Blink and shoot However you choose to store your pictures – on film or microchip – you may still lose that picture of a lifetime while fumbling for the "shoot" button. The answer is to make a camera that takes a picture when you blink, says Hewlett-Packard (GB 2 380 551). A low-power LED in a viewfinder shines … 51¶¯Âþ
Humans Westminster diary THE 19 top-rated universities in the UK formed the elite Russell Group in the 1990s. This bothered me greatly then and increasingly now that I am chairman of the university court of one of the world's great research universities, Edinburgh. Does this influence the government when it comes to funding research in any of the … Opinion
All eyes on Mars ON 27 AUGUST, at 9.51 am GMT, Mars will be a mere 56 million kilometres from Earth, the closest it has been since 57,617 BC. The planet's stellar magnitude will be −2.9 on the astronomers' scale of brightness, on which negative numbers are reserved for only the brightest celestial objects. On the night of the … Features
Jenny Uglow Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men, described by our reviewer as a sparkling group biography of the 18th-century amateur experimenters led by Erasmus Darwin in the Lunar Society, is out in paperback next month (Faber & Faber). Uglow is busy finishing off another project, and admits her reading is a) curtailed and b) erratic as "it's … Books & Arts
Feedback DO YOU ever wonder how folklore factoids – like the giant alligators in New York's sewers – are born, and end up as questions on 51¶¯Âþ's Last Word page? Firetech, a British fire safety company, has been sending the press "invaluable advice" with the explicit warning that a "cause of fires in the home … Regulars