt, the wetsuit, air tank, mask and all the other equipment.
“I was very keenly aware of the fact that I had about 50kg strapped to me and getting into the water was quite foreign when you are used to trying to keep yourself at the surface. It was a very surreal experience,” he says. “The real problem is that it is very limiting as to what you can do. Although it allows you to stay underwater for longer, you have to plan your whole day around it. You have 20kg to 50kg of gear with you – you can’t be walking on the beach and decide you want to go in. Planning is a very big part of it. It demands a lot. There is a lot of relearning required.”
It was during a final-year project for his product design degree at the University of Limerick that Redmond produced the Express Dive. The device has two main parts. When above the surface, the unit uses a fan to suck in air via a vent in the mouthpiece. The air, accelerated around the motor-driven turbine, is compressed through a series of valves and stored in the attached tank, which has a display light that flashes green when it is full. When air is no longer being taken in, the vent shuts off and, as the user dives, air is fed back via the mouthpiece.
That display, which is in the user’s eyeline, then acts as a health bar turning from green to red when the air runs low. The device can take in enough air for two minutes of diving and takes approximately the same amount of time to be refilled. “When you put the compressor into the unit with all of the rest of the stuff, the batteries and the electronics and the membranes for the scuba delivery, the big trick was to be able to get it small enough so that it would be able to be held through the teeth and out of the mouth,” Redmond says.
The electrics are shielded from the water in the casing and are recharged using inductive power transfer – a system using an electromagnetic field, similar to the pads which can wirelessly charge mobile phones, so that there is no need for exposed wires.
Redmond says the mouthpiece feels similar to using a snorkel. He likens it to an extension of the lungs in that the user is taking a deep breath and then using it underwater. “It is an extension of the body’s capacity to store air,” he says. The prototype, made from high-density foam, aluminium and silicone, has been tested in parts. Redmond says he has shown that the motor can compress two minutes’ worth of air into the unit and that the design can be effectively held in the diver’s mouth. What he has not yet done is test the device on a diver, fully submerged for two minutes. But, with enough testing, Redmond is confident he can get a fully functioning device that will not endanger swimmers underwater.
Redmond recently came runner-up for the International James Dyson Award, which will give him £5,000 to further develop the project. Early indications are that the device would be priced at £280, he says, and it is likely to weigh anywhere from 1kg to 3kg depending on the safety features needed.
To anyone who thinks two minutes of air is no more than a minor improvement on snorkelling, Redmond says it could make all the difference underwater. The typical swimmer can hold their breath for about 40 seconds while underwater, he says. “Two minutes is not a lot of time but it is a lot longer than that,” he says.


Intermediate
Cities dont often decide to pack their bags, get up and move down the road. But thats exactly what Kiruna, an Arctic town in northern Sweden, has to do  to avoid being swallowed up into the earth.
Its a terrible choice, says Krister Lindstedt of White, the Swedish architects company that is managing the biblical task. They have to move this city of 23,000 people away from a gigantic iron-ore mine that is fast swallowing up the ground beneath its streets. Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move.
Founded in 1900 by the state-owned Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara mining company (LK), Kiruna has grown rich off the vast amount of iron ore that is below the town but its now facing destruction by exactly the thing that made it rich. The town is here because of the mine, says Deputy Mayor Niklas Siren. Otherwise, no one would have built a city here.
Located 145km inside the Arctic Circle, Kiruna has a brutal climate. It has winters with no sunlight and average temperatures below -15C. But the iron ore has kept people here. It has become the worlds largest underground iron-ore mine. It produces 90% of all the iron in Europe, enough to build more than six Eiffel Towers a day. And demand continues to grow.
In 2004, the mining company told the town that its days were numbered: digging its shafts towards the city at an angle of 60 degrees, subsidence would soon lead to buildings cracking and collapsing. Ten years later, cracks are starting to appear in the ground, and they are creeping closer and closer to the town.
The people of Kiruna have been living in limbo for ten years, says Viktoria Walldin, a social anthropologist who works with the architects. They have put their lives on hold, unable to make major decisions like buying a house, redecorating, having a child or opening a business.
After years of dithering, the city finally has a plan for how it will proceed. Lindstedt has a plan that shows the towns streets and squares beginning to crawl eastwards along a new high street, until the whole place has moved safely away from the mine by 2033.
A new town square is already being built, 3km to the east, with a circular town hall planned by Danish architect Henning Larsen. Twenty other key buildings will be dismantled and put together piece by piece in their new home  like an Ikea flatpack on a bigger scale. Kirunas red wooden church, built in 1912 and once voted Swedens most beautiful building, will take pride of place in a new park, and the bell tower will stand once again above the town hall. But not everything will be saved.
I spoke to an old lady who walks past the bench every day where she had her first kiss, says Walldin. Its things like that  the hospital where your first child was born, for example  that are important to people and all thats going to disappear.
Called the most democratic move in history, the project will get 320m from the mining company for building new facilities, including a high school, fire station, community centre, library and swimming hall. But the biggest worry for most people is where they will actually live and how they will get a house or flat.
People are used to very low rents and very high incomes but, in future, this will have to change says Lindstedt. LK has agreed to compensate residents to the value of their homes plus 25% but many locals say this is not enough to afford a new-build house.
A closer look at the plan shows the new town does not look like the original Kiruna at all. The current town has winding streets and detached houses with gardens. Whites plan has multi-storey apartment blocks around shared courtyards in long straight streets.
It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to reinvent itself into a town that will attract young people. There will be new cultural facilities and visionary things such as a cable car above the high street. But it is a vision that many of the existing residents will probably not be able to afford.


At the beginning of the final series of the TV programme, Downton Abbey, there is a feeling of sadness and everyone knows things are changing. The year is 1925 and Downton Abbey’s neighbours are selling their stately home. At Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham wants to reduce the number of servants.
The real Downton Abbey is Highclere Castle – a stately home owned by George Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon. At Highclere Castle, they have more money than before. Lady Fiona Carnarvon says that the huge success of Downton all around the world has paid for building repairs at the castle.
“It’s been an amazing magic carpet ride for all of us,” she said. “I’m very grateful. My husband and I love Highclere Castle. Now, millions of other people love it.”
At the moment, they only use the ground floor and first floor of Highclere, on the borders of Hampshire. But, a restoration project of tower rooms has begun. When it is finished, visitors will be able to climb up into the tower to an exhibition of the work of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Sir Charles Barry, who also rebuilt Highclere Castle between 1839 and 1842.
In 2009, when the Downton Abbey producers first asked about filming at Highclere Castle, the castle needed £12 million of repairs. “It was just after the banking crisis and we were worried. Then, Downton began and Highclere became a major tourist attraction.”
The number of visitors doubled, to 1,200 a day, after Downton Abbey, written by Julian Fellowes, was shown around the world. It was a hit in the UK in 2010 and, then, in the US. It is now shown on television in 250 countries.
The Downton tourists are part of a growing phenomenon. The organization, VisitBritain, says that nearly 30% of foreign visitors, nearly nine million people, visit castles and historic houses. Almost half of visitors to Britain now say they want to visit places from films or TV.
More than a million tourists take a tour of historic buildings each year and they spend more than £1 billion. Fifty-one per cent of Brazilians, 42% of Russians and Chinese, and 35% of Indian visitors will probably include a visit to a site of interest in their trips.
VisitBritain’s director, Patricia Yates, said: “The links between tourism, films and TV are strong.” She added that period dramas, like Downton Abbey, have also made places outside of London more popular.
“Downton Abbey expresses a certain view of Britain. It is a fantasy world, based in a particular time in history. It’s the first TV period drama that everyone knows and talks about.”
Lady Carnarvon says that the long-term future of Highclere might not be secure. But, she says, “The programme has allowed us to spend faster on the buildings.”
Highclere Castle plans a Tutankhamun event in 2022, 100 years after the 5th Earl of Carnarvon went to Egypt with Howard Carter and discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. Another event is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed the grounds.
“Every single day, don’t take anything for granted,” said Lady Carnarvon. “You have to invest in these great houses. I’ve tried to show people it is fun. We have special events, not just a walk around a dusty house.”