Greek entrepreneur Andreas Raptopoulos saw drones being used to deliver pizza and set about solving a real problem
When Domino's sent two pepperoni pizzas on a 10-minute drone flight last summer in a publicity stunt to demonstrate how takeaways may be delivered in the future, Andreas Raptopoulos reacted with scorn.
"This is total nonsense. Why the hell would you do that? The public risk to transport a pizza around when you can do it perfectly well with all of the infrastructure you already have there? Why don't you use the same technology to save somebody's life when a mother needs medicine or a child needs medicine instead of it being stuck on a lorry on a muddy road. To me, this is where technology works best," the Greek entrepreneur said.
87% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, which is having a disastrous effect on our climate. Reducing our energy use can make a big difference to our planet as well as our wallets
Join Catherine Shoard on the sofa to review the week's big UK releases. Chris Evans is back as Captain America takes on The Winter Soldier in another chapter of Marvel's Avengers franchise; the Muppets return in Muppets Most Wanted, aided and abetted by Ricky Gervais; and Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom highlights the art, craft and hard graft of the humble backing singer. With Peter Bradshaw and Andrew Pulver
Listen to an audio-only version of the show
More from the Captain America interviews
More from the Muppets interviews
This weekends selection of images around the world from same-sex marriages in UK to Land Day in Jerusalem
The historic wine city is being spruced up and updated for the 21st century thanks to a massive regeneration effort. Our writer raises a glass to its reinvention
It's Sunday night and my final meal in Bordeaux. I'm talking with a local called Brigitte in Le Plat à Oreilles, a popular husband-and-wife-run restaurant in the city centre that serves traditional country food. So far, so Bordeaux. But as I dig my spoon into the fricassée de lapin and try not to slurp my glass of Graves, I'm finding it hard to recognise the city that Brigitte is describing.
"Growing up in Bordeaux, I never really saw the river," she says. "It was physically blocked off by the port until about 10 years ago. In the city centre, the buildings were dark and dirty, and you couldn't really sit outside in the squares because of all the cars. It wasn't a very inspiring place to be."
Musical production telling the story of Islam's main prophet has premiered in Sharjah, the small emirate adjoining Dubai
It was quite a challenge, even for the crack team of theatrical experts summoned from around the world: less than six months to produce a hi-tech musical extravaganza about one of the most renowned figures in human history. Oh yes, and the title character can't appear on stage.
But somehow it happened and on Sunday night a lavish production about the life and teachings of Muhammad, Islam's main prophet, intended as a rejoinder to more militant interpretations of the faith, premiered at a specially built £20m mock-Roman amphitheatre in Sharjah, the small emirate adjoining Dubai.
David Park's evocative novellas examine the impact of art through the lives of three poets' wives
The thorny relationship between art and life is probed powerfully by David Park in three absorbing novellas depicting the lives of the wives of three poets, and moving ambitiously from 18th-century London to 1930s Moscow, to contemporary Ireland.
These are poets who suffer for their art, who are at odds with society. We meet William Blake's wife, Catherine, at a time when society scorns him; Nadezhda, the fascinating wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was killed during Stalin's regime; and finally the grieving widow of a fictional contemporary Irish poet.
Jean Hanff Korelitz's pacy thriller examines the fear that we might not know our nearest and dearest as well as we think
If you're a successful couples therapist, secure in your happy marriage to a quietly heroic paediatrician and about to publish a book called You Should Have Known, which berates women in failed relationships for ignoring their partners' faults, it's a pretty safe bet that dramatic irony will force you to swallow some of your own bitter medicine before too long. For Grace Reinhart Sachs, the heroine of Jean Hanff Korelitz's fifth novel, the blow is delivered when one of the mothers at her son's elite school is murdered and the police arrive at her door, looking for her husband, Jonathan.
You Should Have Known occupies similar territory to Gone Girl or The Husband's Secret, domestic suspense novels built on the universal fear that we might not know those closest to us as well as we think. Though it begins as a sharp comedy of manners around the lives of New York's super rich, the tone quickly grows darker as the tension mounts. The result is a witty, often insightful examination of marriage with the pace of a psychological thriller.
The theory that mothers become infertile in middle age so that they can help care for their grandchildren is under attack, raising new questions about female identity
Sitting at my desk today is a benefit made possible by my mother-in-law. She is taking care of my son, leaving me free to do other work and ideally, in biological terms, have more babies. That, in short, is the leading explanation for why she and other women of her age have evolved to stop having babies of their own and live long post-menopausal lives. It's known as the grandmother hypothesis.
However, this idea, and its comforting portrait of family cooperation, is being challenged. It has been half a century since scientists began to explore why human females were one of only a couple of species to became infertile so early in their lives. The American evolutionary biologist George Williams wrote in 1957 that the menopause may have emerged to protect older women from the risks linked to childbirth, keeping them alive long enough to make sure their children grew up to have grandchildren.
The tsar's daughters, murdered in the Russian revolution, take centre stage in Helen Rappaport's powerful account of the end of the Romanovs
The four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II were murdered almost by accident. "I will never be the Marat of the Russian revolution," pledged the prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, after the February revolution in 1917. He tried to find the family refuge outside Russia (Britain's George V couldn't help, although Nicholas's wife, Alexandra, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria) and then sent them to Siberia hoping that the Russian populace would forget about them. But revolutions demand their victims. The entire family was moved to Ekaterinburg and shot. Helen Rappaport has already written about the Romanovs' terrifying final weeks in prison. Now she moves from nightmare to fairytale, placing the four beautiful grand duchesses centre stage for the first time.
What is most surprising in this story is quite how unsuited the family is to power. They all live chiefly for each other. Alexandra finds the business of state "a horrid bore" that keeps her husband away from her. Nicholas comes home for the children's bathtime every night and records episodes of teething and weaning in his diary. When Nicholas abdicates, his first thought is that now he can "fulfil my life's desire to have a farm, somewhere in England".
Bérénice Bejo is outstanding in Oscar-winner Asghar Farhadi's rich study of people trapped in physical and emotional limbo
In the Oscar-winning drama A Separation, the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi painted a piercingly insightful picture of a failing marriage framed within the strictures of a rigidly regulated society the personal and political intertwined, with painful consequences. Although the film depicted (and was indeed made under) often difficult circumstances, its characters were as rich, vibrant and diverse as any that have graced our screens in recent memory, their trials and tribulations at once regionally specific yet oddly universal. In The Past, Farhadi returns to the theme of broken marriage, this time in the altogether more laissez-faire world of a Parisian suburb, where the issue of self-determination seems both open and secular. Yet even in this very different society, Farhadi finds his characters trapped, not by the constraints of an overbearing authority but by the spectre of the past.
Cannes prize-winner Bérénice Bejo brings both heft and mercuriality to the role of Marie, a soon-to-be divorcee who has unfinished business with her estranged Iranian husband, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa). Summoned to France to sign the final legal papers several years after their initial separation, the apparently unreliable Ahmad arrives from Tehran to find Marie pregnant with the child of her new lover, Samir (the brilliant Tahar Rahim), whose own wife, Céline, has drunk poison, to the horror of Marie's alienated teenage daughter, Lucie. Marie wants Ahmad to talk to the troubled girl, but is there something more aggressive about her insistence that her ex stays in the small residence that now houses her new partner and his angry, bewildered son?
An outstanding shot from the Rowing World Cup in Sydney matches the perfect symmetry of a rower's oars with the early morning sunrise reflecting on the water
Charlotte Mendelson invents a satisfying fairy tale starring a misfit teenager and a trio of elderly Hungarian ladies
Families, Charlotte Mendelson's delicious fourth novel confirms, are as unknowable from within as from without. Marina's is no exception. Westminster Court, the apartment building in which she has largely been raised, squats in a poky corner of unlovely Bayswater. Inside, it's a little patch of Hungary.
With her very English mother, Laura, she moved there to live with her maternal grandmother and two great-aunts after her father vanished. Rozsi, Zsuzsi and Ildi are refugees from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their extravagant hand gestures, dramatic eyebrows and fondness for cold sour-cherry soup make them irresistible. "Dar-link!" they cry out in greeting, their accents dusting everything with "snow and fir and darkness".
Is your car a let down at the pumps? There's a simple reason why fuel- efficiency figures are always way out
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My youngest daughter used to struggle with what was "real" and what was "made up". Books and films were real, but the stories in them were made up. Cartoon characters were made up, of course, but one day we met an 8ft Percy Pig in Hyde Park. That really messed with her little blonde head.
Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh has written a brutally honest account of his work and bungling NHS bureaucracy
Why has no one ever written a book like this before? It simply tells the stories, with great tenderness, insight and self-doubt, of a phenomenal neurosurgeon who has been at the height of his specialism for decades and now has chosen, with retirement looming, to write an honest book. Why haven't more surgeons written books, especially of this prosaic beauty? Of blood and doubts, mistakes, decisions: were they all so unable to descend into the mire of Grub Street, unless it was with black or, worse, "wry" humour?
Well, thank God for Henry Marsh. His speciality is drilling into people's heads and sucking out or cauterising various problem globules, usually life-threatening. Those are the bald basics, but they disguise a multitude of traumas, not least those of a very human surgeon. He writes with near-existential subtlety about the very fact of operating within a brain, supposed repository of the soul and with myriad capacities for emotion, memory, belief, speech and, maybe, soul: but also, mainly, jelly and blood. He has been 4mm away, often, even with microtelescopes, from catastrophe.
Hurray for the Riff Raff rage against violence on their impressive fifth album of rootsy rock
Everyone loves a good murder ballad even some feminists, for whom the cognitive dissonance is particularly brutal. In traditional song, women are forever being lured to grisly ends, "and the whole world sings, like there's nothing going wrong", notes Alynda Lee Segarra, who, together with her fiddle player Yosi Perlstein and a cast of New Orleans musicians, go by the name Hurray for the Riff Raff.
Their faultless fifth album pays homage to a variety of roots forms. There are easy-going country laments here, harmonicas, a blues or three and even a doo-wop number, all doffing hats to tradition. Segarra's caramel voice goes down spectacularly easily, and the effortless swing of these songs suggest she was born and bred under a bandstand south of the Mason-Dixon line (spoiler alert: she wasn't).
A weaker pound could help, but a change of mindset is required to rebalance Britain's post-recession economy
Forget Harold Wilson and the jumbo jets that allegedly cost Labour the 1970 election. Forget Nigel Lawson and the import binge of the 1980s. Britain has never seen bigger current account deficits than those it is notching up right now.
Back in the 1960s, a deficit of 1% of national output would have been seen as dangerously high. A 3% deficit would have had investors heading for the exits, prompting a run on sterling. The shortfalls in the third and fourth quarters of 2013 averaged 5.5% of GDP, we learned last week, and yet the pound is seen as a safe-haven currency.
The battle to prove whether these bones actually are Richard's is a bit like quibbling about the authenticity of Wolf Hall
There's been a twist in the strangest cold case of our times: Richard III's bones, thought to have been discovered in 2012, may yet prove as elusive of those of the princes in the tower who he is alleged to have murdered. Two senior academics have cast doubt on claims by Leicester University that his skeleton has been found, its spine bent out of shape by scoliosis, using DNA and carbon dating. There are other noblemen of the time who would have shared the crucial genetic material, they argue, meaning that the match with a swab taken from Richard's distant relative, Michael Ibsen, is inconclusive.
The university has hit back. There's other evidence, it says, that supports a positive identification. But the point is that it doesn't really matter. A couple of dissenting voices may be just what this story needs.
An end to the 'bulk collection' of phone records won't stop the NSA from snooping on us online
Last week in the Hague, Barack Obama seemed to have suddenly remembered the oath he swore on his inauguration as president that stuff about preserving, protecting and defending the constitution of the United States. At any rate, he announced that the NSA would end the "bulk collection" of telephone records and instead would be required to seek a new kind of court order to search data held by telecommunications companies.
This policy change is a tacit admission of what Edward Snowden (and 2001 whistleblower William Binney before him) had been claiming, namely that the warrantless surveillance of US citizens by the NSA and other government agencies does, in fact, violate the constitution of the United States. Obama's announcement looked to some observers as the first crack to appear in the implacable facade of the national surveillance state. This looked promising because, as we know from second world war movies, the first crack is inevitably the harbinger of the eventual total collapse of the dam.
Lachlan Murdoch is back in the picture as 'co-chairman' of 21st Century Fox, but is his father a 'co' sort of person?
So, the older brother becomes "co-chairman" of the empire while the younger brother has to make do with being a mere "co-chief operating officer" of 21st Century Fox. You'd reckon, at first glance, that Rupert Murdoch's own game of thrones was well nigh over. Lachlan, after a prolonged, quasi-entrepreneurial sulk, returns to the Westeros fold. James, victim of the Wapping wild lands, has to make do with TV, movies, videos and sundry digital wonders.
There's no doubt, at first glance, who's won. Daughter Elisabeth, in many ways the ablest but also most independent of the lot, remains in the land of dragons across the Narrow Sea. Ex-wife Wendi, meanwhile, was cancelled at the end of marital series three, a very conscious uncoupling.
Roger Goodell wants to give these women fewer labor rights than a stripper and less pay than a garment worker? Bring it on
Just why would someone ever want to become an NFL cheerleader? For the fleeting, half-baked fame? The camaraderie? Recognition for your athletic-aesthetic prowess? Or maybe its the privilege of being one of Americas Sporting Handmaiden and all the charitable, community-serving femininity youll embody forever after. (Provided, of course, you dont move on to stripping, or bring the NFL into disrepute while you represent it.)
Hopefully young women are looking for at least one of the above, because its certainly not the money, honey: as a brewing lawsuit brought against the Oakland Raiders by their cheer squad has revealed, NFL cheerleaders are some of the most poorly paid legal workers in America. With next to no labor rights and making nowhere near the minimum wage, they could use a cheer or two themselves.
Cameron, Miliband, Clegg the harder they try, the more we despise them
What do the British want from their politicians? That must be a question the aides of all the party leaders agonise over. It's what they're trying to answer as they slave over the latest soundbite or policy initiative, before sending their leaders out into a hostile media environment to chorus "I am not a phoney like the others! I am my own man slash woman!"
The Russians have their answer: bare-chested aggression is what floats their boat. The merciless sturgeon-eyed tyrant. The Russians don't want to vote for the kind of sap who wouldn't rig the election if they didn't. After centuries of dysfunctional relationships with their leaders, they've given up resisting: the fact is they're attracted to a strong man, even when he slaps them about a bit.
As the first same-sex couples celebrate their weddings, we salute the new law
On Friday, for the first time, rainbow flags, the colours of the gay community, flew over two government buildings in London in what the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, called "a small symbol to celebrate a massive achievement". Just after midnight, in London's Camden Town Hall, Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway were among the first same-sex couples to be pronounced "husband and husband".
Regardless of personal views on the paraphernalia of orange blossom and nuptials, the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act now in law in England and Wales with Scotland following in the autumn marks a striking and remarkably rapid change in social attitudes on the question of equality. Polls show two-thirds of people back same-sex unions. Yet little more than a decade ago, England still had a law on the books banning the "promotion" of homosexuality.
Metal veterans to be joined at the concert by Soundgarden and Faith No More
Black Sabbath: 'We used to have cocaine flown in by private plane'
Black Sabbath are to headline Hyde Park in London on 4 July, as part of the British Summer Time festival. The veteran metal band reached No 1 in both the UK and US album charts last year with 13, their first album with original singer Ozzy Osbourne since 1978, and played sold out arena shows in Britain before Christmas. Now they are to play one of the capital's signature summer shows.
"The first time I came to London I didn't have a pot to piss in and I spent the advance I got for the first album on a new pair of shoes and some Brut aftershave," Osbourne said. "Returning almost 50 years on, we are doing a it better for ourselves so I may even splash out on some new aftershave before taking to the stage at Hyde Park, the most beautiful park in London that has opened its gates to so many legends in the past. We are beyond honoured to be allowed to put on a show and hope the Royals will enjoy it."
The American ghostly folk exponent on her time in Bonnie Prince Billy's band and why it's hard keeping festival crowds happy
The Observer's A-Z of festivals 2014 in pictures
Ed Vulliamy: my life in festivals
Win a pair of tickets to the festival of your choice this summer
The subtle musician has it tough at festivals. Those intimate, murmured lyrics, the sleepy strums, tricks that work so well on record they're not best suited to open fields, wind-whipped marquees, audiences that don't always fully invest.
"It's kind of a detached experience, not the same as playing a venue at all," says Angel Olsen, a soft-spoken American whose intense, spectral folk has won her many fans in recent months. "People are drunk, milling around; half the time they're not really even, like, enjoying themselves because they're sweaty and they can't see and people are stepping on their toes. It's hard to tell if people are going to pay attention at festivals. But I've had a pretty decent time with it so far."