Pakistanis stock up on guns

When Abid Noor bids farewell to his wife before leaving for work each morning, he runs a mental check to see whether he has remembered everything - his briefcase, his watch, the lunch his wife has packed and a loaded AK-47.

The AK-47, or Kalashnikov as it is commonly called in Pakistan, is a recent addition.

"I only began carrying it two to three months ago and now I don't leave home without it," said Mr. Noor, 40, who works at the government's planning and development department in the northwest city of Peshawar.

Mr. Noor said he decided to travel armed after a friend, Muhammed Javed Afridi, was kidnapped by five masked men carrying AK-47s, while driving home.

Another friend "was working as principal of a school in Jamrud, and for no apparent reason he was shot dead one day as he was returning from work."

"I think the police are doing the best they can but it's not enough," he said. "I need to try and save myself also."

It's hard to quantify the exact numbers of Pakistanis carrying arms. Some estimates put the number of small arms in the nation of 172 million at more than 20 million, most of them unlicensed.

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UK to start building nukes like crazy

French energy giant EDF plans to turn the former British Energy into a multi-billion pound centre of excellence capable of building nuclear plants around the world.

EDF bought British Energy from the Government in September for GBP12 billion, but the sale received clearance from the European Competition Commission only after Christmas, allowing the creation of the new merged business called EDF Energy.

EDF Energy is still eight years from building its first nuclear reactor in Britain, but is already targeting the US and China as markets ripe for expansion.

Newly appointed EDF Energy chief executive Vincent de Rivaz said: "I have three goals. I want to create a strong nuclear company, I want to deliver on four new nuclear power stations. And I want to combine the expertise of British Energy and EDF scientists to create a worldclass centre of nuclear excellence."

Over the next 16 years, EDF Energy will invest at least GBP16 billion in new reactors. The company is looking at opportunities for a further six reactors around the world. Rivaz also predicted that by 2020 EDF Energy would be producing the cheapest electricity as gas and coal prices soared.

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Plummeting economy hits US higher education hard

From Financial clouds bring gloom to US institutions by Jon Marcus

The mood indoors matched the weather. State appropriations for higher education, which depend on tax revenue, have plummeted - down 15 per cent since October alone in the case of William and Mary - and interest from endowments has fallen even faster. With their parents suffering layoffs or business reversals, more students are likely to need financial aid. And donors, their own investments drying up, have less to give.

"We really are a good case study for the perfect storm," said the university's president, Taylor Reveley, rain coursing down outside the windows of his office. "And we're still early in feeling the full force."

Although some seem to have been hoping they could ride it out, the recession has now hit US universities. They have lined up behind banks and car manufacturers asking for money from the Federal Government, so far without response. They want billions of dollars for science and engineering staff, research into energy alternatives and infrastructure improvements.

And they have started to cut spending. William and Mary has delayed the implementation of a 3 per cent pay rise for all staff, for example, and has cancelled some journal subscriptions.

But the sector's financial leaders warn that this downturn will affect higher education in ways that require far more drastic action than trimming at the margins or asking Washington for a handout.

"The nature of this challenge is so much greater than any of us have seen in higher education," said Stephen Golding, vice-president for finance at Cornell University.

"If we're going to continue to teach, if we're going to continue to do research, if we're going to continue to provide students access to our institutions, we have to stop doing other things that don't support the core mission."

'Life is toxic'

From Dark green by Drake Bennett

According to the paleontologist Peter Ward, however, nothing could be further from the truth. In his view, the earth's history makes clear that, left to run its course, life isn't naturally nourishing - it's poisonous. Rather than a supple system of checks and balances, he argues, the natural world is a doomsday device careening from one cataclysm to another. Long before humans came onto the scene, primitive life forms were busily trashing the planet, and on multiple occasions, Ward argues, they came close to rendering it lifeless. Around 3.7 billion years ago, they created a planet-girdling methane smog that threatened to extinguish every living thing; a little over a billion years later they pumped the atmosphere full of poison gas. (That gas, ironically, was oxygen, which later life forms adapted to use as fuel.)

The story of life on earth, in Ward's reckoning, is a long series of suicide attempts. Four of the five major mass extinctions since the rise of animals, Ward says, were caused not by meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, but by bacteria, and twice, he argues, the planet was transformed into a nearly total ball of ice thanks to the voracious appetites of plants. In other words, it's not just human beings, with our chemical spills, nuclear arsenals, and tailpipe emissions, who are a menace. The main threat to life is life itself.

"Life is toxic," Ward says. "It's life that's causing all the damn problems."

Hack your brain

How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio

Do you ever want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn't it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it's easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn't a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn't real - tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

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