Sinlung: October 2009

Why did Andre Agassi hate tennis?

He is not the only star to claim to detest the sport that made him rich and famous

Andre Agassi admits taking crystal meth during a low point in 1997. Photograph: Frank Baron

"I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have." So writes Andre Agassi in his new autobiography, Open, published this week. It is 2006 and one of the world's most feted sports stars has just woken up in a New York hotel room, poised to play his last tournament.

Open: An Autobiography
by Andre Agassi
400pp,
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,
£10.99

Buy Open: An Autobiography at the Guardian bookshop

But why would a great sportsman hate his sport? Why wouldn't he love everything about it and all it brings to his life – travel, glamour, money, mass adoration, endless free tennis rackets and barley water, not to mention the surely sustaining thought that he is doing something for a living that makes many of us sick with envy?
"But it becomes more than a job, it takes over your life," says former British tennis professional Barry Cowan, perhaps best known for taking Agassi's nemesis, Pete Sampras, to five sets in Wimbledon in 2001. "If you're at the top of tennis, you're on tour 30-plus weeks of the year – and when you're doing that, everything revolves around tennis. Every decision you make, tennis is at the back of your mind. That's the main reason for burnout among tennis players in their 20s.
"I know this for myself – it's something you've done since you were six years old, and there's a sense that if you stop giving 100% you are doomed to failure, and that is unacceptable. No wonder so many players hate their sport – the surprise is that so few admit it."
And despite all the kudos, money and silverware, there's a reason it's the top players who suffer most – because they're the ones playing the most tennis, as they don't get knocked out in the first or second round. So they have the least free time, the most mental stress and suffer the most physically.
Agassi's avowed hatred for his sport is far from exclusive to tennis. British cyclists Chris Boardman, the former Olympic pursuit champion, and Tour de France star David Millar have both admitted to not really liking cycling. "In Boardman's case," says William Fotheringham, the Guardian's cycling correspondent, "he liked the winning not the cycling itself, and he drove himself to win."
That need to win can become a miserable addiction. Olympic gold-winning track cyclist Victoria Pendleton gave an insight into this in a brutally frank Guardian interview after winning gold at Beijing last year. "I was an emotional wreck beforehand," she admitted. "I worried that I would be the one person who let down the team. So winning was just a relief. And even that felt like a complete anti-climax. It was very surreal on the podium and as soon as I stepped off it I was, like, 'What on earth am I going to do now?' I found it quite hard to deal with. It was, like, I've got no purpose any more."
But it is her answer to the question of how to get out of this psychic void that is most telling: "I soon worked out that the only thing I could do was to get another gold medal. I need one. If 2012 goes to plan, winning the Olympics on my home turf, I might finally feel I've achieved the ultimate for me."
Pendleton's pleasure-free, angst-ridden drive to win is almost a defining characteristic of the greatest sports stars. "People say the pressure on top stars such as Andy Murray is unbelievable," says Cowan, "but I feel the pressure is from the stars themselves. They expect the best and if they don't deliver, it is horrible for them. With a sport like tennis, where at any tournament there can be only one winner, there are going to be a lot of perfectionists having to deal with disappointment. You need to be incredibly mentally strong."
Not all are. Former England cricket all-rounder Vic Marks has a poignant insight into the realities of being an athlete. "Sometimes as a cricketer," he says, "you just long for it to rain." But why? "So you don't have to play. I'm not saying cricketers hate cricket, but when you're playing a county game and the sky darkens and it starts to piss down, it doesn't half fill everybody in the dressing room with joie de vivre."
But surely top-flight players long to show the world how marvellous they are at their chosen discipline? "Not always. When it pissed it down, you knew were not going to fail that day. Lovely thought. With cricket, perhaps more than any other sport, everything you do is measured and analysed for all time – your failures are a matter of enduring public record."
Former professional footballer Stuart James echoes that thought: "Lots of players I know would travel to the ground hoping the game would be cancelled," says the ex-Swindon Town regular. "Fans say: 'You've got it good, you're on hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, so how can you moan?' – but most football players think the fans don't really understand what their lives are like."
A terrible fear of failure is one reason the life of the sports star can be rather less than the realisation of a beautiful dream. But there are others: horrendous training schedules, endless travel, foul fans, boredom and lack of privacy. "I remember being underwhelmed when I was selected to go on tour for England," Marks recalls. "People said what a bloody cynical and churlish response that was – but the prospect of being away for four to five months is not necessarily very appealing. Everybody thinks it must be so wonderful to spend the winter in the Caribbean or Australia, but it's not when you're away from your family and you're standing outside for eight hours five days straight."
There have been many English cricketers who have refused the supposed delights of the winter tour, but none more celebrated than Marcus Trescothick, the England batsman whose stress-related illness forced him to pull out of the national squad in 2006. "With Trescothick, there's no one who was more consumed by cricket than him," says Marks, the chairman of Trescothick's county, Somerset. "It had been his life since he was six, and that may well have made the stress worse to the point he had to take drastic measures to get away from Test cricket."

Mental stress

Agassi's biography reveals that he snorted crystal meth from a coffee table at his home in 1997, when suffering a lack of form and worrying about his impending marriage to actor Brooke Shields. "There is a moment of regret followed by vast sadness," he writes of the drug-taking experience. "Then comes a tidal wave of euphoria that sweeps away every negative thought in my head. I've never felt so alive, so hopeful – and I've never felt such energy."
As this passage implies, mental stress isn't the only major reason sports stars suffer more than the rest of us are generally prepared to admit. In his autobiography, Agassi describes the sheer difficulty of getting out bed one morning towards the end of his tennis career. "I'm a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if 96. After two decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body. Consequently, my mind no longer feels like my mind."
That passage will resonate for any player nearing the end of their career, with a body once in prime condition now a bundle of aches and pains that prefigures more intense physical suffering in later life.
"Freddie got a sense of that before he retired," says Vic Marks of the England all-rounder Andrew Flintoff, whose Test career ended earlier this year. "He could still do the bowling, but the batting suffered."
"The incentive to play for England is so high you'd do anything," Flintoff admitted recently. "Some mornings the missus had to get me out of bed and put my shoes and socks on for me. You then get the anti-inflammatories inside you, and a painkiller, and off you go . . . For me, a big achievement was just actually getting out on a cricket field. I've had six operations in four-and-a-half years – and two-and-a-half of those years were in rehab. I've been injured since I was 13. I had back problems all the way through."
Flintoff, of course, is a national icon, all-but-universally liked. The same isn't true of Derby County captain Robbie Savage, who earlier this week went public about some of the more horrible things that he has endured from football fans off the pitch. In Britain, football stars more than any other kind of sportsman or woman are likely to suffer foul abuse (think of what England fans chanted at David Beckham after a match against Portugal: "Your wife's a whore, and we hope your kid dies of cancer"), but none more so in recent years than Savage.
The former Welsh international told Radio 5 Live that he could put up with what he called "dog's abuse" from the terraces and conceded it even fired him up to play better. What he couldn't tolerate was death threats, having the windows at his home broken, having coins thrown at him as he left the pitch. He recalled that once, when he was playing for Birmingham City, he was visiting the NEC with his son when an Aston Villa fan spat at him in the face. "I was out with my little boy. That's got to be out of order, hasn't it?" You'd hope so, but the horrible truth is that many of us who aren't sports stars are immune to taking their feelings or lives seriously.
And even the former England and Aston Villa manager Graham Taylor takes an unsympathetic view of Agassi's revelations. "I'm not certain writing about how he doesn't like playing tennis is a good idea. We're all human beings, but generally speaking I have not got a lot of time for those people who complain about playing professional sport for a living."
There is, a horrible coda to this story of sporting misery. In his 2007 book Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides, historian David Frith wrote that cricket has a suicide rate that exceeds the national averages for the respective cricketing nations, and estimated that more than one in 150 professional cricketers have taken their own lives, among them the great Yorkshire and England wicketkeeper David Bairstow, who killed himself in 1998. Why? Frith concluded that cricket is an all-consuming endlessly absorbing sport and after retirement the thought of life without cricket is intolerable.
The mental and physical pain of playing sport and being at the top of your game may be bad enough, but the existential horror of realising at the end of your career that you are no longer part of that world is surely worse. Perhaps, unlike Agassi, these players didn't hate their chosen sport. More likely, they loved it too much.

Alaa Al-Aswany: When women are sinners in the eyes of extremists

Somalia is in the grip of famine and chaos but officials there are inspecting bras

The excessive interest in covering up women's bodies is not confined to the extremists in Somalia

The Shabaab movement in Somalia controls large parts of the south and centre of the country, and because officials in this movement embrace the Wahabi ideology they have imposed their views on Somalis by force and have issued strict decrees banning films, plays, dancing at weddings, football matches and all forms of music, even the ring tones on mobile phones.

Some days ago these extremists carried out a strange operation: they arrested a Somali woman and whipped her in public because she was wearing a bra. They announced clearly that wearing these bras was unIslamic because it is a form of fraud and deception.

We may well ask what wearing bras has to do with religion, why they would consider them to be a form of fraud and deception, and how they managed to arrest the woman wearing the bra when all Somali women go around with their bodies completely covered. Did they appoint a special female officer to inspect the breasts of women passing by in the street? One Somali woman called Halima told the Reuters news agency: "Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of veil and now they order us to shake our breasts... They first banned the former veil and introduced a hard fabric which stands stiffly on women's chests. They are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat."

In fact this excessive interest in covering up women's bodies is not confined to the extremists in Somalia. In Sudan the police examine women's clothing with extreme vigilance and arrest any woman who is wearing trousers. They force her to make a public apology for what she has done and then they whip her in public as an example to other women.

Some weeks ago the Sudanese journalist Lubna al-Husseini insisted on wearing trousers and refused to make the public apology. When she refused to submit to flogging she was referred to a real trial and the farce reached its climax when the judge summoned three witnesses and asked them if they had been able to detect the shape of the accused's underwear when she was wearing the trousers. When one of the witnesses hesitated in answering, the judge asked him directly: "Did you see Lubna's stomach when she was wearing the trousers?" The witness gravely replied: "To some extent."

Lubna said she was wearing a modest pair of trousers and that the scandalous pair she was accused of wearing would not suit her because she is plump and would need to lose 20 kilos in order to put them on. But the judge convicted her anyway and fined her £500 or a month in prison.

In Egypt too, extremists continue to take an excessive interest in women's bodies and in trying to cover them up entirely. They not only advocate that women wear the niqab but also that they wear gloves on their hands, which they believe will ensure that no passions are aroused when men and women shake hands. We really do face a phenomenon which deserves consideration: why are extremists so obsessed with women's bodies? Some ideas might help us answer this question:

Firstly, the extremist view of women is that they are only bodies and instruments for either legitimate pleasure or temptation, as well as factories for producing children. This view strips women of their human nature. Accusing the Somali woman of fraud and deception because she was wearing a bra is the same charge of commercial fraud which the law holds against a merchant who conceals the defects of his goods and make false claims about their qualities in order to sell them at a higher price.

The idea here is that a woman who accentuates her breasts by using a bra gives a false impression of the goods (her body), which is seen as fraud and deception of the buyer (the man) who might buy (marry) her for her ample breasts and later discover that they were ample because of the bra and not by nature. It would be fair to remember that treating women's bodies as commodities is not something found only in extremist ideologies but often happens in Western societies too.

The use of women's naked bodies to market commercial products in the West is merely another application of the idea that women are commodities. Anyone who visits the redlight district in Amsterdam can see for himself how wretched prostitutes, completely naked, are lined up behind glass windows so that passers-by can inspect their charms before agreeing on the price. Isn't that a modern-day slave market, where women's bodies are on sale to anyone willing to pay?

Secondly, the extremists believe women to be the source of temptation and the prime cause of sin. This view, which is prevalent in all primitive societies, is unfair and inhuman, because men and women commit sin together and the responsibility is shared and equal. If a beautiful woman arouses and tempts men, then a handsome man also arouses and tempts women. But the extremist ideology is naturally biased in favour of the man and hostile to the woman, and considers that she alone is primarily responsible for all sins.

Thirdly, being strict about covering up women's bodies is an easy and effortless form of religious struggle. In Egypt we see dozens of Wahabi sheikhs who enthusiastically advocate covering up women's bodies but do not utter a single word against despotism, corruption, fraudulence or torture because they know very well that serious opposition to the despotic regime (which should really be their first duty) would inevitably lead to their arrest, torture and the destruction of their lives. Their strictness on things related to women's bodies enables them to operate as evangelists without any real costs.

Throughout human history, strictness towards women has usually been a way to conceal political abuses and real crimes. Somalia is a wretched country in the grip of famine and chaos but officials there are distracted from that by inspecting bras. The Sudanese regime is implicated in crimes of murder, torture and raping thousands of innocents in Darfur but that does not stop the regime from putting on trial a woman who insisted on wearing trousers. It is women rather than men who always pay the price for despotism, corruption and religious hypocrisy.

Fourthly, the extremist ideology assumes that humans are a group of wild beasts that are completely incapable of controlling their instincts, that it is enough for a man to see a bare piece of female flesh for him to pounce on her and have intercourse. This assumption is incorrect, because humans, unlike animals, always have the power to control their instincts by will power and ethics.

An ordinary man, if he is sane, cannot have his instincts aroused by his mother, sister, daughter or even the wife of a friend, because his sense of honour and morality transcends his desires and neutralises their effect. So virtue will never come about though bans, repression and pursuing women in the street, but rather through giving children a good upbringing, propagating morality and refining character.

Societies which impose segregation between men and women (as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia), according to official statistics, do not have lower rates of sexual crimes than other societies. The rates there may even be higher. We favour and advocate modesty for women but firstly we advocate a humane view of women, a view that respects their abilities, their wishes and their thinking.

What is really saddening is that the Wahabi extremism which is spreading throughout the world with oil money and which gives Muslims a bad image is as far as can be from the real teachings of Islam. Anyone who reads the history of Islam fairly has to be impressed by the high status it accords to women, because from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the fall of Andalusia, Muslim women mixed with men, were educated, worked and traded, fought and had financial responsibilities separately from their fathers or husbands. They had the right to choose the husband they loved and the right to divorce
if they wanted. Western civilisation gave women these rights many centuries after Islam.

Finally, let me say that religious extremism is the other face of political despotism. We cannot get rid of the extremism before we end the despotism.

Democracy is the solution.

Hugh Hefner: interview on Playboy

From Marilyn Monroe to Nietzsche, Playboy’s aim was to appeal to men on all levels, explains Hugh Hefner, ahead of the launch of his autobiography.

By Lucy Davies

Charmer: Hugh Hefner Photo: AP

It’s easy to forget that, in his day, Hugh Hefner was something of a visionary. The laconic 82 year-old, best known these days for lounging around his luxurious Californian mansion dressed in silk pyjamas and velvet loafers, spent his youth devouring the culture of Depression-era America. He read, watched, saw whatever he could get his hands on, and then copied, transformed and invented.
When the first copies of Playboy appeared in November 1953, the magazine read like a literary who’s who (with the odd titillating photograph thrown in). Sherlock Holmes nestled alongside Ray Bradbury, F Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, John Updike and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When husbands said they read the magazine for the quality of the writing, you can see why their wives might (at a pinch) have believed them.

Next month, as that sophisticated men’s magazine approaches its 56th birthday, brings the publication of Hefner’s magnum opus: a 3,506 page, six-volume illustrated autobiography furnished with an array of material from his 2,000-odd personal scrapbooks. The first of these volumes is by far the most engaging. It takes us through his early years in the suburbs of Chicago where his father worked as an accountant and his mother as a teacher. It also covers his adolescence, his experiences as a psychology major at Illinois University and his army years. He was discharged in the spring of 1946 with the rank of corporal. “I would have made sergeant,” he says, “but my lieutenant didn’t like the fact that I spent so much time drawing cartoons.”
“Let’s get this straight” says Hefner, speaking on the phone from California. “Playboy was not a sex magazine, as far as I was concerned. Sex was simply part of the total package; I was trying to bring sex into the fold of a healthy lifestyle. When Penthouse and Hustler came along they confused what I was trying to do. Before they arrived, we were perceived as a sophisticated men’s magazine.”
In retrospect, Hefner sees his dynamic early years as a “rehearsal for the life I would live in the years to come”. The bittersweet biography shows Hefner as a small boy growing up in what he calls “a very typical, conservative, puritan home… [where he] wasn’t getting many hugs and kisses”. We see him haunting newsstands, devouring comics; lying on his bedroom floor scratching out his own versions of Jekyll & Hyde for his friends. “Creating my own world in a comic or selling my first penny newspaper aged nine, was a way of gaining recognition and acceptance by my peers,” he says. “Though I didn’t recognise it at the time, I did exactly the same thing when I created Playboy. One grew directly out of the other.”
He is charming on the subject of his childhood, sprinkling the story with a confection of period detail: soda fountains and hayrides; ping-pong in the basement; girls named Candy and Betty who he tried to impress by jitterbugging in his “red flannel shirts, yellow corduroy pants and saddle shoes”.
In the summer of 1941 he acknowledged his love of mystery and horror stories – “King Kong was my favourite, but Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein were special too” – by forming the Shudder Club, a horror fan club with its own magazine, secret handshake, code, merit badges and a special insignia, a skull with a bloody dagger. Hefner loved cinema, too. Chicago’s Montclare Theatre became his home away from home. “In that darkened theatre all things were possible: I escaped into wonderful dreams of adventure and romance,” he says. “But the Hays Code [strict censorship guidelines governing moral standards in film introduced by Will Hays in 1930] destroyed all that. Eventually even the married couples on screen slept in twin beds. I was very connected to that kind of repression early on.”
When he later came to establish his blueprint for the sophisticated urban male at play, Hefner says he was trying to recreate the footloose joy of those early films: “I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, Great Gatsby and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss,” he says. “After World War Two, I expected something similar; a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up I knew we were in big trouble. It turned out to be a very conservative, serious period – socially, sexually and politically.”
Hefner entered adulthood at the very moment America was undergoing a domestic revival. There was an intangible but powerful cultural emphasis on security and family life after the Second World War, propelled, to a considerable degree, by the onset of the atomic age and the tensions and fears associated with the Cold War. “I just thought there was another way of living a life,” says Hefner. “Under all the conservatism and the repression there was this yearning for something different. That’s the reason the magazine was successful, why people embraced it from the very outset. There were also all these outdoor adventure magazines that advocated healthy pursuits for family men who never dreamed of thrashing through thickets or wading rivers. They sat at home playing cards and watching television.”
Issue one of Playboy, with a succulent Marilyn Monroe adorning its cover and centrefold, was a humdinger. After hitting the shelves in December 1953, it sold 53,991 copies on its first print run. “If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80,” ran Hefner’s inaugural editor’s letter, “Playboy is meant for you. If you like your entertainment served up with humour, sophistication and spice, Playboy will become a very special favourite… a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste… We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
It all bowls along in this delightfully hammy way, until: “If you’re somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion.” It’s bizarre to think that in the same year the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reached America (albeit with a naked woman on the cover), vociferous in its condemnation of the way in which men profit from the “otherness” of women: “No one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful,” she wrote, “than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
Hefner, however, insists his aim with Playboy was always light-hearted, irreverent. As his influential art director Arthur Paul once put it, the magazine’s mission was to bring the “high art of low art” to readers. “The word 'Playboy’ itself is not a serious one,” said Paul who had studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design under Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. “The rabbit is not serious; it was basically a signal that we could make fun of ourselves.”
For Playboy, Paul employed a series of groundbreaking graphics that used die-cuts, pull-outs, and pop-ups to keep the readers’ attention. He also helped secure the participation of Warhol and Picasso, just two of the artists who contributed pieces to early issues.
His famous rabbit-head logo with cocked ear and tuxedo bow tie was developed by Paul in time for Playboy’s second issue. Initially intended as an endpoint for articles, it soon became their corporate logo. Just five years later it had become so widely recognised that a New York reader was able successfully to send Playboy a letter with a hand-drawn rabbit head as the only address.
Today the magazine (of which Hefner remains editor-in-chief and CCO) boasts a circulation of 4.5 million. But for Hefner, even now, nothing beats the feeling of holding that very first issue in his hands all those decades ago.“I felt like Clark Kent going into a phone booth and coming out as Superman,” he says. “I became Mr Playboy.”

Hugh Hefner’s 'Playboy’, is published by Taschen as a signed, limited edition of six volumes for £900. It includes a facsimile copy of the first issue and a 7cmx7cm piece of Hefner’s silk pyjamas

Top writers who have appeared in Playboy
John Updike, Gore Vidal, John Steinbeck, Boccaccio, Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, Casanova, Voltaire, Roald Dahl, Alberto Moravia, Anton Chekhov, PG Wodehouse, Herodotus, Evelyn Waugh, Anatole France, Jack Kerouac, John Keats, JP Donleavy, Robert Graves, Ian Fleming, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Francoise Sagan, Petronius, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Goethe, Bernard Malamud, Aldous Huxley, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Lawrence Durrell, Vladimir Nabokov, Harold Pinter, Woody Allen, Henry Miller, John LeCarre, Alexander Pushkin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Len Deighton, Gustave Flaubert, Italo Calvino, JG Ballard, Nadine Gordimer, Kingsley Amis, David Mamet

The truth about the disappearing honeybees

A MOVIE called Vanishing of the Bees opened in cinemas across the UK earlier this month. It's a feature-length documentary about the "mysterious collapse" of the honeybee population across the planet - a phenomenon that has recently attracted a great deal of attention and hand-wringing.

The idea that bees are disappearing for reasons unknown has embedded itself in the public consciousness. It is also a great story that taps into the anxieties of our age. But is it true? We think not, at least not yet.

First, the basics. Pollination by bees and other animals - flies, butterflies, birds and bats - is necessary for the production of fruits and seeds in many wild and cultivated plants. More than 80 per cent of the planet's 250,000 species of flowering plants are pollinated by animals.

Agriculture is a large-scale beneficiary of these pollination services, so claims that pollinators are in decline have triggered alarm that our food supply could be in jeopardy, that we may be on the verge of a global "pollination crisis".

Claims of such a crisis rest on three main tenets: that bees are responsible for the production of a large fraction of our food; that pollinators are declining worldwide; and that pollinator decline threatens agricultural yield. Numerous scientific papers, many media stories and even a European Parliament resolution in 2008 present each of these as an uncontested truth. But are they?

Our analysis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reveals a different perspective on the pollination crisis - one that is less catastrophic than that depicted in the movies (Current Biology, vol 18, p 1572, and vol 19, p 915).

The first tenet - that bees are responsible for the production of a large fraction of our food - is simply untrue. Pollinators are important for many crops, but it is a myth that humanity would starve without bees.

Pollinators are important for many crops, but it is a myth that humanity would starve without bees

About 70 per cent of the 115 most productive crops, including most fruits and oilseeds, are animal-pollinated. These account for nearly 2.5 billion tonnes of food a year, about a third of global agricultural production. However, few of these crops depend on animal pollination completely, owing largely to their capacity for self-pollination.

On top of that, production of many staple foods does not depend on pollinators at all: carbohydrate crops such as wheat, rice and corn are wind-pollinated or self-pollinated. If bees disappeared altogether, global agricultural production would decrease by only 4 to 6 per cent.

What of pollinator decline? Claims of global bee disappearance are based on collections of (often extreme) regional examples, which are not necessarily representative of global trends. These examples tend to come from parts of Europe and North America where little natural or semi-natural habitat remains.

Stocks of domesticated honeybees, the most important crop pollinator of all, have also decreased considerably in the US and some European countries in recent decades. However, these declines have been more than offset by strong increases in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Indeed, the number of managed honeybee hives worldwide has increased by about 45 per cent in the past five decades.

There have also been scare stories about "colony collapse disorder" and the spread of Varroa mites in the US and Europe. Again, these are real phenomena, but they are short-term blips rather than the driving forces of long-term trends. Instead, the long-term declines seem to be consistent with the economic dynamics of the honey industry, which seems to be shifting to developing countries in search of cheaper production.

Finally, does a low abundance of pollinators significantly affect agricultural productivity? It is true that a lack of pollinators, especially bees, can limit the yield of many crops and wild plants. It is also true that the yields of many pollinator-dependent crops have grown more slowly than that of most non-dependent crops. However, contrary to what we would expect if pollinators were in decline, the average yield of pollinator-dependent crops has increased steadily during recent decades, as have those of non-dependent crops, with no sign of slowing.

Overall, we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural pollination are untrue.

Pollination problems may be looming, though. Total global agricultural production has kept pace with the doubling of the human population during the past five decades, but the small proportion of this that depends on pollinators has quadrupled during the same period. This includes luxury foods such as raspberries, cherries, mangoes and cashew nuts. The increased production of these crops has been achieved, in part, by a 25 per cent increase in cultivated area in response to increased demand for them.

This expansion may be straining global pollination capacity, for two reasons. Demand for pollination services has grown faster than the stock of domestic honeybees, and the associated land clearance has destroyed much of the natural habitat of wild pollinators.

The accelerating increase of pollinator-dependent crops therefore has the potential to trigger future problems both for these crops and wild plants. These problems may grow as decreasing yields of raspberries, cherries and the rest prompt higher prices, stimulating yet more expansion of cultivation. So although the current pollination crisis is largely mythical, we may soon have a real one on our hands.

Marcelo Aizen is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina
Lawrence Harder is a professor of pollination ecology at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada

Why men will ALWAYS pick 'curvy' Scarlett Johansson over 'size zero' Victoria Beckham when it comes to looks...

As far as looks are concerned, Victoria Beckham and Keira Knightly lose out to Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lopez as far as most young men are concerned.
Scientists have discovered that young men really do prefer 'normal' women to the skinny size zero models often portrayed as glamorous.
Psychologists at St Andrews University solved the weighty issue after photographing dozens of female students - then getting male students to rate them.
They discovered that - despite the size zero trend - the young men preferred girls of an average weight and build.

'Normal-sized' women like Scarlett Johansson were rated more attractive than super-slim ladies like Victoria Beckham in the study

The study, conducted by experts in the university's Perception Lab, suggests that Hollywood stars Johansson and Lopez are considered more attractive and healthy-looking than Bechkam, Knightley or even Paris Hilton.
The St Andrews researchers asked 84 female students aged between 18-26 a variety of questions on their health, took their blood pressure and photographed them.
They then surveyed a group of male students, asking them to rate the photographs of the females for attractiveness, health and weight.
The males rated each aspect out of seven.
The researchers found that young men rated girls in the 'normal' weight range - with a BMI of between 18.5 and 25 - as the most attractive and healthy looking.
The findings are published today in the online scientific journal Perception.
Lead researcher Vinet Coetzee said the discovery sent a strong message to young women who may believe they need to be underweight to be considered attractive.

Not everyone's cup of tea: Actress Keira Knightley and the famously curvy J-Lo

She said: 'We often remark on how healthy or unhealthy someone looks, but it can be very difficult to say precisely how we know this.
'Scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and have made many breakthroughs in our understanding of health and attractiveness, but until now they have tended to overlook the influence of weight.
'What we found was that these young men perceived girls in the normal weight range to be more attractive and healthy than underweight or overweight girls.
'There was no "perfect size" - just within the "normal weight range".'
Miss Coetzee added: 'We studied a group of young healthy students, all aged 18-26.
'However, amongst this group, those students that were rated as more overweight reported more frequent and longer lasting cold and flu bouts, used antibiotics more frequently and had higher blood pressure than the students that were considered normal weight.
'Even at this young age, their health was already suffering because they were overweight, and what is more, other people can spot this in their face.
'The young men were also rated and the same was true for them. The ones rated most healthy and attractive were those in the normal range.'
Professor of psychology David Perrett, who also took part in the study, said: 'A take home message for young people is that maintaining a normal weight benefits current health and will improve good looks.
'In our study, people in the normal weight range were judged healthier and more attractive than under or overweight individuals.
'This sends a strong message to all the girls out there who believe you have to be underweight to be attractive. The people making judgments in our study were all between the ages of 18 and 26 and they did not rate underweight girls most attractive.
'They preferred normal weight girls.'
* The paper, 'Facial adiposity: A cue to health?' by Vinet Coetzee, David I. Perrett and Ian D. Stephen is published online by the journal Perception.

Romanian muscle boy, 5, woos Guinness judges with hand stunt!

LONDON - At five years of age, Romanian bodybuilding lad Giuliano Stroe has landed himself in record books after leaving Guinness judges stunned with his incredible stunts.

The muscle boy lives with his family in Italy where he has been training since the age of two.
Earlier this year he managed to get into the Guinness Book of Records after performing a jaw-dropping handstand stunt on an Italian TV show.
In fact, the strong lad preformed the fastest ever 10m-handwalk with a weight ball between his legs in front of an astonished audience.
And Giuliano has now become an Internet hit after millions of Internet users watched a clip of him performing the stunt on YouTube.
“He has been going to the gym with me ever since he was born. I always took him with me when I went training,” The Sun quoted Giuliano’s dad Iulian Stroe, 33, as saying.
But he added there is no danger of the youngster harming himself, saying: “I have been training hard all my life myself. He is never allowed to practice on his own, he is only a child and if he gets tired we go and play.”
Giuliano, the oldest of four children, says his stardom has not gone to his head and he still enjoys normal kids stuff like painting, watching cartoons and playing in the park when he is not weightlifting.
However, he likes getting filmed and when people applaud it makes him happy.

Yap revives ancient art of star sailing

By Ben Lowings

The traditional canoes are built without using nails, blueprints or measuring tapes

The ancient skills of building ocean-going canoes and sailing them by star across great distances are being revived on the Pacific island of Yap, as the BBC's Ben Lowings reports.
In the mangrove woods on the shores of Yap, part of Micronesia, canoe-builders are busy with adzes and saws.
Groups of men - young and old - are standing on a carpet of wood shavings, fashioning local timber.
As Chief Tharngwan looks on, the teams put together the vessels, ready for the first annual canoe festival of the Yap Traditional Navigation Society.
No nails are used, nor blueprints or measuring tapes - just a leaf from a coconut palm.
Chief Tharngwan places the leaf on the side of the hull and designates a cut with a sweep of his pencil. It is evidence that the Micronesian voyaging canoe is literally a design taken from nature.
Deep ocean sailing
As the festival gets underway, in Colonia, the capital of Yap State, Yapese women will dance in grass skirts, with strands of red, yellow and green livery.
An open-ocean voyage has been planned and smaller canoes will be raced on the smoother waters within the Yap reef.
Watching from the shore, dozens of sailors and enthusiasts are expected from Yap's outer atolls, Guam and the neighbouring states of Micronesia.

Each island has a star above it... There is a star above this island. And there is a star above that place. And I steer between the two

Ali Haleyalur
Master Navigator

The drink of choice will be tuba - gallons of the liquid have been prepared for visitors and participants. It is a wine made from the fermented sap of the coconut palm.
The celebration marks a revival of what was the world's first ocean-going technology - and the navigational methods used to steer the canoes across the vast Pacific.
Master Navigator Ali Haleyalur teaches the art of celestial navigation. He is from the Yapese outer islands of Lamotrek and Satowal.
He sails in the traditional manner - by the stars, winds and currents. He does not use maps, or star-charts.
He points to his head. "It's all in here," he says.
Marshall Islanders, Ali says, are the only Micronesians who make physical charts of any kind - and even these are only made of sticks and pebbles lashed together.
"There can only be one master navigator on each island," he says.
It will be many years before he chooses one of his students to take over his role. Even now, those students are keeping watch at night for him on the occasional inter-island trip. But he is the captain for now.
He has sailed thousands of miles across the deep ocean.
A whale surfaced under his canoe on a recent trip to the neighbouring nation of Palau, about 400km (250 miles) from Yap.
The canoe was lifted out of the water on the whale's back. But his crew's prayers were eventually answered, he says, and the whale swam away.
Island stars
How do you sail on the deep ocean, without charts, lifejackets or radios?

The canoes can be navigated across wide areas of open ocean

Mr Haleyalur laughs gently when I ask him if he keeps a GPS device as a backup. "No GPS," he smiles broadly.
Then, in his soft-spoken manner, this big man lets me in on the basics of celestial navigation.
It is a lesson, I imagine, in the same style as his quiet mutterings to his young initiates, on a starry night miles from land.
"Even if you can't see the island on the water, you can see the island," he explains.
The stars nearest the horizon do not wheel around the sky as do those higher up.
"Each island has a star above it," Mr Haleyalur continues. "I sail through one place. There is a star above this island. And there is a star above that place. And I steer between the two."
In essence, the navigator uses the stars as directional tools, to plot a course between islands - even if those islands are only a few kilometres wide, and hundreds of kilometres away from the boat.
Valuable transportation
Ancient sailing and boatbuilding skills have been in decline for decades.
But Mr Haleyalur is part of a new education programme now under way in Yap to try to reverse this trend.

Many young Yapese are not so interested in sailing traditional canoes

The Yapese boat builders are using the same skills as their forebears - who came here by boat.
"We are constructing two types of canoe," Mr Haleyalur says.
"One type from the outer islands - we are building paddling canoes from the outer islands, and voyaging canoes - very big ones."
Islanders rely on marine outboard motors and imported fibreglass hulls when available. But Mr Haleyalur says sailing canoes are a realistic alternative transport for young islanders.
"I believe we can use our canoes. We can move about between two places. In some places it's the only method of transportation. We don't want to lose this. We want to keep them alive."
'Finding new places'
There have been problems getting young people interested. But it was Mr Haleyalur's students in their 20s - involved in the canoe school - who took me out in their 20-foot outrigger canoe.
Underneath the tropical sun, we went out into the lagoon.
The crew of three young men were surefooted, in tune with the movement of the boat. Their arms and legs cast strong shadows on the deck, almost seeming like part of the boat's rigging itself.

Paul Lane organised Yap's first annual canoe festival

A former US Peace Corps volunteer, Paul Lane, has organised the inaugural canoe festival. For Paul, the canoes deserve to be celebrated in Yap, and around the world
"The world's first ocean-going technology is the reason people got going," he says.
For Paul the canoe symbolises "the wanting to explore, to go to new places - the need to explore, to go to new places- for the survival of humanity."
The ancestors of today's Micronesians set sail from the Philippines and landed on these remote shores, thousands of years ago.
"That's what it's all about," Paul says. "People needed to find new places."

Lashes for Saudi woman journalist

By Sebastian Usher
BBC News

A female journalist in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 60 lashes over a TV show in which a Saudi man described his extra-marital sex life.

The programme, made by Lebanese satellite network LBC, caused a huge scandal in conservative Saudi Arabia when it was shown several months ago.
The journalist is one of two female LBC employees who have been arrested.
Mazen Abdul Jawad, the Saudi man who talked about how he picked up Saudi women for sex, has already been jailed.
The original programme was part of a series called Red Lines, made by the popular LBC network.
Saudi owner
It examined taboos in the Arab world. Unmarried sex in Saudi Arabia amongst Saudis - rather than expatriates - is one of the biggest.
Mazen Abdul Jawad provoked outrage by describing his techniques for meeting and having sex with Saudi women.
He tearfully apologised but was jailed for five years and sentenced to 1,000 lashes.
Three of his friends who appeared on the show got two years each.
Mr Abdul Jawad blamed LBC producers for tricking him.
The station's offices in Saudi Arabia were closed down and two of its producers - both female - put on trial.
LBC has made no comment about the cases.
It has long been attacked by Saudi religious leaders for being at the forefront of Arab satellite stations broadcasting programmes into the kingdom featuring scantily clad Arab singers and actresses.
Ironically, however, LBC is part-owned by the Saudi media mogul and billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

‘Rihanna is a bloody thief’

An Extreme coincidence? ... Rihanna's single cover and the 1998 ECW album front

WRESTLING legend PAUL HEYMAN has blasted RIHANNA for copying his idea for her latest photo shoot.

Paul - the former boss of Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) - says there is an uncanny similarity between her latest single cover and an old album of his theme tunes.

He posted both pictures on his Heyman Hustle website, pointing out his image - featuring a grappler known as Sandman - was released back in 1998.

And Paul told The Sun: "It's pretty obvious this was copied from, or at least EXTREMELY inspired by the ECW album cover.

"From the barbed wire and the right arm up in the air to the blood dripping off the logo.

"Hey, I don't blame them. If you're going to copy someone, copy from the best.

"By the way, Rihanna... you're welcome!"

READ MORE - ‘Rihanna is a bloody thief’

LinkedIn: the secret to the online business network's success

With 50 million members, including Richard Branson and Alan Sugar, LinkedIn's success story quietly rivals that of Facebook.

In spite of its clunky interface, credible business people can no longer afford to avoid LinkedIn

For all the continual media frenzy over Facebook and Twitter, the most remarkable social networking story of all may well be LinkedIn, the global social network for business professionals founded by serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman in December 2002. Last week, a bullish LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced its 50 millionth member, stressing that while it took sixteen months for the social network to get its first million members, the most recent million only took 12 days.
While the LinkedIn 50 million may pale in comparison with the Facebook 300 million army, its achievement is quite remarkable when one considers that there are only around 360 million white collar professional people in the entire world (at least according to the latest International Department of Labor numbers). So over 10% of the world’s professionals are already on LinkedIn. And with the social network now signing up a new member every second of every hour of every day, it shouldn’t be too long before the other 90% of the world’s business professionals eventually wind up in the LinkedIn universe.

So can 50 million professionals really be wrong? And what, exactly, is it about LinkedIn that has made it such a hit around the world, attracting business professionals from 200 countries?
According to Kevin Eyres, the London based Managing Director of LinkedIn’s European operation, it’s all about professionals now “taking more responsibility for their own careers.” In the current recession, he explained to me when we spoke on the telephone yesterday, everyone is “thinking like an entrepreneur.” Getting onto LinkedIn allows us to be “proactive” in building our own networks, finding new staff, rebuilding one’s career, “showcasing” skills and, above all perhaps, organizing one’s “reputation”.
Thinking like an entrepreneur is clearly something that the LinkedIn team is doing very impressively. According to Eyres, the business – which in June last year raised a $53 million round of venture capital - has been profitable for the last two years. And unlike the advertising dependant Facebook, LinkedIn has three “roughly equal streams” of revenue: Premium subscriptions, software as a service and advertising.
According to Eyres, some cultures are better than others at thinking like collaborative entrepreneurs. Holland, for example, is “off the charts” – something that Eyres explains in terms of networking being historically “part of the Dutch DNA.” The Danes too excel in this. While for other less advantaged groups in more conservative, inward-looking cultures – such as Italian women – LinkedIn has actually enabled the levelling of the socio-economic playing field.
It’s no coincidence, of course, that major LinkedIn success stories like Holland, Denmark and even India are all cultures in which English is widely spoken. But in European countries in which English is less prevalent, LinkedIn has had less success.
And this is why Eyres has launched German (January 2009), French (November 2008) and Spanish (August 2008) language sites over the last fourteen months.
Even in the United Kingdom, certainly not a culture as rooted in the collaborative network as much as Holland or Denmark, Eyres is excited by LinkedIn’s progress. Over the last six months, he told me, the UK membership had reached a “tipping point” in which the traditionally reticent locals have become more and more comfortable with both promoting themselves and with giving professional recommendations to others.
So why should one be on LinkedIn? I asked Eyres. What would he say to entice the roughly 310 million professionals who still haven’t signed up for the service?
“You aren’t doing your job correctly if you aren’t on it,” Eyres responded. LinkedIn is going to get you ahead by allowing you to get more knowledge, by enabling you to reach out to a network of like-minded professionals, by giving you access to a uniquely collaborative business environment.
Eyres may well be right. The LinkedIn mantra that “relationships matter” has become the central dogma of our social media age. And over the next year – as LinkedIn adds third party applications to its platform and adds an iPhone app and grows its markets in Latin American and Asia – relationships will matter more and more.
In spite of its sometimes clunky interface and cumbersome networking tools, credible business people can no longer afford to avoid LinkedIn. As Eyres reminded me, even Richard Branson and Alan Sugar are on it. Could there be a better reason to get linked in?

World's largest web-spinning spider found in South Africa

A new breed of giant spider - which has huge five-inch females and tiny males - has been discovered by scientists.
The female of the new species of golden orb weaver spider has a body one and a half inches long with a leg span of five inches and weaves a web more than three feet wide.
The tiny male, however, has a leg span of just one inch. The variation of the Nephila species, named as Nephila Komaci, was discovered by US and Slovenian researchers in Africa and Madagascar.

A new giant orb spider has been discovered in South Africa. It has a leg span of five inches and weaves webs three feet wide.

In the paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, the team from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, described how until recently, said they believed the giant Nephila was extinct.
But Jonathan Coddington from the Smithsonian said a South African colleague found a male and two females in Africa's Tembe Elephant Park allowing researchers to confirm it did exist.
Tests were then carried out that confirmed it was the largest orb weaver ever known and was a newly identified species.

Coddington said: 'We fear the species may be endangered, as its only definite habitat is a sand forest in Tembe Elephant Park in Kwa-Zulu-Natal.
'Our data suggests that the species is not abundant, its range is restricted and all known localities lie within two endangered biodiversity hotspots: Maputaland and Madagascar.'

Nephila spiders are renowned for being the largest web-spinning spiders. Although males are five times smaller than their mates, they are actually normal-sized - it is the females who are giants.
N.Komaci was named after Kuntner's best friend, Andrej Komac, who died in an accident at the time of the discovery.
Kuntner said: 'My friend, himself a scientist, encouraged me to tackle this PhD, but did not live to see the discoveries made.
'He was a big inspiration, and a great friend, thus it was logical to name this new species to his memory.'

The streets of no shame: The shocking picture that epitomises Britain's ladette culture

Maybe she thinks it's the drink that is preventing her from putting one foot in front of the other.
Or perhaps she knows the vulgar truth and is merely trying to impress her friends. Either way, the sight is certainly not an edifying one.
This shrieking ladette was photographed staggering through Cardiff city centre late on Friday night.

A woman with knickers around the ankles in Cardiff

Stripped of dignity: Ladette antics in Cardiff, where drinking in the street has just been banned

Such scenes are not uncommon, which is why Cardiff - one of the country's worst cities for binge drinking - has just banned boozing on the streets.

The crackdown is aimed at late night revellers, targeting rowdy hen and stag parties and generally trying to make the streets safer after dark.
Police can use the new powers to confiscate alcohol or arrest anyone who defies them.
The ban has been a success in trials in small areas but will spread across the entire city in time for Christmas and the New Year.

High antics: Female students appear to wrestle on the ground in Sheffield earlier this month

Yesterday it was hailed as a big step towards 'reclaiming the streets' from drunken yobs.
Cardiff Central MP Jenny Willott said: 'Late night alcohol-fuelled crime and anti-social behaviour is a huge problem on the streets.
'People deserve to have a night out without the fear of intimidation or facing violence as a result of excessive alcohol consumption.

'This ban should help the law-abiding and responsible majority to reclaim the streets.'
The Designated Public Place Order - a power introduced by the Home Office - does not make drinking in public illegal.
But police can order people to stop drinking on the streets and can confiscate their alcohol. Anyone failing to comply will be arrested.
It is believed to be the first time the orders has been brought in to cover an entire city.

It all gets too much for one fresher on the Cardiff pub crawl

Excessive drinking: It all gets too much for one fresher on last week's Cardiff pub crawl

The measures follow the revelation that drink was responsible for more than half the violent assaults in the city centre in the past 12 months.
Cardiff Council deputy leader Judith Woodman said: 'It gives police the right to confiscate alcohol where people are behaving in a rowdy and disorderly way and causing problems to residents and those around them.'
The move could now be followed by other cities.
It comes as experts warned that British schoolgirls are the worst for binge drinking in Europe. The problem is likely to become worse as it becomes more socially acceptable, a conference heard.
Some 648 children under ten were admitted to hospital due to drink between 2003 and 2008.
Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: 'We are more than double our nearest rivals when it comes to women binge drinking. We stand out like sore thumbs.'
He added that many career women were drinking to 'hold their own' with male colleagues at after-work drinking sessions.
Binge drinking among young women hit the headlines again last week when university students across the country took part in organised marathon pub crawls.
Many familiar scenes of debauchery were seen, including half-naked women collapsing on the street.

China in worldwide treasure hunt for artefacts looted from Yuan Ming Yuan palace

Jane Macartney in Beijing

China is to send a team of artefact hunters to nearly 50 countries to track down thousands of treasures looted by foreign armies 150 years ago.
The experts will scour museums, libraries and private collections in Britain, the US, France, Japan and elsewhere to photograph and catalogue what was taken from the Yuan Ming Yuan, popularly known as the Old Summer Palace, after British and French armies sacked it in 1860 then picked through what remained in 1900.
Chen Mingjie, the director of Yuan Ming Yuan, said: “We hope to build a complete database of the Old Summer Palace’s lost relics so we can have a clearer view of the historical royal garden, then known as the Garden of Gardens, before it was looted and burnt.”
He was not sure how many treasures had been pillaged from the palace, which was a summer pleasure ground for Chinese emperors in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Based on our rough calculations, about 1.5 million relics are housed in more than 2,000 museums in 47 countries,” Mr Chen said.
Countries that are signatories to a 1970 Unesco convention can request items taken from them only after that date, but Mr Chen said that China was not trying to reclaim the artefacts.
He said: “We have clarified that this is an attempt to document rather than to seek the return of those relics. We do hope some previously unknown relics might surface and some might be returned to our country during our investigation.”
In the British Museum, the China hall is full of porcelain that almost certainly came from the collections of emperors who lived in Yuan Ming Yuan.
Also in the collection is a series of paintings known as The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, a line drawing on silk believed to be the oldest of its kind in the world. The 8th-century copy of a parody by the artist Gu Kaizhi (about 345-406) was known to have been in the collection of the Qianlong Emperor (1736-96) and is believed to have been looted in 1900.
Under the command of Lord Elgin — the son of the man who acquired the Elgin Marbles — British and French troops looted the garden, also known as the Garden of Perfect Brightness. Lord Elgin wanted to punish the Emperor for the kidnap, torture and murder of 18 members of a 39-man diplomatic mission — including The Times correspondent Thomas Bowlby.
Two treasures that China wants to recover are in France. The bronze heads of a rabbit and a rat from a fountain featuring the 12 Chinese zodiac animals were auctioned as part of the estate of Yves Saint Laurent in February. A Chinese collector bid for them but refused to pay. Five others are back in China. The rest are missing.

A particle God doesn’t want us to discover

Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.
Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.
The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.
At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one.
This time, however, their ridicule has been rather muted — because the time travel idea has come from two distinguished physicists who have backed it with rigorous mathematics.
What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.
What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.
This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up. Whether the recent arrest of a leading physicist for alleged links with Al-Qaeda also counts is uncertain.
Nielsen’s idea has been likened to that of a man travelling back through time and killing his own grandfather. “Our theory suggests that any machine trying to make the Higgs shall have bad luck,” he said.
“It is based on mathematics, but you could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them.”
His warnings come at a sensitive time for Cern, which is about to make its second attempt to fire up the LHC. The idea is to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light around the machine’s 17-mile underground circular racetrack and then smash them together.
In theory the machine will create tiny replicas of the primordial “big bang” fireball thought to have marked the creation of the universe. But if Nielsen and Ninomiya are right, this latest build-up will inevitably get nowhere, as will those that come after — until eventually Cern abandons the idea altogether.
This is, of course, far from being the first science scare linked to the LHC. Over the years it has been the target of protests, wild speculation and court injunctions.
Fiction writers have naturally seized on the subject. In Angels and Demons, Dan Brown sets out a diabolical plot in which the Vatican City is threatened with annihilation from a bomb based on antimatter stolen from Cern.
Blasphemy, a novel from Douglas Preston, the bestselling science-fiction author, draws on similar themes, with a story about a mad physicist who wants to use a particle accelerator to communicate with God. The physicist may be American and the machine located in America, rather than Switzerland, but the links are clear.
Even Five, the TV channel, has got in on the act by screening FlashForward, an American series based on Robert Sawyer’s novel of the same name in which the start-up of the LHC causes the Earth’s population to black out for two minutes when they experience visions of their personal futures 21 years hence. This gives them a chance to change that future.
Scientists normally hate to see their ideas perverted and twisted by the ignorant, but in recent years many physicists have learnt to welcome the way the LHC has become a part of popular culture. Cern even encourages film-makers to use the machine as a backdrop for their productions, often without charging them.
Nielsen presents them with a dilemma. Should they treat his suggestions as fact or fiction? Most would like to dismiss him, but his status means they have to offer some kind of science-based rebuttal.
James Gillies, a trained physicist who heads Cern’s communications department, said Nielsen’s idea was an interesting theory “but we know it doesn’t happen in reality”.
He explained that if Nielsen’s predictions were correct then whatever was stopping the LHC would also be stopping high-energy rays hitting the atmosphere. Since scientists can directly detect many such rays, “Nielsen must be wrong”, said Gillies.
He and others also believe that although such ideas have an element of fun, they risk distracting attention from the far more amazing ideas that the LHC will tackle once it gets going.
The Higgs boson, for example, is thought to give all other matter its mass, without which gravity could not work. If the LHC found the Higgs, it would open the door to solving all kinds of other mysteries about the origins and nature of matter. Another line of research aims to detect dark matter, which is thought to comprise about a quarter of the universe’s mass, but made out of a kind of particle that has so far proven impossible to detect.
However, perhaps the weirdest of all Cern’s aspirations for the LHC is to investigate extra dimensions of space. This idea, known as string theory, suggests there are many more dimensions to space than the four we can perceive.
At present these other dimensions are hidden, but smashing protons together in the LHC could produce gravitational anomalies, effectively tiny black holes, that would reveal their existence.
Some physicists suggest that when billions of pounds have been spent on the kit to probe such ideas, there is little need to invent new ones about time travel and self-sabotage.
History shows, however, it is unwise to dismiss too quickly ideas that are initially seen as science fiction. Peter Smith, a science historian and author of Doomsday Men, which looks at the links between science and popular culture, points out that what started as science fiction has often become the inspiration for big discoveries.
“Even the original idea of the ‘atomic bomb’ actually came not from scientists but from H G Wells in his 1914 novel The World Set Free,” he said.
“A scientist named Leo Szilard read it in 1932 and it gave him the inspiration to work out how to start the nuclear chain reaction needed to build a bomb. So the atom bomb has some of its origins in literature, as well as research.”
Some of Cern’s leading researchers also take Nielsen at least a little seriously. Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at Manchester University, said: “His ideas are theoretically valid. What he is doing is playing around at the edge of our knowledge, which is a good thing.
“He is pointing out that we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, so we haven’t yet proved rigorously that sending information into the past isn’t possible.
“However, if time travellers do break into the LHC control room and pull the plug out of the wall, then I’ll refer you to my article supporting Nielsen’s theory that I wrote in 2025.”
This weekend, as the interest in his theories continued to grow, Nielsen was sounding more cautious. “We are seriously proposing the idea, but it is an ambitious theory, that’s all,” he said. “We already know it is not very likely to be true. If the LHC actually succeeds in discovering the Higgs boson, I guess we will have to think again.”

Roadkill: Tourists left stunned as lioness attacks buffalo - right in the middle of a traffic jam

This stunning series of pictures shows the moment a water buffalo becomes a road-hog.
But the tourists driving through Kruger National Park in South Africa could hardly blame the poor creature, who was more concerned with the tail-gating lioness than other traffic on the road.
The convoy of cars came to a halt to watch - but the passengers then found themselves part of the action as the two beasts lumbered on to the road, oblivious to their gaze.

Battle lines: The lioness and the buffalo size each other up at the start of the attack in Kruger National Park, South Africa

The buffalo screams out in pain as the lioness sinks her teeth into the giant beast

Dinner time: The buffalo screams out in pain as the lioness attacks by sinking her teeth into the giant beast

The incredible fight took place near the national park's Phelwana Bridge in mid-August, as tourists noticed a buffalo standing alone by a tree just 10m from the road.
At first the rest of the countryside seemed desolate, and then passengers began to see lion heads popping up out of the foliage a further 20m away.
It seemed the convoy had missed act one of the battle, as the buffalo seemed injured and was staggering on the spot.
The bufalo desperately tries to shake the lioness loose, but the claws are out and dinner is served

The bufalo desperately tries to shake the lioness loose, but the claws are out and dinner is served

Struggle: The buffalo desperately tries to shake the lioness loose, but the claws are out and dinner is served

Buckin' bronco: Tehe lioness grabs onto the water buffalo as the attack begins

Buckin' bronco: The lioness keeps a firm grip on its prey

Eyewitness 'Mgdonny', who posted this incredible series of photos on picture-sharing site Flickr, said: 'We sat there for about an hour and nothing happened.The buffalo then tried to lift itself up, with great difficulty, and after some time managed to get on its feet.
'As it stood up this female lioness came walking towards it and jumped on to the buffalo's back trying to pull it down.
'The female lioness was injured in the back leg and looked as if it had tried to attack the buffalo previously and was injured in the process.

Break for freedom: Chaos hits the road as the buffalo stumbles on to the tarmac

Peckish for a calf: The buffalo has his leg pulled by the lioness as traffic comes to a stop

'The buffalo started snorting and walking with the lioness on its back trying to escape.'

It came towards the roads and hit a car in the rear bumper and the lioness couldn't hold on and jumped off.'
At this point, the tourists became uneasy as two male lions began to pad their way over.
Luckily, they were content to stay on the side of the road and watch their lady friend bring home the dinner.

Running to safety: The buffalo lurches across the road, having successfully knocked the lioness off her back

Lion's eye view: Morotists dare to stick their head out the window for a picture - but this is one hitchhiker who won't be getting a lift

Lion's eye view: Motorists dare to stick their head out the window for a picture - but this is one hitchhiker who won't be getting a lift

Mgdonny continued: 'The buffalo - still on the road - hit another car in the front bumper with its horn.
'The two huge male lions came walking towards the road and just sat down in the distance.
'After a some time again the female tried two more times to bring down the buffalo but with no success.'
Luckily for the buffalo - and the passengers - the buffalo proved too much for the lioness, and she padded off, leaving the buffalo free to roam another day.