The world's first test tube burger will be cooked and eaten at a live demonstration of "cultured beef" technology in London next month.

The burger is being created from thousands of strands of artificial meat that have been painstakingly grown from stem cells in a laboratory.

Prof Mark Post will explain how he created the test-tube meat at his laboratory at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, before serving the resulting patty to a mystery diner.

He will present the beefburger as a "proof of concept" that laboratory-grown meat could in future become a sustainable alternative to farmed beef, pork or chicken, potentially cutting billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases currently released by livestock.

The meat could also be deemed suitable for vegetarians because it would dramatically reduce the need to slaughter animals, he is expected to say.

But the success or failure of the product, known as "in-vitro meat", could hinge on the reaction of the diner, whose identity is expected to be revealed in the run-up to the event on August 5.

Until now the only person to have tasted lab-grown meat is a Russian journalist who snatched a sample of cultured pork during a visit to Prof Post's lab – before it had been passed safe to eat – and declared himself unimpressed.

The burger will be made up of approximately 3,000 strips of muscle tissue, each measuring about 3cm long by 1.5cm wide.

Each strip is grown from a cow stem cell, which develops into a strip of muscle cells after being cultured in a synthetic broth containing vital nutrients.

The resulting strips begin contracting like real muscle, and are attached to Velcro and repeatedly stretched to keep them supple.

The meat, which will be ground up into a patty with similar strips of fat, may not sound as appealing as a fresh steak but Prof Post said it could satisfy the growing global demand for meat, which is expected to double by 2050.

Speaking at a conference last year, he said he had already produced meat with fibres almost identical to those in real beef, but it had a pinkish-yellow hue which he hoped to turn into a more realistic shade before making his first burger.

"We are going to provide a proof of concept showing out of stem cells we can make a product that looks, feels and hopefully tastes like meat," he said.

He estimated that the first burger would cost about £220,000 to produce, but next month's launch is almost a year later than he anticipated at the time. The current cost could be cut dramatically by industrialising the laborious process, however.

Funding for the project was provided by an anonymous and wealthy benefactor, who Prof Post described last year as a household name with a track record of "turning everything into gold".

The benefactor's identity is expected to be revealed at the event, although it is not clear whether they will be the person to sample the fruits of their investment.

Prof Post has also previously suggested he would like a celebrity chef to help him cook the burger.

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Devotees claim the Fast Diet is an easy way to lose 2lbs a week. So why did it leave Lucy Cavendish tetchy and exhausted?

Everyone I know is on the Fast Diet, the 5:2, intermittent fasting…call it what you will. I can barely go anywhere without people talking about it.

As they will tell you, you eat anything you want for five days of the week, and diet for two. This means fewer than 500 calories a day (600 for men) for two non-consecutive days a week. It has been billed as the diet that anyone can do. After all, goes the theory, how hard can it be to watch what you eat and drink two days a week when you can eat and drink whatever you like the other five?

Not since the days of Atkins has an “ultimate diet” been taken up by so many people. I know as many men as women who are on it, and all claim to be losing around 2lb a week, giving them a steady weight loss over the months as they adjust to it.

The joy of it is its simplicity. The Atkins Diet, which became popular in the late 1990s, was tricky and no fun. All we did was eat endless protein, which made our breath smell. Robert Atkins, the American physician behind it, had a heart attack in 2002, leading many of his critics to suggest the high levels of saturated fat the diet encourages were to blame.

A decade later, the Dukan became the diet de nos jours. Billed as the weight-loss plan that the French wanted to keep secret, the Dukan was another protein-based regime that encouraged disciples to eat, on alternate days, a few vegetables. That the Duchess of Cambridge’s mother Carole Middleton, with her admirably svelte figure, was said to be a follower only added to its allure. However, last week, Dr Pierre Dukan, the retired nutritionist who devised the regime, was censured by France’s national medical body for failing to observe medical ethics, after he prescribed a woman who wanted to lose weight in the 1970s an amphetamine-derived drug believed to have killed hundreds of people.

Now we have the 5:2. It burst into the national consciousness last year, after the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary in which

Dr Michael Mosley showed how it not only helped him lose weight – 14lb over several months, and 25 per cent of his body fat – but dramatically lowered his cholesterol, too. Mosley then wrote a book about his findings with the journalist Mimi Spencer, who recently showed off her 5:2-honed body in a national newspaper. Before her Fast Diet, she said, she “didn’t have the confidence” to wear a bikini.

Well, I’m not after a beach-babe body. I just wanted to lose a few pounds, so I went and bought the book anyway. It is comprehensive and inspiring, full of all the reasons why the Fast Diet could work for me, meal plans with fewer than 500 calories a day, and tips on how to handle the dizzy spells from not eating much.

The authors recommend, perhaps sensibly, that a 5:2 adherent should try fasting on the same days each week. They suggest a Monday, after the over-indulgence of the weekend, and a Thursday, before the over-indulgence of the coming one.

Fair enough. I don’t eat much anyway. I rarely eat breakfast, have something simple for lunch and then I eat dinner with my children. Then I snack, and maybe have a glass or two of wine… but I figured I could cut those out with ease. The idea of two days eating very little sounded like a breeze – until I actually went on the diet.

I started on a Monday after a particularly indulgent weekend. All was fine at the beginning. I spent an hour or so re-reading the Fast Diet book at the breakfast table. It all looked good. I salivated at the recipes. I couldn’t wait to make a tuna, bean and garlic salad.

Unfortunately, I then did nothing but fixate on food. The Fast Diet menu planner suggests dividing your fast-day calorific intake over two, rather than three, meals: breakfast (one boiled egg and half a grapefruit) and a light dinner in the evening. I ate my egg without the customary buttered soldiers happily enough – but, unfortunately, the act of having breakfast seemed to kick-start my metabolism. I found I didn’t just want one egg. I wanted two. And who knew there were 155 calories in a boiled egg? By lunchtime, I was uncharacteristically starving.

Cravings came upon me. I wanted cheese, ham, chocolate, an apple, two apples, maybe some cherries, yoghurt and ice cream, more chocolate, an iced bun… Worse, by dinner, I had started to feel faint. I was so hungry, in a rather obsessive way, that I couldn’t think of anything to do but eat my tiny tuna salad and then go to bed, exhausted.

I assumed this was because I’d just started the diet. But instead of striding onwards on fasting days, getting some kind of energy from my denial and a sense of hope that the weight would come off, I became lethargic, negative and fixated on food. All I wanted to do was go to bed, shut my eyes and hope this would make the non-eating hours fly by.

This made everything worse. I started fantasising about all the food I would eat on non-fasting days. I felt pathetic. I found the minuscule amount of food almost insulting. What grown person can get by on that? It was like existing on air.

“It takes a while to get used to,” says Dr Mosley of his diet. “Most people who drop out do so in the first two weeks, but you need to give it time. It’s important to play around with the 5:2 idea and find a pattern that suits you. If you don’t usually eat breakfast, stick with that.”

So I stuck with that for another four weeks, but it didn’t get any better. On fast days, instead of experiencing a primal rush, my energy levels dropped – and dipped lower as the weeks went by. Any weight-loss benefit was counteracted by the fact that on my non-fast days, I ate twice as much as I would normally. I felt like a hamster stuffing food in my cheeks, storing it up for winter. I even ate pizza.

I became bad-tempered. As, like many women, I have a history of erratic eating, my children didn’t seem remotely surprised that I veered from an egg and cucumber for dinner one day to fried bacon sandwiches the next. To them, this seemed relatively normal. However, my being scratchy and exhausted upset them, to the point that they started trying to feed me to prevent my hunger pangs.

“I am sad to hear that,” Dr Mosley tells me. “The body does adjust. Remember, it’s a general guideline: one diet doesn’t fit all, but the general premise of cutting calorie intake to the quarter of what you are used to, on two days a week, does work. It does, however, depend on what your calorie intake was in the first place.”

I’m not the only person to feel this way about the 5:2. I talked to a close friend who admitted she was finding it as hard as I did.

“I can’t bear it,” she said, as we toyed with some lettuce on one of our agreed fast days. “All I want to do is wolf down an avocado and cheese on some sourdough.”

This seems to be a major drawback – that the denying of food leads to an insurmountable, joyless obsession with it.

Another friend told me she found it hard to stick to her designated fast days. “My job changes all the time, and involves a lot of socialising, which means lunches and dinners, and I lose track of the days,” she said. Others admitted to similar feelings of tiredness and exhaustion. One told me she starts her fasting day just after lunch so that she can spend at least half of those 24 hours asleep. “I can’t eat in my sleep,” she said, morosely.

It occurred to me that we have ended up doing precisely what we were supposed to avoid – making dieting difficult.

“No one diet fits every person,” Dr Mosley reminds me. And, he admits, you can cut yourself some slack: “If you’re lacking in energy, eat more than 500 calories. Spend your two days eating just protein and veg, or cut out carbs.”

Mosley also suggests remembering that, on the days you are not subsisting on a boiled egg and a stick of celery, you can eat anything you want – from pizzas through to chocolate waffles. Even better, as the entire planet seems to have embraced it, it is possible to be sociable and diet at the same time. Even restaurants and food chains such as Pizza Express now offer ‘‘Fast’’ meal options for those on low-cal regimes.

So, I am not giving up. I am taking Mosley’s advice and cutting just the carbs and upping the calories and… doing it my way. And hoping it works this time.

SEE ALSO: THE FAST DIET: Get Thin Quick By Starving Yourself Two Days A Week

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A pedophile who was allowed to remain on Facebook after using it to groom his victims has been freed again without being banned from the site, despite repeating the offense. 

Callum Evans, 21, posed as a girl on the social network to encourage boys to send him explicit images before meeting up with the two 14-year-olds to molest them.

Judge Graham Hume Jones sentenced Evans to a three-year community order two years ago, but did not ban him from Facebook.

He said denying Evans access to the site would be “particularly excessive” and would deprive him of the “social traffic” of his peers.

But Taunton Crown Court, in Somerset, heard on Friday how Evans returned to Facebook within weeks of walking free from court to find more victims.

And despite the further offenses, Evans was given a six month deferred order and allowed to remain on Facebook.

Evans created a new alias, posing as a teenage girl in a bid to get 13 boys and one girl aged between 13 and 15 to send him pornographic photos over a 12-month period.

He was also found to have 648 sexually explicit images of children.

After the 2011 case Facebook said Evans' profile had been deleted despite the judge's decision.

A spokesman for Facebook said: "Facebook's rules ban convicted sex offenders from using the site."

Evans, from Queen Camel, near Yeovil, Somerset, first started using Facebook aged 17 to contact underage boys, and was described as being from a good, middle-class working family.

He was caught when the parents of a 14 year-old boy found sexually explicit photos on his mobile phone.

Police said they had been sent from Evans' mobile and he was arrested, less than a year after being allowed to remain on Facebook.

He was allowed to stay on the social networking site in September 2011 when he first appeared in court.

At that time he admitted six charges of making an indecent image of a child, five charges of causing or inciting a child to take part in pornography, and two charges of sexual activity with a child.

Evans has now pleaded guilty to 17 counts of inciting a child to engage in pornography and four counts of inciting a child to engage in a sexual act.

He also admitted breaching his sex offenders' prevention order on three occasions.

Evans was arrested last August but has been in custody for the past month awaiting sentence after entering his latest guilty pleas.

His Honour Judge Jones handed him a six month deferred sentence, meaning that if Evans behaves during that time, he will be free to go in January.

On July 5 Patrick Mason, mitigating, said: "In essence, there is a single pattern of behavior, committed for two years between the age of 18 and 20, and due in part to the somewhat addictive nature of the internet.

"It has now stopped because of the treatment programme he has been on.

"He has managed to confront his personal anxieties and been able to engage with his parents and help them understand his sexuality. He is a much-changed young man."

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The company, China's answer to Google, has agreed to buy out 91 Wireless, which develops apps for Android phones as well as running its own app store.

The deal marks an aggressive investment into mobile from Baidu, in what is now the world's largest smartphone market. The Nasdaq-listed company dominates web searches in China but is seen as needing to branch out into mobile to continue to grow, as users increasingly access the internet from smartphones.

The price paid is unprecedented for an internet company in China, underlining the strength of the country's rapidly growing technology sector. 213m smartphones were sold in China last year, and 78m were shipped in the first quarter of 2013 alone - a 117% rise - according to research from IDC.

91 Wireless is majority owned by NetDragon Websoft, the Hong Kong listed firm. The company said today it had accepted a $1.09bn bid for its 57pc stake. Baidu has offered the same terms to 91 Wireless's other shareholders.

The millions of Android smartphones in China are not connected to Google's Play Store, leaving other providers to plug the gap. More than 10bn apps have been downloaded from 91 Wireless's platforms, Baidu said in a statement today.

Baidu was the first company to float on New York's Nasdaq index in 2007, and is now valued at $35.5bn. It has cashed in on Google's partial withdrawal from China in 2010, when the web giant clashed with authorities over censorship. However, the company is seeing competition hot up, with internet rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent also investing heavily.

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A Chinese museum has been forced to close after claims that its 40,000-strong collection of supposedly ancient relics was almost entirely composed of fakes.

The 60 million yuan (£6.4 million) Jibaozhai Museum, located in Jizhou, a city in the northern province of Hebei, opened in 2010 with its 12 exhibition halls packed with apparently unique cultural gems.

But the museum’s collection, while extensive, appears ultimately to have been flawed. On Monday, the museum’s ticket offices were shut amid claims that many of the exhibits were in fact knock-offs which had been bought for between 100 yuan (£10.70) and 2,000 yuan (£215).

The museum’s public humiliation began earlier this month when Ma Boyong, a Chinese writer, noticed a series of inexplicable discrepancies during a visit and posted his findings online.

Among the most striking errors were artifacts engraved with writing purportedly showing that they dated back more than 4,000 years to the times of China’s Yellow Emperor. However, according to a report in the Shanghai Daily the writing appeared in simplified Chinese characters, which only came into widespread use in the 20th century.

The collection also contained a “Tang Dynasty” five-colour porcelain vase despite the fact that this technique was only invented hundreds of years later, during the Ming Dynasty.

Museum staff tried to play down the scandal.

Wei Yingjun, the museum’s chief consultant, conceded the museum did not have the proper provincial authorizations to operate but said he was “quite positive” that at least 80 of the museum’s 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic.

“I’m positive that we do have authentic items in the museum. There might be fake items too but we would need [to carry out] identification and verification [to confirm that],” he told The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Wei said that objects of “dubious” origin had been “marked very clearly” so as not to mislead visitors and vowed to sue Mr Ma, the whistle-blowing writer, for blackening the museum’s name.

“He [acted] like the head of a rebel group during the Cultural Revolution – leading a bunch of Red Guards and making chaos,” Mr Wei claimed.

Shao Baoming, the deputy curator, said “at least half of the exhibits” were authentic while the owner, Wang Zonquan, claimed that “even the gods cannot tell whether the exhibits are fake or not,” the Shanghai Daily reported.

China’s vibrant online community begged to differ, reacting with its customary barrage of disgust and ridicule.

One micro-blogger urged local authorities to re-open and re-brand the museum as “China's biggest fake item museum.” “If you can’t be the best, why not be the worst?” mused the user, “Jizhou magistrate”.

China is currently in the midst of an unprecedented museum boom with nearly 400 new museums opening in 2011 alone, according to government figures.

But fake relics have proved a persistent thorn in the industry's side. In 2011, state media reported claims that 80 per cent of the fossils in Chinese museums were fake.

“Fake fossils are like poisoned milk powder that injure and insult visitors,” a scientist from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was quoted as saying.

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The letter sent by a senior figure in the Pakistan Taliban to Malala Yousafzai setting out the case against her is an extraordinary document by any standards.It is an attempt to defend the indefensible – the attempted assassination of a 15-year-old schoolgirl.

In it, Adnan Rasheed deploys all the arguments he can think of, referencing Henry Kissinger (a Jew, he helpfully points out) and quoting Bertrand Russell on the way modern science might be manipulated – via diet and injections – to control populations. His letter complains that she is pushing UN propaganda, of promoting an education system that has no place for Islam and it wonders why whether there would have been such an outcry if she had been injured in a US drone strike.

He knows his audience.

In the days since Malala gave her courageous speech at the United Nations, many Pakistanis have been wondering the same thing. Why aren't victims of American aggression afforded the same platform as Malala? Twitter and Facebook have filled with messages, wanting to know why Malala is campaigning for education but has not mentioned killer drones. Was the whole thing a stunt to discredit the Pakistan Taliban?

There is a huge section of mainstream, educated Pakistan that should know better but has turned against Malala. In this sense, the letter is a clever attempt by the Pakistan Taliban to reconnect with supporters.

But it also smacks of desperation. Last week it felt as if the whole world stopped to watch Malala address the United Nations. It was a moment of optimism and a reminder that sometimes courage really is enough to see off extremism.

How difficult it must have been for the terrorists in their boltholes along the border with Afghanistan to be overshadowed by someone they thought they had left for dead. And by a girl at that.

Every time she stands up before an audience it will be a reminder of their failure.

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Artificial blood vessels which can survive in the body for up to nine months have been created from stem cells by scientists.

Networks of blood vessels derived from human cells were grown on the surface of mouse brains, where they worked as well as natural vessels for up to nine months.

Previous studies using similar methods had failed to produce blood vessels which were durable and long-lasting when grown in animals.

Being able to repair or grow new blood vessels could form the basis of new treatments for conditions such as heart disease and diabetes, researchers said.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, researchers described how a type of human stem cell was used to create "vascular precursor cells", which in turn form blood vessels.

After being implanted onto the surface of mice's brains, the cells formed into functioning blood vessels within two weeks, and continued to work for up to 280 days.

Similar cells implanted under the skin rather than on the brain also produced blood vessels, but these were shorter-lived and required five times more precursor cells to produce, researchers reported.

Dr Rakesh Jain of Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the study, said: "Our team has developed an efficient method to generate vascular precursor cells from human iPScs and used them to create networks of engineered blood vessels in living mice.

Stem cell technology "has brought enormous potential to the field of cell-based regenerative medicine", but "the challenge of deriving functional cells from these iPScs still remains," he added.

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Scientists believe they are a step closer to "switching off" a chromosome that causes Down syndrome.

Researchers claim they have shown in principle that a natural "off switch"– usually used to decide the sex of a baby – could be used to neutralize the extra chromosome behind trisomy 21, better known as Down Syndrome.

The finding paves the way for researchers to study the cell pathologies and identify genome-wide pathways implicated in the disorder, which has up until now been elusive.

But writing in the journal Nature, they warn it is still only a "conceivable idea" that the gene could be switched off in humans.

Professor Jeanne Lawrence, of University of Massachusetts Medical School, who led the research, said she hoped it could lead to new therapeutic techniques.

"Our hope is that for individuals living with Down syndrome, this proof of principle opens up multiple exciting new avenues for studying the disorder now, and bringing into the realm the consideration research on the concept of 'chromosome therapy' in the future," Professor Lawrence said.

Her research uses a naturally occurring genetic switch, called the XIST gene, to turn off the entire chromosome in one go.

It showed that inserting the XIST gene into the extra copy of chromosome 21 had a similar switching-off effect in the stem cells taken from a Down sufferer.

Scientists said the technique could be used to treat other conditions Down sufferers face, such as diseases of the bone marrow.

Neil Brockdorff, Professor of Developmental Epigenetics at the University of Oxford, told The Times: "In the long term it may even be possible to make the correction in patient-specific cell lines, and then use these for cell therapy, treating specific problems that individuals experience."

The chief executive of the Down Syndrome Association said the findings have "serious implications" and could be of significant benefit.

"This is exciting new research," Carol Boys said.

"The findings could have serious implications for future work that may be of real benefit to people with Down syndrome."

This month a new non-invasive blood test for Down syndrome in unborn babies went on trial.

Prenatal patients at King’s College Hospital and Medway Maritime hospital in Chatham, Kent, are to be offered the £400 screening test, which researchers claim can identify with 99 per cent certainty whether their unborn child will have Down syndrome.

Children with Down syndrome are born with three copies of chromosome 21, rather than the usual two. There are 23 pairs in total.

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Forget Gordon Gekko. Old-style City traders are being replaced by maths geniuses who use super-computers to beat the markets. But are 'quants’ a force for good or evil?

At seven minutes past one on the afternoon of Tuesday April 23 this year a tweet from the AP news agency in Washington was published. It read “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.” This was not true – the AP account had been hacked by a shady group of technology nerds calling themselves The Syrian Electronic Army– but within milliseconds the tweet had been noticed and flagged by trading computers on Wall Street.

Programmed to scan the internet for words or phrases that might affect stock markets, the unthinking machines had immediately seized upon the tweet, noted the proximity of the words “Obama”, “explosions” and “White House” and unleashed a torrent of trades. Within seconds, the Dow Jones had plunged 140 points and more than $200 billion of capital had been wiped out.

A few minutes later the report was exposed as a hoax and the markets quickly returned to their pre-tweet levels. But, to many, the idea that one fake tweet could have such an enormous impact on the financial markets was incredible. Who was running Wall Street? Humans or machines?

If you thought “humans”, you were woefully out of date. Over the past decade or so there has been a technological coup d’etat on the trading floor. The old “Masters of the Universe” – the Gordon Gekko types with their slicked-back hair and $5,000 suits – have been superseded by unbelievably powerful computers capable of analysing vast amounts of data and buying or selling shares in the blink of an eye. Today, if you visit a trading floor, instead of pumped-up men in loose ties screaming down the phone, you are more likely to see rows of studious-looking people (most of them still men) sitting in front of computer screens, quietly monitoring trades being carried out on their behalf by machines.

Around 70% of the orders to buy or sell on Wall Street are now placed by software programs, and the studious-looking people, mathematical geniuses who are responsible for writing these programs, are the new “smartest guys in the room”. It is the age of the algorithm.

Mathematicians made their first forays into the financial world in the late Sixties. Edward Thorp, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, published a book in 1967 called Beat the Market in which he laid out what he claimed was a foolproof way of making money on the stock market, all based on a system he had previously devised to beat casinos at blackjack. The blackjack system had been so successful it had forced casinos to change their rules and Beat the Market– which had to do with selling stocks and bonds at one price and buying them back at a lower price – proved to be even more groundbreaking. In 1974, Thorp founded a hedge fund called Princeton/Newport Partners and proceeded to make a killing on the markets.

At the same time, the job prospects for scientists had nosedived. Since the 1969 moon landing, the American government had cut funding for science programmes and diverted it to the war in Vietnam.

“A generation of physicists who had gone to graduate school left with their PhDs and entered a severely depressed job market,” explains James Owen Weatherall, author of The Physics of Finance. They had to earn a living somehow, and, seeing how much money that there was to be made on Wall Street, many decided to move into finance.

In Britain, the fall of the Soviet Union led to an influx of Warsaw Pact scientists. In both cases, these scientists brought with them a new methodology based on analysing data and also a faith that, using sufficient computing firepower, it was possible to predict the market. It was the start of a new discipline, quantitative analysis, and the most famous “quant” of all was a shambling donnish maths genius with a scraggly beard and aversion to socks called Jim Simons.

For those who know their physics, Simons is a living legend. A piece of mathematics he co-created, the Chern-Simons 3-form, is one of the most important elements of string theory, the so-called “theory of everything”. Highly academic, Simons never seemed the sort of person who would gravitate to the earthy environs of Wall Street. But in 1982, he founded an extraordinarily successful hedge fund management company, Renaissance Technologies, whose signature fund, Medallion, went on to earn an incredible 2,478.6 per cent return in its first 10 years, way above every other hedge fund on the planet, including George Soros’s Quantum Fund.

Its success, based on a highly complex and secretive algorithm, continued in the Noughties and over the lifetime of the fund, Medallion’s returns have averaged 40 per cent a year, making Simons one of the richest men in the world with a net worth in excess of $10billion.

Of his 200 employees, ensconced in a fortress-like building in unfashionable Long Island, New York, a third have PhDs, not in finance, but in fields like physics, mathematics and statistics. Renaissance has been called “the best physics and mathematics department in the world” and, according to Weatherall, “avoids hiring anyone with even the slightest whiff of Wall Street bona fides. PhDs in finance need not apply; nor should traders who got their start at traditional investment banks or even other hedge funds. The secret to Simons’s success has been steering clear of the financial experts.”

Not surprisingly, old-style traders hate the quants. Not only have they pushed them off the top of the trading tree, there is also a basic clash of cultures. They are not flash and, invariably, rather awkward socially. As one anonymous software salesman who deals with hedge funds relates on a blog: “They don’t do small talk. When one of them picks me up from reception and we ride the elevator, I have learnt not to start chatting away about, say, the weather. They simply don’t seem to understand. They think you’re attempting to communicate something apparently important about meteorological conditions. Same thing with innocent jokes… blank stares.”

So what exactly do quantitative analysts do?

Patrick Boyle and Jesse McDougall run a hedge fund which they operate out of an Islington town house. Their offices are next to the sort of ethical café whose owners would probably be horrified at the rampant capitalism on display next door. When I meet them they are seated in a small room dominated by three computer screens. They start work at seven in the morning and end around 11 at night. “We have computer screens in our kitchen and living room,” says Boyle, 37. “So we can monitor the markets while having dinner and we can log in remotely if we are out in the evening.” He shows me a chart tracking his fund’s performance. The line doesn’t dip when the rest of the market dips and rises faster than the FTSE.

How do they do it?

“We do it with maths,” he says. “We buy stock market data and we analyse it. It’s like weather forecasting – we can say that there is a 65 per cent probability that the market will be up between open and close, so we are able to have better than 50 per cent odds on short-term movements and over time if you call short term well, you can make money.”

Who wrote the computer program they use? “I did,” says Boyle. How do you write something like that? “Slowly.”

The writing of the program may be slow but the speed of transactions is super fast. Some quants specialise in what is called High Frequency Trading (HFT), which involves large numbers of trades over very short periods of time. “In one millisecond the price could go up by one penny,” says McDougall. “You do it thousands of times on hundreds of shares and you make money.”

Boyle and McDougall’s hedge fund doesn’t do high frequency trades, so to find out more I meet Simon Jones, who was running the quants desk at a major bank up until a few months ago. He is 36 years old.

“The guys and women who worked with me were the best of the best. They came from all over the world: from India, Russia and China.” The job was intense and highly competitive. “Let’s say I have noticed that the moment the Dow goes up the FTSE goes up,” says Jones. “The first person to notice that and make a trade can make money but to do that means getting the data from New York to London and then getting my trading decision across the Atlantic and me buying my FTSE before anyone else does.”

In this game speed is critical and that has led to what has been dubbed an arms race between firms. It has got to a point where firms have actually started moving their servers nearer to an exchange to speed up connection times.

In 2010, a company called Spread Networks laid a new direct cable between New York and Chicago, going straight through the Allegheny mountains, which shaved a little bit more than 1,000th of a second off the transmission time between stock exchanges.

For the opportunity to use a similarly fast tube between New York and London, Jones’s old bank was asked to pay $50 million. “It would have given us an advantage over others of about a six thousandths of one second,” says Jones.

This focus on the shortest of short-term gains has vastly increased volatility. “Warren Buffett owns shares in Coca-Cola and when they go down he says 'I’m holding on to them because I think they will go back up’,” says Jones. “But the HFT guy, all he cares about is the next millisecond. And when too many people start panicking about the next millisecond that’s when you have a crash.”

The perfect example of such a crash took place on May 6 2010. So many shares were traded that day that the online trading section of the New York Stock Exchange temporarily froze and between 2.30pm and 3pm the Dow Jones lost and then regained nearly $1 trillion. In what became known as the “Flash Crash”, shares in the management consultancy firm Accenture plummeted to a fraction above zero . Apple shares went up to $100,000.

“None of us knew what to do or what would happen next,” says Dave Lauer, a quant who was working on a HFT desk that day. “It was terrifying.”

For Lauer, the Flash Crash was a wake-up call. “I started to see how the race to be fastest had left things in a very fragile state,” he tells me. The following year his wife revealed she was pregnant which prompted him to make a big decision. “I remember thinking, 'How will I explain to my future child what I do for a living?’” Lauer quit his job and last year told the Senate Banking committee that High Frequency Trading had brought the market to crisis point.

The Flash Crash was partly caused by the HFT strategy of “spoofing”; making bogus offers to buy or sell shares to flush out the intentions of rivals. On the day, an astonishing 19.4 billion shares were traded, more than were traded in the entirety of the Sixties, but hundreds of millions of them were never actually sold; they were merely held for a few thousandths of a second as traders tested the waters.

Isn’t there something wrong with a system that promotes so much volatility to the benefit of no one except a handful of hedge funds? Can it be a meaningful investment of time and technology? Warren Buffett’s business partner, Charlie Munger, has described High Frequency Trading as “basically evil”. “I think it is very stupid to allow a system to evolve where half of the trading is a bunch of short-term people trying to get information one millionth of a nanosecond ahead of somebody else,” he said earlier this year. “It’s legalised front-running.” HFT is certainly of no clear benefit to everyday investors - savers in pension funds and life policies.

The quants I meet don’t believe what they do is necessarily dangerous but they do voice some doubts.

“Some of the guys who come from pure science and maths backgrounds are used to solving a problem and it works,” Patrick Boyle says. “They think they can find a formula that will perfectly describe how the market moves. That is the philosopher’s stone – it is utterly impossible.” The danger is that in only seeing numbers and patterns the human dimension is forgotten.

After 16 years in the City, Simon Jones is now planning to go travelling. “A quant can earn up to seven figures,” he tells me, “but sometimes I do wonder whether I contributed positively to society.”

And what does he conclude? He pauses. “I was working with the best of the best,” he says. “My bank employed the brightest engineers, chemists and scientists – and we were all working together to get richer. The chemical and physics and health industries are worse off because of what we do because I tell you this: if there was a pay bonus structure similar to what we had in the City for curing cancer, we’d have found a cure for cancer.”

I find that sad and a little bit frightening. So, I ask, quants: good or bad? Jones looks at me and says, “Humans just found a new way of being greedy.”

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The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has been quietly working on a slew of new features which it hopes will encourage more people to contribute to the free, crowdsourced encyclopedia.

Earlier this month, Wikipedia launched version 1.0 of VisualEditor, a way to edit pages without needing to learn the arcane 'wiki markup language'.

In the past, editing Wikipedia has required people to learn some wiki markup – the syntax and keywords used by the MediaWiki software to format a page. While this was considered acceptable in 2001, today it drives away some contributors.

Now VisualEditor allows users to edit and become members of the community, even if they are not wiki markup experts.

“If you know the Wiki user interface it's very primitive. You click on 'edit' and you get basically plain text but with lots of codes in it. We think this is problematic because it excludes a lot of people from editing,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at an event in London on Monday evening.

“VisualEditor is a user interface that is much more familiar to people. When you click edit you get something that looks very much like any word processor, and you can change things and do whatever you want.”

Although VisualEditor has been available as an opt-in "alpha" release on the English-language Wikipedia since December 2012, it is now the default for new editors. However, editing purely in “wikitext” will remain an option for experienced editors who find it faster and more precise.

“This is version 1.0, which means it is the first one that has really had mass adoption and mass use,” said Wales. “We've had a lot of feedback and there's going to be a lot of upgrades and changes, and we're investing a lot in that kind of thing.”

Wikipedia is also working to improve its notification system. In the past editors were greeted with what Wales described as “the orange bar of doom” whenever somebody left them a message. Now Wikipedia's notification system is more like Facebook, with a little number appearing in the corner of the screen.

Notifications are also sorted into categories, so editors can distinguish between messages thanking them for an edit, mentions by other users, and changes that are relevant to them.

“For me this has been a fabulous upgrade because suddenly I see things that I would have never seen before,” said Wales.

Meanwhile, Flow is a planned change to talk pages and other non-article workflows in the MediaWiki software, designed to make it easier for newcomers to interact with the community. Wales described this as one of Wikipedia's “more ambitious and exciting” projects, adding that it will launch around Christmas time.

Central to Wikipedia's attempts to entice new editors is its mobile strategy. While reading Wikipedia on a mobile device is not a problem, editing is a big challenge. Wales said that his development team is now working on ways to improve the experience of editing articles from a mobile device.

In particular, he is keen for Wikipedia to make use of the geo codes that many articles are tagged with. For example, an article on the Eiffel Tower would be tagged with its GPS coordinates in machine-readable format.

“On the web that's just an interesting titbit of information. On mobile clearly that's massive, it's really important and should be a key part of the user interface,” said Wales.

Wales is not just interested in attracting new editors, however. He is also keen to encourage new developers and entrepreneurs to start making better use of Wikipedia's freely licensed data and application programming interface (API).

Much of this data has been encoded in machine-readable format for the Wikidata free knowledge base, which centralizes access to and management of structured data. This data is characterized, catalogued and tagged in various ways to make it easily accessible to developers.

“With open data on the rise and with our efforts to make our data more accessible, I think there's a lot of really interesting initiatives and things that can come out of this,” said Wales.

He compared it to the launch of Facebook 's Social Graph API in 2007, which allowed people in the ecosystem to use Facebook data to create all kinds of new and interesting services.

“We've got all this data within Wikipedia – it's a very very large set of vetted, carefully thought-about, argued-about, debated data ... You can have all these kinds of connections that you can generate, and this is the concept of Wikidata,” said Wales.

He pointed to the efforts of governments around the world to put public data into machine-readable formats, suggesting that this data could be combined with Wikipedia data to power new applications.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting its annual international conference, Wikimania, in London next year, where it will discuss these developments in more detail. The company is hoping to attract 10,000 people to the event, and Wales predicted that it would be “the most outward-looking Wikimania that we've ever had”.

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The iPad generation will learn fewer words, experts fear, as using text messages, emails and computers to learn could be stunting children’s vocabulary.

Our brains are hardwired to learn new words when we hear others use them in conversation. But as children increasingly learn through devices instead of listening to others they do not get the opportunity to hear a wide range of words.

Therefore experts believed that the oral tradition of passing on knowledge is being eroded, and all generations spend too long staring at their screens.

Marco Catani, of the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, told the Daily Mail that increasingly people do not have time to communicate and children turn to the internet, iPhones, mobile phones and tablet computers to which they all have access to.

"These are visual rather than auditory, so it is likely that they will end up with a lower average number of words than previous generations,” he said.

Over reliance on computers has previously been blamed for shorter attention spans and making children increasingly self-centered.

In a study, 27 volunteers had their brains scanned as they learned made-up words, and it was found that hearing and verbally imitating speech was the key to understanding.

Dr Catani explained that when learning new vocabulary you start by hearing it then repeat it until you get it right, and therefore increase your vocabulary and by the time a person reaches adulthood they know around 30,000 words.

One area of the brain, the arcuate fasciculus, is key to this process.

It is a bundle of nerve fibres which links two regions of the brain which are tied to language – one that hears and decodes sounds, and one that moves the mouth to form speech.Those with a stronger arcuate fasciculus found it easier to learn new words, the scans showed.

Once familiar, words are stored in other parts of the brain, according to the study reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Catani said: “Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary, as much of their interaction is through text, email and screen.

"This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children.”

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Researchers claim the number of women aged 34 and under who are dying from alcohol related conditions such as liver disease has more than doubled since the 1980s.

They warn that in the past decade, while there has been a downward trend in alcohol related deaths among young men, they are increasing among young women.

Researchers assessed drink related deaths in three cities — Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool – and blame cheap alcohol and a shift in the way drink is marketed towards women for the increase in deaths.

Dr Deborah Shipton, from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, said the trends appeared in these cities appeared to reflect what was happening nationally.

She said: "Among young men aged 29 to 34, the trends seem to reflect what we see nationally.

"We see the number of deaths among young men go up in the 1990s and early 2000s but then that starts to fall again in the late 2000s.

“Among women of the same age, however, it goes up and they are not decreasing like have seen in other parts of the population.

"What this indicates is that young women are drinking a lot more. If this continues it is going to have huge implications as they get older.

"As people get older, there tends to be more people dying from these diseases, so the fact we are seeing so many deaths at a younger age is very concerning."

There are around 8,700 deaths each year due to alcohol in the UK. Most are caused by liver disease due to damage from alcohol but also include alcohol poisoning.

This week the ministers shelved plans to introduce a minimum price for a unit of alcohol along with a pledge to outlaw multi-buy offers on drinks in supermarkets.

A group of government advisers have now resigned in protest at the decision.

The new findings, which are published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, show that since the 1980s the number of alcohol related deaths in Glasgow trebled overall from 24 in every 100,000 to 64 in every 100,000.

In Manchester and Liverpool the death overall death rates trebled and quadrupled respectively over the three decades.

However, between 2007 and 2011, there has been a small decrease in the number of deaths. Among young men aged between 29 and 34, mortality rates fell from around 38 in every 100,000 to 30 in every 100,000.

Among women aged between 29 and 34, mortality rates have increased from 14 in every 100,000 to 20 in every 100,000.

Dr Shipton added: "I think this has been driven by the increase in availability of alcohol.

"It has become a lot cheaper and as this has happened, it has become more acceptable for women to drink to excessive levels culturally.

"Drinks are marketed much more at women now and drinking venues have also been marketed more at women."

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How does a dictator define victory? In 1991, Saddam Hussein convinced himself that he had beaten America in the First Gulf War. Saddam’s army had been routed and his air force and navy pretty much destroyed. During a ground campaign lasting only 100 hours (in which, incidentally, not a single US or British soldier was killed by enemy fire in battle), Iraq was ignominiously expelled from Kuwait.

So why did Saddam think he had won? Well, at the moment of the ceasefire, he was still alive in Baghdad and able to call himself “president of Iraq”. Never mind that his foreign adventure had resulted in one of the most comprehensive military defeats of all time.

The lesson is that when it comes to claiming victory, dictators set the bar very low. We may now be seeing a version of this phenomenon in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has lost control of swathes of his country, including the northern and southern border regions and the largely Kurdish area of the north-east. Syria's biggest city, Aleppo, is now contested territory.

True, Assad has won a series of battles in recent months, but the aim of this offensive is not to reimpose his rule over all of Syria. Instead, his relatively modest objective is to dominate a corridor of territory linking Damascus with the Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean coast around Latakia.

Put simply, Assad has written off most of Syria. He is strengthening his grip on an area of the country. But he is not, in any real sense, the president of all Syria. His writ no longer runs over most of the country – and he is not trying to change that in anything but a limited sense. In reality, he is fighting to secure his position as the most powerful warlord in a country of warlords.

In his own mind, however, Assad might believe he is winning because he still holds Damascus and his traditional heartland. I wonder if he will succumb to the Saddam definition of victory: as long as you are alive and in your capital – and your entourage of sycophants still calls you “Mr President” – then you have won.

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Scientists are developing a pill that could be used to cure cat allergies, ridding sufferers of sniffing, sneezing and itchy eyes.

Researchers claim they may have discovered a cure for the UK's most common pet allergy and say treatment could be on the market within five years.

A team from Cambridge University discovered the trigger that can cause allergic reactions in one in ten people.

The scientists believe it is a protein in feline dandruff, known as dander, that combines with a chemical in humans to spark the reaction.

The only treatment currently available for symptoms, which can also include rashes and dangerous asthma attacks, is to take antihistamines or to have a number of injections to build up a tolerance to the allergen.

However, scientists believe a pill or inhaler could be used to treat the problem.

Lead author Dr Clare Bryant, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine, told the Daily Mail: "When cats lick themselves they spread saliva, hormones and skin cells on to their coat.

"When the hair falls out, it is proteins in this dandruff stuck on their fur that people are allergic to. How cat dander causes such a severe allergic reaction in some people has long been a mystery.

"This is the first time we have discovered the process that leads to the allergic reaction. It opens up a whole new type of drug to treat it."

The research, which will be published in the Journal of Immunology, suggests that a similar treatment could be used to treat dog allergy sufferers.

"With just a puff of an inhaler which contains the drug, a person would be OK to interact with cats without an adverse reaction, " Dr Bryant added.

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Women like to date men who make them laugh due to evolutionary differences hard-wired into our brains, according to new research.

Scientists found that women's brains show greater activity than men's in reward-related regions in response to humour.

The finding is consistent with the idea that women have evolved to appreciate humour, whereas men have evolved to produce humour.

According to this view, women use a man's ability to make them laugh as a way to judge his genetic fitness as a suitable partner and potential father.

The new study, by Stanford University School of Medicine, involved scanning the brains of 22 girls and boys aged from six to 13 as they viewed funny videos, such as people falling over and animals performing tricks.

For comparison, the children also watched 'positive' clips, featuring dancers and snowboarders, and neutral clips, featuring nature videos and children riding bikes.

In addition to MRI scanning of their brains, the children were also asked how much they enjoyed the clips and how funny they found them.

During funny clips, girls brains showed more heightened activity than the boys' in a range of areas including the midbrain and amygdala.

This indicates that girls experienced stronger mirth and positive feelings, the researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Social Neuroscience, said.

"Our data for the first time disclose that sex differences in humour appreciation already exist in young children," they wrote.

They added their findings suggest selecting a mate by responding to humour is more effective in women "because the female brain, and particularly the reward circuit, is biologically better prepared to respond accordingly."

The study, which the authors said was the first to examine gender-related brain differences in response to humour in children, suggests that such differences have evolved rather than being learnt.

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Researchers claim that caffeine acts as a mild antidepressant by helping to boost mood hormones and other chemical signals in the brain.

Using data from 208,424 people, they found those who drank two to three cups of coffee a day had a 45 percent lower risk of suicide than those who drank less than one.

For those consumed more than four cups a day had a 53 percent lower risk.

There were 277 deaths from suicide during the study period, which stretched from 1988 to 2008.

Around 70-80 percent of the participants were coffee drinkers, according the paper, which is published in the World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

The researchers, who are based at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, however, if depressed adults were already drinking coffee, increasing their intake would probably have little impact.

"Overall, our results suggest that there is little further benefit for consumption above two to three cups/day or 400 mg of caffeine/day," wrote Professor Alberto Ascherio and his colleagues.

Previous research has shown that caffeine can increase the expression of neurotransmitters in the brain, such as serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline, which affect emotions.

SEE ALSO: Is Coffee Bad For You?

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The week before last, China reported that its second quarter GDP slowed to 7.5pc, following on from 7.7pc growth rate reported in Q1.

Many people are worrying that China's weaker growth is not only set to continue but maybe weaken even further. A number of observers are starting to think about a so-called "hard landing".

I happened to spend a couple of days in China the week before the Q2 numbers were published so my mind is fresh with things I observed and heard. I was a guest of the 48 Icebreakers Group, who were celebrating their 60th anniversary, and met a number of senior policymakers. I also met a number of leading business people and participated in a lively discussion about the economy hosted by CCCTV, the state television channel.

I came away thinking that, while China's slower growth is for real, most of it has occurred as a result of government policies as part of their shift to focusing on a better quality of growth and not just growth for the sake of it.

Before I turn to discussing the details behind the current state of the economy, let us not forget this: China's economy is $8.2 trillion, now more than half the size of the US. That means if China grows by 7.5pc - its Q2 rate and what the government is assuming for the rest of the decade - this would be equivalent of the US growing by 4pc.

The US has not grown by 4pc for many decades, apart from the odd year. So if China's slowdown is limited to 7.5pc, then from a global perspective, this is a country that is going to have a massive impact on the world. So, while a slowdown from above the 10pc China achieved for the best part of the last three decades is notable, from a global perspective, it is not as slow as many people think. If China grows by 7.5pt for the decade (it's currently closer to 8.5pc so far this decade), it will be an economy of around $16 trillion or more by 2020, allowing its average citizen to enjoy wealth of around $12-13,000.

What would be of concern is if China was still growing by 10pc or more, and its growth was based on exports and state-backed investment spending. Such growth would place huge pressure on natural resources as well as creating many problems internally in China, including a widening gap between the privileged elite and the less well-off.

The current leadership has taken up the mantle of the previous regime's five-year plan and decided that it wants more balanced growth, which is more inclusive for all its 1.3 billion people. Moreover, it seems intent on trying to execute this plan and actually make the transition to a more balanced economy, with a greater role for the consumer and less importance for exports and state or regional state-backed investment.

In my TV discussion, I debated the current state of the economy and these challenges with other guests, most of whom are prominent Chinese business people or economists. To my slight surprise, given that it was CCTV, they were all quite open (I didn't see it shown on TV so I am not aware of what was edited out!). A couple thought that the leadership was not really committed to change; others thought they were, but it is extremely difficult to engineer.

I teased them all, saying this is the sort of thing I hear from around the world about China all the time these days. I also pointed out that if you track the relationship between monthly reported retail sales - the only monthly guide for consumer spending, relative to industrial production - you can see that it is slowly trending in the right direction. This was partly in response to one person who claimed that, despite the attention being given to higher wages in China, the real value of household wealth continues to decline, making it difficult for most Chinese people to consume.

Given that real retail sales are trending higher, relative to industrial production, despite the state-enforced clampdown on luxury gifting and its efforts to stop house prices rising too quickly, there must be some real wealth being created, otherwise it wouldn't be happening.

I also cited a personal anecdote: walking around the shopping mall in the complex where I was staying I was struck how busy it was for a weekday evening. I have been staying there since it was first built and it never used to be so packed.

I left China wondering whether, in contrast to previous periods, this leadership is trying to change too many things at the same time. I discussed this quite openly with the policymakers I spoke to, and all of them suggested it is possible that growth could be slower than they would prefer, but they are determined to make these changes.

I ended up suggesting to some of them that, to help the adjustment, perhaps they might want to do something really bold and even get rid of the notion of the "migrant worker" completely, allowing them to have the same rights as everyone else. Far from demonstrating irritation at my possible lack of diplomacy, two said in essence this is what they will do in the next couple of years in all but the largest cities.

Returning to London, I still think there is a risk that growth might slow further as a result of government-inspired policy changes, but given the leadership's determination, I am more confident that the decade ambition of 7.5pc is likely to be achieved. For the rest of us, including here in the UK, that is going to remain a fantastic business opportunity, especially for those that can provide want they want to consume.

Jim O’Neill is former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and chairman of education charity Shine (www.shinetrust.org.uk)

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American student Gabrielle Turnquest was called to the Bar of England and Wales after passing her exams at just 18.

The average lawyer undertakes the Bar Professional Training Course when they are 27.

However, the young high-flyer will not go on to work in the UK as she wants to return to her native America to qualify as a lawyer there.

But her success means she is also called to the Bahamas Bar, the country of her parents, and she hopes to work there.

Gabrielle took the course, at the University of Law, along with her sister Kandi, who also passed her exams but at the ripe old age of 22.

The teenager, who is originally from Windermere, Florida, hopes eventually to be a fashion law specialist.

She said: “I am honoured to be the youngest person to pass the Bar exams but, really, I was not aware at the time what the average age was.

“I didn’t fully realise the impact of it.”

Gabrielle has already made history at her previous university, Liberty University in Virginia, where she was the youngest person to finish an undergraduate degree there, in psychology, at the age of 16.

If the youngster wanted to work as a barrister in the UK she would still have to carry out a pupillage at a chambers for at least a year and then be granted a tenancy.

Traditionally, a trainee lawyer had to be 21 to be eligible for the call to The Bar but that was scrapped in 2009 with the introduction of the Bar Training Regulations.

Nigel Savage, President and Provost at The University of Law, said: "The growing globalisation of law firms and the need for more international expertise means that it is becoming increasingly more important for young legal professionals to have experience across different legal markets if they are going to maximise the number of job opportunities that are available to them.”

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A hangover can leave you with more than a sore head in the morning — it impairs the way your brain holds and processes information, according to new research.

Anyone who has woken up after a heavy night of drinking will have suspected it already, but it seems a hangover really does affect your ability to think clearly.

Psychologists studying hangovers, which they define as the symptoms left behind after alcohol levels in the blood return to zero, have found they impair the way the brain works.

The findings indicate that the impact of an excessive night of drinking can last far longer than the time it takes to become sober again.

Indeed, anyone who has woken up to be haunted by their actions and behaviour whilst inebriated will know of the misery a hangover can bring.

The new research suggests along with the dizziness, nausea and anxiety a hangover can induce, it also leaves the brain itself less able to function.

Preliminary findings, which are due to be presented at a conference at Keele University on Thursday, show that suffering from a hangover impacts your "working memory."

This governs the ability to hold information in your mind and to manipulate it, leaving sufferers less able to perform tasks such as mental arithmetic.

Dr Lauren Owen, Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at Keele University’s school of psychology who has been leading the research, said: "Most people are familiar with the undesirable hangover effects that may arise the day after excessive drinking.

"What’s more the symptoms of alcohol hangover are not just physiological — they affect cognitive functioning and mood as well which may lead to numerous undesirable life consequences.

"Although numerous scientific papers cover the acute effects of alcohol consumption, researchers have largely neglected the issue of alcohol hangover.

"We are measuring a large range of cognitive functions using a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests which will reveal the associated brain functions that may be impaired.

"The findings are preliminary, but so far we are observing that tasks that rely on what psychologists call 'working memory' seem to be most reliably affected.

"So far we have found there are statistically significant differences on these tasks compared to the 'no alcohol' condition however the magnitude will not be fully apparent until all the data is in."

She said that the early results seem to indicate a 5-10 percent drop in performance of working memory and an increase in errors by around 30 per cent while participants were hung-over.

Reaction times were also marginally slower in those who were hung-over and represented someone in their 20s having the reaction times equivalent to someone in their 40s.

The conference will also hear about new evidence from the Netherlands about how a hangover induced by alcohol can also have an affect on driving performance.

Researchers have also been examining whether alcohol induced hangovers decline in with age.

Dr Richard Stephens, a senior psychology lecturer at Keele University who has organised the conference, said: "People tend to think that hangovers get worse with age, but we are finding that people generally suffer fewer hangovers.

"This is probably because older people learn what they can drink and what they cannot.

"We have still to compare an older person with a younger person who drink the same thing."

The scientific cause of hangovers is still not well understood. While it is thought to be partly a symptom of dehydration, chemicals in the drink are also thought to play a role.

The main form of alcohol found in drinks is ethanol, which the body breaks down into chemical called acetate so it can be expelled from the body.

However, it can briefly form a toxic molecule called acetaldehyde during that process.

Low levels of methanol that can also be found in some alcoholic drinks and when this is broken down it forms more toxic compounds.

Complex organic molecules known as congeners can also be found in darker alcoholic drinks and are also thought to worsen a hangover.

It may go someway to explaining why drinking whisky can cause more of a hangover than drinking vodka.

However, for anyone reading this and suffering from a hangover, Dr Stephens says there may be some evidence to support one common cure.

He said: "The enzymes in our bodies preferentially break down ethanol over methanol.

"So if they are breaking down methanol and producing these toxins, drinking a bit more ethanol will help.

"So there is a biological basis for hair of the dog."

However, he adds, this may simply put off the inevitable and there is evidence that alcoholics suffer worse hangovers.

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While most dog owners will recognise their pet’s wagging tail as a sign of joy, they may also want to pay more attention to their animal’s face the next time they walk in through the front door.

Animal behaviour experts have found the animals’ emotions are betrayed by specific facial movements that can reveal whether your dog really is pleased to see you.

Using high-speed cameras, the researchers tracked the changes in the faces of dogs in the moments they were reunited with their owners or when meeting a stranger for the first time.

They found that the dogs tended to move their left eyebrow upwards around half a second after seeing their owner.

When the animals were introduced to someone they had never met before, they moved their left ear back slightly.

If they were presented with an object they didn’t like, such as a pair of nail clippers, the animals moved their right ear instead.

Dr Miho Nagasawa, from the department of animal science at Azabu University in Sagamihara, Japan, said: “It is difficult to explain this difference in movement between the ears and eyebrows. “Dogs’ ears are prominent features used to convey emotional expression, therefore our results suggest that dogs were more cautious toward unfamiliar people.

“In contrast, eyebrow movement might indicate a visible response whereby dogs attempted to look at their owners more intently.”

The researchers, whose study is published in the journal Behavioural Processes, placed 12 dogs in a room divided by a partition with some black curtains that opened briefly to all the dogs to glimpse what was on the other side.

Coloured tags were placed on the dog’s faces to allow a high speed camera to precisely track the movement of their features.

When the curtain opened, their owner, a stranger, a toy or an item they did not like was on the other side, allowing the researchers to record their response.

They found that the dogs moved their eyebrows upwards whenever they saw someone behind the screen, but far more when it was their owner, particularly on the left side.

The researchers suggest the subtle changes on different sides of their face are a reflection of activity in key parts of the brain that control emotions.

They also say it could because the animals were experiencing conflicted emotions – joy at seeing their owner but sadness at not being able to reach them through the partition.

Dr Nagasawa said: “One explanation for this result is that presentation of the owner elicited both negative and positive emotions.

“A negative response might appear … perhaps because the dogs could not approach and touch their owners despite seeing them through the partitions.”

The findings come after psychologists conducted research earlier this year that showed how many owners are able to detect a range of emotions in the facial expressions of their pets.

Dr Tina Bloom, from Walden University in Minneapolis, Minn. found that even people with minimal experience with dogs could detect happy, sad, surprised and frightened expressions .

Her findings have suggested that humans have developed a natural empathy with dogs after evolving side by side for thousands of years.

Dogs have also been found to be adept at reading emotions in human faces and reacting to them.

Dr Nagasawa added: “Ownership is a significant social factor for dogs. This suggests that human-dog bonding relationships have a biological basis.

“Canids are highly social and communicate using an abundant array of facial expressions.

“These communication methods might play an important role in their communication with humans.”

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