A few months before he died, Carl Sagan recorded a message of hope to would-be Mars explorers, telling them: “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.”
Seventeen years after the pioneering astronomer set out his hopeful vision of the future in 1996, a company from the Netherlands is proposing to turn Sagan’s dreams of reaching Mars into reality. The company, Mars One, plans to send four astronauts on a trip to the Red Planet to set up a human colony in 2023. But there are a couple of serious snags.
Firstly, when on Mars their bodies will have to adapt to surface gravity that is 38% of that on Earth. It is thought that this would cause such a total physiological change in their bone density, muscle strength and circulation that voyagers would no longer be able to survive in Earth’s conditions. Secondly, and directly related to the first, they will have to say goodbye to all their family and friends, as the deal doesn’t include a return ticket.
The Mars One website states that a return “cannot be anticipated nor expected”. To return, they would need a fully assembled and fuelled rocket capable of escaping the gravitational field of Mars, on-board life support systems capable of up to a seven-month voyage and the capacity either to dock with a space station orbiting Earth or perform a safe re-entry and landing. “Not one of these is a small endeavour,” the site notes, requiring “substantial technical capacity, weight and cost”.
Nevertheless, the project has already had 10,000 applicants, according to the company’s Medical Director, Norbert Kraft. He told The Guardian that the applicants so far ranged in age from 18 to at least 62 and, though they include women, they tended to be men.
The reasons they gave for wanting to go were varied, he said. An American woman called Cynthia, who gave her age as 32, told the company that it was a “childhood imagining” of hers to go to Mars. She described a trip her mother had taken her on in the early 1990s to a lecture at the University of Wisconsin.
She said the lecturer had been Sagan and she had asked him if he thought humans would land on Mars in her lifetime. Cynthia said: “He in turn asked me if I wanted to be trapped in a ’tin can spacecraft’ for the two years it would take to get there. I told him 'yes', he smiled, and told me in all seriousness, that yes, he absolutely believed that humans would reach Mars in my lifetime.”
She told the project: “When I first heard about the Mars One project I thought, this is my chance – that childhood dream could become a reality. I could be one of the pioneers, building the first settlement on Mars and teaching people back home that there are still uncharted territories that humans can reach for.”
The prime attributes Mars One is looking for in astronaut-settlers are resilience, adaptability, curiosity, ability to trust and resourcefulness, according to Kraft. They must also be over 18.
Founded in 2010 by Bas Lansdorp, an engineer, Mars One says it has developed a realistic road map and financing plan for the project based on existing technologies and that the mission is perfectly feasible. The website states that the basic elements required for life are already present on the planet. For instance, water can be extracted from ice in the soil and Mars has sources of nitrogen, the primary element in the air we breathe. The colony will be powered by specially adapted solar panels, it says.
Mars One said it had signed a contract with the American firm Paragon Space Development Corporation to take the first steps in developing the life support system and spacesuits fit for the mission.
The project will cost a reported $6bn, a sum Lansdorp has said he hopes will be met partly by selling broadcasting rights. “The broadcasting revenue from the London Olympics was almost enough to finance a mission to Mars,” Lansdorp said, in an interview with ABC News.
Another ambassador to the project is Paul Römer, the co-creator of Big Brother, one of the first, and most successful, reality TV shows.
On the website, Römer gave an indication of how the broadcasting of the project might proceed: “This mission to Mars could be the biggest media event in the world,” said Römer. “Reality meets talent show with no ending and the whole world watching.”
The aim is to establish a permanent human colony, according to the company’s website. The first team would land on the surface of Mars in 2023 to begin constructing the colony, with a team of four astronauts every two years after that.
The project is not without its sceptics, however, and concerns have been raised about how astronauts might get to the planet and establish a colony with all the life support and other requirements needed.
Professor Gerard’t Hooft, winner of the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics in 1999, is an ambassador for the project.’ T Hooft admits there are unknown health risks. The radiation is “of quite a different nature” from anything that has been tested on Earth, he said.
The mission hopes to inspire generations to “believe that all things are possible, that anything can be achieved,” much like the Apollo Moon landings.
“Mars One believes it is not only possible, but imperative that we establish a permanent settlement on Mars in order to accelerate our understanding of the formation of the solar system, the origins of life and, of equal importance, our place in the universe,” it says.


Not just the identity of the man in the car park with the twisted spine, but the appalling last moments and humiliating treatment of the naked body of Richard III in the hours after his death have been revealed at an extraordinary press conference at Leicester University.
There were cheers when Richard Buckley, Lead Archaeologist on the hunt for the king’s body, finally announced that the university team was convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” that it had found the last Plantagenet king, bent by scoliosis of the spine, and twisted further to fit into a hastily dug hole in Grey Friars church, which was slightly too small to hold his body.
But, by then, it was clear the evidence was overwhelming, as the scientists who carried out the DNA tests, those who created the computer-imaging technology to peer onto and into the bones in extraordinary detail, the genealogists who found a distant descendant with matching DNA, and the academics who scoured contemporary texts for accounts of the king’s death and burial outlined their findings.
“What a morning. What a story,” said Philippa Langley, of the Richard III Society. She had been driving on the project for years, in the face of incredulity from many people, and finding funds from all over the world when it looked as if the money would run out before the excavation had even begun.
Work has started on designing a new tomb in Leicester Cathedral, only 100 yards from the excavation site, and a ceremony will be held to lay him into his new grave there, probably next year. Leicester’s Museums’ Service is working on plans for a new visitor centre in an old school building overlooking the site.
Richard died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.
The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Another sword slash, which also went through the bone and into the brain, would also have proved fatal. But many of the other injuries were after death, suggesting a gruesome ritual on the battlefield and as the king’s body was brought back to Leicester, as he was stripped, mocked and mutilated.
One terrible injury, a stab through the right buttock and into his pelvis, was certainly after death and could not have happened when his lower body was protected by armour. It suggests the story that his naked corpse was brought back slung over a horse, mocked and abused all the way, is true. Bob Savage, a medieval arms expert from the Royal Armouries who helped identify the wounds, said it was probably not a war weapon but the sort of sharp knife or dagger any workman might have carried.
Michael Ibsen, the Canadian-born furniture maker proved to be the descendant of Richard’s sister, heard the confirmation on Sunday and listened to the unfolding evidence in shocked silence. “My head is no clearer now than when I first heard the news,” he said. “Many, many hundreds of people died on that field that day. He was a king, but just one of the dead. He lived in very violent times and these deaths would not have been pretty or quick.”
It was Mathew Morris who first uncovered the body, in the first hour of the first day of the excavation. He did not believe he had found the king. The mechanical digger was still chewing the tarmac off the council car park, identified by years of research by local historians and the Richard III Society as the probable site of the lost church of Grey Friars, whose priests bravely claimed the body of the king and buried him in a hastily dug grave, probably still naked, but in a position of honour near the high altar of their church. The leg bones just showing through the soil were covered up again.
Ten days later, on 5 September, when further excavation proved Morris had hit the crucial spot, he returned with Lin Foxhall, head of the archaeology department, to excavate the body. “We did it the usual way, lifting the arms, legs and skull first, and proceeding gradually towards the torso – so it was only when we finally saw the twisted spine that I thought: 'My word, I think we’ve got him.'”
As far as Langley is concerned, Richard was the true king, the last king of the north, a worthy and brave leader who became a victim of some of the most brilliant propaganda in history, in the hands of the Tudors’ image- maker, Shakespeare. There remains the dark shadow of the little princes in the tower, an infamous story even in Richard’s day: the child Edward V and his brother Richard were declared illegitimate when Richard III claimed the throne, imprisoned in the Tower of London and never seen alive again. Although it is by no means certain that the bones found at the tower centuries later are theirs, there may be more DNA detective work to be done there.


Scientists have implanted a false memory in the brains of mice in an experiment that they hope will shed light on the well-documented phenomenon whereby people ‘remember’ events or experiences that have never happened. False memories are a major problem with witness statements in courts of law.
Defendants have often been convicted of offences based on eyewitness testimony only to have their convictions later overturned when DNA, or some other corroborating evidence, is brought to bear.
In order to study how these false memories might form in the human brain, Susumu Tonagawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his team encoded memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons. Memories of experiences we have had are made from several elements, including records of objects, space and time. These records, called engrams, are encoded in physical and chemical changes in brain cells and the connections between them.
According to Tonagawa, both false and genuinememories seem to rely on the same brain mechanisms. In their work, Tonagawa’s team used a technique known as optogenetics, which allows the fine control of individual brain cells. They engineered brain cells in the mouse hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in forming memories, to express the gene for a protein called channelrhodopsin. When cells that contain channelrhodopsin are exposed to blue light, they become activated. The researchers also modified the hippocampus cells so that the channelrhodopsin protein would be produced in whichever brain cells the mouse was using to encode its memory engrams.
In the experiment, Tonagawa’s team placed the mice in a chamber and allowed them to explore it. As they did so, relevant memory-encoding brain cells were producing the channelrhodopsin protein. The next day, the same mice were placed in a second chamber and given a small electric shock, to encode a fear response. At the same time, the researchers shone light into the mouse brains to activate their memories of the first chamber. That way, the mice learned to associate fear of the electric shock with the memory of the first chamber.
In the final part of the experiment, the team placed the mice back in the first chamber.
The mice froze, demonstrating a typical fear response, even though they had never been shocked while there. “We call this ‘incepting’ or implanting false memories in a mouse brain,” Tonagawa told Science.
A similar process may occur when powerful false memories are created in humans. “Humans are very imaginative animals,” said Tonagawa. “Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So, just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with bad or good high-variance ongoing events. In other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you.”
He added: “Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. We hope our future findings along this line will further alert legislatures and legal experts to how unreliable memory can be.”
Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a leading researcher in false memories in people. He said that the latest results were an important first step in understanding their neural basis.
“Memory researchers have always recognized that memory does not, as is often assumed, work like a video camera, faithfully recording all of the details of anything we experience. Instead, it is a reconstructive process, which involves building a specific memory from fragments of real memory traces of the original event, but also possibly including information from other sources.” He cautioned that the false memories created in the mice in the experiments were far simpler than the complex false memories that have generated controversy within psychology and psychiatry – for example, false memories of childhood sexual abuse, or even memories for bizarre ritualized satanic abuse, abduction by aliens, or “past lives ”. “Such rich false memories will clearly involve many brain systems and we are still a long way from understanding the processes involved in their formation at the neuronal level,” said Professor French.
Mark Stokes, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, said the experiments were a “tour de force” but that it was important to put them into perspective. “Although the results seem to imply that new memories were formed by the artificial stimulation (rather than the actual environment), this kind of phenomenon is still a long way from most people’s idea of memory,” he said. Rather, he said, it was equivalent to implanting an association that perhaps someone cannot place but that makes them wary of a specific environment for no apparent reason. “It is unlikely that this kind of pairing could lead to the rich set of associations related to normal memories, although it is possible that, over time, such pairing could be integrated with other memories to construct a more elaborate false narrative.”
The mouse models created by the MIT team will help scientists ask ever more complex questions about memories in people. “Now that we can reactivate and change the contents of memories in the brain, we can begin asking questions that were once the realm of philosophy,” said Steve Ramirez, a colleague of Tonagawa’s at MIT. “Are there multiple conditions that lead to the formation of false memories? Can false memories be artificially created? What about false memories for more than just contexts – false memories for objects, food or other mice? These are the once seemingly sci-fi questions that can now be experimentally tackled in the lab.”
As the technology develops, said French, scientists need to think about its uses carefully. “Whatever means are used to implant false memories, we need to be very aware of the ethical issues raised by such procedures – the potential for abuse of such techniques cannot be overstated.”


Intermediate
Hundreds of young Cubans are using the first known free, open-access internet service in the communist island nation. It has been made possible by one of Cubas most famous artists. A small cultural centre in the capital city, Havana, has suddenly become a rare source of free wi-fi. The internationally known Cuban artist Kcho is providing the service. Perhaps more surprisingly, the service has been approved by the state-owned telecommunications company, Etecsa.
People say the service is very slow, especially when the centre gets crowded. But, in a country where only about 5% of the population has unrestricted access to the internet, a facility that is both free of charge and free of restrictions is being welcomed.
The chance to click on international news websites, communicate with friends and family overseas and use sites like Facebook and Twitter has created a lot of excitement. I come as often as I can, said Adonis Ortiz, 20, while video-chatting with his father, who lives in the US and whom he has not seen in nine years.
As diplomatic and trade relations between the US and Cuba improve, American tech giants such as Google and Apple are expected to enter the Cuban market as soon as they are permitted. In the meantime, Cuba has installed a high-speed fibre-optic cable under the sea from Venezuela and internet users have some access to Chinese equipment.
Another estimate, that a quarter of Cubans have access to the internet  still one of the lowest rates in the Western Hemisphere  in fact measures residents who use a restricted domestic intranet that only features certain websites and has limited email.
Kcho has offered the public admission to his own personal internet connection. But this is not the action of a counter-revolutionary or free-market rebel. Kcho was probably chosen as the acceptable face of a government recognizing the inevitable attractions of the internet.
Kcho, who has close ties to the Cuban government, announced that his actions had been approved by the Ministry of Culture. The artist said he wanted to encourage Cubans to familiarize themselves with the internet. Its only possible if you are determined and if you absorb the costs, Kcho told the Associated Press. It is expensive but the benefit is tremendous. I have something that is great and powerful. I can share it and I am doing so.
Kchos real name is Alexis Leiva Machado. He became famous internationally for his painting, sculpture and drawings after winning the grand prize at a prominent art biennial in South Korea. He is currently preparing for the Havana biennial in May. Born on one of Cubas islands, he is known for contemporary art with rustic, seaside and patriotic themes and imagery.
In the centres courtyard, tech-savvy young people lounge throughout the day or just sit outside when its crowded, tapping away on laptops and tablets or glued to their smartphones.
Cuba has some of the lowest connectivity rates on the planet, with dial-up accounts closely restricted and at-home broadband almost unheard of except in the case of foreigners  they pay hundreds of dollars a month for the service in a country where the average salary is between $17 and $20 a month. Kcho is believed to be paying $900 a month to provide the free wi-fi.
Since 2013, Cuban authorities have opened hundreds of internet salons, where an hour online costs $4.50, at speeds far lower than those at Kchos studio of around 2mbps. A 2014 report found average internet connectivity speeds to be around 10.5mbps in the US and 23.6mbps in world-leading South Korea. Globally, the average was about 3.9mbps.
With dozens of users at one time, the signal strength of Kchos wi-fi is diluted. One user said he sometimes visits in the middle of the night, when nobody else is around, and finds it to be unbelievably fast.


Intermediate
Is this the moment when streaming goes truly mainstream? According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), there were only 41m subscribers using music streaming services around the world in 2014. It might be the area with the biggest revenue growth for the record business but it is still quite small. Not only that, but many of those subscribers have streaming as part of a mobile phone package so it is uncertain exactly how active its users are. Some sources suggest that Apple is aiming to reach 100m subscribers, which, based on a subscription fee of $120 per year, would generate $12bn annually. To put that in context, the entire global worth of recorded music in 2014 was just under $15bn. Apple is good at making products go mainstream but its not that good.
Is this the end of downloading? The iTunes Store arrived in 2003 (2004 in Europe) at a time when piracy was widespread. Apple managed to persuade consumers to pay for downloads and grew a huge business with an estimated 70% market share. Downloads were still 52% of the total digital income in 2014, according to IFPI. Apple holds the lions share of this  it is biggest music retailer in the world. But download revenue reached a peak in 2013 in the UK at 283m and fell to 249m in 2014. The decline in download sales hit the US in 2013 so Apple bought Beats in 2014 for $3bn in order to get into the premium headphone market and, also, to make the transition from music ownership (downloads) to music access (subscription streaming). Apple, and the record industry, cannot afford to get rid of the download market just yet  so streaming and downloading will have to coexist under the Apple brand. The vast majority of people like music but dont love it enough to pay $120 a year to listen to it. The average spend of a music buyer in the UK in 2014, for example, was just 39.52. Even Apple will  nd it very dif cult to make most of those people triple their annual spend on recorded music.
Has Apple Connect made Apple the most artist-friendly service? Apple have previously tried to be artist-friendly via iTunes. It didnt work. Apple Connect is something very different, somewhere in the middle of YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud. It lets artists post music, videos, photos and more to their pro le pages. Apple has generally had strong relations with the music industry and, also, artists themselves and, generally, it has a good reputation among artists. Compare that to Spotify, which has been criticized by artists from Radioheads Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift. There is the smell of revolution in the air and Apple is making sure its on the right side of the battle.
Where are the artist exclusives? This is going to be the interesting bit when the service goes live. Getting exclusives for big albums will be crucial to streaming. Spotify paid a lot of money to get Led Zeppelin and Metallica exclusively. Apple was watching this carefully and making notes. It already has AC/DC and the Beatles catalogues for download on iTunes. But can it persuade these two to enter the world of streaming? It also managed to get the surprise Beyonce album in 2013 before anyone else so it is inevitable that it will want more like that. It was an easy decision for artists to give iTunes the download exclusive on an album because iTunes controls so much of the download market. But trying to do that in streaming is not the same thing. It is also important to remember that streaming now counts towards the album chart in markets like the UK and US and artists, who still want to succeed in the charts, will not want to limit their audience by limiting themselves to one service.
Is this going to kill Spotify? Some people are already saying that Apple Music will destroy rivals like Spotify. However, its not that simple. Apple is entering a market where others have been working and gaining experience for many years. It has a lot of catching up to do. The winner of this battle will not be the company with the best service; it will be the company with the most money. Apples competitors have a head start in the market but they are losing huge amounts of money. Spotify, for example, lost 93.1m in 2013. Apple, on the other hand, started 2015 by becoming the most pro table company in corporate history, with $178bn in the bank. If Apple Music loses Apple money, the company will not continue it for long but it will not stop investment without at least trying to beat the competition.


Intermediate
There are worse things to do in life than stroll along Rios Copacabana beach in the sunshine on the way to watch a World Cup match, so it was perhaps not surprising that England fan Anthony McDowell from Liverpool was in a good mood. The place is lovely. The people are great. Theres a party atmosphere, said McDowell. The only thing that could be better is the England team.
He and half a dozen friends are among the thousands of supporters from around the world who have made the beach into a party zone of national colours and chants. Some danced, some posed for photos, some drank, but mostly they just walked and talked football, waiting for the next game to begin on the nearby big screen. The last time there were so many people here during the daytime, the pope was visiting.
The cheerful, largely peaceful mood was very different from the protests, transport chaos and stadium problems during the preparations for the World Cup. But, now the football is under way, visiting supporters are determined to enjoy the experience. If I had known, when I started planning, how complicated and costly it would be, I wouldnt have come. But, now that were here, its great, said Brian Hill, an England fan from Sunderland.
The trip has not been without its problems. Hill travelled for more than 20 hours to get to Rio. His son, Andrew, had his sunglasses stolen almost as soon as he sat on the beach. And, they have been surprised that many bars do not have big screens for the games. But, like many fans, they said they loved the atmosphere of this tournament, which has got off to a spectacular start on the pitch.
Everyone must have been thrilled by Robin van Persies extraordinary diving header for the Netherlands against Spain. And, there have been lots of goals: 28 in the  rst eight games  almost three times as many as at the same stage in South Africa in 2010. Adding to the carnival mood on the streets, where the majority of fans are from neighbouring nations, Latin-American teams have been very successful so far.
Up to now, the tournament has avoided the worst Doomsday scenarios, though it is far from trouble free. The stadiums may have been delivered late and  in some cases  not fully  nished, but there have been no reports of structural problems or dif culties entering the grounds since the kick off.
As at previous World Cups, ticketing has been a problem, with many empty seats at several games. FIFA spokesman Saint-Clair Milesi con rmed that only 48,000 of the 51,900 seats at the Netherlands versus Spain game were filled.
The Globo newspaper listed a number of problems in the 12 host cities. Almost all suffered worse traf c congestion than usual. The worst transport problems were in Natal, where bus drivers were on strike. In Salvador, some journey times were  ve times longer than usual. Traf c was already bad but this week it is chaotic, said Jecilda Mello, a local resident.
But, protests have diminished since the opening day, when small demonstrations took place in several cities and police used tear gas and pepper spray. Since then, the only security threat has been petty theft and overexcited fans. A spontaneous street party of Argentinian fans was dispersed with pepper spray after the fans blocked roads.
The huge distances have led to some very different World Cup experiences. The tournament has made only a small mark on Sa_o Paulo, South Americas most populous city, but far away in Manaus  the remote Amazonian city where England played Italy  visitors said there was World Cup fever with brightly decorated streets and  ags on many cars.
The FA chairman, Greg Dyke, said there was a big difference in atmosphere. Weve had a really warm welcome in Manaus. Its a big thing for them, even if it is a bit strange to spend so much on a stadium with no one to play in it. But we were in Sao Paulo for four or  ve days before the opening match and you wouldnt have known until the last day that there was even a World Cup on. It was weird.


Intermediate
A new report has warned that up to a billion people will remain in extreme poverty by 2030 unless countries confront the social, economic and cultural forces that keep them in poverty. The report by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network says that many people may rise above the poverty line of $1.25 a day, but slip back again when they experience problems such as drought or illness and insecurity or con ict.
The report found that, in parts of rural Kenya and in South Africa, 30 to 40% of people who escaped from poverty fell back again, rising to 60% in some areas of Ethiopia between 1999 and 2009. Even in successful countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, the proportion was 20%.
Individual examples show how easy it is for people to slip back into poverty. Amin, from rural Bangladesh, has seen his livelihood gradually decline, due to his own and his wifes illnesses, the cost of his sons marriage, the death of his father and loss of goods such as  shing nets. Lovemore, from Zimbabwe, has become one of the poorest people in his village. He recently lost his job due to bad health and had to take in his  ve grandchildren after the death of his daughters.
We need to ensure that people who are lifted out of poverty remain above the poverty line permanently. Too many families are slipping back into poverty because they struggle to recover from personal or bigger setbacks. Governments shouldnt assume that, just because somebodys income reaches $1.25, that means job done, said Andrew Shepherd, lead author of the report.
A UN high-level panel said it was possible to achieve the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030. The report, however, argues that more of the same will not get to zero. Despite a drop in extreme poverty from 1.9bn in 1990 to 1.2bn in 2010, the report says that progress in the next 15 years will be much harder. The big gains in China are unlikely to be matched by similar progress elsewhere, while climate-related shocks and deep poverty in parts of sub-Saharan Africa will slow down progress.
The report says the focus should be on the chronically poor  those who are poor for many years or their entire lives  and on stopping the descent into poverty. Governments have been quite good at moving people over the poverty line because that is relatively easy. But they have shied away from the more dif cult job of trying to solve chronic poverty, said Shepherd.
The report says progress on poverty reduction has had less of an impact on the chronically poor than on those who were already closer to the poverty line. It will not be possible to get to zero unless development policies focus on the chronically poor, it adds. The report suggests three policies, all of which require massive global investment.
The  rst is social assistance  to bring the poorest people closer to a decent standard of living. The second is education, from early childhood to the start of work, to enable people to escape and stay out of poverty. The third is economic growth policies that ensure that the bene ts of increasing national prosperity reach the very poorest people.
All this will cost money and the report says one obvious implication is that countries will need greater tax revenues. Aid will also be needed for the start-up costs for social assistance, universal health coverage and to  nance education, including scholarships for the poorest children. There remains a huge role for aid in the next 20 years, as many developing countries spend less than $500 on each of their citizens a year. Even Nigeria, with its oil wealth, spends only $650 per person, Shepherd said.
With the current crises in Syria, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, the report says it is essential that governments try to reduce the risk of con ict and to create peace.
The report also argues that, if the inequalities which affect the poorest people  such as access to land, labour markets and the power relationships between men and women  are addressed, this would tackle two goals at the same time: reducing chronic poverty and inequality.
The authors urge governments to develop an inclusive national development plan and to work with civil society to ensure that the poorest people are represented politically as well as trying to stop dif cult social norms, such as dowries and witchcraft, that contribute to extreme poverty: This often means challenging parts of the status quo.


Intermediate
Every morning, before the temperatures in Indias capital start to rise, a handful of old friends gather. On the dry grass not far from the India Gate monument at the centre of Delhi, they stretch, breathe and meditate.
It is the only healthy way to start the day. Much better than an egg or a sandwich or a cup of tea, said Arvind Singh at 6.15am as he did his breathing exercises on a bench.
Singh, a 42-year-old salesman, and his friends are not alone. All across India, in the overcrowded cities, on whatever green space is left, you can see similar scenes.
On 21 June  the new International Day of Yoga  Narendra Modi, Indias prime minister, hopes the world will join in. On the grass near India Gate, up to 45,000 people will take part in a 35-minute class  they hope it will be the biggest yoga session ever.
The participants will include 64-year-old Modi, most of his government and, they hope, a range of celebrities.
Encouraging Indians, and others, to stretch has become a focus for Modi, who led his Bharatiya Janata Party to a landslide election victory in 2014. In May 2015, schools were told to make sure students attended yoga events at the same time as the big demonstration in Delhi, even though it is on a Sunday.
Indias police officers are well known for being out of shape. So, the government has said they want to introduce compulsory yoga for them. They have said, too, that daily yoga lessons will be offered free to three million civil servants and their families. Air India, the national airline, has also said it will introduce yoga for trainee pilots.
Modi, an ascetic who is a vegetarian and an enthusiastic yoga practitioner, suggested an international yoga day when he was speaking to the United Nations on a visit to New York in 2014.
Modi said that yoga is an invaluable gift of Indias ancient tradition. He said that it encourages unity of mind and body, thought and action, harmony between man and nature, and a holistic approach to health and wellbeing. He added, It is not about exercise but discovering the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.
Yoga is between 3,000 and 6,000 years old. It came from somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, possibly from among religious ascetics. Its meditative practices, as well as its physical exercises, have long been associated with local religious traditions including Buddhism and Jainism, as well as Hinduism, which is practised by 80% of Indians.
Modi has been criticized before for creating a view of Indian culture that has little place for other traditions. One person called the event on 21 June a mix of cultural nationalism and commercialization.
Others, however, talk about a recent US court ruling that said yoga was not always linked to religion. A court in California ruled that: The practice of yoga may be religious in some contexts but yoga classes as taught in the [San Diego] district are not religious, mystical or spiritual. This ruling came after two Christian parents said they believed that yoga in schools was a Hindu exercise.
Amish Tripathi, the author of best-selling novels set 4,000 years ago in India that retell stories from Hindu mythology, said characters in his books practise yoga.
In ancient India, yoga was part of daily life, both the physical and the mental aspects. Every culture has gifted something to the world and this is our gift, Tripathi said.
Suneel Singh, a guru in south Delhi, agreed that yoga did not belong to any one religion: Is tai chi just Chinese? Is football just English? It is the same with yoga  yoga is for everybody. It is a cheap way to stay healthy.


Swiss police recently entered the Baur Au Lac hotel in Zurich at dawn and arrested 16 football officials, including five current or former FIFA executives. They were later charged with corruption in the US. The officials included the former Brazilian federation chief Ricardo Teixeira and his successor, Marco Polo Del Nero.
They were among 16 individuals accused of fraud and other crimes by the US Department of Justice. The US has now charged 27 defendants, including former FIFA executives. “The level of corruption is completely unacceptable,” said the US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch.
Swiss police arrested the president of the South American football confederation, the Paraguayan Juan Ángel Napout, and Alfredo Hawit, the head of the North and Central American and Caribbean governing body. Hawit started his job after Jeffrey Webb left the job in May 2015 because he was arrested. This was part of the US operation that led to a crisis at FIFA and caused Sepp Blatter to lose his job and reputation.
The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said of the latest arrests: “They are in custody before their extradition. The US believes they accepted bribes of millions of dollars”. Webb and the Colombian former executive Luis Bedoya entered guilty pleas in the US.
Eleven current and former FIFA executives have now been charged in the investigation, which alleges $200m in bribes, mainly from TV and marketing contracts but also FIFA’s development programmes.
“The message from this announcement should be clear to everyone who hopes to escape our investigation: you will not escape,” said Lynch. Teixeira, the former son-in-law of the FIFA ex-president João Havelange, was charged together with Del Nero and his predecessor José Maria Marin, who was charged in May 2015.
Fourteen men were charged in May 2015. Days later, Blatter won a fifth term as president but then agreed to leave his job as the crisis grew. He was then suspended together with the UEFA President, Michel Platini, because of an alleged £1.3m payment to the Frenchman. Both men might get life bans when the FIFA ethics committee hears their case in December if they are found guilty.
Among those also charged on Thursday were Rafael Salguero, a Guatemalan who left the executive committee in May; the former South American confederation secretary general Eduardo Deluca; former Peruvian football federation president Manuel Burga; and Bolivia’s football president, Carlos Chaves, already jailed in his own country.
Lynch said: “The Department of Justice really wants to end the corruption in the leadership of international football – not only because there is such a lot of corruption but also because the corruption is an insult to international principles.”
The acting FIFA President, Issa Hayatou, refused to comment on the detail of the latest arrests. But he said neither he nor the organization was corrupt. Hayatou appeared for the first time before the media since he started the job in September, when Blatter was suspended, and said the current crisis was the fault of a few bad people.
“FIFA is not corrupt. We have some people that have shown negative behaviour. But not everyone in FIFA is corrupt,” said Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football for more than 25 years. “There are lots of people who have been in FIFA for more than 20 or 30 years that have not been accused of anything.”


Intermediate
Much of BB Kings best work was blues but he was always open-minded about and interested in other kinds of music. He bridged musical and cultural differences with warmth and skill. Perhaps it is too early to speak of the last of the bluesmen but it is hard to imagine that any future blues artist will match King. He in uenced thousands of musicians and millions of music fans in a career that lasted 65 years.
Riley B King (the B did not seem to stand for a name) was born in Mississippi, the son of African-American farm workers. He learnt the basics of guitar from a family friend and perfected his singing with a quartet of gospel singers. In his early 20s, he moved to Memphis.
Within a couple of years, he was playing regularly at a bar in West Memphis and he also became a disc jockey, presenting a show on a Memphis radio station. His billing, The Beale Street Blues Boy, was shortened to Blues Boy King and then to BB. After a single session in 1949 for a Nashville label, King began recording for the West Coast-based Modern Records in 1950.
He had his  rst hit in 1952, with Three OClock Blues, which was number one in the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it was the  rst of many hits. On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was innovative but had its roots in blues history. He was always ready to praise the musicians who had in uenced him  he would usually mention T-Bone Walker  rst. He would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
He once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style. I loved that sound but just couldnt do it. He was modest about his singing, too, a mixture of the style of ballad singers such as Nat King Cole and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll.
Throughout the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist on an endless series of one-nighters. In 1956, he played 342 gigs. In 1962, he tried to change that working pattern by signing with a major label, ABC, but the  rst records under that contract were rather unsuccessful, both with his fans and with the record company.
The 1965 album Live at the Regal, however, has become iconic, a turning point in the early listening of many younger musicians. He had further R&B hits with blues numbers including How Blue Can You Get and Paying the Cost to Be the Boss, and, in 1969, he got near the top of the pop charts  where no blues artist had been for many years  with The Thrill Is Gone.
It took him a while to establish himself with a rock audience but he was brought to their attention by musicians who admired him. About a year and a half ago, he said in 1969, all of a sudden, kids started saying to me, Youre the greatest blues guitarist in the world. And Id say, Who told you that? And theyd say, Mike Bloom eld or Eric Clapton. I owe my new popularity to these youngsters.
From then on, King was  rmly established as a leading blues artist. Guided by his manager, Sidney Seidenberg, he went on international concert tours that took him to Japan, Australia, China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners at the Cook County jail in Chicago and at San Quentin, which led to his long involvement in rehabilitation programmes.
In 1990, King was diagnosed with diabetes and cut back his touring but his followers outside the US could still see him every year or two. He would now deliver most of his act sitting down but the strength of his singing and the  uency of his playing were almost as good as ever. The celebrations for his 80th birthday, in 2005, included an award-winning album of collaborations with Clapton, Mark Knop er, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, tributes from musicians as diverse as Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a goodbye tour that was not a goodbye at all.
In 2009, King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012, he performed at a concert at the White House, where the US President, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago. King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others died before him.


Music subscription services, including Spotify and Deezer, have broken through the $1bn sales barrier worldwide, as increasing numbers of fans choose to pay for music online.
Streaming and subscription revenues rose by more than 50% in 2013 to reach $1.1bn, helping overall sales of recorded music in Europe grow for the first time in 12 years, according to figures published in March 2014.
There are now an estimated 450 music-rental services around the world, and, while many people still listen for free, a desire for more choice is persuading more music lovers to part with their cash. In a three-year period, 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).
Easily accessible from smartphones and tablets, subscription services are popular with people looking to try out new music without committing to buying a download or a CD. Consumers say they are attracted by a cheap, user-friendly and legal alternative to pirated downloads. “It is now clear that music streaming and subscription is a mainstream model for our business,” said IFPI Chief Executive, Frances Moore. There are signs that, in Britain and America, streaming may soon generate more revenue for the music industry than downloads from online stores such as Apple’s iTunes. Subscription services now account for a third of all digital sales globally, with downloads making up the balance, but the IFPI data shows that the two formats are growing at different rates.
In the US, the percentage of people claiming to use subscription and streaming rose from 19% in 2012 to 23%, while the percentage of people downloading fell from 28% to 27%. In Britain, downloaders remained static, at exactly one third, while subscribers grew from 19% to 22%. In Sweden, France and Italy, streaming is already more popular than downloading.
Digital formats now account for 39% of all music sales, or nearly £5.9bn out of £15bn, and, while sales of CDs and vinyl declined steeply in 2013, they still contribute just over half the industry’s income. A recent crash in music sales in Japan, which accounts for one fifth of music industry sales and where physical formats remained popular for longer than elsewhere, meant sales across all formats globally fell 3.9%.
However, vinyl continued to make a comeback in some markets. Sales increased by 32% in America and by 101% in the UK in 2013.
The IFPI also said that One Direction were the biggest-selling artists of 2013, with 4m physical and digital sales for their Midnight Memories album. Katy Perry’s Prism was the best-selling album by a female artist, in sixth place behind Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars and Daft Punk.
Consumer-technology companies have been racing to join the music-streaming trend, with Apple launching iTunes Radio and Google promoting its Play Store, with smaller players like Beats Music, created by the team behind the Beats headphones brand, also joining the fray.


Intermediate
From all across Rwanda, and even parts of neighbouring Burundi, people are coming to the southern town of Butare to a little shop called Inzozi Nziza (Sweet Dreams). They come for a taste of the unknown, something most have never tasted before  sweet, cold ice cream.
Here, at the central African countrys  rst ice- cream parlour, customers can buy scoops in sweet cream, passion fruit, strawberry and pineapple  avours. Toppings include fresh fruit, honey, chocolate chips and granola. Black tea and coffee are also on sale.
The shop, which has ice cream, coffee, dreams written on its signs, is taking advantage of local curiosity about the dessert  and changing lives in the process, says Inzozi Nzizas manager, Louise Ingabire.
Ice cream is important, she says between mouthfuls of a honey- avoured offering. Some Rwandans like ice cream, but its a new thing. We still have some work to do, to tell others that theyll enjoy it.
The shop can certainly make dreams come true. I didnt have a job before: I just stayed at home. Now, I have a vision for the future. I am making money and I can give some of it to my family, says the 27-year-old.
Butare, which has 89,600 residents and is located 135km south of the capital, Kigali, is the home of the National University of Rwanda. Inzozi Nziza has become a meeting place for tired students looking to treat themselves to something cool and different.
Its something uniting people here, Kalisa Migendo, a 24-year-old agriculture student, says. If you need to go out and talk to a friend, a girl or a boy, you come to Inzozi Nziza for an ice cream.
Most of the ingredients are from local sources and the milk comes from nearby Nyanza. The vanilla beans and cocoa are imported.
Inzozi Nziza was opened by the theatre director Odile Gakire Katese. She met Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas, co-founders of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, New York, and formed a partnership to open the shop in 2010.
An ice-cream shop, Katese said, might help to put the human pieces back together by rebuilding spirits, hopes and family traditions, Miesen says.
At the start, Miesen and Dundas owned the shop in partnership with its staff and had shares in the business, which is a cooperative and non-pro t. After 18 months, they transferred their shares to the women, who had by then proved they could run the business.
Ice cream is new to Rwanda. Making the business successful requires a lot of skills and changing peoples way of thinking because selling and eating ice cream is not part of Rwandan culture.
The Butare shop employs nine women, who spend their spare time practising with Ingoma Nshya, Rwandas  rst and only female drumming group, which was established by Katese ten years ago.
The musicians are Hutu and Tutsi women. Some are survivors of the 1994 genocide, during which almost a million Tutsis and Hutus were killed. Some members of Ingoma Nshya are widows, some orphans.
Historically, says Ingabire, Rwandan women were forbidden to drum and many people considered the drums too heavy for women to carry. But its something which brings unity.
Ingabires father, two siblings and many cousins were killed in the genocide. When Im drumming, it gives me power because were still alive and survivors, she says.
The ice-cream parlour is in a documentary by  lm-makers Rob and Lisa Fruchtman. Sweet Dreams, which tells the story of how the women have made a promising post-genocide future, also includes the female drummers.
The  lm has been shown in more than a dozen countries, including the US, UK and several African states. We feel the  lm is about resilience, hope, bravery, resourcefulness and the ability to change the course of your own life, says Lisa Fruchtman.


Intermediate
Will we soon live in a world where drones deliver packages? If you believe Amazon, the answer is yes. Others are not so sure: we need to make more technical progress in this area but there is also the problem of public safety.
Amazon spokesman Paul Misener told a US congress hearing recently that his company would be ready as soon as all the rules were in place. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) will  nally have regulations on the commercial use of unmanned aircraft by June 2016. But the technology has a long way to go before then and larger machines arent legal yet  only drones up to 25kg will be legal. And the FAA says that, if youre going to crowd the skies with radio- controlled  ying robots, they must all use different radio frequencies that nobody can jam or hijack.
Professor Sajiv Singh, who runs a cargo delivery company called NearEarth, said that, to pilot a state-of-the-art drone, you simply give it some basic instructions: go to this altitude, perform this short task, go back home. But even short  ights from a mobile landing pad could cause serious logistical problems, he said.
Theyre not going to deliver from one uninhabited place to another uninhabited place; theyre going to deliver from a warehouse to the consumer, which will probably be an urban area or a suburban area, he said. In those particular cases, there are going to be hazards that the vehicle is going to have to see. Maybe there will be terrain that the map doesnt know about. Then, maybe theres construction equipment that wasnt there before but is there now. Maybe GPS signals are blocked, in which case its going to have an incorrect idea about where it is. All these problems can be solved, he said  but its dif cult.
One major problem is maintaining radio contact with a drone and planning for what happens if that contact breaks. If you have an off-the-shelf UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle], itll just keep going and crash into the ground, said roboticist Daniel Huber.
Furthermore, you cant do everything with a 25kg aircraft, said Jay McConville, director of business development for unmanned systems at Lockheed Martin. People in the aircraft business have to remind ourselves that the operator doesnt really care about every little thing about the aircraft and wants instead to focus on the end result, he said. Operators want to see vehicle status information; they want to see video on their handheld device or their laptop.
Technologically, most of the things that we need for this are in place, said Huber. He is working on a program to allow drones to inspect infrastructure  pipelines, telephone lines, bridges and so on. Weve developed an exploration algorithm where you draw a box around an area and it will  y around that area and look at every surface and then report back.
Huber, who works on 3D systems imagery, said about Amazon: I have heard them say that many packages are lightweight  a drone can carry a kilogram for 15 minutes. If you have a vehicle that can go into a neighbourhood, it can deliver from that base. You need a 15-minute distance and typical off-the-shelf drones have that distance. Its one way, he said, of making sure the surrounding population is relatively safe. The larger you get, the more dangerous you get.
Problems with the use of drones can be solved in some very dramatic ways, Huber said. At a recent conference, he said, a disaster relief drone company demonstrated a robot that could take off and, when it got tired, land on its own charging station and exchange its batteries.
Of course, safety is still a major concern  Singh says that, for a commercial aircraft to be allowed to  y, it has to prove a rate of one serious failure every one million hours. Drones, he said, are a long way from that. The Reaper drone has one failure in 10,000 hours, Singh said. But they dont consider an oil leak a catastrophic failure  something has to fall out of the sky.
Part of the reason for this is that air travel is dangerous so standards are much higher. If you  y commercial airlines, they often say, Oh, a component has failed  we have to go back to the gate, Singh said. And thats an established industry with 60 years of legacy! I hate to think that a drone might come down on a busy road. Part of the solution, Singh said, is planning for every situation: If things fail, the vehicle has to do something reasonable.


A thick crust of bird droppings is piled on the gilded balustrade of one of Britain’s most expensive properties. Pigeon skeletons lie among shattered mirrors and water streams through broken cornicing. This is The Towers, a £30m palace in “Billionaires’ Row” in north London, whose spectacular ruin has been kept secret until now.
It is one of ten mansions in the middle of The Bishops Avenue – the heart of London’s spiralling property market – that have stood almost entirely vacant since they were bought a quarter of a century ago, it is believed on behalf of members of the Saudi Arabian royal family. Their Grecian columns are cracking into pieces and mosaic-tiled swimming pools are filled with rubble. Nature has taken over to the extent that owls have moved in.
It is a desolate scene repeated up and down the supposedly prestigious avenue that Lloyds Bank has calculated is the second most expensive street in Britain. While more and more people struggle to get on to London’s property ladder as house prices rise at 11.2% a year, 16 mansions on the most expensive stretch of The Bishops Avenue are sitting empty, many behind padlocked gates, with their windows shuttered with steel grilles and overgrown grounds patrolled by guard dogs.
Across the street stands another derelict mansion, worth £18m, with smashed windows and walls coated in anti-climb paint. Metal grilles block the windows of another, which has been sold for £20m.
But that doesn’t stop the prices going up. Dryades, a mansion until recently owned by a Pakistani politician, sold for £12m in 2007 and is believed to be worth about £30m today. Heath Lodge, the scene of the 1984 murder, by silver bullet, of fashion tycoon Aristos Constantinou, is worth £13m today, after having been sold in the late 1970s for £400,000.
The dereliction can be agonizing for people struggling to keep a roof above their heads in one of the world’s most expensive cities. One security guard working on the avenue said it was exasperating to see so many tens of thousands of square feet of property – enough to house dozens of people – falling apart.
Royals flushed with oil wealth from Nigeria and Saudi Arabia were among the first to come to this curving road near Hampstead Heath. Iranians fled here after the fall of the shah. Now, Chinese house hunters are following Russians and Kazakhs who have spent millions securing an address estate agents tell them is as world famous as the Champs Elysées and Rodeo Drive. Recently, two mansions have been on sale for £65m and £38m, promising endless Italian marble, leather-padded lifts and luxury panic rooms.
However, in the grounds of the empty mansions, stone fountains crumble and lawns have become bogs. Inside one, water drips through a huge crystal chandelier onto a thick carpet rotting under sections of collapsed ceiling. Moss grows through shattered bricks and mirrored tiles are scattered across a bathroom. The swimming pool is filled with a foot of brackish water and has flowers growing through its tiles. Wooden slats bulge away from the sauna.
But it is the wreck of The Towers, a grand mansion set among acres of hornbeams, oaks and limes, that is most dramatic, with its huge, high-ceiling halls occupied by pigeons and its walls turned bright green by algae as water pours through three storeys and plinks into a vast, empty, basement swimming pool. Unopened wooden crates marked “bullet- proof glass” reveal the security fears of the previous owners.
Today, very few people live on The Bishops Avenue full time. A security guard patrolling the pavement outside one mansion said that the owners were not there. Another, outside Royal Mansion, declined to say if anyone was home, while a member of staff at another mansion simply warned the Guardian about the guard dogs. Magdy Adib Ishak-Hannah, an Egyptian-born private healthcare mogul, whose personal wealth is £45m, said he was in the minority of permanent residents.
“It’s not a neighbourly place, where you can chat over the fence,” he said. “To be honest, I have never seen what my neighbours look like. Next door, a Saudi princess spent £35m on a new house and I’ve never seen her. There are about three houses that are lived in 24/7 and half of the properties are occupied three to six months a year. The other half, who knows if they come or not?”
The multimillion-pound wrecks are evidence of a property culture in which the world’s richest people see British property as investments. One Hyde Park, a block of apartments in Knightsbridge, is another example where more than half the flats are registered with the council as empty or second homes.
Nevertheless, the talk on the avenue is about building £5m apartments, instead of £50m mansions, in an effort to draw people back.
Anil Varma, a local property developer, has decided to rebuild one of the most valuable sites on the avenue as a collection of 20 apartments with a concierge, maid service, 25-metre pool, spa and cinema.
“If you build a big house and try and sell for £30m to £40m, it won’t sell,” he said. “Locals won’t buy and so you have to bring in overseas buyers.”
But the prospect of the avenue’s empty property being used to help solve the housing crisis remains distant. Andrew Harper, a local Conservative councillor, laughed when asked whether some of the derelict housing could become affordable homes. He said the land price would be prohibitive.
“Very wealthy people own property there,” he said. “Sometimes they live in them and sometimes they don’t.”


Not many exercise classes have a tea break in the middle. But Margaret Allen’s class has one. After a gentle warm-up and a few quick exercises, the 93-year-old great-grandmother lets her group sit down and relax with a cup of tea. Some of the eight people in the class look like they need a break, but Allen is not even sweating.
The general rule is that eating just before doing sport is not a good idea and especially not halfway through the class. But, on the afternoon I visit Allen’s class in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, they eat fruitcake during the break. The cake was made for Allen’s recent birthday by her 89-year-old sister, Joan.
The ladies have just finished their cake when Allen gets up again. She plays a lively Scottish song and there is lots of toe pointing and leg kicking. Forty-five minutes later, the class is finally over.
Allen has been leading classes in the north-east town for 45 years. She wasn’t very sporty at school, but she started playing the piano for a keep-fit class during the second world war and started leading the class in her 40s when the old instructor retired.
At one time, Allen’s class had more than 18 regulars, each paying £1 a time. But, these days, the group is getting smaller. During the tea break, the ladies discuss a funeral that most of them went to that week for one of the younger people in the group who died recently, aged 68.
Allen, who loves dancing, has never done any formal training to be a fitness instructor. Instead, she got ideas for her own moves from five fitness videos from the BBC. Allen thinks she is healthy because she keeps busy, especially since her husband died in 1997. She started writing poetry when she was 80.
Allen is the oldest, her sister the second oldest. The baby of the group is 60-year-old Jean Cunion, who is a bit embarrassed to say that she is perhaps the least fit of the group. “I remember, the first time I came, Margaret said, 'Who’s that breathing heavily?' and I had to say it was me.” Ruth Steere, 76, says Allen always has her back to the class, but she always knows what’s happening: “She always shouts at us if we go wrong. She’s very good at knowing what we are doing.”
“I write poems about everything. I just can’t stop,” she says, when she phones me a few days after the interview to read out a poem she has written about the joys of exercise. She still plays the piano and gives speeches. She also did a computer course when she was 88.
Ageing is no fun, she says. She reads me a few lines from a poem she has written called ’That Beast Called Age’. She happily remembers a doctor who saw her for the first time a few years ago, who said he didn’t believe she was more than 78: “I said, 'Thank you, doctor. You can go now.'” She also has a practical idea for people who are overweight: “I just think people shouldn’t eat too much. When I hear someone say, 'Oh, I can’t lose weight', I say: 'Sellotape.'” She mimes taping her mouth shut. “I said this the other day to a big fat man. Everything in moderation is my motto.” Earlier in 2013, Allen was watching the news and saw a woman get the British Empire Medal. “The woman said: 'I’m 80 and I’m the oldest fitness instructor in the country!' I thought: 'No, you’re not.'” But Allen won’t write to the Queen to complain.


George W Bush, Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Hawking have done it. David Cameron, Barack Obama and Pamela Anderson have refused to do it. The Ice Bucket Challenge began in the US in July. It has raised $100 million for the ALS Association, an American motor neurone disease charity, and £4.5 million for a British charity, as well as thousands of pounds for charities in Hong Kong and Australia.
But some people are unhappy with the Ice Bucket Challenge. Animal-rights groups and environmentalists (people who want to protect the natural world) have criticized it. Some people say it wastes water. Other people criticize it because some people enjoy the fun and then do not donate anything to charity.
But the challenge continues to grow. If you don’t know how it works, someone gives a short speech to camera about the charity, then throws a bucket of ice cubes in water over their head or asks a friend to do it. Then, they give the names of three other people who have to do the same or donate money to the charity.
It was an unlucky coincidence that the Ice Bucket Challenge was happening during World Water Week, when people from all over the world met in Stockholm to discuss the planet’s water crisis. The charity WaterAid is asking people to use recycled water from their baths or rainwater from their gardens, or to use sea water.
Douglas Graham, of the UK Motor Neurone Association, said: “We are not surprised about the criticism but this is a wonderful windfall and we’re so grateful. We didn’t expect it but, suddenly, the donations just started.” The money is a very big help to a small charity that looks after sufferers of a terrible disease that has no cure and kills five people a day in the UK.
Former Baywatch star and animal-rights activist Pamela Anderson wrote a public letter to the ALS Association. In the letter, she said that she did not like the charity’s use of animal experimentation.
A few US stars have rejected the challenge because of California’s drought. Actor Matt Damon solved the problem by using water from his toilet. Actor Verne Troyer used milk, also for environmental reasons. And some people say the challenge caused a water shortage on the Scottish island of Colonsay.
Another criticism is that small charities won’t know what to do with the extra money but the MND Association rejects this. “Oh, we know what to do with the extra money here,” said Graham. “We pay for research to find the causes of the disease, and a treatment or cure. We give care and support to 3,500 people and they need it because this disease is expensive to manage. More than 50% of people with the disease die within two years.”
But, for many people with a connection to the disease, the awareness that the challenge has created is as important as the money. Normally, the MND Association gets about 300,000 hits a year on its website. On just one day recently, it had 330,000 hits.
“It is great to donate to any charity. I understand that some people might want to donate to a different charity,” said Graham. “In 2013, British people gave £62 billion to charity – we should be proud of that. It’s fabulous for us to get this windfall. Over the next few weeks, we will decide how to spend the money in the best way.”


The business idea is to produce a cheap light that gets free power from gravity and could end the use of dangerous kerosene lamps in Africa and India.
But when British designer, Patrick Hunt, tried to get money from banks or venture capitalists to help start his business, he hit a problem. “We tried to get funding, but it’s slow and difficult and nobody wants to take a risk,” he said.
So he tried crowdfunding on a US website, Indiegogo, which has recently opened up in the UK. Within five days, he made £36,200. His campaign was so popular that within 40 days he had made £400,000 from the public.
A 10kg bag of rocks is attached to the light, lifted to a height of about two metres, and while it slowly falls to the ground it makes enough power for half an hour of light.
Hunt is one of a new group of entrepreneurs who are trying to get money from the fast-growing crowdfunding industry to start their businesses. Another new crowdfunding site is InvestingZone. It matches wealthy people with entrepreneurs.
On Indiegogo, users can offer “perks” for different levels of investment – for example, people who helped to fund Hunt’s light could feel good about helping someone who is less rich, but they also got one of his lights as a present.
For Danae Ringelmann, who started Indiegogo, the “gravity light” is a perfect example of how crowdfunding can work and how it can test an entrepreneur’s idea. a European service. It says it is very popular in Britain. International activity has increased by 41% since December.
There are other crowdfunding sites, such as Kickstarter, Seedrs and Funding Circle, but Indiegogo is the only crowdfunding site where anyone can start a campaign. No project is too crazy for Indiegogo.
The site charges a 4% fee for successful campaigns. Entrepreneurs who do not find the amount of money they wanted to find can either pay back all the money or keep all the money but pay a 9% fee.
A British woman made £100,000 to open a “cat café” in London through the site. It will be called Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium, but it is not open yet. It will be somewhere people can “come in from the cold to a comfortable chair, a hot cup of tea, a book and a cat”.
With her Wall Street background and the experience of helping 100,000 businesses and services find money, Ringelmann has good advice for entrepreneurs.
“Ideas are a dime a dozen. What is important is how you make your idea happen. If you are afraid that someone will steal your idea, and that that person will make your idea happen better and faster than you, then you are not the right person to make the idea happen. It’s all about confidence to move fast and to learn,” she says.
Crowdfunding as an alternative to banks has grown, but, at the moment, big-bucks investors with lots of money are not very interested. That could start to change in the UK when people start using InvestingZone.


Intermediate
Until the end, David Bowie, who has died of cancer, was still full of surprises. His latest album, Blackstar, appeared on his 69th birthday on 8 January 2016 and proved that he hadnt lost his gift for making dramatic statements as well as challenging, disturbing music.
Throughout the 1970s, Bowie was a trailblazer of musical trends and pop fashion. He became a singer-songwriter, a pioneer of glam-rock, then got into what he called plastic soul, before moving to Berlin to create innovative electronic music. His ability to mix brilliant changes of sound and image is unique in pop history.
Bowie was born David Robert Jones in south London. In 1953, the family moved to Kent, where David showed talent for singing and playing the recorder. Later, he studied art, music and design.
At 15, David formed his first band, the Kon-rads. It was clear that Davids talents and ambition meant that he should go solo. David took the name Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees.
Bowies first album, released in June 1967, was titled simply David Bowie. In July 1969, Bowie released Space Oddity, the song that would give him his first commercial breakthrough. Timed to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing, it was a top five UK hit.
In March 1970, Bowie married art student, Angela Barnett. The Man Who Sold the World was released in the US in late 1970 and in the UK the following year. With its daring songwriting and broody, hard-rock sound, it was the first album to really show his writing and performing gifts. The albums themes included immortality, insanity, murder and mysticism, which showed that Bowie was a songwriter who was thinking outside of pops usual boundaries.
He followed it with 1972s Hunky Dory, a mix of wordy, elaborate songwriting. It was an excellent collection that met with only moderate success but that all changed with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars later that year.
This time, Bowie appeared as a science-fiction character  an intergalactic glam-rock star visiting planet Earth. The hit single Starman brought instant success for the album.
Everything Bowie touched turned to gold. He had his first UK number 1 album with Aladdin Sane (1973), which included the hit singles The Jean Genie and Drive-in Saturday. But Bowie was already planning his next career moves.
His increasing interest in funk and soul music could be heard on the album Young Americans (1975), which gave him a US chart-topper with Fame (with John Lennon as a guest vocalist).
With the album Station to Station (1976), Bowie introduced a new persona, the Thin White Duke. This persona was the same as his role as a sad space traveller in Nicolas Roegs film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Bowies relationship with his wife had been suffering under the pressures of success and the couple divorced in 1980. This was a year of further creative triumph, bringing a fine album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and its chart-topping single, Ashes to Ashes, followed by a period playing the title role in The Elephant Man on the Broadway stage.
He achieved a number 1 single with his 1981 partnership with Queen, Under Pressure, and became increasingly involved with different media. He appeared in the German movie Christiane F (1981) and wrote music for the soundtrack. He had another chart hit with Cat People (Putting Out Fire) from Paul Schraders movie Cat People (1982).
1983 was the year in which he put his energy into the album Lets Dance and follow-up concerts. Lets Dance turned Bowie into a crowd-friendly global rock star, with the album and its singles Lets Dance, China Girl and Modern Love all becoming huge international hits.
This was the heyday of MTV and Bowies talent for eye-catching videos increased his popularity, while the six-month Serious Moonlight tour drew massive crowds. It was to be the most commercially successful period of his career.
At the 1985 Live Aid famine relief concert at Wembley Stadium, Bowie was one of the best performers. In addition, that year, he teamed up with Mick Jagger to record the fundraising single Dancing in the Street, which quickly went to number 1.
A few days after his appearance at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in April 1992, Bowie married the Somalian model Iman and the couple bought a home in New York.
For the album Black Tie White Noise (1993), he included elements of soul, electronica and hip hop. It topped the UK album chart and gave him a top 10 single, Jump They Say.
New media and technology influenced his recordings, too. His 1999 album Hours was based around music he had written for a computer game called Omikron, in which Bowie and Iman appeared as characters. The birth of Bowie and Imans daughter, Alexandria, followed in August 2000.
As an adopted New Yorker, Bowie was the opening act at the Concert for New York City in October 2001, where he joined Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, the Who and Elton John in a benefit show six weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
During his Reality tour in 2004, Bowie had chest pains while performing in Germany and needed emergency surgery in Hamburg.
He saw the medical emergency as a warning and started to slow down. In February 2006, he was given a Grammy lifetime achievement award. He was entered into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
The Next Day (2013) was his first album of new material in a decade. It included the single Where Are We Now?, which gave him his first UK top 10 hit since 1993. The album went to the top of the charts in Britain and around the world. In 2014, Bowie was given the Brit Award for Best British Male, making him the oldest person to get the award.
He is survived by Iman, their daughter, Alexandria, his stepdaughter, Zulekha, and his son, Duncan, from his first marriage.


Intermediate
According to a group of experts, bogus allergy tests are convincing thousands of people to take unnecessary treatments and put themselves or their children on inadequate diets. This can result in malnutrition. Allergies and food intolerances are increasing rapidly but confusion between the two, as well as misdiagnosis, are causing real harm, said the charity Sense About Science, which has produced a guide with the help of allergy specialists.
Its probably the biggest mess for science communication  there are myths, misinterpreted studies and bad medical practice. All this results in under- and over-diagnosis, said Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science. The costs are huge  unnecessary actions for some and not enough action for those whose lives depend on it.
Experts fear that restaurants and caterers hear so many people say that they have allergies (which can be dangerous for the individual), when in fact they have a food intolerance (which is not dangerous), that they may not take all the precautions they should take when serving a person who has a genuine allergy.
It matters very much, said Moira Austin of a charity that supports people suffering from anaphylaxis. If a caterer thinks somebody is just avoiding a food because they dont want to get bloated, they may be less careful. There have been a number of fatalities where people have gone to a restaurant, told staff that they have an allergy to a particular food and the meal has been served up containing that allergen.
The guide says most internet and shop-bought allergy tests have no scientific basis. They include a home-testing kit that looks for specific immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies against foods in the blood. These antibodies are part of the immune systems response to infections but the best medical evidence has shown that high IgG levels do not suggest an allergy, the guide says. Results are often positive in people who do not have an allergy or a food intolerance.
Also unscientific is another test, a mixture of acupuncture and homeopathy. It attempts to measure electronic resistance across the skin while the child or adult holds the suspect food in their hand. Hair sample testing is also pointless, the guide says. Hair is not involved in allergic reactions so testing hair samples cannot provide any useful information on allergies.
I commonly see children who have been put on to unnecessarily restricted diets. Their parents assume, in good faith, that they have allergies to multiple foods because of allergy tests that have no scientific basis, said Paul Seddon, a paediatric allergist. This needs to stop, which can only happen if we prove these tests are unscientific.
Another paediatric allergist, Adam Fox said: I get a number of patients who come in after sending their hair off for analysis or after excluding a whole range of foods for their children. It is very difficult to deal with that. There are two challenges. Children need to be given proper diets but it is the unnecessary avoidance of things that arent harmful that has a huge impact on the quality of life. A child who cant eat wheat or drink milk cant go to parties.
The belief that a childs chronic lack of energy or headaches or eczema are caused by an allergy takes a long time and many tests to prove or disprove. It is tempting to go to an alternative therapist who will do one test and provide a quick, but wrong, answer.
Allergies are increasing in developed countries. The percentages of children diagnosed with allergic rhinitis and eczema have both trebled in the last 30 years. This is leading many more people to suspect allergies are the reason for their own or their childrens health problems. The guide lists a number of myths about the sources of allergies, from the suggestion that they are caused by E numbers in food colourings to toxic overload and fast food.


Intermediate
When Larry Pizzi first heard about electric bikes nearly 20 years ago, he asked: Why would anyone want to screw up a bike by putting a motor and batteries on it?
Its a question that still puzzles some people. Bicycle shops in the US do not usually sell e-bikes, even though they have been around since the late 1990s.
Pizzi, who is now CEO of Currie Technologies, the number one seller of e-bikes in the US, believes thats about to change. Others in the bike industry agree. Familiar brands including Trek, Raleigh and Specialized all offer electric models and they believe that the market is about to take off.
The US is different from other countries when it comes to electric bikes. Nearly 32m e-bikes were sold in 2014, most of them in China, where they are mostly used for transportation. They are popular in much of Europe, too. Theyre common in the Netherlands and Switzerland; German postal workers use them to get around and BMW offers one for about $3,000.
Electric bikes are different from motorcycles or mopeds, which rely on motorized power; they are bicycles that can be pedalled with  or without  help from an electric motor. Riding an e-bike feels like riding a normal bike with a strong wind behind you; the motor just helps you go faster or climb hills. Unlike mopeds, e-bicycles are usually permitted on bike paths and they cant travel faster than 20mph.
To succeed, the electric bike business in the US must overcome legal, cultural and financial obstacles. E-bikes are banned in some states, including New York. Some people who own and work in bike shops dont like putting motors on bicycles  one of the reasons is the extra weight. Some e-bikes weigh nearly 30kg.
E-bikes are also expensive. While cheaper models sell for as little as $700, Court Rye, the founder and editor of ElectricBikeReview.com, a popular website, says riders should expect to pay at least $1,500 for a quality e-bike with a good battery. The best models cost more than twice that.
The companies that make and sell e-bikes say they can overcome those obstacles. E-bike technology, particularly the batteries, is improving. Batteries are getting smaller, theyre getting lighter, theyre getting more reliable and they are lasting longer, says Don DiCostanza, the founder and CEO of Pedego, an electric bikemaker and retailer.
Companies like Bosch, the German electronics giant, and Shimano, the leading manufacturer of bicycle gears, are entering the business. This should help lower the resistance from bike shops. This has really caught the attention and the imagination of bicycle dealers, says Curries Larry Pizzi. Pedego and startup ElectroBike arent waiting for the shops to come around; they are building their own stores.
Perhaps most importantly, more cities are building cycling infrastructure including bike lanes so bicycle commuting has become more popular. As the US Census Bureau reported in 2014, the number of bike commuters grew from about 488,000 in 2000 to 786,000 in 2012. Electric bikes make commuting more practical  and fun  by reducing worry about hills, headwinds, tiredness and sweat.
Most of our customers are ageing baby boomers who want to have the cycling experience they had as a kid, says Pedegos Don DiCostanza. The main reason they stopped riding bikes was because of hills. Pedego has opened nearly 60 stores in the US and it has sold bikes to tour companies in San Francisco and Washington, DC.
ElectroBike, which operates 30 stores in Mexico, opened its first American store in Venice Beach, California in the autumn of 2014 and hopes to grow to 25 US stores in a year. CEO Craig Anderson says: We want to help reduce traffic, help reduce our carbon footprint and encourage a healthy lifestyle. He tells customers: Ride this once and try not to smile.
Startups like Pedego and ElectroBike will have to compete with big companies like Trek and Currie, which, in 2012, was acquired by the Accell Group, a public company based in the Netherlands that is Europes market leader in e-bikes. Accell owns the Raleigh brand, as well as Haibike, an award-winning German electric bike.
Accell has great hopes for e-bikes in North America, Curries Larry Pizzi says. While baby boomers are still very important, were finding that a lot of younger people are using e-bikes for transportation, instead of cars.
Accells Yuba brand even sells a cargo bike with a stronger motor and rear rack. You can carry two children, says Pizzi. You can carry 45kg of shopping. Its a minivan alternative.


To a master traditional navigator like Tua Pittman from Raratonga in the Cook Islands, a canoe is much more than just a means of transport. “The canoe is our island, the crew members are the community and the navigator is the leader,” Pittman says. He continues, explaining that the converse is also true. “An island is our canoe, the community are the crew members and the politicians and leaders are the navigators. On a canoe, you are not just going from one destination to another using the stars, the moon, the sun and the birds. Navigation is using the philosophies of being a leader to show your crew members the light of life.”
It has been a whirlwind week for the crews of the flotilla of four sailing canoes since arriving in Sydney for the start of the World Parks Congress. Tua’s journey began at the Cook Islands on 25 September. The first leg took the islanders to Samoa, then Fiji, Vanuatu and onto the Gold Coast, before heading south to Sydney. Around 100 crew members were involved in the various stages of the voyage and they aimed to travel using only traditional navigation techniques. Unfortunately, said Tua, the crews were forced to rely on modern navigation equipment on some occasions to reach Australia in time for the Congress.
The official title of the expedition is the Mua Voyage and it is a partnership between the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Oceania Regional Office and five Pacific Island countries: Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Fiji. The main goal of the 6,000-nautical-mile (11,000km) trip was to deliver a special message to the World Parks Congress.
In part, the message said: “We see the signs of overexploitation. We no longer see the fish and other marine creatures in the size, diversity or abundance of the past. We witness the change as foreign fishing fleets ply our waters in a race to strip our resources. Our coral reefs, the greatest in the world, and our mangrove and wetland spawning grounds are disappearing. Our ocean is vast but not limitless. Growing global populations and the relentless pursuit of unsustainable development are reducing the ability of our ocean to sustain life.”
In spite of the effort and urgency behind the Pacific Islanders’ message to the delegates of the Congress, much of the final days of the marine part of the Congress were taken up with trying to set a revised target for the amount of the ocean that needs to be protected in marine sanctuaries. According to the IUCN, as of 2013, the amount of the world’s oceans in marine protected areas was not even three per cent and less than one per cent of that is ’no take’. This was despite a target of 20-30% no-take areas set by the last World Parks Congress held in South Africa in 2003.
World-leading marine scientist Professor Callum Roberts from the University of York was one of the scientists who helped set the 20-30% target in 2003. But he said it was not enough. “The IUCN should now lift its target from 30 to 33%. New research strengthens the case for the 30% target set previously to now be raised. Any reduction in efforts at this stage and moment in history would be disastrous for our oceans.”
After difficult negotiations, the World Parks Congress delegates passed a motion that will dramatically shift the goals for global marine management. Instead of the 20-30% aspirational target, the IUCN’s new official position is to “urgently increase the ocean area that is effectively and equitably managed in ecologically representative and well-connected systems of MPAs [marine protected areas] or other effective conservation measures by 2030; these should include strictly protected areas that amount to at least 30% of each marine habitat and address both biodiversity and ecosystem services.”
Tua Pittman was delighted with the news that a strong resolution on the planet’s oceans had passed the Congress. “It’s just like a huge reward for all the effort that we made to be here and to be heard. To hear they made that resolution is fantastic. It’s a step in the right direction.” He says that, while much of the traditional navigational aids were things such as the sun, moon and stars that never changed and would, at least on a human scale, always be there, other impacts of environmental degradation were becoming clearer when voyaging across the Pacific.
He said he was 55 and, in his lifetime, he was already beginning to see that it was much harder to catch fish on the open ocean. He also said that pollution was worsening, particularly as the canoes approached big cities such as Sydney. And the effects of climate change were already beginning to impact seriously on Pacific Islanders. “The decisions of the big countries have twice, thrice, four times the impact on the small countries than on developed, large nations. Many times, people don’t even know where our islands are and, from the eyes of a traditional navigator, our people have a very, very deep concern because we are talking about decisions made far away that impact on our homes.”
The Mua Voyage had been a massive logistical undertaking, said Tua. Years of preparation and navigational planning went into such a trip and it was critical to the voyagers that the world listened to their message and acted. The leaders of wealthy countries, he went on, need to start to think more like traditional navigators who recognize their vessels are mere specks in an enormous sea. Most importantly, and spoken like a true navigator, Tua says politicians must seek a different route to avoid the pending ecological crises that are beginning to befall the small island nations. “The world needs to find a different path.”


Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer for England, has likened the problem of antibiotic resistance to the risks presented by international terrorism. While this might sound like an exaggeration, the threat was actually, if anything, understated. Each year, the global number of deaths to which bacterial resistance contributes far outstrips those caused by terrorist attacks.
While it is difficult to track the global impact of antibiotic resistance across all bacterial species, the World Health Organization estimates that for tuberculosis alone multi-drug resistance accounts for more than 150,000 deaths each year. Antibiotic resistance is no longer an abstract risk: this is now a war.
In the past hundred years, our expectations of life and survival have changed beyond all recognition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, life expectancy in the UK stood at around 47 years of age for a man and 50 for a woman, a number heavily affected by the very high rate of infant mortality in those days. Around a third of all deaths occurred in children under the age of five, largely because of infectious disease.
In contrast, a child born in Britain today has a better than one in four chance of reaching their 100th birthday. For this we have public health systems, vaccination and antibiotics to thank. It is by these means – the prevention and treatment of illnesses caused by microorganisms – that the real war against disease is principally won.
Elsewhere, we have pushed the limits of survival, notably in intensive care. This, the specialism in which I chose to train, is where antibiotic resistant organisms are most prevalent. Here, powerful antibiotics, essential in the treatment of life-threatening illness, are used routinely. These drugs decimate ordinary bacteria. But what they leave behind are hardy species that have begun to learn tricks that allow them to evade antibiotic drugs.
As a newly qualified doctor in the late 1990s, I learnt about Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus – the infamous MRSA – a bacterial species resistant to methicillin and all other penicillins. In the fight against it, there were a handful of exotic-sounding drugs – vancomycin and teicoplanin among them. These were supposed to be our last lines of defence, but antibiotic resistant bacteria became more and more common; as did species with new patterns of resistance. Drugs we had previously barely heard of became commonplace. New last-line drugs emerged to replace the old. We got used to this state of affairs; a steady escalation in the arms race between us and the bacteria.
But the balance has been shifting steadily. In our hospitals and our GP surgeries we have abused the drugs that gave us such a huge advantage over infectious disease, using them too often and too indiscriminately. And some of the worst abuses have occurred outside of healthcare, with antibiotics introduced into the food chain, through agriculture and the lacing of livestock feed with anti-bacterial drugs. We assumed that antibiotic therapy was an advantage we could enjoy forever. We became complacent that the pharmaceutical industry would continue to stay ahead of the game.
But this is no longer the case. New, more resistant species have been identified. The vancomycin that we used to rely on to treat MRSA infection was defeated. Vancomycin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (VRSA) emerged in our hospitals. And other bacterial species were learning the same trick. Enterobacteria, organisms usually found in the gut, had also acquired vancomycin resistance. Today, infections with formidable, highly resistant organisms are commonplace and the pharmaceutical industry is not keeping pace. Fewer and fewer new anti-microbial drugs are emerging from their production lines. It is becoming increasingly difficult to develop new drugs active against resistant strains. For every method of attack the pharmaceutical companies invent, bacteria rapidly evolve a defence. All of the simple approaches to the problem have been exhausted.
Antibiotics have become drugs that are expensive to develop, that are only used in short courses and that quickly become ineffective due to the evolution of bacterial resistance. Consequently, the pharmaceutical industry’s incentive to manufacture new drugs that can fight them is low.
Almost as soon as antibiotic use became widespread in the 1940s, the first evidence of bacteria resistance to antimicrobial therapy emerged. Initially, these were little more than curiosities. When they did infect patients, the numbers were so small that at first they were not enough to warrant much attention. But today, they have become a fact of medical life. Less than a century after the discovery of penicillin, we are beginning to lose the fight.
Since the first MRSA deaths in otherwise healthy children in the US in 1998, the number of deaths from MRSA infection in the US each year has risen to tens of thousands – outstripping the number of deaths caused by AIDS. Bacterial resistance in hospitals is everywhere you look. This is a war like no other. There needs to be cultural change in our prescribing behaviours and more restraint in the use of antibiotics in farming and agriculture. And somehow, the pharmaceutical companies have to be convinced to chase the development of these less profitable drugs.
Within my working lifetime, the pattern of antibiotic resistance in healthcare has transformed from a rare but notable event to a problem of epidemic proportion. If we are to avoid a return to the pre-antibiotic time with all its excess mortality, we must be bold. To squander the advantage we have so recently gained against microorganisms in the fight for life would be unthinkable.