The European Parliament have said that health warnings will cover nearly two-thirds of cigarette packs and there will be a ban on menthol cigarettes in the EU.
The EU will ban menthol and other flavours from 2022. MEPs also decided that most electronic cigarettes, which are more and more popular as alternatives to normal cigarettes, do not to be need regulated in the same way as medicines.
The Department of Health and e-cigarette companies in Britain want to find out exactly what this means – for example, will e-cigarette companies be banned from advertising at sports events?
The Department of Health said: “We are very pleased to see tougher action on smoking, with European controls banning flavoured cigarettes and the introduction of stricter rules on health warnings on cigarette packs.
“But we are disappointed with the decision not to regulate nicotine-containing products (NCPs), including e-cigarettes, as medicines. We believe these products need to be regulated as medicines.
“Smoking levels in England are at their lowest since records began – 19.5 per cent – but we want to reduce the numbers of people smoking even more and believe this important step will help.”
UK e-cigarette companies, who were happy with the parliament’s vote, said they were already in talks with the Advertising Standards Authority. But they said that it would not be a good idea to ban all advertising.
MEPs decided e-cigarettes should only be regulated as medical products if the e-cigarette companies said they could stop people from smoking.
Other groups want e-cigarettes, used by about 1.3 million people in Britain, to be regulated in the same way as gums, patches and mouth sprays, which are aimed at helping smokers to quit.
The MEPs voted to put health warnings on 65% of each cigarette pack. At the moment, the warnings cover at least 30% on the front and 40% on the back. The UK government has not decided if they will do the same as Australia and introduce standardized packaging. First, they want to know that this will stop people from smoking.
The MEPs’ decision about the bigger health warnings on the packaging could become law in 2014.
“The UK continues to believe that medicinal regulation of NCPs is best for public health,” said the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority.
Linda McAvan, Labour MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, said: “We know that it is children, not adults, who start smoking. There are fewer and fewer adult smokers in most EU countries, but there are more young smokers.”
Martin Callanan, the Conservative MEP for North East England, said that banning e-cigarettes would have been totally crazy. “These are products that have helped many people stop smoking more harmful cigarettes.”
British American Tobacco said the bigger health warnings were not necessary and that a ban on menthol cigarettes would make more people want to buy from the black market.


The National Security Agency (NSA) has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top-secret document. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers. Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a request for comment denied knowledge of any such program.
In a statement, Google said: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”
Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. “If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge,” one said. An Apple spokesman said he had “never heard” of PRISM.
The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law, introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US. It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.
Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers. The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata. Some of the world’s largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online. Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks. The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies. Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users’ communications under US law, but the PRISM program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies’ servers. The NSA document notes the operations have the “assistance of communications providers in the US ”. The revelation also supports concerns raised by several US senators during the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in December 2012, who warned about the scale of surveillance the law might enable and shortcomings in the safeguards it introduces. When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA’s inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data.
But the PRISM program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.
A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document, highlights the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details and more. The document is recent, dating to April 2013. Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA, which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy.
The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organization, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications and perform real-time collection on targeted users.
A senior administration official said in a statement: “The Guardian and Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This law does not allow the targeting of any US citizen or of any person located within the United States. The program is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons.
“This program was recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings and debate. Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”


Intermediate
Glastonbury Festival is declaring war on the plastic water bottle as part of a long-term plan to become the worlds most environmentally friendly outdoor music event.
Festival organizers are targeting the disposable bottle, one of the most obvious symbols of the throwaway culture, that each year leaves the 900-acre festival site covered in plastic. An estimated one million plastic bottles are used during the festival.
Stainless-steel reusable bottles will be given to 2,000 road crew and band members. Thousands more will go on sale to festival-goers to stop them relying on plastic bottles. The 140,000 ticketholders are also being asked to bring reusable bottles that they can fill at 400 drinking-water taps across the site.
Lucy Smith, Glastonburys green issues organizer, said: We have amazing water quality in the UK but everyone is obsessed with drinking bottled water.
She said that, in 2015, Glastonbury also plans to replace all plastic glasses and cutlery with reusable items.
Environmentalists say that there is currently 150 million tonnes of plastic waste around the planet and oceans, poisoning ecosystems and killing wildlife.
Ultimately, festival organizers hope to make Glastonbury the worlds greenest greenfield festival. They want to be like Americas Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, which is a leave-no-trace event, where people have to take away all that they bring.
Glastonbury festival-goers are also being asked to travel to the site on public transport or to try car-sharing with friends. We want to be as sustainable as we can. We do everything we can, but the litter of 140,000 people is a challenge. We cant put bins everywhere, added Smith.
Plastic water bottles can take hundreds or even thousands of years to completely biodegrade. Their manufacture makes their negative ecological impact even worse. Millions of barrels of oil are used in the manufacture of plastic bottles and the transportation of mineral water across the planet produces even more carbon emissions.
Around 13 billion plastic water bottles are sold in the UK every year, but only one in five is recycled.
Smith said that, instead of buying bottled water, festival-goers should take advantage of the water on tap, which comes from huge underground reservoirs. The charity WaterAid will also set up water kiosks around the site, which will stock reusable bottles and cups and offer free refills.
Organizers say that almost half of all the rubbish left on site was recycled in 2013 and add that there will be 15,000 bins for recycling across the festival grounds in 2014.
Even though it is becoming more environmentally friendly, critics say that Glastonbury is becoming increasingly corporate. Iron Maidens Bruce Dickinson said he would never bring his band to Glastonbury Festival, which he called the most bourgeois thing on the planet.


Do you want your child to be good at sport, make the school team and, maybe one day, even compete on the world stage? Well, try to ensure that your would-be Olympian or World Cup winner is born in November or, failing that, in October. A study led by one of the UK’s leading experts on children’s physical activity has found that school pupils born in those months are fitter than everyone else in their class.
November- and October-born children emerged as fitter, stronger and more powerful than their peers born in the other ten months of the year, especially those whose birthdays fell in April or June. Dr Gavin Sandercock, from the Centre for Sports and Exercise Science at Essex University, and colleagues found that autumn-born children enjoyed “a clear physical advantage” over their classmates.
The research involved 8,550 boys and girls aged between ten and 16 from 26 state schools in Essex. All were tested between 2007 and 2010 on three different measures of fitness: stamina, handgrip strength and lower-body power. The results revealed that a child’s month of birth could make “significant” differences to their levels of cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength and ability to accelerate, all of which predict how good someone is at sport, in which such attributes are vital. Performances at school sports days in the weeks ahead may bear out the findings.
November-born children were the fittest overall as they had the most stamina and power and were the second strongest. Those born in October were almost as fit, scoring highest for strength and coming third for power, with December children close behind.
The gap in physical prowess between children in the same class but born in different months was sometimes very wide. “For example, we found that a boy born in November can run at least 10% faster, jump 12% higher and is 15% more powerful than a child of the same age born in April. This is, potentially, a huge physical advantage,” said Sandercock. Such gaps could ultimately decide who became a top-level athlete because, as the paper says, “selection into elite sports may often depend on very small margins or differences in an individual’s physical performance”.
The study, which has been published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, found that, when scores for the three kinds of fitness were combined, those born in April were the least fit, then those in June. That could see those children excluded from school teams and becoming sporting underachievers, Sandercock said.
The findings seem to show that children born in the early months of the school year enjoy a double “autumn advantage” – they are already known to have an academic advantage and, now, they also appear to be better equipped for sport, too. The results show that something other than “the relative-age effect” – the greater maturity of those born early in the school year – is at work, especially as the fittest children were not the tallest or heaviest, he added.
The authors believe that autumn-born children’s greater exposure over the summer months, towards the end of pregnancy, to vitamin D – the “sunshine vitamin” linked to a range of health benefits – is the most likely explanation. “Seasonal differences in intrauterine vitamin D concentrations seem most plausible,” they say. John Steele, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust, said the quality of a young person’s introduction to PE and sport at school can be “a major factor” in their sporting development. “Children that get a high-quality first experience, which develops their physical literacy, are those that will have greater agility, balance and coordination, and are more likely to develop an enjoyment of physical activity and excel in sport as they grow up”, he said.
UK Sport could not say if a disproportionately high number of the 1,300 athletes across 47 sports it funds were born in November and October. Natalie Dunman, its head of performance pathways, said that, while the differences highlighted in the new findings were borne out by teenagers competing in junior-level competitions, they had disappeared by the time sportspeople were taking part in adult competitions. She said: “Looking at elite, senior athletes, there are many factors that go into making a champion and our work hasn’t uncovered anything to suggest that month of birth is one of the key ingredients.”


The last time she took to the stage, the prototype of the mobile phone was undergoing its first trials. Thirty-five years later, as she performs once again, singer Kate Bush is faced with a different world.
While most concerts are now aglow with phones and tablets, Bush is taking a stand against fans watching her shows through the digital veil of a screen.
Prior to her highly anticipated series of concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Bush released a statement appealing to her fans to put down their mobile phones at her gigs.
Bush wrote on her website: “I have a request for all of you who are coming to the shows. We have purposefully chosen an intimate theatre setting rather than a large venue or stadium. It would mean a great deal to me if you would please refrain from taking photos or filming during the shows.
“I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras. I know it’s a lot to ask but it would allow us to all share in the experience together.”
With her love of theatrics and opulent costumes, Bush’s keenness to stop fans uploading grainy footage to YouTube could also be an attempt to keep the show a surprise for the thousands of fans who have purchased tickets for the 22 dates she is playing.
Bush is not the first to speak out against the detrimental effect of the presence of phones at concerts, with numerous artists berating their fans for experiencing live music through the filter of a screen.
The Who front man, Roger Daltrey, recently said it was “weird” that people did not have their mind on the show when they had gone to a performance and were concentrating on staring at the screen rather than the artist on stage.
He said: “I feel sorry for them, I really feel sorry for them. Looking at life through a screen and not being in the moment totally – if you’re doing that, you’re 50% there, right? It’s weird. I find it weird.”
In 2013, Beyoncé berated one of her fans at a gig for filming. “You can’t even sing because you’re too busy taping,” Beyoncé told him. “I’m right in your face, baby. You gotta seize this moment. Put that damn camera down!”
The debate around the presence of phones at live events is not restricted to music, with sport fans equally vocal on the subject. Recently, Dutch fans at PSV Eindhoven launched a vehement protest against the introduction of wi-fi in their stadium, holding up banners with messages like “No wi-fi. Support the team,” “You can sit at home,” and “Stand united ”, while Manchester United have also told fans to leave their “large electronic devices” at home, prohibiting filming on tablets this season.
Jarvis Cocker has previously criticized phone- wielders in the audience for driving him “insane at concerts”, adding: “It seems stupid to have something happening in front of you and look at it on a screen that’s smaller than the size of a cigarette packet.”
Johnny Marr said in 2013 that it meant that fans missed out on the sensory experience of live music in their desperation to document the event for later.
“To stand and just be looking at it through your phone is a completely wasted opportunity. You know, I don’t mean to be unkind but I think you should put your phone down because you’re just being an idiot, really. Just enjoy the gig,” he said.
“That’s one of the things about gigs – it’s taking in what’s going on with the people around you and, watching it on a little screen, it’s a waste of time.”
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs resorted to putting up a sign at one of their venues, pleading with fans to pocket their technology. It read: “Please do not watch the show through a screen on your smart device/camera. Put it away as a courtesy to the person behind you, and to the band.”
It has even filtered into the world of classical music, with one of the world’s leading pianists surprising concert-goers in June 2013 when he stormed off stage because a fan was filming his performance on a smartphone. Krystian Zimerman returned moments later and declared: “The destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous.”
But Sam Watt of Vyclone, a phone app that encourages audiences to film at concerts and then brings together the footage to create a crowd-sourced video of the event, said that such artists were fighting a losing battle and that filming at concerts enhanced rather than detracted from the experience.
“Fans filming is now part of the concert experience – that is a just a fact – so we take that footage that people are filming at concerts through the app, they upload it onto the app, and then it comes back to them mixed together with everybody else who was filming. You end up with really fantastic content,” he said.
“Our overall thinking is that filming at concerts adds to the experience, rather than taking away from it and I think, if Kate Bush came round for a cup of tea, we could have a really interesting discussion about this and we might be able to win her round,” he added. “Knowing that people are going to film and want those memories is really important because it is probably going to hit them on the head in the future if they say to everyone they can’t film. You’ve got to embrace it.”


Intermediate
It has mapped the worlds highest peaks, the ocean floor, the Amazon rainforest and even shown us a bit of North Korea. But Googles mission to map the world has mostly stayed away from the inhospitable Arctic.
Now, however, Google is starting what might be the most significant update to centuries of polar map making  and one it hopes will help provide a better understanding of life on the permafrost for millions of web users. Google has flown a small team to Iqaluit, the largest town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. They have with them their warmest winter clothes, a stack of laptop computers and an 18kg telescopic camera that they can fix to their backpacks.
Helped by an Inuit mapping expert, and followed around by curious locals, the team spent four days collecting the images and information that will give the isolated community on Baffin Island what people across the globe who live in cities now take for granted.
The town of 7,000 people will go on display via Googles popular Street View application in July 2013.
Unlike more accessible parts of the world, which have been mapped using a special camera on a car roof, for Googles Iqaluit project mappers walked the towns snowpacked roads and crossed little-known trails, some of which are made of ice and disappear in the short summer months.
The team also walked along part of a 15km dead-end road known as the Road to Nowhere, despite warnings about the risk from polar bears and other wildlife.
John Graham, mayor of Iqaluit, understands the enthusiasm of the locals who followed Googles digital map makers while they worked. The Street View project, he said, follows in the footsteps of the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who in 1576 sailed into the bay where Iqaluit now is while searching for the Northwest Passage, and the 1941 flight of Captain Elliott Roosevelt, an officer and son of the US President, which led to the site being chosen for a military airbase. His exploration led to the founding of the modern town of Iqaluit.
What Google had already created on their existing map using satellite images was quite accurate, but they were missing one road that had been created in the past year.
One difficulty was how to situate many businesses and homeowners that have mail sent to the local post office, not delivered to their address. Putting the PO box addresses on the map would mean the 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 came one night to help correct such problems. They were provided with a laptop computer and shown how to make sure their homes, shops and meeting places would show up accurately on the map.
The project is more than a novelty. Arif Sayani, the towns Director of Planning, said the town would be able to use the maps as a promotional tool for those thinking of visiting or moving to the area. It may also speed up planning decisions in Iqaluit.
The project leader for Google said he hoped to see the work continue in other northern towns. However, the high costs of moving people and equipment around the vast Arctic territory means they might have to use cheaper methods in the future, for example, sending equipment to the area and asking volunteers to complete the map.


The Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a son on Monday, 22 July. Third in line to the throne, the baby is destined to be the 43rd monarch since William the Conqueror obtained the English crown in 1066.
Kensington Palace announced at 8.30pm that the baby was born at 4.24pm in the exclusive Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, West London. “We could not be happier,” the Duke of Cambridge said.
In a statement, Kensington Palace said: “Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4.24pm. The baby weighs 8lbs 6oz. The Duke of Cambridge was present for the birth.” The duchess experienced at least ten and a half hours’ labour, which Kensington Palace said had “progressed as normal”.
The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Harry and members of both families were informed and were delighted with the news that Her Royal Highness and her child were both doing well.
It is understood that the couple delayed making the announcement immediately so that they could enjoy some private time with their newborn. William telephoned his family to tell them the good news, speaking to the Queen, his father, Charles and younger brother, Prince Harry.
The birth of the baby prince means the monarchy has three generations of heirs to the throne for the first time since 1894.
The baby is the first Prince of Cambridge to be born for more than 190 years since Prince George of Cambridge, a grandson of George III and the only son of Prince Adolphus Frederick, the 1st Duke of Cambridge.
In a statement, Prince Charles said: “Both my wife and I are overjoyed at the arrival of my first grandchild. It is an incredibly special moment for William and Catherine and we are so thrilled for them on the birth of their baby boy.
“Grandparenthood is a unique moment in anyone’s life, as countless kind people have told me in recent months, so I am enormously proud and happy to be a grandfather for the first time and we are eagerly looking forward to seeing the baby in the near future.”
The newest royal will be called HRH Prince George of Cambridge. When Kate was three months pregnant, a decree issued by the Queen said: “All the children of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales should have and enjoy the style, title and attribute of Royal Highness with the titular dignity of Prince or Princess prefixed to their Christian names or with such other titles of honour.”
Following tradition, a formal notice was posted on an ornate rococo-style easel – the same used to announce Prince William’s birth in 1982 – in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace shortly before 9pm. Within an hour, the numbers had swelled from hundreds to thousands outside the palace, with locals and tourists alike keen to share in the historic moment.
New Yorker, Sharon Surloff, was delighted with her phone picture of the royal bulletin, snapped after she and her niece and mother had squeezed through crowds to take a photograph of the easel.
“The police were just saying to everyone: 'OK, 20 seconds and then the next person'. It’s just great to be here, though. We arrived this morning, at nine in the morning, so it has all worked out beautifully.”
The palace announced the birth in a press release. Minutes later, as crowds of well- wishers outside cheered, “It’s a boy”, the formal medical bulletin was taken from the hospital to a waiting car by Ed Perkins, Prince William’s press secretary. He handed it to a soldier, who then took the notice, which was signed by Marcus Setchell, the Queen’s gynaecologist, to Buckingham Palace under police escort.
The prime minister was one of the first to offer his congratulations. Speaking outside 10 Downing Street, David Cameron said: “It is wonderful news from St Mary’s, Paddington, and I am sure that, right across the country, and, indeed, right across the Commonwealth, people will be celebrating and wishing the royal couple well.
“It is an important moment in the life of our nation but, I suppose, above all, it is a wonderful moment for a warm and loving couple who have got a brand new baby boy. It has been a remarkable few years for our royal family: a royal wedding that captured people’s hearts, that extraordinary and magnificent jubilee and now this royal birth – all from a family that has given this nation so much incredible service.”
Congratulations came from the White House, too, from Barack Obama and his wife. The president said: “Michelle and I are so pleased to congratulate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the joyous occasion of the birth of their first child. We wish them all the happiness and blessings parenthood brings.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, tweeted: “Delighted for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. May God bless them all with love, health and happiness.”
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said: “Many congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. I wish them and their son all happiness and good health.”
The campaign group, Republic, which launched its Born Equal initiative calling for every child to be born equal in political status and rights, said the royal birth raised questions about Britain and democratic values. Chief Executive Graham Smith said the baby should be able to grow up without “constant interference and intrusion”. He said: “Here is a new baby whose career, religion, even personal relationships have already been mapped out. Meanwhile, this is an opportunity for the rest of us to consider whether this circus is the best way to run things.”


Lego’s profits rose strongly in the first half of 2014, helped by the success of its Lego Movie in the US and UK.
The Danish toy company sold a lot more products in Europe, North and South America, and Asiaas children bought products linked to the film.
The film took more than $250 million in the US and £31 million in the UK between February and April 2014.
The movie cost about $60 million to make. It is entertaining and aimed at people who are likely to buy the company’s products.
Lego’s finance director, John Goodwin, said that the Lego Movie products had a positive effect on profits during the first half of 2014. They are now waiting to see what will happen after the movie comes out on DVD in the second half of 2014.
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego’s chief executive, said that Lego were very happy that they have sold more products in the first half of 2014. He said this was a result of Lego’s ability to develop, launch and distribute Lego products, which children all over the world put at the top of their wishlists.
Lego, based in the small town of Billund in Denmark, started producing its plastic bricks in 1949 and became a popular and well-known children’s toy around the world by the 1970s.
In 2003, the company nearly collapsed. Then, Knudstrop became Lego’s new chief executive. He got rid of hundreds of products and, then, refocused the business on its bricks.
The company opened its first factory in China in April 2014.


Intermediate
Tea, baked beans on toast and fish and chips have long been part of the British food tradition. But, there has been a change in tastes over the generations. This has been clearly shown in data published recently in the National Food Survey, which was set up in 1940 by the government because of concerns about health and access to food.
Everyone knows the British love tea but consumption has more than halved since the 1970s, falling from 68g of tea per person per week to only 25g. Britons are now drinking on average only eight cups of tea a week, down from 23 cups in 1974. And, while tea remains the most popular hot drink in the UK, people now spend more money on coffee.
The data is from 150,000 households who took part in the survey between 1974 and 2000, combined with information from 2000 to 2014. It shows a move towards healthier diets in recent decades, with shifts to low-calorie soft drinks, from whole to skimmed milk and increasing consumption of fresh fruit. But, weekly consumption of chips, pizza, crisps and ready meals has soared.
There has also been a dramatic shift from white to brown bread but the figures suggest the amount of bread people are eating has fallen from 25 to 15 slices a week over the past four decades. The consumption of baked beans has dropped by a fifth despite a rise in other types of convenience food, particularly Italian dishes. Adults in the UK now eat an average of 75g of pizza every week compared with none in 1974, while the consumption of pasta has almost tripled over the same period.
Fresh potatoes are also becoming less essential with a 67% decrease from 1974, when adults ate the equivalent of 188g every day. Sales of other vegetables such as cucumbers, courgettes, aubergines and mushrooms have increased. Consumption of takeaway food has almost doubled since 1974, from 80g per person per week to 150g. Around 33g of this amount is chips and 56g is meat, with kebabs (10g), chicken (7g), burgers (5g) and meat-based meals (32g) particularly popular.
Some trends suggest that British people are becoming more careful about what they put on their plates, with the average consumption of fruit increasing by 50% since 1974. In 2014, UK adults ate an average of 157g of fruit per day. Bananas have been the most popular fruit in the UK since 1996, reaching 221g per adult per week in 2014, well above apples (131g) and oranges (48g). Lowcalorie soft drinks represented half of all soft drinks consumed in 2014 for the first time. Britons are also spending a smaller proportion of their salaries on food today  11%, compared with 24% in 1974.
The UK Environment Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, said: Food is the heart of our society and this data not only shows what we were eating 40 years ago but how a change in culture has led to a food revolution. Shoppers care more about where their food comes from than ever before, the internet has brought quality food to our doors at the click of a button, fashionable restaurants are showcasing the latest trends and exciting global cuisines are now as common as fish and chips.
By studying this data, we can look beyond what, where or how previous generations were eating and pinpoint the moments that changed our habits forever. Weve only scratched the surface of what the National Food Survey can tell us. From local food maps and school projects to predicting new food trends, I look forward to seeing how this data can be used to learn more about our past and grow our world-leading food and farming industry in the future.


How long can you hold your breath? I’m trying it right now. The first 30 seconds are easy. I want to give up at 45 seconds but I continue and it gets easier for a while. But, as I go past one minute, my heart is pounding. I breathe out a tiny bit and this helps. One minute and 12 seconds. I’m quite impressed with myself.
In some sports, it is very important to be able to hold your breath, particularly in freediving. In 2006, I met Sam Amps, who was captain of the UK freedive team. At a swimming pool in Bristol, she taught me some simple ways to help me hold my breath for longer while swimming underwater. By the end of the session, I could hold my breath for 90 seconds, long enough to let me swim across the pool. Sam swam across the pool three times easily. She could hold her breath for five minutes, while swimming. Five minutes!
I asked how she did it: very slow breathing for several minutes before each dive, then a big, deep breath before diving in.
Our heart rate doesn’t slow down when we hold our breath. At least, it doesn’t if you’re doing it on land. When you’re under cold water, the heart rate slows down in most people. This change in our bodies is useful in diving – but it is even more useful for not drowning.
Holding our breath is becoming very useful in one particular area of medicine. Radiotherapy for breast cancer involves pointing radiation exactly at the tumour. It’s usually done in short periods, between breaths. But, if the patient can hold their breath for several minutes, it means that doctors can give the complete radiation dose, in the right place, all at the same time. The problem, of course, is that most people cannot hold their breath for several minutes. But doctors at University Hospital Birmingham have shown that, if patients are given air with extra oxygen before holding their breath, they can hold it for five-and-a-half minutes.
Surprisingly, to achieve this you have to fool the diaphragm. When you breathe in, you’re pulling the muscle of your diaphragm flat so that the volume of your chest increases – this pulls the air into your lungs.
When you hold your breath, you keep your diaphragm like that. If you breathe extra oxygen before a breath-hold, as in the Birmingham radiotherapy experiments, you may be able to stop the diaphragm from becoming tired too quickly. So, it’s your diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing, that is in charge when you are holding your breath. But, in the end, even if you’ve fooled it for a while, the signals from the diaphragm become too strong and you have to give up – and take a breath.


Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world’s population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet by 2050 to avoid catastrophic shortages.
Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra two billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world’s leading water scientists.
“There will not be enough water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected nine-billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards diets common in western nations,” the report by Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.
“There will be just enough water if the proportion of animal-based foods is limited to 5% of total calories and considerable regional water deficits can be met by a reliable system of food trade.”
Dire warnings of water scarcity limiting food production come as Oxfam and the UN prepare for a possible second global food crisis in five years. Prices for staples such as corn and wheat have risen nearly 50% on international markets since June, triggered by severe droughts in the US and Russia, and weak monsoon rains in Asia. More than 18 million people are already facing serious food shortages across the Sahel.
Oxfam has forecast that the price spike will have a devastating impact in developing countries that rely heavily on food imports, including parts of Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East. Food shortages in 2008 led to civil unrest in 28 countries.
Adopting a vegetarian diet is one option to increase the amount of water available to grow more food in an increasingly climate-erratic world, the scientists said. Animal protein-rich food consumes five to ten times more water than a vegetarian diet. One third of the world’s arable land is used to grow crops to feed animals. Other options to feed people include eliminating waste and increasing trade between countries in food surplus and those in deficit.
“Nine hundred million people already go hungry and two billion people are malnourished in spite of the fact that per-capita food production continues to increase,” they said. “With 70% of all available water being in agriculture, growing more food to feed an additional two billion people by 2050 will place greater pressure on available water and land.”
The report is being released at the start of the annual world water conference in Stockholm, Sweden, where 2,500 politicians, UN bodies, non-governmental groups and researchers from 120 countries meet to address global water supply problems.
Competition for water between food production and other uses will intensify pressure on essential resources, the scientists said. “The UN predicts that we must increase food production by 70% by mid-century. This will place additional pressure on our already stressed water resources, at a time when we also need to allocate more water to satisfy global energy demand – which is expected to rise by 60% over the coming 30 years – and to generate electricity for the 1.3 billion people currently without it,” said the report.
Overeating, undernourishment and waste are all on the rise and increased food production may face future constraints from water scarcity.
“We will need a new recipe to feed the world in the future,” said the report’s editor, Anders Jägerskog.
A separate report from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) said the best way for countries to protect millions of farmers from food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia was to help them invest in small pumps and simple technology, rather than to develop expensive, large-scale irrigation projects.
“We’ve witnessed again and again what happens to the world’s poor – the majority of whom depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and already suffer from water scarcity – when they are at the mercy of our fragile global food system,” said Dr Colin Chartres, the Director General.
“Farmers across the developing world are increasingly relying on and benefiting from small-scale, locally-relevant water solutions. [These] techniques could increase yields up to 300% and add tens of billions of US dollars to household revenues across sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.”


Cities don’t often decide to pack their bags, get up and move down the road. But that’s exactly what Kiruna, an Arctic town in northern Sweden, is having to do – to avoid being swallowed up into the earth.
“It’s a dystopian choice,” says Krister Lindstedt of White, the Stockholm-based architects firm charged with the biblical task of moving this city of 23,000 people away from a gigantic iron-ore mine that is fast gobbling up the ground beneath its streets. “Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move – or else face certain destruction. It’s an existential predicament.”
Founded in 1900 by the state-owned Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara mining company (LK), Kiruna has grown rich off the vast seam of iron ore below the town, but it’s now facing destruction by the very phenomenon that created its wealth. “We are symbiotic: the town is here because of the mine,” says Deputy Mayor Niklas Siren. “Otherwise, no devil would have built a city here.”
Located 145km inside the Arctic Circle, Kiruna is subject to a brutal climate, enduring winters with no sunlight and average temperatures below -15C. But the deep deposit of magnetite has proved a strong enough magnet to keep people here. Driven by the insatiable global appetite for construction, the mine has become the world’s largest underground iron-ore extraction site, producing 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 broke it to the town that its days were numbered: digging its shafts towards the city at an angle of 60 degrees, subsidence would soon lead to the widespread cracking and collapse of the town’s buildings. A decade on, fissures are starting to appear in the ground, creeping ever 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 has finally unveiled a master plan for how it will proceed. “Imagine it like a walking millipede of a city,” says Lindstedt, unrolling a plan that shows the town’s streets and squares beginning to crawl eastwards along a new high street, until the whole place has moved safely out of the way of the mine by 2033.
A new town square is already under way, 3km to the east, with a circular town hall planned by Danish architect Henning Larsen, while 20 key buildings have been identified to be dismantled and resurrected piece by piece in their new home – like an Ikea flatpack on a grand scale. Kiruna’s rust-red wooden church, built in 1912 in a form that recalls the indigenous Sami teepees, and once voted Sweden’s most beautiful building, will take pride of place in a new park, while the cast- iron 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. “It’s things like that – the hospital where your first child was born, for example – that are important to people’s sense of identity and all that’s going to disappear.”
Billed as “the most democratic move in history ”, the project has been allocated the equivalent of £320m by the mining company for building new facilities, including a high school, fire station, community centre, library and swimming hall. But top of most people’s concerns is where they will actually live and what process will determine the housing allocation.
“These details have yet to be determined,” admits Lindstedt. “People are used to very low rents and very high incomes but, in future, this will have to change.” 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 at market rates.
To aid the valuation process, the architects have monitored the housing lettings in nearby cities over a period of years, and “tagged” the homes in Kiruna with the assets they possess, from internal space and gardens to proximity to bus stops and the city centre. They have also proposed a “Kiruna Portal ”, a kind of mass salvage yard, where materials from the doomed homes can be brought and hopefully recycled in the construction of the new buildings – although, given that Sweden has no tradition of self-build, it’s hard to see this taking off.
A closer look at the plan shows the new town bears little relation to the original Kiruna at all. The current town is a sprawling suburban network of winding streets, home to detached houses with gardens. White’s plan incorporates a much higher-density arrangement of multi-storey apartment blocks around shared courtyards, lining straight boulevards, down which the icy winds will surge.
It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to “reinvent itself” into a model of sustainable development, attracting young people who wouldn’t have stayed in the town before, with new cultural facilities and “visionary” things such as a cable car bobbing above the high street. But it is a vision that many of the existing residents seem unlikely to be able to afford.


Intermediate
When you see the word Amazon, whats the first thing you think of  the worlds biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet shop  and which do you think is most important?
These are questions in a debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have made objections to a bid made by the huge US e-commerce company for a prime new piece of cyberspace: .amazon.
The Seattle-based company has applied for its brand to be a top-level domain name (currently .com), but the South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses.
Together with many other disputed claims to names, including .patagonia, the issue goes directly to the heart of debates about the purpose and governance of the internet.
Until now, the differences between commercial, governmental and other types of identity were easy to see in every internet address by the use of .com, .gov and 20 other categories.
But these categories  or generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as they are technically known  are about to see the biggest expansion since the start of the worldwide web.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)  a US-based non-profit organization that plays a key role in cyberspace governance  has received bids (each worth almost $200,000) for hundreds of new gTLDs to add to the existing 22.
Amazon has applied for many new domains, including .shop, .song, .book and .kindle. But the one that has caused most discussion is its application is for its own brand.
Brazil and Peru have asked for the .amazon application to be withdrawn. They say a private company should not be given a name that is also the name of an important geographical area, an area that runs through and across their territories and is also used for certain regions and cross-border organizations.
Allowing private companies to register geographical names as gTLDs to strengthen their brand or to profit from the meaning of these names is not, in our view, in the public interest, the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology said.
Brazil said its views were supported by other members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela).
There have been other objections over proposed top-level domains that take geographical, cultural or contested brand names.
Argentina is unhappy that the US outdoor clothing retailer, Patagonia, is claiming a domain name that has been known far longer as a region of spectacular beauty that also has its own parliament. Argentina rejects the .patagonia request for a new generic top-level domain. Patagonia is an important region for the countrys economy because it has oil, fishing, mining and agriculture resources. It is also a region with a vibrant local community and it is a major tourist destination.
The contested proposals are expected to be discussed again at a meeting of ICANNs Governmental Advisory Committee in Durban in July. The first approved domain names will probably be in use before the end of 2013.


The mass collection of telephone records by government surveillance programmes poses a clear threat to the personal privacy of ordinary citizens, according to US researchers who used basic phone logs to identify people and uncover confidential information about their lives.
Armed with anonymous “metadata” on people’s calls and texts, but not the content of the communications, two scientists at Stanford University worked out individuals’ names, where they lived and the names of their partners. But that was not all.
The same data led them to uncover potentially sensitive information about some individuals. One man was found to own a rifle, while another had recently been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat. Other data pointed to a new pregnancy and a person with multiple sclerosis.
The results highlight the extraordinary power of telephone metadata – the number called, when and for how long – particularly when it is paired with public information available from services such as Google, Yelp and Facebook. The value of the data, which is not subject to the same legal protections as the content of people’s communications, has long been recognized by the security services. As Stewart Baker, the former general counsel at the US National Security Agency (NSA), put it in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations: “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life.”
Patrick Mutchler, a computer security researcher at Stanford, said that while the power of metadata was understood by those gathering the information, the public was largely in the dark because so few published studies have revealed how rich the data is. “That makes it difficult for people with strong opinions about these programmes to fight them. Now, we have hard evidence we can point to that didn’t exist in the past,” he said.
For the study, the researchers signed up 823 people who agreed to have metadata collected from their phones through an Android app. The app also received information from their Facebook accounts, which the scientists used to check the accuracy of their results. In all, the researchers gathered metadata on more than 250,000 calls and over 1.2m texts.
Analysts who logged into the NSA’s metadata-gathering system were initially allowed to examine data up to three hops away from an individual. A call from the target individual’s phone to another number was one hop. From that phone to another was two hops. And so on. The records available to analysts stretched back for five years. The collection window has now been restricted to two hops and 18 months at most.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mutchler describes how, on a shoestring budget, he and fellow graduate student, Jonathan Mayer, uncovered a wealth of personal information, some of it sensitive, about people who took part in the study. Through automatic and manual searches, they identified 82% of people’s names. The same technique gave them the names of businesses the people had called. When these were plotted on a map, they revealed clusters of local businesses, which the scientists speculated surrounded the person’s home address. In this way, they named the city people lived in 57% of the time, and were nearly 90% accurate in placing people within 50 miles of their home. Mutchler believes some of the misses came from people not updating their Facebook page when they moved out of their parents’ home, for example, to go to college.
The scientists next delved into more personal territory. Using a simple computer program to analyse people’s call patterns, they inferred who among the study volunteers was in a relationship. Once they knew the owner of a particular number had a partner, identifying the significant other was easy, they report.
For the final part of the study, the researchers delved even deeper, to see what sensitive information they could glean from telephone metadata. They gathered details on calls made to and from a list of organizations, including hospitals, pharmacies, religious groups, legal services, firearms retailers and repair firms. From these, they pieced together some extraordinary vignettes from people’s lives.
The metadata from one person in the study showed they had a long call from a cardiology centre, spoke briefly with a medical laboratory, answered a number of short calls from a local pharmacy and then made calls to a hotline for abnormal heart-rate monitoring devices. Another participant made frequent calls to a local gun supplier that specialized in semi- automatic rifles and later placed a number of long calls to the customer support hotline run by a major gun manufacturer that produced the rifles. The metadata from two others suggested one had multiple sclerosis and the other had just become pregnant.
“All of this should be taken as an indication of what is possible with two graduate students and limited resources,” said Mutchler, who argues that the findings should make policymakers think twice before authorizing mass surveillance programmes. “Large-scale metadata surveillance programmes, like the NSA’s, will necessarily expose highly confidential information about ordinary citizens,” the scientists write, adding: “To strike an appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties, future policymaking must be informed by input from relevant sciences.”
Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said the study provided numbers that discussions can now be based on. “With the right analytics running over nation- scale communications data, you can infer huge amounts of sensitive information on everyone. We always suspected that, of course, but here’s the data.”


Intermediate
A new, high-tech computer-assisted autopsy system is becoming more and more popular in European hospitals. Its inventor has said the technique could eventually mean there is no such thing as a perfect murder.
The method, called Virtopsy, is now being used at some forensic medical institutes in Europe, after it was pioneered by a group of scientists at the University of Zurich. A traditional autopsy begins by using a knife to make a Y-shaped cut in the chest. But now pathologists are able to examine the dead body in 3-D via computer screens.
Michael Thali, the Director of Zurichs Institute for Forensic Medicine in Europe, and one of the inventors of Virtopsy, said it had the potential to revolutionize 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.
Virtopsies combine the images from high-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) and surface scans of dead bodies. Combined, the machines are referred to as a Virtobot. The technique allows you to find injuries that are not seen during a traditional autopsy, as well as air pockets, heart attacks and even cancer.
The Virtopsy might replace the autopsy one day, Richard Dirndorfer, one of the pioneers of DNA analysis in criminology, and a developer of Virtopsy, told the German science magazine PM. I think well see it happen gradually, just like DNA analysis gradually replaced blood group analysis, he said.
The computer imaging techniques allow doctors to see deep inside dead bodies. The method has already allowed the discovery of injuries that were not picked up during traditional autopsies. At first, the aim is to use the new method to complement the traditional autopsy.
It will allow forensic scientists to plan their autopsies far more efficiently, Dominic Wichmann, an internal medicine specialist at Hamburgs University Hospital, told Spiegel. Criminologists from around the world have been travelling to Switzerland over the past few years to see the new method.
The method had been under development for decades. Then a donation from a rich ophthalmologist allowed the project to take off. The new generation of forensic scientists and pathologists dont see it as a threat. They see it as something that will complement traditional methods and possibly even one day replace them, though probably not entirely.
In order to analyze the colour of the blood, the consistencies (of body fluids) or smells, well need to keep on with the traditional cut, said Lars Oesterhelweg, Deputy Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Charit Hospital in Berlin, which is using a version of the Virtopsy.
He added that the new method was particularly helpful in re-examining cases where the cause of death was unclear. It means that third opinions can be gathered, investigations can be re-examined and cases can be reopened, he said.
Scientists using the new method said that relatives of the dead often dont like the idea of autopsies because of the disfigurement they cause. They are much happier with the non-invasive method.


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


Intermediate
Back in 2005, when BlackBerry brought instant messaging to the mobile phone, the company was just entering its boom times. While the iPhone was still just an idea, BlackBerrys innovations ensured its smartphone was one of Canadas biggest exports.
Six years later, in the summer of 2011, when there were riots in London and other UK cities, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was so effective at mobilizing the rioters that politicians wanted the service to be temporarily shut down. But, two years later, it is the users themselves who are pulling the plug.
Demand for BlackBerry phones is falling. Dozens of alternatives have sprung up to take its place, from Facebooks and Apples instant messaging applications to independent apps such as WhatsApp and Kik (which is also Canadian). They are free to download and use, and they use the internet to swap text messages, pictures, voice clips, stickers and even videos between most types of phones.
In an attempt to keep its customers, BBM has been released on Android and Apple phones. Despite the competition from other apps, the response has been extraordinary, with more than 20 million downloads. But, despite this interest, many people believe BBMs wider release will not save the service. The move to bring BlackBerry to the iPhone is four or five years too late, says James Gooderson, an 18-year-old student who blogs on technology. WhatsApp has made BlackBerrys unnecessary for young people.
BBM says it has 80 million monthly users after its upgrade, but WhatsApp has 300 million. Other services show BBMs limitations: unlike Skype and Viber, it does not yet offer video or voice calls; unlike Path, it does not do location sharing; there is no video sharing, as on iMessage; and the stickers (a more sophisticated version of the smiley face), adored by kids all over the world, are also absent. Even the contacts and calendar sharing that BBM made possible on BlackBerry phones are not on the Apple and Android versions.
Messaging is moving from verbal to visual. Photos uploaded to Instagram get instant comments and Snapchats pictures, which selfdelete after ten seconds, have opened a world of other possibilities. Like BBM, all of these services are free for any phone with an internet connection. But as recently as 2011, BBM was so powerful it helped to start a revolution in Egypt; and at the time of the London riots, it was a more immediate source of news than the television screen.
We could see on our BlackBerry messages where the rioters were going next; TV news would catch up four hours later, said Jean- Pierre Moore, 28. He manages a youth club in Stockwell, south London, an area with some of the highest levels of crime and poverty in Britain. Moore mainly communicates on an iPad now. He does not agree with the idea that a shutdown of BBM would have stopped the looting. The social networking wasnt the reason, he says.
Nearly 80% of young smartphone owners regularly use a social networking application but two-thirds use more than one. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, 60% use Facebook every day, but 46% use alternatives. Its a much more complex, multifaceted environment, says Benedict Evans, a digital media specialist. All of these apps use your smartphone  they plug into your phone book and your photo library. Apps rise and fall like fireworks. Some, like Instagram, last; others just disappear.
Thirteen-year-old Bennett has three phones. He keeps his BlackBerry for messaging, uses an iPhone to play games, and makes phone calls on an Android phone. His friends are still on BBM. At the touch of a few buttons, a single BlackBerry message can be sent to the phone owners entire contacts book  several hundred people, in some cases; on WhatsApp, the limit for a broadcast message is 50. But, for Bennett, Instagram is now a major social network. Instagram is Facebook without parents, he says. Facebook has been taken over by the older generation. When I saw my mum on Facebook, I deleted my account.
The low cost of buying and communicating on a BlackBerry is still an advantage. Unlimited BBM messages are available to anyone with a secondhand was a belief that encrypted words sent over the companys secure servers could not be traced back to their writers. Arrests and prosecutions after the riots put an end to that belief. phone and a 7-a-month deal from a telecoms company. But people no longer trust the privacy of BBM. Part of the attraction to business people, revolutionaries, demonstrators and rioters
Across town from Stockwell, outside the gates of a private school in the rich district of South Kensington, the older pupils all have Apple logos on their phones. They all use WhatsApp. For many, BBM is a distant memory. I still have a Blackberry, but Im the only one, says a teenager standing with a circle of friends. And how does that make him feel? Isolated, he replies.


Volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes can make a city totally disappear. But there are two other things that can make it disappear, too – water and sand.
One hundred years ago, Venice – one of the most beautiful and low-lying cities in the world – used to flood about ten times a year. Now, its lowest point, Piazza San Marco (only three feet above sea level) floods approximately 100 times a year.
But rising sea levels are not the only cause. In many parts of the world, the land is also sinking. In Venice, the city sank by 20cm between 1950 and 1970. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is also sinking by about 2cm a year – but the situation in Jakarta is much worse – it is sinking 10 to 20cm every year. In the past three decades, the city has sunk four metres.
The Indonesian capital has pumped out so much water to support its population that the land above is too dry. This is creating a bowl.
There are many plans to save Venice, and Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are taking the problem seriously. But it is not same in Miami where politicians will not accept that the city has a serious problem.
There are three main problems in Miami. It is less than ten feet above sea level; an increasing number of tropical storms are flooding the city; and it is built on porous rock, which absorbs the rising seawater. This water then fills the city’s foundations and comes up through drains and pipes. This forces sewage upwards and pollutes the city’s fresh water. It is possible that it may, one day, be impossible to live in Miami.
In the Maldives, the populations of whole islands may leave their homes. The capital is Malé. It has a population of 153,379 and is only four feet above sea level. Malé has built a ten-foot sea wall, which cost $63 million. But, in the long term, Malé and the rest of the islands will only be safe if sea levels stop rising.
In Africa, the Sahara is getting bigger – it is moving south at a rate of 30 miles per year. This is a problem for people who live in northern Mauritania.
People may have to leave the Californian resort of Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, in the next decade. The problem in California is not caused by global warming – the problem is that there are too many people there. In 1870, the total population was only half a million but, now, the state is home to 38 million people. And these people have 32 million cars.
Every person in Rancho Mirage uses more than 200 gallons of water every day. This is causing a man-made drought. They have reduced water use by 25% but this will probably not make much difference. The long-term answer in California’s desert is for people to leave some cities.
Fire is a growing problem to towns and cities in America – in fact, forest fires cause the most damage after bad storms. There were 800 major fire disasters there between 1953 and 2014. A new report by the USDA Forest Service shows the increasing number of towns and cities that are particularly vulnerable to wildfire.
Many cities are fighting a losing battle against nature but is it possible to choose the world’s most vulnerable city? Natural disasters are very difficult to predict – but the future for Malé does look very bad. Its new sea wall might continue to work but the islands around the Maldives capital are going to disappear soon. And, if they disappear, Malé’s reason for existing disappears, too.


The customer next to you in the queue looks innocent enough. But, instead of a shopping list, you notice she’s carrying handwritten notes about the appearance and cleanliness of the store. She’s been timing the progression of the queue on her phone … and is that a tiny camera lens peeking out from her purse? The odds are you’ve just spotted a mystery shopper.
There are approximately 50,000 mystery shopping trips carried out every month in the UK, according to the Mystery Shopping Providers Association, and, as more and more spending takes place online, the demand for mystery shoppers is growing. “Retailers are becoming increasingly aware that shoppers who are prepared to set foot in a physical store want a service and an experience they can’t get online,” says Simon Boydell, spokesman for Marketforce, which has more than 300,000 mystery shoppers on its books. “Our clients want to measure how well their stores are delivering on that experience.”
“We assign different store locations to each shopper and rotate them so that they never go back to the same shop within three months,” says Jill Spencer of mystery shopping company ABa. “Each day, they typically spend up to eight hours visiting five to ten stores, plus another hour or two filing detailed reports on every aspect of their visit.” For that, the mystery shoppers can earn up to £155 a day. They are also reimbursed for their petrol and hotel stays, and compensated for their car depreciation (the shoppers can be expected to drive as many as 20,000 miles a year). Meanwhile, video mystery shoppers, who film their visits with a hidden camera planted in a buttonhole or handbag, can earn even more – around £300 a day.
Shoppers are usually repaid any money they spend in the stores and may also be allowed to keep the products they buy. “I’m typically given between £5 and £20 to spend at each store, to assess the service I receive at the till,” says Laura, a 50-year-old mystery shopper from Devon, who has been paid to visit around 7,000 shops since 2001. The purchase usually has to be related to a service or a type of product that the retailer wants her to check. “I’m always given a scenario, such as buying something from a specific department or a new product range, but, within that framework, I can often buy whatever I want – and keep it.”
Like most full-time mystery shoppers, Laura is self-employed, taking jobs from ABa and other mystery shopping companies as and when they come up. Her income is typically £30,000 to £40,000 a year and that doesn’t include all the freebies she gets on the job. “With the perks, it’s enough to live on. But I don’t do it because I love shopping. In fact, I hate shopping now. When I’m not working, it pains me to have to go out and buy a pint of milk.” She does, however, find it satisfying to return to a store she has previously mystery shopped and see standards have improved. “I know it must be because of my feedback or why would they pay me to give it? Some of the retailers I shop at win awards for customer service and I think that is down to us mystery shoppers. I feel I’m not just doing a service to my company; I’m doing a service to all shoppers everywhere.”
Sadly, regular mystery shopping assignments that pay like Laura’s are few and far between. In fact, competition is so fierce, she keeps her job a closely guarded secret and even her friends and family don’t know who she works for (Laura is not her real name).
It’s estimated that more than 500,000 people have registered as mystery shoppers in the UK, but just 10% or less manage to get regular work each month and this has led to a dramatic reduction in compensation. “Where once you got a fee, reimbursement for your purchase and mileage, you now often just receive a contribution towards a purchase,” say Val, a 51-year-old former mystery shopper. “I worked for 40 different mystery shopping companies for almost 20 years but I gave up entirely three years ago because I had bills to pay and very few assignments paid what I considered to be an acceptable rate.”
Nowadays, mystery shopping companies mostly rely on the promise of freebies to incentivize their workers. “Marketforce shoppers typically get a couple of pounds for a visit as a token gesture for their time and effort,” says Boydell. “At the most, we’ll pay £15 to £25 plus reimbursement for, say, a meal for two or a hotel stay. We don’t directly employ any shoppers so we don’t have to pay them the minimum wage.”
“I’d go on a cruise for nothing,” says Laura. “But I think mystery shopping companies that pay you a nominal fee to travel to a restaurant and eat a meal are exploiting people. I won’t touch those jobs anymore.” There are plenty of people, however, that would. Hannah, a 41-year-old City lawyer, has conducted nearly 500 visits for the Mystery Dining Company in her spare time without receiving remuneration or travel expenses. As a prestigious “platinum diner”, she is regularly hand-picked by the Mystery Dining Company to carry out their most exclusive assignments, enjoying £200 meals at Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurants, five-star hospitality at Ascot and overnight stays at boutique hotels.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if you work for a mystery dining company. Hannah says she typically spends two to four hours after each visit writing detailed reports on everything from the quality of the food to specific interactions with staff, whom she always needs to be able to name or “subtly” describe. Trickiest of all, she must memorize all these details while eating her meal – unable, of course, to openly write anything down.
“There’s lots to remember and sometimes it can detract from the experience. You’re expected to give feedback while it’s fresh, so I’ve had to get up at 5am to write a report before work. It’s a challenging thing to do; you need to be focused, articulate and detail orientated.”


More than one million British workers might be employed on zero-hours contracts, new figures reveal, suggesting that British business is using the controversial employment terms far more widely than previously thought.
The figure – derived from a poll of more than 1,000 employers conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) – prompted renewed calls for the government to launch a full inquiry into the use of the contracts, after a week in which a string of organizations – from retail chains to Buckingham Palace – have faced criticism for hiring staff but offering no guarantee of work and pay each week. Employees on zero-hours contracts often get no holiday or sick pay and have to ask permission before seeking additional work elsewhere. The CIPD found that 38% of zero-hours contract workers describe themselves as employed full-time, typically working 30 hours or more a week. One-third of voluntary sector employers use the contracts and one in four public sector organizations.
The latest numbers also call into question the accuracy of official data on the topic. The Office for National Statistics has increased its estimate of the number of UK zero-hours workers by 25%, to around 250,000.
Peter Cheese, the chief executive of the CIPD, said: “There does need to be a closer look at what is meant by a zero-hours contract, the different forms that they take and clearer guidance on what good and bad practice in their use looks like. And this needs to consider both the advantages and disadvantages in practice for businesses and employees.”
Retailer Sports Direct recently became the focus of controversy on zero-hours when it emerged that the company employs around 20,000 of its 23,000 staff on the contracts. The retailer’s use of the contracts was followed by details of a string of other companies using the deals, including cinema chain Cineworld and Buckingham Palace, which uses them for its 350 summer workers.
Pub group J D Wetherspoon has 24,000 of its staff – 80% of its workforce – on the terms.
Vidhya Alakeson, from the Resolution Foundation, an independent think tank, added: “If it’s true that there are around one million people on zero-hours contracts, then that would be a substantial portion of the workforce – this could no longer be dismissed as an issue affecting only a tiny minority.
“The new estimate underlines the urgent need for a deep and thorough review of zero-hours by the government, which takes into account not only the scale of the problem but the effect these contracts have on workers’ employment rights, earning capacity and personal well-being.”
Unions and poverty campaign groups have accused employers of pressuring staff into signing the contracts as a way to evade their responsibilities and cut staff benefits.
Dave Prentis, of the trade union Unison, said: “The vast majority of workers are only on these contracts because they have no choice. They may give flexibility to a few, but the balance of power favours the employers and makes it hard for workers to complain.”
Workers on zero-hours contracts are often only told how many hours they will work when weekly or monthly rotas are worked out, but are expected to be on call for extra work at short notice. They should be entitled to holiday pay in line with the number of hours they work, but do not qualify for sick pay.
The charity National Trust, which employs many of its seasonal workers on zero-hours contracts, said it offered the same pay and benefits to those workers, pro rata, as full-time staff, but needed some workers to be on a more flexible arrangement.
“We believe zero-hours contracts are essential in our organization, as we are very weather- dependent,” a spokeswoman said. “Our properties have told us it’s important to be able to reorganize staff rotas quickly to respond to the weather and zero-hours contracts allow us to do this.”
Politician Chuka Umunna said the contracts should be the exception to the rule. “While some employees welcome the flexibility of such contracts, for many, zero-hours contracts leave them insecure and unsure of when work will come,” he said.
Some people have argued that the flexibility of zero-hours contracts may have allowed the UK to avoid higher levels of unemployment during the economic downturn, while the CIPD research suggests that only 16% of those on zero-hours contracts report that their employer frequently fails to provide them with sufficient hours each week.
The institute’s figures also suggest that 17% of employers in the private sector made use of zero- hours contracts, considerably lower than the 34% of organizations in the voluntary sector and 24% in the public sector.
Industries where employers were most likely to report at least one person on a zero-hours contract were hotels, catering and leisure (48%), education (35%) and healthcare (27%).


Scientists have made an “atlas of the brain”. It shows how the meanings of words are organized in different regions of the brain. The atlas uses rainbow colours to show how words and their meanings are grouped together in areas of the brain.
“We wanted to build a giant atlas that shows how the meanings of words are represented in the brain,” said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
No single brain region contains one word or idea. A single brain spot contains a number of related words. And, each single word appears in many different brain spots. Together, they form networks that represent the meanings of each word we use: life and love, death and taxes. All have their own networks.
The atlas shows how modern imaging can completely change what we know about how the brain does some of its most important tasks. With further work, the technology could have an enormous effect on medicine and other areas of study.
“It is possible that we could use this technology to decode information about what words a person is hearing, reading or possibly even thinking,” said Alexander Huth, the main author of the study. One possible use would be a language decoder that could allow people who can’t talk, because they have a serious illness, to speak through a computer.
To make the atlas, the scientists recorded people’s brain activity while they listened to stories. Then, they matched the transcripts of the stories with the brain activity data to show how groups of related words produced 50,000 to 80,000 responses all over the brain. Huth used short, interesting stories. The stories had to be interesting so that the people in the experiment would listen to the words and not fall asleep. Seven people listened to two hours of stories each. Each person heard about 25,000 words – and more than 3,000 different words – as they lay in the scanner.
The atlas shows how words and related terms use 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” and “murdered ”. On the brain’s right-hand side, near the top of the head, is one of the brain spots used for family terms: “wife”, “husband”, “children”, “parents”.
Each word is represented by more than one spot because words often have many meanings. One part of the brain, for example, is used for the word “top” and also for other words that describe clothes. But, the word “top” also uses many other regions. One of them is for numbers and measurements, another for buildings and places. Interestingly, the brain atlases were similar for all the people in the experiment. This suggests that their brains organized the meanings of words in the same way. But, the scientists only scanned five men and two women. All are native English speakers. It is highly possible that people from different backgrounds and cultures will have different brain atlases.
Lorraine Tyler, a neuroscientist and head of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University, said the research was a great achievement. But, at the moment, the brain atlas does not show small differences in word meanings. “This research is amazing and new, there is still a lot to learn about how the meaning of words is represented in the brain.”


Music subscription services, like Spotify and Deezer, have made more than $1bn worldwide, as fans choose to pay for music online.
Income from music streaming and subscription rose by more than 50% in 2013 to reach $1.1bn. And, sales of recorded music in Europe grew for the first time in 12 years.
Many people still listen for free, but many others are willing to pay money to get a better choice of music. In three years, the number of paying subscribers rose from 8 million to 28 million, according to the 2014 digital music report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Subscription services are easily accessible from smartphones and tablets, so they are popular with people who want to try out new music without buying a download or a CD. People like this cheap, user-friendly and legal alternative to pirated downloads.
In Britain and America, streaming may soon make more money for the music industry than downloads from online stores such as Apple’s iTunes. A third of all digital sales globally now come from subscription services and the other two thirds come from downloads.
In the US, the percentage of people using subscription services and streaming rose from 19% in 2012 to 23%. At the same time, the percentage of people downloading fell from 28% to 27%.
In Britain, the number of people downloading music stayed the same at exactly one third, but subscribers grew from 19% to 22%. In Sweden, France and Italy, streaming is already more popular than downloading.
Thirty-nine per cent of all music sales are now digital. Sales of CDs and vinyl reduced a lot in 2013, but they still make just over half the music industry’s income.
Vinyl continued to make a comeback in some places. Sales increased by 32% in America and by 101% in the UK in 2013.


Tigers are more numerous in Nepal than at any time since the 1970s, a new census has revealed, giving conservationists hope that the big cats, whose numbers have been dropping across south Asia for 100 years, can be saved.
The number of wild royal bengal tigers in Nepal has increased to 198 – a 63.6% rise in five years – the government survey showed.” This is very encouraging,” said Maheshwar Dhakal, an ecologist with Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation.
The census is based on the examination of pictures from more than 500 cameras placed in five protected areas and three wildlife corridors. More than 250 conservationists and wildlife experts worked on the survey, which cost about £250,000.
Dhakal said that a parallel survey was conducted in India and the results from both countries will be published later in 2013.” It will take a few more months for India, which now has 1,300 big cats in several huge protected areas, to finalize the data,” he added.
Nepal has pledged to double the population of tigers by the year 2022 from 121 in 2009 when the last systematic tiger count took place. Increasing prosperity in Asia has pushed up prices for tiger skins and the body parts used in traditional Chinese medicines. International gangs pay poor local Nepali significant sums to kill the cats. The skin and bones are handed to middlemen, who pass easily through the porous border to India, where the major dealers are based.
One major problem is complicity between senior officials and mafia networks involved in the trade. Conservation experts credit the increase in numbers to the effective policing of national parks, stronger anti-poaching drives and better management of tiger habitats in Nepal, where forests cover 29% of the land. But they say Nepal needs to do more to protect the habitat and animals on which tigers prey so the big cats have enough space to roam and food to eat.
As the number of tigers has increased over the years, so have incidents of conflict with villagers. Seven people were killed in attacks by tigers around national parks in 2012 compared to four in 2011, park officials said. Villagers are also seeking better protection.” The government is making conservation plans for tigers. But it should also come up with plans to protect people from tigers,” Krishna Bhurtel, a local village headman in Chitwan, told Nepali newspaper Nagarik.
Wildlife authorities captured a tiger in Chitwan after it killed two people, including a villager who was pulled from his bed in May. Thousands of tigers once roamed the forests in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. But their numbers have dropped to about 3,000, a 95% drop over a century. Chitwan National Park in central Nepal has the highest number of adult tigers, with 120, followed by Bardiya National Park (50) and Shukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve (17).
Diwakar Chapagain, who heads a World Wildlife Fund Nepal unit that monitors wildlife trade, said tiger skins were in demand in Tibet, where well-heeled people use them as festival costumes.
In Nepal, kings used to stand on tiger skins in front of stuffed tigers for special occasions. Some affluent Nepali have mounted tiger heads on the walls of their living rooms. Tiger bones are in high demand for use in traditional Chinese medicines.” The trade in tiger parts is lucrative and fetches thousands of dollars in illegal markets,” Chapagain said, highlighting the threat tigers face.


According to a recent scientific study, organic food has more healthy antioxidants than regular food. It also has fewer toxic metals and pesticides. The international team that did the study suggests that changing to organic fruit and vegetables could be as healthy as adding one or two portions of the recommended ‘five a day’ fruit and vegetables.
The team, led by Professor Carlo Leifert, concludes that there are big differences between organic and non-organic food. Organic food has between 19% and 69% more antioxidants. It is the first study to show clear differences between organic and regular fruits, vegetables and cereals.
The researchers say that the higher levels of antioxidants have the same effect as “one to two of the five portions of fruits and vegetables that people should eat every day”. They say this means that organic food is better for our health.
The findings will make people argue even more about whether or not organic food is better for people. Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition at King’s College London, said the research showed some differences. “But are the differences relevant? I am not sure.” He also said that research showed organic cereals have less protein than regular crops.
The results of the research are based on an analysis of 343 studies from around the world – more than ever before – which examine differences between organic and regular fruit, vegetables and cereals. Helen Browning, who supports organic farming, said that the research showed that how we farm affects the quality of the food we eat.
Leifert and his colleagues conclude that many antioxidants reduce the risk of serious diseases, including diseases of the heart and certain cancers. The researchers also found much higher levels of cadmium, a toxic metal, in regular crops.
They found four times more pesticides on regular crops than on organic food.
People will criticize the research: including so many studies in the analysis could make the results unreliable. Also, the higher levels of cadmium and pesticides in regular food are still below recommended limits. But, the researchers say that cadmium stays in the body and that some people may want to avoid this. They also say that recommended limits are for single pesticides and not for the mixture of chemicals that farmers use on regular crops.
Another criticism of the research is that the differences it found may be the result of different climates, different types of soil and different types of crops; they may not be the result of organic farming. But, the biggest criticism will be about possible health benefits. The most recent major analysis, which included 223 studies in 2012, found little evidence of health benefits. “Other studies did not find evidence that organic foods are much more nutritious than regular foods,” it found.
Sanders agrees. “You are not going to be healthier if you eat organic food,” he said. “What is most important is what you eat, not whether it’s organic or regular. It’s whether you eat fruit and vegetables at all.”
Shoppers say that healthy eating (55%) and avoiding chemicals (53%) are the main reasons they buy organic food. Browning said: “This research supports what people think about organic food. In other countries, there is much more support and acceptance of the benefits of organic food and farming. We hope that now the UK will accept organic food like people in the rest of Europe.


Intermediate
If the amount of food wasted around the world were reduced by just 25%, there would be enough food to feed all the people who are malnourished, according to the UN. Each year, 1.3bn tonnes of food, about a third of all that is produced, is wasted. This includes about 45% of all fruit and vegetables, 35% of  sh and seafood, 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products and 20% of meat. Meanwhile, 795 million people suffer from severe hunger and malnutrition.
The UN identi es the problem of food waste as one of the great challenges to achieving food security. By 2050, food production will have to increase by 60%, compared to 2005 levels, to feed a growing global population. Reducing food waste would help to meet future demand.
The problem is global but appears in very different ways. In developing countries, there is a lot of food loss, which is unintentional waste, often due to poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure. In wealthy countries, there are low levels of food loss but high levels of food waste, which means food is thrown away by consumers because they have purchased too much or by retailers who reject food because of strict standards of appearance.
In developed countries, consumers and retailers throw away between 30% and 40% of all food purchased, whereas, in poorer countries, only 5% to 16% of food is thrown away.
In the developing world, food waste is almost non-existent, says Robert van Otterdijk, coordinator of the UN Food and Agriculture Organizations Save Food programme. Food waste is happening in countries where people can afford to throw away food. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of food losses in developing countries because of the underdeveloped conditions they have.
The environmental impact of food loss and waste is high. The carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2  this means that, if food waste were a country, it would be the third highest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. About 30% of available agricultural land is used to grow or farm food that is subsequently wasted. And more surface and groundwater is used to produce wasted food around the globe than is used for agriculture by any single country, including India and China.
Climate change is caused by our economy of production and consumption because it is out of balance with what the Earth can provide, says van Otterdijk. Production of food is one of the biggest production sectors in the world and, if one-third of all this is wasted, you can imagine what a huge effect this has on the natural resources  on land, water, energy and greenhouse gas emissions.
The places that waste the most food are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where consumers waste 39% of all food purchased. Next is Europe, where about 31% of all food purchased by consumers is thrown away. In the UK, 15m tonnes of food is lost or wasted each year. British consumers throw away 4.2m tonnes of edible food each year. This means that 11.7% of all food purchased is wasted, which costs each family 700 a year.
The foods most commonly found in British bins are bread, vegetables, fruit and milk. The most wasted food in the UK by weight is bread, with consumers throwing away 414,000 tonnes (22.4%) of all bread purchased. By percentage, the most wasted food is lettuce and leafy salads, of which consumers throw away 38% (64,000 tonnes) of all they buy.
The UK has made progress in the past ten years after a campaign to reduce waste. Van Otterdijk says the UK has been very successful in combating food waste. Between 2007 and 2012, the amount of food waste produced by UK households decreased by 21%, from 5.3m tonnes to 4.2m tonnes, largely due to greater awareness.
Van Otterdijk says there has been a very encouraging, unexpected, continuing interest in food waste and this enables campaigns around the world to gain momentum. We have to do much more and it needs the participation of public and private sectors, he says. But, if it continues like this, maybe, after ten years, well have globally signi cant results.