KMR - 01.05.12 19:01 IF YOU want to learn how to live longer, look at the people of Okinawa, a string of islands in south-western Japan. Raised on a diet of fish and soyabeans, their life expectancy is among the highest on Earth. There is a natural control group; many Okinawans fled to Brazil and Hawaii after the second world war, where they switched to a meatier diet...

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KMR - 01.05.12 12:42 WELCOME to China, the land of video surveillance. Guangdong province boasts over 1m cameras. In 2010 the city of Chongqing, governed by the now-disgraced Bo Xilai, ordered 500,000. Other provinces have hundreds of thousands, according to Human Rights in China, an NGO.

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KMR - 29.04.12 14:55 But it might. That is the burden of research carried out last year by two teams of scientists, one in America and one in the Netherlands. They tweaked the bird-flu virus’s genes to produce a version which can travel through the air from ferret to ferret. And ferrets are, in this context, good proxies for people.

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KMR - 27.04.12 18:55 IN 1932, as the global economy collapsed, a Danish carpenter called Ole Kirk Kristiansen started to supplement his income by selling wooden toys. Eventually he hit on the idea of making toy bricks. He and his son and grandson steadily perfected these bricks. They shifted from wood to plastic.

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KMR - 16.04.12 22:16 DUBAI boasts some of the world’s most spectacular shopping malls, including the Mall of the Emirates with its indoor ski slope and the Dubai Mall with its 33,000-creature aquarium. But for anyone with an eye to the future the most interesting mall is one that few tourists visit: 20 minutes’ drive from downtown, through scrubland and past abandoned...

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KMR - 15.04.12 09:43 THE Irish left the sterling zone. The Balts escaped from the rouble. The Czechs and Slovaks left each other. History is littered with currency unions that broke up. Why not the euro? Had its fathers foreseen turmoil, they might never have embarked on currency union, at least not with today’s flawed design.

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KMR - 14.04.12 15:24 Germany’s recent success has both new and old roots. Only a decade ago, still struggling with the costs of unification, it was a basket-case. It has since bounced back to show that a high-wage country can succeed in top-end manufacturing, not least by holding down unit labour costs.

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KMR - 06.04.12 14:16 “DARKNESS” was a word Lyn Lusi was used to. Western journalists instinctively reached for it when they came to her hospital in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness”. Goma itself was a black and grey place, a town built on volcanic basalt tough as broken glass through which green shoots struggled to grow.

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KMR - 06.04.12 13:34 On the other hand, the 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5%.

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KMR - 06.04.12 13:17 However, start-ups of that size are often making their first baby steps into the market and need publicity. Aggregate Media Funds, a Swedish firm started in 2002, pools excess advertising space provided by 15 Swedish media companies that are shareholders in the fund, and gives it to start-ups in return for an equity stake (it also plans their...

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