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Michelangelo a 'renaissance Rain Man'

Michelangelo may have been a Renaissance "Rain Man", according to two experts in autism.

The 16th century sculptor and painter's artistic genius could have been a mark of Asperger's syndrome, it is claimed.

People with the disorder, also known as high-functioning autism, have difficulties with communication and social interaction but often show an unusual talent or skill in a particular area.

Some display remarkable abilities in music, drawing or mathematics.

Now two leading authorities in autism are suggesting that Michelangelo met the criteria for Asperger's.

Dr Muhammad Arshad, staff psychiatrist at Five Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust, and Professor Michael Fitzgerald, from Trinity College Dublin, outline their evidence in the Journal of Medical Biography.

They argue that, like the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man, the great Renaissance artist was socially dysfunctional and obsessive.

But while Hoffman portrayed a character with an extraordinary ability to remember numbers and gamble, Michelangelo's gift was for art.

He had a troubled childhood, being frequently beaten by his father and uncles, who disapproved of his artistic interests.

Aged 14, Michelangelo began a three-year apprenticeship with the famous artist Domenico Ghirlandaio, who said the boy knew more about drawing than he did.

From these early beginnings emerged the man who sculpted the statue of David and painted the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

His dexterity with brush and chisel was in sharp contrast to his complete inability to conduct normal human relationships, however.

Dr Arshad and Professor Fitzgerald noted: "Michelangelo was aloof and a loner. Like the architect John Nash (1752-1835), who also had high-functioning autism, he had few friends."

The artist was unable to show emotion, as demonstrated by his failure to attend his brother's funeral.

He was also obsessive, followed repetitive routines, and sought to control every aspect of his life. Loss of control caused him "great frustration".

His highly retentive memory allowed him to generate, in a short time, many hundreds of sketches for the Sistine ceiling.

Michelangelo found communication and conversation difficult. He could not be engaged in long conversation, and would often walk off in the middle of an exchange, say the experts.

"He was bad tempered and had anger outbursts," they added.

They described him as "strange, without affect, and isolated" and "preoccupied with his own private reality".

Autism appears to have run in the artist's family, said Dr Arshad and Professor Fitzgerald. His father and grandfather, and one of his brothers, all displayed autistic tendencies.

The two experts conclude: "Michelangelo's single-minded work routine, unusual lifestyle, limited interests, poor social and communication skills, and various issues of life control appear to be features of high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome."

Between Planets

Let the heroine carry the big gun: Seven local women writers talk about creating their own worlds- and the problems with life on Earth.

PHOTO BY JANA FREIBAND

(Left to right) Lois McMaster Bujold, Patricia Wrede, Pamela Dean, Peg Kerr, Lyda Morehouse, and Caroline Stevermer (not pictured: Eleanor Arnason)

ARTS FEATURE . VOL 25 #1225 . PUBLISHED 5/26/04

By Terri Sutton

Lately, I've been visiting writer's museums. The Pushkin museum brought into focus for me something I'd been noticing subliminally for some time: that none of the writers who are presented to us in school as though they were lone geniuses were, in fact, alone. Every one of them, when I looked further, came out of a context of other writers, readers, letter writers and other correspondents, editors, artists, bright friends, and just people generally who cared enough to argue about the issues around which they wrote. --Lois McMaster Bujold

Minneapolis-St. Paul has altogether more good science fiction and fantasy writers per capita than it deserves. Credit the surplus to the state's 39-year-old Minicon science fiction and fantasy convention, or our two independent sci-fi and fantasy bookstores, DreamHaven and Uncle Hugo's (both opened in the '70s), or longtime Uncle Hugo's manager, the late Scott Imes (a one-man message board). Or it may be the many writing groups, or the continuing efforts of networkers like Eric Heideman and his magazine Tales of the Unanticipated. Perhaps the root cause is the frigid winters, which a certain kind of sensible person endures indoors, with nothing else to do but write. Most probably, credit goes to all of the above.

It may be just as difficult to figure why most of our best known and most celebrated sci-fi and fantasy writers are women. One, Eleanor Arnason, will be the guest of honor this weekend at WisCon--the world-renowned feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin. In a spirit of inquiry, we decided to round up Arnason and six other ingenious local women sci-fi/fantasy novelists for a chat outside the Anodyne Cafe. It was hardly the first time they'd met; most of them have been in writing groups together. Their zigzagging discussion visited a cosmic range of subjects: the metaphor of violence, male-on-male porn (written by lesbians), differing definitions of "conservative", and the lasting influence of Han Solo. Arnason missed the group grope and was interviewed separately at the Black Dog in St. Paul.

CITY PAGES: Many of you have written stories from the point of view of a man with a weapon: a gun or a sword. What's the attraction of this image?

ELEANOR ARNASON: One thing that's happening is that you're dealing with the stereotypes of science fiction. Which has had kinda butch guys since the 1930s pulp magazines: two-fisted, tough, and violent. The pulp tradition tends to lead to plots where problems are solved by violence. And I think we're seeing a really good example in Iraq of precisely how useful violence is in solving problems. So one of the things I've done in a lot of stories is have characters who don't manage to use violence successfully. Or who decide, when they reach the point of crisis, that violence is not an option. Ring of Swords came out of two things. One was that I wanted to write about a culture where homosexuality was normal, and heterosexuality was weird. And I also wanted to write the kind of story I would not normally write. I have no use in general for military space opera; I don't like anything that glorifies war. So it was really a thought experiment. In the end, it's a story that is set up to have a war, and the major characters decide that, instead, they're going to have a Shakespeare festival. Much better idea.

LYDA MOREHOUSE: For me it comes back to roles I didn't get to play as a kid--which I did play anyway--and that I think just leaked into my fiction. Getting to shoot the blaster was the cool part. Even my heroine carries a big gun; it's a Magnum. Which I have shot! I did one of those safety programs. And I discovered that the bigger the gun, the better shot I was.

PATRICIA WREDE: Size does matter.

PEG KERR: Conflict is the engine of plot, and warriors are about conflict. It's a chance to examine power and the way it plays out in human relationships.

WREDE: Especially when you're just getting started as a writer. What is conflict? It's people bashing each other. I find myself moving away from that as I get more interested in doing things with other kinds of conflict.

LOIS BUJOLD: I will say that with my warrior characters the worst wounds have been from words, and not from weapons. Those are the ones that don't heal after 20 years.

PAMELA DEAN: I actually decided I would just give up on weapons after my first three books. There was a war in there because fantasy novels have wars in them. But it made me nervous. I'm so completely clumsy and incapable of handling a sword or a gun that I just gave up on it.

MOREHOUSE: There's something for me that's inherently sexy about a guy with a sword. I was thinking about this in terms of me as a reader. Why did I ever pick up the fantasy genre with covers that ought not to appeal to a young woman--you know, with the big guy with the sword on the cover? Power is a big part of it. There's something about swordplay that's also a mental challenge, particularly at close range.

CAROLINE STEVEMER: There's a code, even with hardboiled detective novels. The hero abides by the code. He may not be the only good man in the world, but he's the best man in the world that he's in. I'm thinking of Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler. To just have people flailing away at each other has so much less interest than whatever kind of interaction it is, according to the rules.

KERR: But also with swords, you've got the hero and the antagonist within arm's length of each other. So they have a chance to talk.

BUJOLD: Yes, there's better dialogue in swordplay than in gunfights.

CP: Is the idea that the warrior is vulnerable to words a fantasy?

DEAN: Look at all the people who came back from Vietnam and remembered with horror being spat on by protestors. The vets that I've talked to seemed to feel that that was just as bad as the other things that happened to them.

BUJOLD: "Soldier" is a role that people take off and put on. But they're people before they become soliders; they're people after they put that role down. And they're not something else in between, even if they're finding themselves caught up in something.

CP: How has feminism challenged you in your work?

STEVEMER: I [grew up in] a small-library sort of place. If it won an award, they might have the third book in the series. And I have a real fondness for "ripping yarns," like The Prisoner of Zenda. But I longed for a story with a good part for the girl. The feeble, beautiful, helpless, to-be-rescued women in these books were such a disappointment. It's probably just as well, because it kept my mind off some of the other things that were being said in these books, about colonialism and all kinds of ghastly "isms."

CP: You didn't want to be Han Solo?

MOREHOUSE: I wanted to be Han Solo!

BUJOLD: I read all these British boys' adventure yarns without ever noticing that they weren't addressed to me.

MOREHOUSE: Me too!

KERR: You would've been a great Han Solo, Lyda.

MOREHOUSE: I was, in fact, a great Han Solo, in my own backyard. I didn't worry about the fact that I wasn't the right gender. Princess Leia was pretty cool, but I liked kissing the girl too, so there you go. Although when I set out to write Archangel Protocol, I purposely wanted to write a strong female character that someone like myself would [hope to] find. Of course later I discovered there's tons of people writing this stuff! [Laughs] Definitely I would say that the women of the science fiction community have supported me in ways that I'd never felt anywhere else.

BUJOLD: I was hitting my first reading in the early '60s, so feminism wasn't even there yet. So I was basically oblivious as an early writer to all those issues. I did focus on the female heroes that I met in science fiction books, like "The Ship Who Sang" characters. In the fiction, that kind of equality seemed a feasible sort of thing. In the real life that was going on around me, it was not so sanguine.

DEAN: For me, there was feminism, but it was all 19th-century feminism; it was focused on getting women the vote, the right to work. And it was all over. What I didn't get was gender-role stereotyping. My first novel had been published, I was revising the second one, and I suddenly looked at it and thought, "What the hell did I do? Why are all the male characters doing this, and the female characters doing that--that's grotesque!." Now the book was a deliberate homage to people like E. Nesbitt, Edward Eager, and C.S. Lewis, all of whom were writing in a really standard tradition. I just barely had time to decide that in this society, men and women were separate but equal. So that when you had a king, everybody who did politics was male, and when you had a queen, everybody who did politics was female. But I almost put something out there that was contrary to what I thought, but had been taken unconsciously from all my reading.

WREDE: I'm the oldest of five, my mother always worked. This was the '50s, '60s. The impact of feminism for me was, "Well, so? Doesn't everybody think that?" In my family, there was no question about gender-role stereotyping. I have twin girl cousins who are fur trappers in Alaska. Did feminism impact my writing? I don't think so.

KERR: I think that one of my primary introductions to feminism was reading Pamela Sargent's series Women of Wonder. Lois says she writes about identity. I think feminism is, for women and men, trying to discover the largest identity for them possible--not allowing them to be circumscribed by gender roles. Because I'm interested in that, I write that.

ARNASON: I wrote one story ["Knapsack Poems"] that I'm very happy with in which the protagonist is essentially a single being made of eight separate people: Some are female, some male, and some neuter. That was enormously fun to write. What is a person who is all sexes at once? I do a lot of dealing with sexual stereotypes. I'd say it's probably the main thing I do. I think that one of the useful things for women writing science fiction is that most of the science fiction *ACCENT cliches are things that sort of abrade women, or prickle them. They're not the conventions that women feel 100 percent comfortable with. If you're writing a kind of fiction where you're comfortable with the conventions, it's much easier to fall into sloppy writing habits.

MOREHOUSE: I just want to know why there aren't more female characters like Han Solo in the movies. Loners with no apparent connection to small animals or children.

BUJOLD: He certainly doesn't have to call his mother every week, or at least we don't see him doing it.

WREDE: The secret diaries of Han Solo.

MOREHOUSE: "Hi, Mom..."

KERR: She must be a kick-butt woman.

BUJOLD: 'Cause he's gone as far away from her as he can. [Laughter]

CP: What, if anything, have you learned from writing from a male character's perspective?

DEAN: I'm going to parse the question. The gender of the character is really not relevant. If I were writing a contemporary novel set in the U.S. in certain subcultures that I would run screaming from, I would have to cope with it. But since it's all imaginary cultures or contemporary-looking ones where there's a little twist in reality, it simply doesn't come up.

WREDE: It's a lot harder for me switching from a medieval character, male or female, to a modern one. Unless you have a culture where the gender roles are very strong and explicit...

MOREHOUSE: Like Eleanor's done.

WREDE: ...but I've just never been interested in exploring that particular.

BUJOLD: I've written from both viewpoints, and the female characters always feel more claustrophobic to me. They're tighter, they run more safety calculations in their heads. I find that writing male characters is more free; the characters are freer to move in a way. The other difference is not so much inside the character's head, but how the world reacts to the character, whether they are male or female. The environment shapes character.

WREDE: But that's the society you've made up. If you have a truly egalitarian society, then it doesn't react differently based on gender. But that is something that seems to be extraordinarily different for anyone in this culture to imagine thoroughly or escape . .

STEVEMER: But also if you want any conflict...

WREDE: But you get conflict from other places...

KERR: That's also a great way to explore culture in fiction. Lois has a very multifaceted universe. You can learn a lot about the cultures by how they approach the same character based on their gender.

ARNASON: Well, I was very nervous about it, because I was not only writing from the point of view of a man, but of a gay man. I did a tremendous amount of background research. I read a lot of books by gay men. And I asked two friends of mine who were gay men to vet the book. The absolute fear I had was that I was going to stumble onto some kind of gay slang by accident and say something really embarrassing. I think what happens is that if a character works, at a certain point the character becomes so plausible to you that you're no longer looking at them from the outside.

MOREHOUSE: I'm actually going to cop to feeling guilty, because it hadn't occurred to me that the books after Archangel Protocol follow more men than women! One thing that happened was that I fell in love with a villain--Satan. I find him hot. In my current novel, I'm writing about a gay man. I guess it's very hard for me to write about a strong woman because like I said my reading experience was that I tended to be Han Solo.

CP: I read that a fan told Lyda that her Satan, or Morningstar, reminded her favorably of "hurt-comfort" slash. "Slash," for our readers, is a sometimes pornographic subgenre of fiction written and circulated by fans of certain books, movies, and TV shows. The classic example of slash involves Kirk and Spock discovering their mutual passion. Could someone describe the "hurt-comfort" variety?

DEAN: There's a sublimated romantic relationship, generally between people of the same sex, but not always these days. And these people either don't know, or can't talk about it, or are committed elsewhere. So you isolate them somewhere and have one of them be injured. Sometimes the romantic stuff actually becomes revealed, and sometimes it's still completely sublimated, but the act of one caring for the other is a way of expressing the underlying emotion without actually transgressing whatever it is they can't transgress.

MOREHOUSE: Wow, you explained that really succinctly! I've admitted that I was looking at slash fiction at the time [I was writing]. I went to see that godawful film, Episode One, we'll call it. I left so ready to write fan fiction. I realized that what fan fiction comes out of is a general dissatisfaction with the character and the world.

BUJOLD: You want to fix it.

MOREHOUSE: People want to write in your universe [to Lois], because they want it to continue. But there's also that other part, "This was so irritating!" So I ended up foolishly reading a bunch, and of course I found the slash. There's some Obi Wan Kenobi slash--it was bad. I think there was some secret influence there.

[Laughter]

BUJOLD: It's a laboratory of gender studies. I think that if somebody can ever explain "hurt/comfort," you will have reached a great insight into the female gender that still eludes me. It's all over the place in fan fiction.

KERR: It doesn't appeal to you?

BUJOLD: Oh, yeah!

KERR: It's difficult to understand our attraction to it.

DEAN: It's sort of instantaneously understood--you go, "Yes, of course." But then you go...

BUJOLD: If you stop and look at it, you'd say "This is really weird." I can't help wondering if there's an element of sublimated hostility on the part of the writers because they bash the heck out of the characters, and they have such a good time doing it.

WREDE: I read an article in which the author's contention was that it was the desire to be taken care of. It was the "You'll be sorry when I'm dead only not quite because I want to be there to watch" kind of thing.

KERR: You talk about gender roles. Much of it is male-male interaction, and it's a chance to see a male character play a caretaker. We should also mention that a lot of this is primarily read by women.

MOREHOUSE: It's written by women, and it's read by women. It's also written by lesbians. There's a humongous group of lesbian slash writers who write male-male slash. That's bizarro! Apparently some people do a lot of research into whether or not some off the things they try to do are physically possible.

KERR: It's what Ellen Kushner calls "girls on boys on boys."

MOREHOUSE: There's a common, sort of odd, undercurrent of women writing about gay men. You did it, and I'm doing it. And Eleanor did it.

KERR: Lois did it, with Ethan of Athos.

DEAN: [Sci-fi writer] Joanna Russ wrote an article about slash way back in the '70s. She says that what you do--what women at least in the 1970s who were writing this stuff were doing--by having two male characters is, you level the playing field. These people are equals. They have the same social status. The same cultural status. And so you can work out a relationship that is free of the inborn hierarchical distinction made between men and women. She didn't really address why nobody wrote about two women. Possibly it was because in its origin it was fan fiction, and there were very few women in Star Trek, and they weren't the cool ones.

CP: All of you do unexpected things with romance--for instance, Caroline sneakily sticks her hunky love interest into the body of a fat old king, in College of Magics. Why is it important to have romance be a part of your writing?

ARNASON: It's an important human emotion, or drive. It probably became more important in science fiction after women started coming into the field in large numbers. In early science fiction, the emotional age of all the characters is about 14. They're really kind of pre-sexual. Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness seems to me totally charged with sexual tension. I write a lot about romances that don't quite come off. I'm reading the Princess Meredith series by Laurel Hamilton, who writes the Anita Blake vampire murder-mystery series. I'm on the third book. The first 200 pages are sex. Nothing else. I tend to think books are more erotic if you have the possibility of sex that doesn't...where the consummation is not central to the story.

MOREHOUSE: I'm actually a big romance fan. I buy those paperbacks, and I read the whole damn thing, and I enjoy it.

WREDE: What's that saying, "Trashy literature is about sex and violence; great literature is about love and death."

[Laughter]

BUJOLD: Shakespeare has romances in all his plays! Some of them come to really bad ends, but they're always in there.

KERR: It's taking on a new role. When you are in a romance, you are confronting the Other and finding your affinity, your connections with them, and that changes you. That leads to the change that makes a character so interesting. And it's fun to write!

MOREHOUSE: Yeah, skip all the other stuff. It's just fun.

CP: So many of your books compress all this wildly raw romantic emotion into really articulate but sort of polite and reserved conversation.

MOREHOUSE: [Whispering] She's talking about fandom....

[Laughter]

BUJOLD: Drama is more powerful than melodrama. That element of restraint gives it a focus, a power, that you can't have if you're just emoting all over the map.

STEVEMER: The big fear is being unintentionally funny.

BUJOLD: That too!

WREDE: Yeah. The reserve in my books comes largely from a deep-seated terror of committing purple prose.

ARNASON: Pamela, Pat, Lois, and Peg have all been in different writing groups together. In their cases, how they write dialogue might have something to do with learning from each other.

MOREHOUSE: I actually think it's part of our culture, if we have such a thing. I think lots of us who grew up as science fiction/fantasy readers are culturally sort of intellectuals. We have a lot of distance with roiling emotions underneath. How else could you read science fiction as a teenager? It comes naturally--reserve perhaps even filtered through intellectual debate. I was raised Unitarian, so for godsakes!

DEAN: Yes, me too!

MOREHOUSE: I have major arguments and I tell people "Wow, that was a religious experience."

KERR: I think for me part of it is that through sheer dumb luck I started keeping a journal from a very early age. So I was always an observer of my own life, as well as a participant.

MOREHOUSE: Maybe it's part of growing up as a clumsy, nerdy kid too. When I started talking, I was always putting myself at risk. Because I might say something stupid, I might just be mocked because I was the nerd of the class, or I might say something too smart. I became really aware of communication as a really intense form of human interaction.

KERR: I have a hunch that everybody around this table went through their young adulthood feeling they were a bit smarter than a lot of people around them--

MOREHOUSE: --or at least weirder!

BUJOLD: With supporting evidence!

[Laughter]

WREDE: I don't understand real people at all well. I understand fictional people a lot better. On paper, I can make it work.

BUJOLD: Also, one of the things I like as a writer is that it's very redemptive. You can take all your mistakes and turn them into something useful. No matter how painful the experience, it can be redeemed by being transformed and put into your next book.

WREDE: But this question assumes that writing is a whole lot more conscious and deliberate than it actually is. It's like roller-skating or riding a bicycle. You're not consciously adjusting every minute. You're worried about moving forward and staying in balance.

MOREHOUSE: And I'm still learning to ride my bicycle. When you're first starting off, believe me, you're wondering if the training wheels are coming off.

WREDE: Don't look back!

CP: I find it fascinating how often the urge to merge in your books is nearly a group effort: much input, positive and negative, from other characters who are as important as the love interest. Why not just one fine romance with hero and heroine?

WREDE: There are two levels that everybody works on, the personal and the societal. You can't just leave one out unless you're going to do one of those lone-spaceman-exploring-far-planets books, which is not what we write. If you're going to write about relationship, you've got to write about all the relationships.

KERR: I think that all of us have an allergy to either/or thinking. We don't feel like you've found your romantic partner--boom!--you're done with your relational work for the rest of your life.

CP: Eleanor has talked about how Jesse Helms and the NEA controversies inspired her to write Ring of Swords. Do political situations provide fodder to you?

MOREHOUSE: They're my lifeblood!

ARNASON: That's what science fiction is about for me, it's politics. I write about war, I write about sexual prejudice, I write about race prejudice. It's all ultimately about contemporary society. I don't think you can write anything serious in the United States if you're not dealing with class and race. I would probably argue that the problem that feminist science fiction faces right now is that in order to continue growing it has to deal with racism and class prejudice. So far that hasn't happened in a really strong way.

WREDE: Everything is material. I don't think I've ever specifically gotten something from a political situation, but that says nothing really about anything.

BUJOLD: The political situation may not be current. All of us are history readers. I know that the My Lai massacre is at the root of several incidents in my books.

KERR: My second novel is certainly concerned with political concerns. I was comparing the witchcraft trials of New England with the current AIDS crisis, and showing how the roots of Puritan thinking about relationships, about sexuality, about religion, affected us in our current struggle to deal with this overwhelming health problem.

STEVEMER: I've always been interested in things that would permit me to escape from wherever I was, mentally, so the urge to write fantasy is probably a reaction. It's probably related to the reason why I don't write about what I know. As we're always told we should.

BUJOLD: By people who don't write.

KERR: But I would deny it if anyone said you're writing fantasy because you're looking for escapism. Emma Bull wrote that "fantasy is usefully subversive." Because it makes you examine things in a different way by getting around people's defenses.

MOREHOUSE: "It's an alien!"

KERR: We're talking about the Other. And that's an up-front concern for us right now. It's not escaping to examine our relation with the Other.

WREDE: The whole fantasy thing is about metaphor. In fantasy because you can make magic real--and magic is not a real thing...

STEVEMER: ...says you.

WREDE: --you can make magic work however you want. Therefore it can mean whatever you want. For me magic is a metaphor for power. In real life, you'd have to look at political power, the power of money, or charisma and personality. But in fantasy I can distill all that and say, "Here's pure power, what do you do with it?"

MOREHOUSE: That's really interesting, because when you talk about politics and money, that is exactly what I chose to write about.

WREDE: But I want to write about the underlying thing that gives them juice.

ARNASON: David Hartwell distinguishes science fiction and fantasy by saying that fantasy is conservative and pastoral and science fiction is progressive and urban. I think there's an argument for that. There's some very good fantasy. But any fiction that is sentimental about the Middle Ages has got some problems for me. You tend to be sentimental about a rigidly hierarchical class system, which has a whole bunch of peasants at the bottom, and that kinda ticks me off. I don't identify with aristocrats very much.

STEVEMER: People can argue about the conservatism side of things. I suppose you get the wrong idea because there are lords and ladies and people with social position and all that. I do think that it's more honored in the breach than in the observance--that where you get the interesting stuff is where it transcends that. I'd hate to be pigeonholed as the kind of person who only writes stories with people with titles in them. Because I really don't like them all that well myself.

WREDE: It's whether the titles are the important part or not.

STEVEMER: Well...whole panels have been done on working-class fiction and characters in fiction, and I'd much rather be on that side of the fence. I just end up over in this area with teapots and teacups. It's a kind of nostalgia that has to do with revising things. I want to go back and have a do-over.

WREDE: Saying that fantasy is conservative ignores all the egalitarianism that has been superimposed on this originally very medieval structure. In most modern [written] fantasies, you have women in the army, women doing all kinds of things that were very rare in real life.

MOREHOUSE: If I had not come across fantasy when I did, I think I'd be a very different person. Because it opened up worlds to me that were in fact very forward-thinking, very progressive--and not just in science fiction, but also in fantasy. Places that I would not have taken myself that were not "conservative" in the "put-down" sense. Whether it is a "conservation" of ideals of loyalty, the good parts of chivalry--that's not necessarily a bad thing. Those things I think we yearn for today, because they're missing.

ARNASON: I'm thinking now that we probably need to be writing in a serious fashion about the future, because we may be living at a point where everything is genuinely breaking down. And if that is so, we need to know where we want to go from here. We're basically living in a half-dozen different science fiction disaster novels right now. Maybe this is a good grim place to end. A lot of these crises, [according to] the predictions I'm seeing, are going to peak or crest in my lifetime. As I've aged, the thing I find most discouraging is that I won't be around to see how the 21st century ends. But there is stuff, huge stuff, that is probably going to happen in the next 20 years. So I'm trying to learn to take better care of myself so that I can be around to see it.

--------

Eleanor Arnason: In 1978, Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith; four others followed, including the acclaimed Ring of Swords (1993), a slippery account of political negotiations between humans and a homosexual alien race, the Hwarhath. Since then, Arnason has concentrated on short stories, many about the Hwarhath: "The Potter of Bones" and "Knapsack Poems" were nominated for Nebulas this year.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Author of the Nebula-winning Miles Vorkosigan series, tricky sci-fi space opera for people who like their heroes self-conscious and their moral dilemmas well-examined. Bujold also writes a complex fantasy series, the latest installment of which is Paladin of Souls. Moved to Minneapolis from Ohio in 1995 after years of friendship with Patricia Wrede.

Pamela Dean: One of the original "Scribblies"--a writing group including Wrede, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and Steven Brust who first started meeting in 1980. Dean's best-known Scribblies-era work was Tam Lin, a literary college tale infiltrated by Faerie. In 1998, she published Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, another contemporary story tilted by magic. Her Secret Country YA fantasy trilogy was just re-released; a sequel will follow.

Peg Kerr: Says Wrede inspired one sharply opinionated character in the gem-cutter's fantasy Emerald House Rising. Her The Wild Swans (1999) intertwines 17th-century fantasy and 1980s AIDS struggle. Kerr's husband was at Carleton with Dean and Wrede and she was mentored by Arnason. She writes with Caroline Stevermer.

Lyda Morehouse: Fashions masterful train wrecks out of hard-boiled detective fiction, angelic fantasy, cyberpunk, and apocalypse prose. Apocalypse Array, the fourth book in her near-future series, will be released later this year. "Potentially younger than the other people here," she calls Arnason a mentor.

Caroline Stevermer: Her "fantasy of manners," A College of Magics, is at once an alternative history of Europe, circa 1900, with magic and extra countries; a women's college cosy; a queasy adventure; and a topsy-turvy romance. The just-published sequel is titled A Scholar of Magics.

Patricia Wrede: Prolific inventor of flying blue donkeys and other comically fantastic stuff for her award-winning children's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Wrede also writes fantasy in both medieval and regency settings. The epistolary novel, Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, written with Stevermer, was re-published in '03, and a sequel, The Grand Tour, is expected before the year is out. Helped midwife Bujold's entry into writing.

Can she bake a cake?

Amelia was voted Outstanding Woman of the Year which she accepted on behalf of "all women". The French press ended an article about Amelia's accomplishment with..."can she bake a cake?" ...Amelia replied...

"So I accept these awards on behalf of the cake bakers and all of those other women who can do some things quite as important, if not more important, than flying, as well as in the name of women flying today."

Extracted from the Ellen's Place biography of Amelia Earhart.

The future of shopping

Few industries can match retailing for cut-throat competition. Jostling for the attention of consumers, Tesco, Wal-Mart and other giant retailers are working hard to fine-tune their store formats.

Now hi-tech emerges as a tool to build market share. BBC News Online visited the "Future Store" in Rheinberg, Germany, set up by the world's fifth-largest retail group, Metro.

The intelligent scale doesn't like our bunch of bananas.

When we had put tomatoes on the scale, its digital camera took just a split second to recognise the produce, weigh it and print a bar-coded price tag.

No wait at a checkout to have them weighed. No need to find "tomatoes" on a 50-button display.

But now the scale is baffled, and offers four choices: Are we weighing bananas, chicory salad, long beans or avocados?

Touching the banana logo on the screen solves the slip-up. "The bunch of bananas was probably too large for the camera," says an apologetic shop assistant.

Welcome to Metro's Future Store.

New and old

At first glance the supermarket looks disappointingly normal.

Yes, to German shoppers the layout may be revolutionary, with wide "freshness aisles" right at the entrance, offering a vast and pleasantly displayed array of fresh fish, meats, vegetables, and the mouth-watering smell of freshly baked bread and donuts.

Nothing new here for many French and UK shoppers.

The real revolution, though, lies with nifty machines like the Intelligent Scales using IBM's Veggie Vision software.

The machines, so the claim goes, can identify most produce by sight, regardless of whether it is packed in a plastic bag or not.

Marketing the easy way

The good people of Rheinberg a town of 30,000 in the west of Germany are willing participants in this hi-tech experiment in retailing.

Not sure what to buy? In key sections - multimedia, baby care, hair colours, wine, meat, and fruit and vegetables - touchscreen terminals give in-depth information.

How a particular wine tastes, which food to have with it, and a smattering of the wine region's history - in colour, interactive, and on demand as a print-out.

Learn how to cook asparagus and skin tomatoes. Get recipes for the meat and veg available and in season (courtesy of Nestle, whose products just happen to crop up in some of the recipes).

Above the aisles, large flat screens show still pictures and videos of special offers and promotions.

"Customers buy more when we have two screens next to each other showing the same product," says Metro's Holger Schneidewindt.

A quick scan of a product barcode, a few taps on a handheld computer, and the wireless network changes the display on the large flat screen above a shelf groaning with bottles of vodka and schnapps.

For managers of the 4,000 square metre store, it is marketing the easy way.

Don't scream for ice cream

Personal Shopping Assistants (PSA) are the clincher, though - small Wincor Nixdorf tablet computers clipped to shopping trolleys and activated with a loyalty card.

Want some ice cream but don't know where to find it? Type "ice cream" on the touch screen and you are directed to the correct aisle - floor plan included.

Regular purchases show up on a favourites list, with price and location. Special offers are flagged up as you move from section to section.

Write your shopping list online - at home or work - and soon it will be automatically downloaded to the PSA.

The integrated scanner gives you both a running total of your shopping and fast-track treatment at the check-out.

Smart logistics

The shop's shelves sport 30,000 wireless electronic price labels that can be changed at the push of a button.

Smart self-scan check-outs, meanwhile, tackle fraud by comparing the weight of your shopping bag with the items you scanned and prevent underage drinking by prompting staff to check out customers scanning alcoholic products.

The Future Store's biggest potential, though, is its use of RFID tags, a kind of "talking barcodes".

With the help of software from business process expert SAP, Metro now knows in detail how supplies move from the Essen distribution centre on to trucks, into the Rheinberg store room, and on to the shop floor.

The result: the inventory is always up-to-date, shelves are rarely empty, and losses are down.

At its most revolutionary, smart shelves using RFID - currently tested on Gilette razor blades, Pantene shampoo and Philadelphia cream cheese - alert staff when the shop's shelves are getting empty or cheese packs are past their sell-by date.

Are Rheinbergers geeks?

One year into the experiment, the people of Rheinberg have taken to the store with gusto.

"Customers come to the store more frequently, store loyalty is up and sales are up 30%," says Metro spokesman Albrecht von Truchsess.

To a large part that is due to the store's new "fresh and easy" format.

But more than 70% of customers have used the various technologies at least once, and a hard core of regular users (21% for PSAs, 53% for the scales) is growing strongly.

And it is the over-60s, not just the geeks of this rural area, who are among the keenest to use the new technology.

Looking past the bottom line

But does the Future Store make a profit?

Not in the traditional sense. Ultimately, it is just a large laboratory, using customised bleeding-edge technology.

"One can't talk about return on investment for such a store," says Metro's Mr von Truchsess.

And anyway, for Metro's 45 technology partners, this is a giant "Bring Your Own Technology" party, where each partner's costs are neither disclosed nor added up.

For Metro, meanwhile, it is an opportunity to find out whether better service and a streamlined supply chain can help it compete with Germany's ultra-cheap grocery discounters like Lidl and Aldi.

But it is also a way to identify potential trouble, for example to see whether radio interference can trip over large RFID systems.

There is just one problem. Surveys suggest that some customers dazzled by the snazzy technology think prices must be higher as well.

Not so, says Metro's Mr von Truchsess.

But he admits: "There will always be certain areas where customers will not accept a high-technology store".

Famous sex theory questioned

A popular explanation for why we have frequent sex has been challenged by a report published in Science magazine.

According to the Red Queen Hypothesis, sex exists to help organisms protect themselves against parasites.

Parasites are constantly developing new ways to take advantage, so animals need to evolve defences quickly - and sex, say some, allows them to do this.

But scientists have constructed a model, which suggests this "arms race" alone is not enough to account for sex.

Clone invasion

Evolutionary biologists are obsessed with sex and why we have it.

It is one of nature's great mysteries because there are not many obvious reasons why we should do it - but plenty why we should not.

Firstly, sex is a very inefficient way to make babies. Asexual organisms can produce twice the amount of young than their sexual counterparts.

"Clones have a tremendous advantage," explained Curt Lively, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Indiana, US.

"If you have a sexual population and you introduce a clone, that clone will have an advantage, because its intrinsic growth rate is higher. So the clones should take over."

Secondly, if being overrun by clones is not enough, sex is dangerous. You may catch a nasty disease while engaging in the messy act and, even if you don't, your offspring are likely to inherit shoddy genes from their father.

"It is a paradox why so many organisms have sex," said the paper's co-author Sarah Otto, from the University of British Colombia, Vancouver, Canada.

"If you are a parent who has survived to reproduce you probably have a good gene combination, so shuffling them about is not going to benefit you."

But sex does exist - in great abundance. Natural selection, for some reason, chose it. The clones have not taken over and the risk, big as it might be, is not big enough to make sex a bad idea.

Red Queen to the rescue?

The Red Queen Hypothesis takes its name from the character in Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass, who tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can to stay in the same place.

The idea is that organisms have to keep evolving - keep adopting new genetic combinations - to "outwit" pathogens.

"The theory states that parasites are selected to target the most common genotype, which is now this clone," Professor Lively told BBC News Online. "So if the parasites are successful, and very virulent, they can prevent that clone from taking over the sexual population.

"But for this theory to work, there have to be an awful lot of parasites about, and they have to have very dramatic effects."

And there is the rub. According a mathematical model developed by Sarah Otto and her colleague Scott Nuismer, there are not enough parasites about to explain why organisms have so much sex.

Too much sex

Having sex every now and again might be an advantage, Dr Otto believes. Doing it occasionally should fox the parasites. But doing it frequently probably just spoils winning genetic combinations.

According to her model, if evading parasites was the only objective, organisms should reproduce sexually sometimes, but asexually often.

"If you actually do the maths, the hosts that are common in the population at the current moment in time have been doing a pretty good job at evading their parasites.

"A little sex makes enough of the combinations present, but having more sex breaks apart the combinations that are working to evade the parasites."

Since we - and many other organisms - have more than a little sex, we might have to look beyond the Red Queen for the whole answer.

"What the Red Queen can't explain is why creatures have more than a minimal amount of sex," said Dr Otto. "If organisms only had sex very rarely, then it could be the case that the Red Queen could explain that."

'Junk' throws up precious secret

A collection of mystery DNA segments, which seem to be critical for the survival of many animals, are causing great interest among scientists.

Researchers inspecting the genetic code of rats, mice and humans were surprised to find they shared many identical chunks of apparently "junk" DNA.

This implies the code is so vital that even 75 million years of evolution in these mammals could not tinker with it.

But what the DNA does, and how, is a puzzle, the journal Science reports.

Excess baggage?

Before scientists began laboriously mapping several animal life-codes, they had a rather narrow opinion about which parts of the genome were important.

According to the traditional viewpoint, the really crucial things were genes, which code for proteins - the "building blocks of life". A few other sections that regulate gene function were also considered useful.

The rest was thought to be excess baggage - or "junk" DNA.

But the new findings suggest this interpretation was somewhat wanting.

David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz, US, and his team compared the genome sequences of man, mouse and rat. They found - to their astonishment - that several great stretches of DNA were identical across the three species.

To guard against this happening by coincidence, they looked for sequences that were at least 200 base-pairs (the molecules that make up DNA) in length. Statistically, a sequence of this length would almost never appear in all three by chance.

Not only did one sequence of this length appear in all three - 480 did.

Vital function

The regions largely matched up with chicken, dog and fish sequences, too; but are absent from sea squirt and fruit flies.

"It absolutely knocked me off my chair," said Professor Haussler. "It's extraordinarily exciting to think that there are these ultra-conserved elements that weren't noticed by the scientific community before."

The really interesting thing is that many of these "ultra-conserved" regions do not appear to code for protein. If it was not for the fact that they popped up in so many different species, they might have been dismissed as useless "padding".

But whatever their function is, it is clearly of great importance.

We know this because ever since rodents, humans, chickens and fish shared an ancestor - about 400 million years ago - these sequences have resisted change. This strongly suggests that any alteration would have damaged the animals' ability to survive.

"These initial findings tell us quite a lot of the genome was doing something important other than coding for proteins," Professor Haussler said.

He thinks the most likely scenario is that they control the activity of indispensable genes and embryo development.

Nearly a quarter of the sequences overlap with genes and may help slice RNA - the chemical cousin of DNA involved in protein production - into different forms, Professor Haussler believes.

The conserved elements that do not actually overlap with genes tend to cluster next to genes that play a role in embryonic development.

"The fact that the conserved elements are hanging around the most important development genes, suggests they have some role in regulating the process of development and differentiation," said Professor Haussler.

Rethinking "junk" DNA

The next step is to pin down a conclusive function for these chunks of genetic material.

One method could be to produce genetically engineered mice that have bits of the sequences "knocked out". By comparing their development with that of normal mice, scientists might be able to work out the DNA's purpose.

Despite all the questions that this research has raised, one thing is clear: scientists need to review their ideas about junk DNA.

Professor Chris Ponting, from the UK Medical Research Council's Functional Genetics Unit, told BBC News Online: "Amazingly, there were calls from some sections to only map the bits of genome that coded for protein - mapping the rest was thought to be a waste of time.

"It is very lucky that entire genomes were mapped, as this work is showing."

He added: "I think other bits of 'junk' DNA will turn out not to be junk. I think this is the tip of the iceberg, and that there will be many more similar findings."

'Save Karyn's' charity payback

A woman who turned to the net to help her clear a $20,000 credit card debt has said she hopes to donate that amount to charity.

Former TV producer Karyn Bosnak set up the site, savekaryn.com, having racked up big debts in the department stores of New York. She quickly got into difficulties when she lost her job.

But 20 weeks after setting up the site, enough people had sent her money to pay off all her credit cards. She has now written a book about the experience.

"It made me very aware of other people. I've been forced to really evaluate my situation - also really evaluate the way that I was living my life," she told BBC World Service's Everywoman programme.

"It was the selfish way, and I have no problem admitting that.

"I've started to give to charity much more than I ever have, and my plan is to give all the money back to charity."

Too much to pay

The New York Times Magazine named savekaryn.com one of the best ideas of the year when it was set up in 2002.

The website now offers advice to others seeking to get out of debt.

Ms Bosnak explained that she had initially got into difficulties "purely just by shopping."

"I moved to New York from Chicago - which is a big city, but nothing like New York - and I just bought clothes, and got my hair done, and went to dinner, and just always assumed that I could pay it back."

She paid only the minimum payments on her cards and soon found out that the debt had mounted considerably.

"I didn't even realise it was that high," she said.

"I thought it was $13,000 or something. I added it up and it was over $20,000, and I was like, 'oh my goodness, what have I done?'"

She had also lost her job and did not find another for four months, making her problems worse.

"I looked in my closet and I had shoes and purses and clothes, but when I finally got a new job I couldn't afford a subway card to get to work," she stated.

"I could barely afford to eat every week, because I had to make payments of $800 to credit card companies every month in addition to my rent.

"I got with a programme and consolidated my cards, but it still was too much to pay."

She explained that she had come up with the idea of a website after her roommate saw a sign in a shop asking for $7,000.

"As a joke he came home and told me about the sign, and said 'why don't you just ask for the money?'

"So I set up a website, and I thought if 20,000 people gave me one dollar, I'd be home free."

Taking control

Ms Bosnak said she had tried to make the site amusing, including a feature called the Daily Buck which highlighted the daily ways she had tried to save a dollar.

But she said she had never "in a million years" expected it to work.

Less than five months after setting up, Ms Bosnak had received the $20,000, although it was not without a certain amount of abuse.

Criticisms were made that the $20,000 would bring clean water to parts of the world, or set up a school - rather than bail out a shopaholic.

"I got that criticism a lot - that there are people out there, charities, who need this money more than you. I completely understand that," she said.

"I was never in a position for people to truly feel sorry for me - it was joking, like 'today I had drink water from the tap, I couldn't buy a bottle of water' or 'oh no, I have to give myself a manicure.'

"It was never serious, like I was truly needy of the money."

She said some e-mails she received accused her of being "the reason people hate America."

"But for every mean one I received, I would get a nice one from somebody," she added.

"They were from all over the world."

Others would e-mail and say she had encouraged them to take control of their situation, or cut up their credit cards.

She said that she now feels it is better to give than receive, and is a reformed character.

"I still love shopping," she admitted.

"But I shop on a budget now."

Funds sought to aid virus writer

The Sasser web worm caused trouble for thousands of net users but its author does at least have some fans.

A group called the Sasser Support Team has begun gathering cash donations for Sven Jaschan, the author of Sasser.

Following a tip-off, Mr Jaschan was arrested in Germany in early May and has since confessed to being the creator of the Sasser worm.

Mr Jaschan has now been freed while he is investigated on computer sabotage charges.

Funding drive

The Sasser worm appeared on 1 May and rapidly spread around the web crashing computers that it infected.

German police arrested Mr Jaschan on 7 May near the town of Rotenburg in northern Germany and soon after he reportedly owned up to making the virulent worm.

If found guilty of sabotage charges, Mr Jaschan could face up to five years in jail.

But the Sasser Support Team has sprung to his defence, saying the whole episode was a misunderstanding.

In an anonymous message announcing the formation of the fund sent to a computer security mailing list, the group said Mr Jaschan had a positive end in mind when he created the worm.

"Sasser was intended as a harmless wake-up call to the world," said the e-mail. "Sven did the right thing by making this alarm call."

It continued: "When will people realise that microsofts (sic) base products are not fit to be subjected to the hostile environment that the internet is these days?"

The group is accepting donations for Mr Jaschan to pay legal fees or simply to help him enjoy himself a little before he goes to court.

In e-mails to BBC News Online the Sasser Support Team said it was independent of Mr Jaschan and said it wanted to raise a lot of cash for him.

"The sky is the limit," they wrote. "However, it seems to peak at around the price for a stick of smokes and some cheap whisky."

The website set up to co-ordinate the donations has, at time of writing, collected $97.15. The highest donation is £10 and the lowest one cent.

Donations can be sent via the Paypal net payment system.

"The entire world is angry with him, so we think he could use some friends," the team wrote. "We also like sticking it to the man."

Damaging attack

Statistics gathered by security firm Trusecure found that the biggest problem Sasser caused, with 73% of those surveyed, was a surge in calls to help desks to clean up infected machines.

Also 63% of those hit by Sasser found that it stopped them using their desktop computer to get on with work.

Some 30% of those surveyed said it took 10 hours or less to clear up after the virus hit them.

Trusecure reports that most people fell victim through direct net connections. It estimates that it will cost $979m to clean up the damage done by Sasser.

Russ Cooper, chief scientist at Trusecure, said the impact of the worm could have been minimised if Microsoft had done a better job of distributing a security patch.

"If Microsoft had broken down the patch into smaller components as opposed to one large patch," he said, "numerous businesses would have been able to protect themselves more readily against the Sasser worm and the global impact of the Sasser Worm would have been significantly reduced."

Check out the invisibility cloak

Flying cars, transparent cloaks, technology which can read minds and games played by brain waves - the stuff of fiction, surely? Not so, these seemingly far-fetched inventions - and more - are now reality.

What lies beneath the cloak

For a vision of what the future holds, thousands of nay-sayers and believers alike have got an up close and personal glimpse at NextFest, an expo in San Francisco organised by the technology magazine, Wired.

"This is a city that is always looking at what is next," says editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. "We have brought the most innovative minds and extraordinary technologies from around the world and here is what's next. These are the things that will change the way we live and work and play in the future."

The 110 exhibitors were chosen from 2,500 research and development projects underway at universities and corporations worldwide.

Some showcase new thinking; others take an existing concept and turn it on its head, such as Brainball, a computer game in which being ferociously competitive is not on.

R-e-l-a-x to win at Brainball

Co-inventor Thomas Broome, of Sweden's Interactive Institute, says it's an anti-game.

"The more relaxed you are, the more you can get unconnected to your state of winning and wanting that you actually win this game. Brainball measures your alpha waves and the person who is the most relaxed can push the ball to the other side and win."

Among the game's fans are the musician Brian Eno, yoga gurus and children with attention deficit disorders.

Back to the future

The loudest "oohs" and "aahs" are prompted by a gleaming car that wouldn't look out of place on a lavish Hollywood film set.

Skycar's inventor behind the wheel

The levitating Skycar is the brainchild of Paul Moller, who has spent $200 million trying to get his invention airborne. The car needs 35 feet to take off, but thanks to its 770hp engine can climb at 6,400 feet a minute and reach speeds of 365mph.

"The head of NASA says that in 10 years, 25% of the American population will have access to the Skycar. And he also says that in 25 years 90% of people will be using them," Mr Moller told BBC News Online.

But would-be customers will need a chunk of change to hit the skyway. The initial cost is estimated to be about $500,000 - but with fuel consumption of 20 miles to the gallon, it's almost eco-friendly compared to gas-guzzling four-wheel drives.

For those keen to look as futuristic as their mode of transport, Nextfest showcases fabrics which the wearer can change by downloading patterns from the web, and outfits which monitor health and wellbeing.

"The era of wearable electronics for fashion and health is here," says Frederic Zenhausern, of the University of Arizona's Applied NanoBioscience Centre, who works with the Science Fashion Lab on such concepts.

On the catwalk, a model struts past in a biometric bodysuit which monitors vital signs and dispenses medicine, followed by a Gulf War veteran in a camouflage uniform kitted out with pathogen detectors, a micro-fuel cell and a GPS locator so his superiors can track his whereabouts.

On the battlefield, an invisibility cloak could be just the ticket. Straight out of a Harry Potter adventure, the cloak is covered with tiny light-reflective beads. It appears to be transparent as it's fitted with cameras which project what is in front of the wearer onto the back of the cloak, and vice versa.

The material can also cover objects, says Naoki Kawakami, of the University of Tokyo. "It could be used to help pilots see through the floor of the cockpit at a runway below, or for drivers trying to see through a fender to park a car."

Read minds to detect crime

Also showcased is brain fingerprinting, which aims to help those solving crimes or interrogating terror suspects. It reads minds by measuring brain waves and the responses that someone has to trigger words or images of a specific event.

Its inventor is neuroscientist Dr Lawrence Farwell, of the Brain Fingerprinting Lab, who has worked with the CIA and FBI.

The robot has proved to be a hit

"We need something that is humane, not harmful to the people who are being tested, which gives accurate and scientific results. Brain fingerprinting provides a very scientific solution to a very difficult problem, and that is determining who is a terrorist and who is not, who has committed a specific crime and who hasn't."

Another hit is Asimo, a humanoid robot which can walk, turn, climb up and down stairs - and even dance. Its maker, Honda, believes it will be a boon to the bed-ridden, infirm, elderly, blind and disabled.

Spokesman Jeffrey Smith says making the robot mimic human movement is deliberate. "Asimo was designed to be cute and friendly-looking because we believe that the robot's design may be key to human acceptance in society."

Judging by the enthusiastic response to the inventions on show, this acceptance will not be hard to come by.

Geological time gets a new period

Geologists have added a new period to their official calendar of Earth's history - the first in 120 years.

The Ediacaran Period covers some 50 million years of ancient time on our planet from 600 million years ago to about 542 million years ago.

It officially becomes part of the Neoproterozoic, when multi-celled life forms started to take hold on Earth.

However, Russian geologists are unhappy their own title - the Vendian - which was coined in 1952, was not chosen.

The decision was taken after a fifteen-year long period of consideration by expert geologists.

"There's always been a recognition that the last part of the Precambrian is a special time before the first shelled animals, when there are these mesh-like creatures of uncertain affinity," Professor Jim Ogg, secretary-general of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), told BBC News Online.

"Now it's an official part of the timescale."

'Snowball' Earth

The Ediacaran begins at the end of the last ice age of the Snowball Earth, or Cryogenian Period, a term given to a series of glaciations that covered most of our planet between 850-630 or 600 million years ago.

One theory proposes that these climate shocks triggered the evolution of complex, multi-celled life.

The proposal had to pass three balloting stages, first by the members of the ICS's Terminal Proterozoic Period subcommission (which was set up specifically to consider the Ediacaran question), then by the ICS itself and finally by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) which ratified the definition in March.

At each stage, the vote had to be passed by two-thirds of the voting members.

However, Russian geologists are likely to continue to call the period by its alternative name: the Vendian.

In 1952, the Russian geologist Boris Sokolov coined the term Vendian for a system of sedimentary rocks in the former Soviet Union.

The two Russian members of the Terminal Proterozoic Period subcommission and Dr Sokolov submitted a formal comment expressing their disappointment at the decision to choose the Ediacaran over the Vendian.

"This decision ignores both the priority of the name Vendian and a long tradition to use this term in the international geological literature," Sokolov, Mikhail Semikhatov and Mikhail Fedonkin wrote in their comment.

The name Ediacaran takes its name from the Ediacara Hills in the Flinders mountain range of south Australia. The name is of Australian Aboriginal origin and refers to a place where water is present.

The Enorama Creek section of Flinders was designated the "boundary stratotype" for the Ediacaran by the Terminal Proterozoic Period subcommission.

A boundary stratotype is a rock sequence defined and used as the standard comparison for all other rock sequences of its age.

In pictures: Faberge treasures

A collection of Faberge gems and nine Imperial Eggs has gone on show at the Kremlin Museum in Moscow. Russian industrialist Viktor Vekselberg bought them from the Forbes family in New York.

Amateur rocket fired into space

An amateur unmanned rocket has been launched into space from the Nevada desert - the first time this has been achieved by a privately-built vehicle.

The Civilian Space eXploration Team's 6.5m (21ft) GoFast rocket is understood to have exceeded an altitude of 100km.

"It just roared off the pad and flew into space," said rocketeer and CSXT avionics manager Eric Knight.

The GoFast vehicle and its payload sent back signals from space before falling down to Earth for recovery.

'Fantastic achievement'

The sending of an amateur rocket and payload into space marks a significant milestone in the exploration of space.

The GoFast rocket - named after one of the project's sponsors - lifted off from the Black Rock Desert on Monday witnessed by officials from the US Federal Aviation Administration.

A 14-second burn allowed the rocket to reach an altitude of more than 100km - the official boundary of space - in about three minutes. It reportedly spent several minutes in space before beginning its descent.

The rocket and the payload came down on separate parachutes.

Eric Knight said the team had detected the payload's telemetry beacon but had not yet reached it.

British rocketeers have praised the triumph.

"It is a fantastic achievement," Richard Osborne, from the Mars rocketry group, told BBC News Online. "I have been in Nevada with them during their previous attempts. It is a very impressive team."

The achievement comes at a time when it is widely expected that the first private astronaut will go into space in the next few weeks.

Computer Fonts

Came across an interesting site for fonts: DaFONT

Rabbis spark wig burning rumpus

Orthodox Jews in New York and Israel have been burning wigs made of Indian human hair after rabbis ruled they may contravene religious law.

Hundreds gathered in the Brooklyn suburb of Williamsburg on Sunday to ignite a bonfire of more than 300 wigs.

Orthodox women often wear wigs because custom requires that they cover their own hair in public once married.

Indian wigs were declared non-kosher after Israeli rabbis discovered the hair was often cut at Hindu ceremonies.

Orthodox law forbids use of any items used in what they consider to be idol worship.

Last Wednesday, a revered Israeli Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Shalom Yosef Elyashiv, issued the ban on wigs made with the offending hair.

'100% kosher'

In Israel, lists were drawn up of places where banned wigs were sold and, in the religious city of Bnei Brak, some people gathered up offending wigs and cast them into fires, Haaretz newspaper reported.

Wig shops in New York City, with its large Orthodox Jewish community, are facing a similar concern.

Owners said frantic customers have been phoning to check where their wigs came from.

And some women have resorted to wearing less comfortable synthetic wigs or have adopted hats or hair nets.

But it is not merely religious concerns that are prompting the panic - human hair wigs can cost up to $1,000 and it could prove expensive if a woman finds her wig does not conform to the ruling.

Not taking any chances, Yaffa's Quality Wigs shop in New York left a recorded message on its phone, reassuring customers its wigs were "100% kosher".

Self knowledge just a click away

Personality tests proliferate on the Web

How often do you balance your checkbook? What was your best subject in high school? If you were a dog, what breed would you be?

For seekers of self-knowledge, there's a plethora of online personality tests that will help gauge everything from weighty matters like what type of mate or career would be best for you, to more frivolous concerns such as whether your personality is more like that of a Golden Retriever or a Chihuahua.

This form of self-analysis is hardly new. For decades, people have taken tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, an assessment developed in the 1940s based on Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung's theories about psychological type preferences.

Less scientific quizzes have long been the hallmarks of women's magazines like Cosmopolitan, whose current issue features the multiple-choice quiz "How Seductive Are You?" with questions such as "Do you dress to draw eyes to your cleavage?"

Some of the most popular online tests are found on dating sites like eHarmony.com or Match.com. The latter offers a personality assessment as well as a "physical attraction test" that involves the physical traits -- like height or hair color -- you find appealing in a potential partner.

Many of the basic tests are free, although you're likely to get a pitch to buy more detailed reports or to subscribe to a matchmaking service once you fill out a questionnaire.

Tickle.com, formerly known as Emode.com, is one site that offers about 200 tests whose basic results are available at no charge. Among them is the popular "What Breed of Dog Are You?" quiz. Chihuahuas, for example, are considered energetic, devoted, saucy and intense.

The idea behind Tickle is to tap into people's favorite subject: "themselves," said company founder and Chief Executive James Currier.

"It does it in a way that's scientific, uses the best available research out there as well as makes it fun," he said.
Just for fun

Tickle.com's free tests are designed mostly for entertainment. But the company charges $14.95 for a premium service featuring more in-depth, "PhD certified" tests on personality, careers and relationships that the company says are drawn from the latest psychological research. The Web site also offers a matchmaking system based on compatible traits, such as intelligence and values.

Karen Schaefer, 52, an artist in Charlottesville, Virginia, said she has taken many of the personality tests on Tickle.com simply out of curiosity.

She met her fiance, who also is from Charlottesville, through the Web site's matchmaking system last August, a relationship that began with the two discussing the personality tests they both took. They got engaged a couple of months later and plan to get married in October.

"I think if you answer the questions honestly, or you take a pretty good stab at it, you can find out as much about yourself that you didn't know as things you did," she said.

Not surprisingly, many experts are skeptical about whether there is any true insight to be gleaned from quizzes available on the Internet.

While answering the questions can be fun, users probably shouldn't rely too much on the scores because in most cases it's not clear how the quizzes are compiled or who is tabulating the results, said Carl Weinberg, a psychoanalyst in New York.
Instant gratification

People who use quizzes to find dates online also should beware that many respondents are likely to fib to make themselves appear more desirable, Weinberg said. But, he added, self-analysis over the Internet is symbolic of Americans' love of fast results.

"People are looking for a quick answer," he said.

As with many other things on the Web, people should be cautious about how much information they give out online, said Jason Catlett, president and founder of junkbusters.com, a privacy advocacy Web site. But he said he had not heard of any instances of privacy breeches with online quizzes.

Most of the tests are innocuous, but some, like Tickle.com's "Are you Naughty or Nice?" asks questions about some serious matters such as whether respondents have ever shoplifted or used drugs.

Currier said the Web site closely guards customer privacy and does not give users' personal information to third parties.

Schaefer, who says she has no privacy worries about online tests, said she continues to take new quizzes, saying they are always teaching her new things about herself.

"They're fun," she said. "I love to do logic tests -- anything that makes me investigate myself a little more."

Cannes applauds anti-Bush film

Michael Moore's controversial anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11" has debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to resounding applause from film critics.

Moore, who is facing an uphill battle to get his movie into U.S. theaters this summer as planned, offers a relentless critique of the Bush administration both before and after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"You see so many movies after they've been hyped to heaven and they turn out to be complete crap, but this is a powerful film," Baz Bamigboye, a film columnist for London's Daily Mail newspaper, told The Associated Press.

"It would be a shame if Americans didn't get to see this movie about important stuff happening in their own backyard."

Even Moore's skeptics seemed impressed.

"I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore's work. There's no such job as a standup journalist," said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix.

But Rocchi said "Fahrenheit 9/11" contains powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families.

"This film is at its best when it is most direct and speaks from the heart, when it shows lives torn apart," Rocchi told AP.

The film links Bush with powerful Saudi families, including that of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

It also includes pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused, as well as grisly images of dead Iraqi babies and children burned by napalm along with maimed and injured U.S. soldiers.

The film takes its title from Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," which refers to the temperature needed to burn books in an anti-Utopian society. Moore calls "Fahrenheit 9/11" the "temperature at which freedom burns."

Moore, who won an Academy Award for his film "Bowling for Columbine," is sill arranging for a U.S. distributor for "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Miramax financed the movie, but parent company Disney blocked the release because of its political overtones.

Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein are working to buy back the film and find another distributor.

Outside the Cannes theater after the first "Fahrenheit 9/11" screenings, reporters asked Harvey Weinstein if the film would be released in the United States. Weinstein responded, "Have I ever let you down?"

Last week, Moore accused the Walt Disney Company of stifling free speech by blocking the distribution of his film.

Moore told CNN that Disney had said they did not want to upset the Bush family because of the risk of jeopardizing "tens of millions of dollars" in tax incentives.

The New York Times reported that Disney executives denied the allegation. One unnamed executive told the paper it did not want to be seen taking sides in the forthcoming U.S. election and risk alienating customers of different political views.

"We just chose not to be involved," Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner said.

Moore said media companies such as Disney must allow all voices to be heard.

"We live in a free and open society where dissent is not to be stifled or silenced. They have violated that trust," he said.

"We have only got a few studios left and if we get to a point where they can decide that only these voices can be heard, how free and open is our society at that point?"

Travel for tall people improves

Some business travelers have to put up with a lot more than others. We are talking here about tall people.

Take California publisher Everard Strong. At 6-feet 9-inches, he has had his fill of shrunken hotel room beds, leg-twisting airline seats and rental cars fit for, by comparison anyway, the diminutive.

But he also reports there are signs that some segments of the travel industry are beginning to address the problem.

Strong is the publisher of TALL Magazine, now in its second issue and in national distribution. The "lifestyle magazine for a heightened culture" specializes in unique problems faced by tall people, and carries advertising for products and services related to that community.

"I freak out ... start to get nervous whenever I have to take a flight," Strong said. "I want to be at the airport two and a half hours before the flight so I can guarantee a bulkhead or exit seat, even if it's a short flight," he said.

Tightened airport security measures have made that quest all the harder, he said, and getting to the airport early these days doesn't guarantee a comfortable seat.

"And when you check into a hotel or motel, it's always a crap shoot," Strong said, with anything smaller than a queen-sized bed guaranteeing a legs-over-the-edge night. He also tries to collect upgrade coupons for car rentals to ensure a more comfortable ride.

His troubles even extend to public transit. If he does not get a seat he can't stand up straight when using the San Francisco area's BART rapid transit system, he says.

The current issue of his magazine carries a report on the topic within the hospitality industry, where there are some signs of good news.

The Hotel Monaco group -- with properties in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C. and Seattle - has offered "tall guestrooms" for some time. These rooms -- ranging in number from seven to 25 per property -- feature extra-high ceilings, beds that are 96 inches (243 cm) long, and raised showerheads in the bathrooms. There is no extra charge.

The hotels plan to add higher doorframes, raised vanities and toilets, longer bathrobes and in-room information on local tall clothing stores.

The Palms Casino in Las Vegas has 22 "NBA Suites" featuring doors that top out at 8 feet (2.43 metres) and beds that long, ceilings that are 10 feet (3.04 metres), and shower heads at 7 feet (2.13 metres). Other furniture in the rooms is also built especially to accommodate the tall.

Designed for use by professional basketball players by the family which owns both the casino and the Sacramento Kings franchise, the penthouse suites may be booked by anyone upon request, as long as they are available, a spokeswoman for the property said. The cost is $400 on weeknights, more for weekends.

Strong says the lodging industry in some cases fails to recognize the needs of tall people when they arrive at the front desk by not offering them an upgrade to a larger space.

TALL magazine "is something that's been on my mind for four or five years. I've been involved in magazine publishing for eight or nine years. I love the industry and was always wondering and hoping some publication would come to serve the tall community," he said.

"So I decided to combine my interests," Strong said. "There are a lot of products and services. We're not short on any material in the immediate future."

Nor does there appear to be a shortage of potential readers. Average U.S. heights have been gradually creeping up for decades, a trend seen in many parts of the world. There are now 8.8 million men over 6-feet 2-inches and 5.5 million women over 5-feet 9-inches in the United States.

NASA's finances 'in disarray'

NASA's finances are in disarray, with significant errors in its last financial statements and inadequate documentation for $565 billion posted to its accounts, its former auditor reported.

The U.S. space agency's chief for internal financial management said the problem stemmed from a rough transition from 10 different internal accounting programs to a new integrated one.

But audit firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers noted basic accounting errors and a breakdown in NASA's financial controls.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers and NASA parted ways earlier this year, according to the space agency's inspector general, Robert Cobb.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers declined to comment, but a source familiar with the situation said the audit firm opted out of the contract because it was unhappy with the relationship.

In a scathing report on NASA's September 30, 2003, financial statement -- which got scant attention at its release but was detailed in a cover story in the May issue of CFO Magazine -- the audit firm accused the space agency of one of the cardinal sins of the accounting world: failing to record its own costs properly.

The same report said the transition to the new accounting program triggered a series of blunders that made completing the NASA audit impossible.

There were hundreds of millions of dollars of "unreconciled" funds and a $2 billion difference between what NASA said it had and what was actually in its accounts, which are held by the Treasury Department, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said in its report.
$565 billion

"The documentation NASA provided in support of its September 30, 2003, financial statements was not adequate to support $565 billion in adjustments to various financial statement accounts," the auditor wrote in a January 20 report to Cobb, NASA's inspector general.

It also noted "significant errors" in financial statements provided by NASA.

That big number -- $565 billion, with a "B" -- was the result of posting problems, new software and a "massive cleanup" of 12 years of NASA's financial records, said Patrick Ciganer, NASA's chief for integrated financial management.

Under the new system, Ciganer said in a telephone interview, errors that were discovered in the transition could show up multiple times in the accounting process: once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in the correct column.

By this reckoning, a $40 billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate NASA centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors.

"They have weak controls and problems with their internal system and that would make them vulnerable to (financial) fraud, although we don't have that evidence yet," said Gregory Kutz, a director in the General Accounting Office, which is looking into NASA's accounting issues. A Senate hearing on the issue was set for Wednesday.
Priorities

With a current annual budget of $16.2 billion, NASA's priorities include an ambitious multi-year mission to the moon and possibly Mars, finishing construction on the International Space Station and returning the grounded shuttle fleet to flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster.

The independent investigation of the Columbia accident, in which seven astronauts died, found NASA's culture at fault. The same spirit that fueled the early boom in space exploration in the 1950s evolved into separate parts of a sprawling agency working independently rather than cooperatively.

The same independent path extends to NASA's financial accounting, Cobb said.

"You've got an environment at the agency where there are these 10 centers which pride themselves on their independence ... and it becomes very difficult in connection with any of NASA's functional management responsibilities to have people kowtow to the folks at (NASA) headquarters who have the responsibility to pull it all together," Cobb said.

Cinager said he was hopeful that NASA's culture would change, noting a new "willingness of all of the constituencies in the agency to introspectively look at how can they improve the way they are doing their specific duties."

But Shyam Sundar, a professor in accounting with Yale School of Management, described the event as "a big mess," after seeing the auditor's report.

"If NASA would have been a public company, the management would have been fired by now," he said.

Weather may explain Mexico UFO stir

A cluster of mysterious objects that surrounded a Mexican Air Force plane, alarming the pilots and sparking a UFO scare, could be a weather phenomenon known as ball lightning, a scientist said on Friday.

Unidentified lights appear on video taken by Mexican Air Force pilots.

The pilots grew nervous during a routine drugs surveillance flight in March when their radar detected strange objects flying nearby and an infrared camera showed 11 blobs of light, invisible to the eye, hovering or darting about their plane.

Mexico's Air Force this week released footage from the infrared camera that was shown widely on television.

As Mexican and international media published photographs of the objects, UFO Web sites saw the case as possible evidence of a new sighting of some form of extraterrestrial life.

But nuclear science researcher Julio Herrera said the blobs of light may have been nothing more than ball lightning -- glowing spheres that are little understood but often sighted near the ground during thunderstorms.

"Just as you have lightning between clouds and ground, you can also have it within the clouds and sometimes ball lightning can develop. I feel this is one of these rare events," said Herrera, based at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

"It's a very rare atmospheric phenomenon and it would be very interesting to be able to analyze all the information these pilots obtained," he told Reuters.

UFO follower Jaime Maussan said on Tuesday the objects seemed "intelligent" after they turned around to surround the plane chasing them -- but Herrera said electrical discharges in ball lightning could have been attracted to the plane as a conductor.

Pricey omelet costs $1,000

It's not made of gold -- just eggs, lobster, caviar and a few trimmings. But an omelet on the menu of a swanky Manhattan hotel will set you back $1,000, plus tip.

"I couldn't believe it was the price when I first saw '1,000' on the menu. I thought it was the calorie count," Virginia Marnell, a customer at Norma's restaurant in Le Parker Meridien hotel on West 57th Street, told the Daily News for Monday editions.

The omelet, which debuted May 5 and is billed as the "Zillion Dollar Frittata," has six eggs, a lobster and -- here's the kicker -- 10 ounces of sevruga caviar.

The restaurant pays $65 an ounce for the caviar, according to Norma's general manager, Steven Pipes.

"Since we knew it was going to be a very expensive dish, we decided to have some fun with it," Pipes told the News. "It's not just a gimmick, though. It tastes good."

Beside the omelet's entry in the menu is the following message: "Norma dares you to expense this."

No one has ordered it yet.

A "budget" version of the omelet, containing only one ounce of caviar, sells for $100.

While You Were Out ?

Even on Vacation, Americans Find Ways to Work

Marty Kotis insists upon taking a vacation every year ? if you can call it that.

Kotis, who owns a real estate development company in Greensboro, N.C., remains accessible to his office staff via one of two cellphones, personal digital assistant, and laptop computer. He even checked in with his office twice a day while honeymooning in France.

"For me, knowing that I'm accessible takes away stress," Kotis says. "Otherwise I would worry that something major could go wrong and I wouldn't know about it or be able to fix it."

Technology Altering Idea of ?Vacation?

While vacations were once treasured as a time to get away from the daily grind, more people today are settling for working vacations. In fact, working vacations are becoming chic, according to Lee Hecht Harrison, a global career management services company.

"People who deferred vacations during the depths of the recession for fear of seeming dispensable will finally take the time off that they're due," says Bernadette Kenny, the company's executive vice president. "But the lines between vacation and work will be increasingly blurred. Inexpensive cellphone plans and widespread Internet access have made checking in on the office and fielding pressing problems more commonplace."

A recent American Management Association survey confirms Kenny's prediction: one quarter of those surveyed claimed they would be in daily contact with their offices during vacation. Also, 40 percent planned to conduct some office-related work, and 44 percent were required to provide their offices with their itineraries and/or contact phone numbers while on vacation.

Still, there are some folks who refuse to be bothered during their annual sabbatical. Shel Horowitz, of Northampton, Mass., for one, believes in bona fide vacations. "Time off from work is truly important," says Horowitz, a communications consultant. "I learned that the hard way when my business was new and I worked a full month without a break. I was a mess by the end and I vowed never to let that happen again."

That was 21 years ago and Horowitz has kept that promise to his family and himself. In fact, he doesn't even work on weekends.

The need for a break is undeniable for anyone working a high-stress job, says Nancy Rosenburg, author of Outwitting Stress.

"Just because your body is in a new, relaxing, exotic locale doesn't mean a vacation is at hand," Rosenburg says. "In fact, the time away, spent loosely tethered to the office via phone, fax, and e-mail, can be even more stressful than actually being there in the office."

There are two clear responses to the working vacation dilemma, says Kurt Sandholtz, principal of the Extraordinary Performance Group Inc., a management-consulting firm in Orem, Utah. These responses fit into personality types described as "alternaters" and "bundlers."

"Alternaters prefer to focus on one thing at a time. They need vacations to be a clean break from work and get frustrated when an employer tries to encroach on their personal away time," says Sandholtz, coauthor of Beyond Juggling, a 2002 book on work-life balance. "Bundlers enjoy combining activities in a meaningful way. These are people who love making family vacations out of business trips, and seem to move between the two domains with ease."

No Rest for the Rest

So while Horowitz could be termed an alternater, Ken Capps, vice president of public affairs for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, is more accurately labeled a bundler.

Capps recently returned from a vacation in Hawaii. He schlepped along his laptop, cellphone, and Blackberry, checking e-mails and telephone messages regularly. He found it relaxing to drink coffee and check e-mail while his kids did belly flops in the hotel pool.

"I want to make sure that I can put out any fires that don't need to be burning while I am on vacation," he says. "It gives peace of mind knowing that everything is under control rather than showing up to the office after vacation to a crisis."

Clearly, carrying on business while away is not what was originally intended by the concept of a vacation, says Neil Martin, a labor and employment partner at the law firm Gardere Wynne Sewell in Houston. But the current thinking is that employees shouldn't let the time off become its own source of pressure as they try to play catch-up upon returning from a Detroit or Disneyland trip. "When business demands create the expectation that a worker on vacation will have time to handle a few matters while sunning on the beach, the saying, 'The best never rest' should apparently be changed to, 'The rest never rest,' " Martin says.

Thou Shalt Relax?

But Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist in New York, says working vacations display a healthy confidence in co-workers as team members who are willing to cover for one another to accommodate breaks that help prevent burnout.

"Individuals who trust their teammates will also feel more comfortable taking a vacation without being worried that Machiavellian scheming will take place in their absence," Dattner says. "Ultimately, employees should decide for themselves what is most necessary for their own peace of mind. Being commanded 'Thou shalt relax' by others can actually be quite stressful. Jay Leno hasn't taken a vacation in over 20 years, and he seems pretty happy with his career."

Uproar as gondoliers 'cut up' their boats

Venice's gondoliers are being told to stop cutting off the tail end of their boats in a bid to help them squeeze under the city's bridges.

High tides, said to be the result of global warning and heavy rains, have prompted some boatmen to chop off their gondola's distinctive iron "risso", mounted on the stern.

The double-s shaped decoration is said to represent the curves of the city's Grand Canal.

At least 20 out of Venice's 400 gondoliers are reported to have modified their boats, despite the strict regulations that cover the vessels' shape and construction.

Tourism at risk

The change has angered traditionalists who have called it a "barbaric act".

Franco Vianello Moro, president of Ente Gondola, the boatmen's governing body, said gondoliers were mutilating their boats and putting the city's tourist industry at risk.

He said some gondoliers no longer knew how to manoeuvre their boats.

Venice's Institute for the Conservation of Gondolas, which regulates the industry, is now warning boatmen that they have until 30 June to restore the gondolas to their original state.

In a letter to the city's gondola stations to be sent out on Monday, the Institute has put forward a compromise deal.

Gondoliers are being advised they can customise their boats to allow the risso to be lowered before difficult bridges.

"You cannot just wake up one morning and decide to cut off part of your gondola," a spokesman for the Institute told BBC News Online.

"Even though some will not like this, we hope they will understand," he added.

---------------------------------

Interesting trivia:

The gondola " is asymmetric, as its left side is larger than the right one by 24 cm and so it always navigates inclined on one side. It has its bottom flat; this allows it to cross even depth of few cm. For its construction they are used 8 different kinds of wood and it is composed of 280 pieces. The only elements in metal are the characteristic 'iron' of the head and the 'risso' of the stern."

(excerpted from Institute for the Conservation of Gondolas)

Top 11 Things Found in the Microsoft Cafeteria

11. Age of Entrées
10. Lunch Service Pack (fixes lack of butter in mashed potatoes and leak in drinking glass)
9. IISed Tea
8. Blue Screen of Death By Chocolate Cake
7. Fat16-Free Mayo
6. Zoo Tycoon Wild Game Appetizer Sampler
5. Outlook Espresso
4. Imitation Apple Pie
3. Patch Cobbler
2. Hotmail waiters
1. Steve-ish MeatBallmers

(BBSpot Article)

US Presidential election info

The Canadian Broadcasting Company has posted an interesting collection of material on the US Presidential elections.

Court rejects teens' appeal to lower voting age

Two Edmonton teenagers have lost another battle to lower the legal voting age.

Christine Jairamsingh, 19, and Eryn Fitzgerald, 18, started their campaign while they were still in high school. At the time, they fought for the right for young people to cast ballots in a civic election, but lost.

On Thursday, three judges with the Alberta Court of Appeal put another damper on their fight when they upheld an earlier judgment that a youth's right to vote is not guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In 2002, Justice Erik Lefsrud of the Court of Queen's Bench agreed in principle that voting-age limits violate democratic and equality rights under the charter. But Lefsrud said the infringements are justified because they maintain the integrity of the electoral system.

Jairamsingh and Fitzgerald said they are doing this because there are close to one million 16- and 17-year-old Canadians who are being denied a fundamental democratic right.

The two women, who start university next September, are trying to decide whether they want to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Only 22.4 per cent of people between 18 and 20 voted in the 2000 federal election according to an Elections Canada study.

This year Elections Canada started a program that invites high school students to track the federal election by casting proxy votes in their schools.

Australian weds Danish prince

Tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Copenhagen Friday as Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark married Mary Donaldson, the first Australian to stand in line for a ruling throne.

An estimated 250,000 people, many waving Danish and Australian flags, cheered as the procession of black, vintage Rolls-Royces wound through the streets of the capital.

Security was intense along the three-kilometre parade route, with 1,300 uniformed police officers, army ambulances and police helicopters keeping watch.

Wearing an ivory satin gown and an antique lace-trimmed veil, the bride was accompanied down the aisle of Copenhagen's Our Lady Lutheran Cathedral by her father, who wore a kilt to mark his Scottish heritage.

A 32-year-old marketing executive and law graduate, Donaldson is the first Australian to stand in line for a reigning throne. She met the prince, who is next in line for the Danish throne, at a bar during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

She had to give up her Australian citizenship, convert to the Lutheran Church and learn the Danish language to marry the prince.

Britain's Prince Edward and his wife Sophie attended the wedding, along with royalty from Sweden, Japan, Belgium, Thailand, Monaco and Spain.

Denmark is Europe's oldest monarchy and the royal family enjoys strong support among Danes.

Danes cheer as prince weds Aussie

Denmark's Crown Prince Frederik has married 32-year-old Australian businesswoman Mary Donaldson in a ceremony attended by hundreds of the world's royals.

The couple exchanged vows at the city's Lutheran Cathedral in front of 800 people including film star Sir Roger Moore and the crown princes and princesses of Spain, Norway and Sweden.

Amid unprecedented security in the Danish capital, the guests filed into the 175-year-old church on Friday, stopping to wave to onlookers and TV cameras.

The couple affirmed their wedding vows twice, a Danish Lutheran wedding tradition.

"Since you have promised one another that you will live together in marriage and have now confirmed before God, and before us who are present, I declare you to be man and wife before God and all of mankind," Lutheran Bishop Erik Norman Svendsen said.

Then Frederik kissed his bride, the first time they have done so in public.

The royal wedding marks the conclusion of something of a modern fairy tale after almost four years of courtship since the couple first met at a bar during the Sydney Olympics.

Donaldson is the first Australian to join a European royal family and when Frederik's 64-year old mother, Queen Margrethe, dies she will become Queen Mary and her husband Frederik X, King of Denmark.

Donaldson loses her Australian citizenship and becomes a Dane by marrying Frederik -- who was once considered Europe's most eligible bachelor.

From Copenhagen to Sydney, the wedding was broadcast live around the world and police in the Danish capital said 250,000 people lined the route of the royal motorcade to catch their glimpse of the newly-weds' horse-drawn carriage.

A massive security operation -- the biggest in Denmark's modern history -- was in place for the wedding with a third of the nation's 10,000-strong police force on duty and the guest list kept secret until the last minute.

Royal wedding fever had gripped the country with celebrations beginning over a week ago and including military parades, receptions and banquets, rock concerts and other parties.

But celebrations were not confined to Denmark, with Australians apparently delighted one of their own is marrying into Europe's oldest royal family.

Danish media report that sales of flat-screen televisions soared in the run-up to the wedding, while there has been an increased demand for Australian products including wine, cheese, Tim Tam biscuits and Vegemite.

The nation has been obsessed with the couple since rumors of their relationship begun despite the couple doing their best to keep it secret.

For 12 months the relationship was kept out of the spotlight, with Frederick taking secret visits to Australia. Towards the end of 2001, the couple agreed that Donaldson should move to Paris. She then moved to Copenhagen in early 2003.

Then, after months of speculation, the royal palace confirmed the romance and the couple announced their engagement in October.

Moose calls mark Newfoundland anniversary

Newfoundland is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its most famous "come from away": the moose.

On May 14, 1904, four of the animals were introduced from New Brunswick and released at Howley, on Newfoundland's west coast. The moose were brought as a source of meat.

Now with an estimated 120,000 moose on the island, there are more moose in Newfoundland than people in St. John's. The animals have made their home in the woods and even backyards of the province.

"It's a big thing as far as we're concerned because look at how they multiplied and made meals for many, many people," said Jean Kelly of Howley.

Kelly is helping to organize a celebration for the moose, including a new moose statue that will be unveiled in July where the first moose stepped onto the island.

About 20 kilometres away in Reidville, farmer Gerard Beaulieu practises his moose call and proudly displays the head and antlers of the largest moose hunted in Newfoundland.

Beaulieu is pleased the animals have made the province their home but he admits they've been a nuisance at times, eating his strawberries, and plucking cherries, plums and apples from his trees.

"They're not only a nuisance, they're a threat," said RCMP Cpl. Peter Cornick, who patrols the Trans-Canada Highway. "People have struck these moose with their cars and we've had people killed because of it."

Cornick said he loves a moose dinner and like many islanders, he has a soft spot for the gentle giants.

Supreme Court Won't Block Gay Marriages

Supreme Court Refuses to Block State-Sanctioned Gay Marriages Set to Take Place in Mass.

WASHINGTON May 14, 2004 — The Supreme Court refused Friday to block the nation's first state-sanctioned gay marriages from taking place next week.

The justices declined without comment to intervene and block clerks from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in Massachusetts. That state's highest court had ruled in November that the state Constitution allows gay couples to marry, and declared that the process would begin on Monday.

The Supreme Court's decision, in an emergency appeal filed Friday by gay marriage opponents, does not address the merits of the claim that the state Supreme Judicial Court overstepped its bounds with the landmark decision.

A stay had been sought by a coalition of state lawmakers and conservative activists.

A federal judge ruled against them on Thursday, and the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision on Friday, setting up the Supreme Court appeal. The appeals court agreed to hear arguments on the request to bar same-sex unions in June, after several weeks of legal gay marriages.

The stay request had been filed with Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a Massachusetts native who handles appeals from the region. He referred the matter to the full nine-member court.

Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, had told justices in a filing that they were not asking the Supreme Court "to take any position on the highly politicized and personally charged issue of same-sex marriage."

Instead, Staver wrote, they wanted the court to consider whether the Massachusetts judges wrongly redefined marriage. That task should be handled by elected legislators, he said.

In the Supreme Court's last ruling involving gay rights, justices ruled last year that states may not punish gay couples for having sex. In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia complained that the court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" and was inviting same-sex marriage.

Daughter inspires funky wheelchair

A man whose company specialises in aircraft technology has just launched a 'designer' wheelchair that was originally made for his daughter.

Richard Smith was so frustrated by the lack of suitable wheelchairs that he decided that he could do a better job himself.

"A lot of companies aren't prepared to put in much production investment, but I also think there's a lack of imagination," Mr Smith told BBC News Online.

Mr Smith, from Leominster, Herefordshire, hired two graduates in industrial design and worked with them to produce the Chunc.

"I started working on this three years ago, when Sophie, who was then 12, started to have to use a much bigger wheelchair.

"And I frankly found the products that she was using too heavy, too cumbersome, not really fit for the purpose and quite stigmatising as well."

The Chunc is on show at Naidex 2004 - an exhibition of products for disabled people - at the NEC in Birmingham.

Growing chair

The HR Smith Group has come up with a wheelchair that uses bold colours and lightweight composite materials resulting in something that has a similar appeal to a Swatch, a Smart Car or a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

"All the parts are individually designed even down to the nuts and bolts, so when you put it together you have a wheelchair that actually looks as though someone's thought about it," said Mr Smith.

The chair is designed to 'grow' with the user, and will require periodical adjustments as the child develops.

It folds so that it can be carried in the boot of a family hatchback.

The Chunc has been crash-tested for people weighing up to 54kg and has just been put on the NHS list of approved wheelchairs.

Buying it privately would cost around £1500.

The next stage, according to Richard Smith, will be to refine the design and increase the maximum weight to 75kg.

"We're hoping to complete that work next year," he said.

Asked whether he has his sights on other areas of the disability market, Mr Smith said a lot of interest has been expressed in a powered version of the Chunc.

"Let's get this one right first though, and supply all of those people who've expressed an interest."

Berg video website shut down

The internet website that first posted video footage of an American contractor being beheaded in Iraq has been closed.

The Malaysian server for the site said it took action after the huge numbers of people trying to view the video overloaded its systems.

The company said it had been unaware of the site's contents, but would have acted sooner if it had known.

The graphic images of 26-year-old Nicholas Berg's death prompted shock and outrage the world over.

They also prompted thousands upon thousands of people to log on to the internet so they could see for themselves the entire event in all its horror.

The video was stored on a computer server belonging to a Malaysian web hosting company, Acme Commerce Sendirian Berhad.

The server had been leased to the creators of the site, Al-ansar.biz. They first put the film on the net, and are thought to have links to al-Qaeda.

Acme Commerce's business manager told the BBC that the volume of traffic to that one address was so great that it jammed connections to hundreds of other servers operated by the company.

Though the decision to close the website was a technical one, he said the company would have acted earlier on moral grounds if it had known the site's contents.

He said Acme had no wish to be associated with any group which had possible al-Qaeda connections, or which distributed such gruesome pictures.

Malaysia's opposition leader has called for an investigation into the possibility that the country is hosting what he called a "master network of international terrorist websites".

US moves to ban furtive photos

The US has moved a step closer towards imposing controls on camera phones.

A bill banning so-called up-skirt photos and other forms of voyeurism has made further progress through the political machinery in Washington.

It would make the taking of covert photos in places like locker rooms or bedrooms a crime punishable by up to a year in prison and fines.

The popularity of small mobiles with cameras has made it much easier to take illicit photos without permission.

Privacy concerns

National governments, local authorities and some businesses are starting to restrict the places these devices can be used due to privacy fears.

In the US, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has unanimously voted to support the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act.

The bill was passed by the Senate last September and now goes to the House of Representatives, which is expected to follow suit.

"This bill targets the pernicious practice of invading a person's privacy through the surreptitious use of hidden or concealed surveillance equipment," said Republican Representative Howard Coble.

There have been cases around the world of people using camera phones to take illicit photographs and more public places are moving to ban their use.

In Japan, some fitness centres ban the use of camera phones and the Italian information commissioner has issued guidelines on where and how such phones can be used.

In the UK, several councils have taken action to stop such phones being used in schools, leisure centres and swimming pools.

Physicists probe ancient pyramid

The largest particle detector in Mexico is being built inside a pyramid in the ancient settlement of Teotihuacan.

The equipment will detect muons, tiny particles that are created when cosmic rays bombard the Earth's atmosphere.

Dr Arturo Menchaca and colleagues from Mexico's National Autonomous University hope that by tracking the muons through the pyramid, they can find cavities.

This could indicate whether the kings of the ancient people who built the site are also entombed within it.

Yellow spikes

"Down we go - and mind your head," Dr Menchaca says, as he adjusts his yellow hard-hat, and lowers himself down the rusting iron steps in to a dark 2,000-year-old tunnel running beneath the Pyramid of the Sun.

It is a 100m walk along the cramped tunnel to the team's new laboratory, a plastic shed set up in a cavern in the bowels of the structure.

Above, many thousands of tonnes of rock and earth silently press down.

The experiment is costing half a million dollars. At the moment, it resembles a large, flat metal plate, connected to a box of wires with a monitor displaying a flickering yellow line.

This is the machine that tracks the muons, sub-atomic debris left over when cosmic rays smash into molecules in the Earth's atmosphere.

They travel at near the speed of light and pass through solid objects, leaving tiny traces. When a muon hits the receptor, the yellow line leaps up and down in spikes.

Possible burials

"The idea is to try to discover density variations in the pyramid," Dr Menchaca told BBC News Online.

"In order to do that you either need to drill holes, or find something that goes across your volume.

"These cosmic rays are very penetrating radiation. Some of them go through this pyramid, and some of them are absorbed.

"The amount which is absorbed depends on the material which it finds. If we f