It is for this same reason that people have to have the jab again and again to maintain immunity. This is of course expensive, as well as tedious for patients, resulting in many people simply not getting the jab at all. However a new vaccine produced by drug company Acambis hopes to be able to tackle all possible mutations of the most common form of the virus, Influenza A. The drug, appropriately named ACAM-FLU-A, works by targetting a particular protein named M2 that is present in all strains of flu. Previous drugs targetting different proteins showing up on only some of the strains.

In a limited human trial, 9 out of 10 patients developed lifelong immunity to flu, however Acambis scientists are now working to perfect the drug before larger human trials. Dr Michael Watson is very confident:

“As a universal vaccine, ACAM-FLU-A can potentially overcome many of the drawbacks of existing influenza vaccines. It can be manufactured at any time of the year, and could be stockpiled in advance of a pandemic or potentially used routinely to ensure population protection against future pandemics.”

It is the notion of a pandemic that scares most experts. Analysts claim that a pandemic of the human form of bird flu across the world is “inevitable”, and that when this arrives it could kill as many as 50,000,000 people. At this sort of scale, the “winter-only” drugs currently in use would be much less effective in stopping the virus, which would mutate as it moves around. But will the new lifelong jab prevent this kind of catastophe? Whilst it has the potential to immunise most of us to most types of flu we are likely to encounter, Professor Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading, states that “larger trials and tests on a wider range of viruses will be needed before the full potential for pandemic protection can be assured.”

The huge object has been described as looking like a “silo”. It has no marks apart from two numbers, which experts are trying to use to identify the tank’s origin. It is thought that the object fell from a ship, and is probably a bulk storage tank containing liquids. However, despite this sordid diagnosis the incongruent object has been a source of intrigue among the local population. Alasdair MacEachen, assistant director of environmental services at Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, commented that:

“It’s certainly generated a fair bit of interest with people walking on the beach or just travelling along the road, because you can actually see it from the main road along the west side of Benbecula. It’s a big object so you can’t miss it, and it’s not often you see something like that on the beach.”

The authorities are considering anchoring the object down – not to make it a permanent tourist attraction, but rather to avoid any tragedies. As it was so precariously brought to shore, it is likely to continue roll over as the tides wash by, and an object of that size could be fatal to anyone caught in the way of its movement. Furthermore, they want to avoid the silo from rolling back out to sea, where it could become a hazard to any closeby ships. MacEachen continues:

“Although it looks as if it’s empty and it’s been ruptured, my advice would be not to go too close to it. It’s a fairly light construction so you don’t want it rolling on top of someone, and with that sort of thing you can never tell. My advice would be to just observe it from a distance.”

One can only wonder how such a huge object managed to disappear from a ship without being noticed, and how it managed to get washed all the way back up to shore?

A team from Imperial College London has been granted 2.1 million pounds for the development of the i-Snake. They envisage the tool being used for heart bypass surgery, but also note that it could aid in any number of procedures, such as the diagnosis of problems in the guts and bowels. The ultimate aim for surgeons is to manage to conduct these procedures without any skin incisions at all. Such surgery can leave scars, keep patients in hospital far too long, and involve a much longer recovery time. Health Minister Lord Ara Dazi, who is on the development team, commented that:

“The unrivalled imaging and sensing capabilities coupled with the accessibility and sensitivity of i-Snake will enable more complex diagnostic and therapeutic procedures than are currently possible. The cost benefits that i-Snake will introduce include earlier, cheaper and less invasive treatment, faster recovery and procedure times and intangible benefits through an increase in patient care and quality of life.”

All of these procedures are to be tested in a lab before they are to be used on any real patients. However despite this caution, the innovation of the device is no doubt only the beginning of a whole range of smarter and more flexible surgery tools that are bringing us closer to the idea of an operation no longer being dangerous. Dr Ted Bianco, director of the Wellcome Trust, comments: “Gone are the days when the surgeon’s knife ruled in the operating theatre. The future of surgery is in smart devices like i-Snake.”

With over 300 improvements on its predecessors (but most of them merely enhancements and improvements on the familiar) it is understandable why veteran technology writer Walt Mossberg dubbed the operating system “evolutionary, not revolutionary.” He goes on to say:

“I believe it builds on Apple’s quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.”

Apple has sold 2.2 million of its desktop computers (Macs) in the last 3 months, and hopes that this new release will boost sales even further. Nik Rawlinson, editor of MacUser magazine, optimistically writes that “when Tiger was launched it earned Apple $120m very quickly and all the expectations are that sales will be double that.” Nevertheless, one Mac user interviewed at the MacLiveExpo, held in London, commented that:

“I never buy any operating system when it first comes out. I normally wait until it has been out for six months or a year. Tiger does what I need it to do right now. I’ve not seen anything in Leopard to make me want to buy it immediately.”

Whether Leopard will have what it takes to outdo rival operating system Windows Vista from Microsoft remains to be seen. Whilst the market for Macs is still far below that of desktop PCs, 99% of which come pre-installed with Windows software, the abundance of handy features that Apple’s new super-user-friendly system provides may begin to tip the balance. As Rawlinson writes:

“Vista has been quite a disappointment for many people and Leopard could be the reason many people make the switch to Macs.”

Unfortunately, if only the “switch to Macs” didn’t necessitate switching so very much more too, Apple might have more luck – but as usual they uphold a silent policy of making sure that if one thing you own is from Apple, so is everything else too.

When people make quick and simple websites – little hompages, or sites to advertise one event – they usually want to do it for free. This means signing up with a free hosting company – which is all well and good, but means that the ultimate internet address used to get to the site will include the company’s name, making your site’s name a non-central part of the address. For instance, if you sign up with Yahoo’sGeocities, your ultimate address will be www.geocities.com/yourpage, and if you sign up with Lycos-provided service Tripod, your ultimate address will be yourpage.tripod.com. 3 clicks away from this is www.dot.tk, where you can get yourself a much catchier address like www.yourpage.tk. Although the service is free, Dot TK sites come with targeted banner adverts, and these are what generate the island’s income.

The “.tk” part of the address is called the domain. Whereas the more expensive and definitive “.com” domain refers to websites which are commercial, and the common “.org” domain is used for organisations, Dot TK is what’s known as a country-level domain, specific to Tokelau. All these domains are registered through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – and whilst it has always been obvious that a Dot Com domain was needed for companies, it took a lot of persuasion to initially allow a domain specific to Tokelau. It was Joost Zuurbier, a Dutch entrepreneur, who presented the case for his investment:

“It was a four year process. They didn’t believe the contract or even the island were real and it was only because a member of the board had been to Tokelau in 1978 that they finally agreed it was OK.”

Since 2001, millions of mini-website makers have been drawn to the attractive address Dot TK offers, bringing in huge revenue from advertising. With every domain registered, the Dot TK Company donates an undisclosed amount to Tokelau’s miniature economy: in 2007 contributing 10%. This has in turn enabled the tiny nation to start using the internet more; back in 2001 there were 12 computers on the island, now there are over 200, including ones in internet cafés. There is broadband internet, and people make phone calls no longer with radios but with Skype. The inhabitants have even been discovering YouTube, MySpace and music downloads. Even better, Tokelau hospitals are now able to receive medical advice from experts overseas.

The prediction was made by Martin Sadler of Hewlett Packard, who notes that the decreasing cost of parts, and the exponentially increasing storage capabilities of modern technology will fuel this massive growth. The technology will become huge because it is so useful, in both research and security, and even advertising. Saddler comments that:

“We imagine by 2057 our motorways, rivers and coastal defences, farms, businesses, homes and neighbourhoods and bodies will all be highly instrumented. We have some real choices that we can make over the next few years about how much we benefit from all this information… or how much it presents some sort of dark future for us.”

Sadler alludes to the moral consequences of such a system, where information you didn’t want recorded or sensored, or used as a piece of data, is unwittingly discovered by the network.

“Maybe the first time you know you are pregnant is when a targeted piece of advertising comes through on your computer screen offering you some baby clothes because somehow the smart toilet, or some other aspect of your environment, leaked that information.”

One MIT researcher has already set up a system in his own home where a set of 11 cameras and 14 microphones will record every waking moment of the first 3 years of his sons life, amounting to some 400,000 hours of data. Labelled the “Speechome Project“, it is an example of the use in research that surveillance has – in this case, discovering more about how babies learn language. Oliver Sparrow, advisor to the UK government, comments that devices will become

“Too small to see, … permeate your body, permeate the space in which we exist, record everything, know everything about you, transmit your reputation wherever you go. These kinds of things will be possible, whether we permit them, and which societies will permit them and which will not, and how this will polarise things remains completely unplottable.”

Both Sparrow and Saddler are encouraging public debate about the subject and how surveillance technology should be used in the near future. They warn that this will become possible, so we need to decide now what to allow.

The study, maybe somewhat surprisingly for younger readers, found that three-quarters of people in their late fifties and early sixties were still having sex, whilst this figure dropped to a half for the early seventies, and a quarter for the early eighties. Leader of the study, Stacy Lindau, comments on the findings, saying:

“This suggests that, among older adults, there is an internal drive or need for sexual fulfilment. People are living longer. Many people have higher expectations for what ageing should be like … yet we have no baseline data on sexuality in later life. These data will give people a sense of whether what they’re experiencing is typical.”

Indeed, half of the people surveyed described their sex problems as “bothersome”, bringing to light just how important that aspect of life is even as you grow older. Of those surveyed, the ones who rated their health as worse were also less likely to be intimate, demonstrating how important health is in maintaining that kind of physical relationship. Professor Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago, who co-authored the report, notes that:

“There are a lot of people who feel that age is very tightly correlated with sexual activity or interest, but it turns out that healthy people are sexually active if they have a partner, and that this is an important part of the quality of life.”

The study sheds some light on an area perhaps taboo, and brings with it a better perspective on the world of sexual relations, regardless of one’s age.

Google Sky is included with the latest version of Google Earth, adding a button to the interface which flips the camera up into the sky. Whilst the original Earth model looked down upon a sphere, the Sky model inverts this to look up onto the inside face of a much bigger sphere which the camera is inside. This inside face is plastered with thousands of images taken by agencies such as NASA, all compiled into a singular grand night sky. Dr John Mason, of the British Astronomical Association, praised the new application, saying:

“Light pollution and air pollution is now so bad in many areas that all you can see when you look up is a few dozen stars. If this helps people to realise just what they are missing, it is a jolly good thing.”

Whilst Google Sky isn’t the first program to offer stargazing, it appears to be all set to takeover the market. Whilst other options are also free, they do not provide the same interactive, free-moving camera that made Google Earth so popular, along with its rich integration of related data including routes and buildings. Sky offers clear views of over 300 million stars and galaxies, with various overlays to point out constellations and bring up further data relating to celestial bodies. Patrick Moore, the famed British astronomer, likewise sings the applications praises:

“This thing, Google Sky, seems to me the best way to learn your way around, and the stars become so much more interesting when you know which is which, and it’s a bloody good way to do it.”

The program goes alongside Google’s previous other forays into the heavens, Google Moon and Google Mars – I wonder how long it will be before we’re installing the seemingly inevitable Google Universe.

Well, not much if you realise that inside the bag is no more than the robber’s girlfriend’s vibrator. This was the way that Nicki Jex, 27, tried to make away with £613 just after Christmas last year. When customer Wayne Vakani was told to “back off”, he kept his distance but followed the robber’s movements, ultimately providing the information that led to Jex’s arrest.

After initially denying any involvement, Jex later changed tact and pleaded guilty. But making reference to the ridiculous item being used for the hold-up, his defence in mitigation pointed out that the man was in a “fragile” state of mind and in the midst of drug addiction:

“One can be thankful that the item he had wasn’t a firearm. Frankly, he didn’t care less what happened to him at that time. He was falling into the abyss and that’s the root cause of drugs.”

Jex has now been jailed for five years, and Mr Vakani awarded £500 for his “very considerable courage”. Not bad for being threatened by a weapon that would have, at most, tickled.

But what if you were God? God would, for every Rubik arrangement, know exactly which twists to make – he’d be able to solve it in the minimum amount of moves. It’s this piece of speculation that has led to the number being called “God’s Number” – the minimum moves needed to solve any Rubik’s Cube if you are omniscient. Whilst the new proof tells us God’s Number is below 26, the truth of the elusive number remains to be discovered.

Why the number is so tantalising a prospect to figure out is anyone’s guess, but perhaps it’s the sheer difficulty of the problem compared to the simplicity of the solution – just an integer in its “low twenties”. Contrasted to the low solution are the 43 billion billion possible Rubik arrangements to plough through to get it – far too much even for a supercomputer.

Graduate student Daniel Kunkle and Gene Cooperman from Northeastern University in Boston thought of a clever way to get round cracking the problem. By telling their computers to only solve the different cube arrangements half-way – arriving at points where they knew only a few more moves would be needed, they came to the half-proof that most arrangements took 26 moves or less, but some were taking 29 or more. They were then able to focus all the computer’s energies on the problem cases above 26, which numbered significantly fewer, finally being able to resolve all of these cases.

Whilst the 21st century’s Rubik counterpart is something like Su Doku, easily solvable by most computers, the Rubik’s Cube of the 1980’s remains firmly mysterious and yet as ever a tantalisingly simple puzzle – if only you knew…