On one level, sexual attraction is simply a matter of chemicals. So could a scent-focused singles night help you find a new mate?
When most new romances seem to be sparked online and on your phone, could Pheromone Parties, an LA dating craze, provide the perfect antidote? Sleep in a T-shirt for three days, bag it and take it to a bar. Then let people smell it. If they're drawn to your scent, they have their photo taken with your bag, so you can track them down and get chatting.
The premise is that pheromones are the chemical triggers of sexual attraction. Our DNA will respond to mating potential and drive us to hook up.
Chiropractors claim that the posture people adopt when using their mobile phones could shorten their lives. Is this really true?
Texting is bad for your health. Do it while walking and you can bump into walls or step out into traffic. Studies have linked excessive texting with insomnia, stress and painful tendons (BlackBerry thumb). Now the United Chiropractic Association (UCA) has warned that texting for long periods could lower life expectancy because it makes people lean forward. The association links "forward-leaning posture" (defined as dropping the head forward and rounding the shoulders) with the risk of developing hyperkyphosis in old age. Hyperkyphosis is an abnormal rounding of the upper spine that reduces the space available for the heart and lungs, so they are put under pressure and work less effectively. An older person with hyperkyphosis, chiropractors warn, will suffer the same increase in the risk of death as an obese person. The association is encouraging people to have their posture checked by a registered chiropractor. So should you limit your texting immediately?
The story of the man who sells his soul for worldly gain has been a powerful influence on composers and writers for centuries. As three new Fausts open at the Royal Opera House, novelist Philip Hensher journeys into the abyss
Faust is always with us. When it first appears in written form, in 1587, much of the narrative is already here: the signing of a contract in blood, a period of worldly power, including great influence over specific royal courts and the ability to call great figures back to life. Other elements in the story, such as a woman whom Faust drags down and who ultimately redeems herself, and sometimes, him too, would have to wait.
But the story goes back long before that. Scholars trace it to Simon Magus in the Acts of the Apostles, the magician of Samaria who tries to purchase the holy powers of the Apostles. Some form of the bargain that makes a gain at too great a cost surfaces in imaginative literature throughout history Great Expectations and The Godfather are variations on the Faust story. It may be one of those fundamental narratives, like Cinderella, that seems to be hardwired into the human brain to help us make sense of a sequence of events. Tony Blair's story was frequently described in a casual way as "Shakespearean", but "Marlovian" would have been more accurate. The tragedy of a politician who is seen as selling his principles for power fits the Faust plot with uncanny precision. If Blair looked like Faust, a small investigation into how the unusual adjective "Mephistophelean" followed Peter Mandelson around is rather instructive.
John Crace condenses a pale imitation of Austen's gothic pastiche with added vampire intrigue into a bite-sized 600 words
It was a source of constant disappointment to Catherine Morland that her life did not more closely resemble her books. Though by the end of this one, she would be glad of all the distance she could get. Improbable as it may seem in the 21st century, Cat, as she preferred to be known (short for Catatonic), had never once left her small Dorset village in her 17 years. Indeed it was not entirely clear she was aware of anything but the Twilight novels of Stephenie Meyer. So it came as some surprise to Cat to be informed by her neighbours, the Allens, that there was a place called Edinburgh in Scotland and that they were inviting her to join them for the festival.
To her surprise, on arrival in the city of contrasts, intimate surprises and contrasts, Cat found she had been invited to the Highland Ball! She wasn't entirely sure why Highland Ball! had an exclamation mark but she assumed it was the style of a Jane Austen parody, and so worried instead about her inability to reel. Fortunately, Mrs Allen had already considered this possibility and had arranged for Cat to have dancing lessons with the enigmatically pale Henry Tilney.
Four young people share their stories of working in low-wage jobs, from Party City to McDonalds to coffee shops and groceries
"Here, put your ear right here," Caroline Albanese says, pointing at her wrist. As you get closer, you can hear the bones in her wrist make a strange click, click, click as she turns her hand. "That happened while I was blowing balloons at Party City one day," she explains, sounding proud of the old battle wound. The injury, which happened when her hand got stuck between two helium tanks, included a broken finger and caused her to miss over a week of work. "I didn't know you could get workers' compensation back then. No one told me," she says.
Yet regrets about her time at Party City are few and far between. It was her first job and while it was not exactly a dream job, it helped her pay for college. Not all 16-year-olds are as lucky anymore, with many low wage jobs being filled with college students, graduates and those who have found themselves out of a job due to bad economy.
Apollo, Manchester
Tempah says he wants to make 'deeper music' after battling with the notion of selling out, but there are few signs of hidden depths amid this ear-splitting performance
"Manchest-ah!" yells Tinie Tempah, as he appears atop a giant roofed construction, wearing a silver glitter suit. A bona fide pop star following two unit-shifting albums, he performs his lucrative grime/dance/hip-hop/pop formula backed by an ear-splittingly loud live band, with shrieking guitar solos played by metal men with beards.
First scheduled for last December, the "Demonstration" tour was postponed owing to "needing more rehearsals", and an ambitious gig at Manchester's vast arena became two at the smaller if not exactly intimate Apollo. Tempah seems to have undergone other dark nights of the soul.
Demand for affordable Scandinavian chic has helped Danish chain of variety stores go from strength to strength in Britain
Whether it's noir detectives, Faroese knits or home furnishings, Scandinavian chic has never been cooler. Now the Danes have even given the pound shop a Nordic makeover and British shoppers can't get enough.
It's lunchtime on Monday and trade in Tiger's central London store is brisk as office workers browse rainbow-coloured displays of toys, stationery and hobby paraphernalia such as knitting needles and glitter glue. With 80% of the products selling for £5 or less, the concept is Danish design at Woolworths' prices.
Tim Dowling works from home, has a busy family life, and likes the odd shower. Heartless creatures that we are, we've challenged him to cut his energy use at home in half: what will he have to resort to in order to achieve it?
Comments on this piece will be opened at 9am on Monday morning.
The basic idea is simple: I mean, if I am able, to cut my energy use in half, just by changing my habits. First, however, I need to know how much I am using normally.
For electricity that's easy. A week early Richard Woods from Energeno showed up with a Wattson meter, which displays the amount of juice youre drawing off the grid in real time. The box was bigger than I imagined it would be, and looked like a minimalist MP3 player.
They can play for hours, settling into dense, swirling grooves without exhausting their hits, but this show needs a greater sense of momentum
"Show your hands if you're wearing black nail varnish," commands XFM presenter Jon Holmes, introducing the first of the Cure's two Teenage Cancer Trust shows. When a surprising number of arms shoot upward, he sighs: "Forty-year-olds in black nail varnish. That's scary." But not as scary, we soon discover, as Robert Smith in full fig: big-screen closeups reveal that the 54-year-old frontman has acquired a passing resemblance to Gene Simmons of Kiss, which seems fitting: both the Cure and Kiss are fan bands these days, mining catalogues so extensive that they could tour for the rest of their days without repeating themselves too often.
The Cure, however, would benefit from heeding the Simmons dictum: "Rock is about grabbing people's attention." They may be able to play for more than three hours without exhausting their hits, but they've yet to work out how to build up a show: song follows song an incredible 45 in all but there are few peaks or teasers, let alone much of the fraught darkness that got them here in the first place.
Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
Eastern poetry, mushrooms and Schoenberg's composition classes emerged as recurring themes in Lee's randomly ordered readings from John Cage's anthology
Comedian, Observer commentator and experimental-music fan Stewart Lee has a great line about the branch of Nando's that displaced his favourite jazz club: "They ought to introduce a new menu which, through improvisation and chance procedure, redefines the parameters of what chicken could be."
His current project uses improvisation and chance procedure to redefine what a standup gig might become. In truth, it's not a standup show at all, given that Lee is seated and reading from a script not his own, but John Cage's anthology of short stories, epigrams and mini-essays which the composer recorded in 1959 while his regular collaborator, David Tudor, performed improvised music in another room.
Harry Potter actor also describes trying to integrate at Brown University in the US, followed by British photographers
Liverpool show they can win in a variety of ways, while Gylfi Sigurdsson must wonder what could have been
Match report: Liverpool 4-0 Tottenham Hotspur
Check out the best images from Anfield
Supporter of Djurgarden club died from head injuries
Opening game at Helsingborg abandoned after 42 minutes
A supporter of the Stockholm club Djurgarden died from head injuries sustained in an assault before his team's opening Swedish league match at Helsingborg, police said on Sunday.
The match was subsequently abandoned before half-time after Djurgarden fans stormed the pitch.
I owe my career to the time I spent living with my mum and dad, so no wonder nearly 50% of young Europeans do it
How to survive living with your parents
Just over a week ago, I received a text message from my brother Pete. It was a photo of a baked potato on a plate, accompanied by the caption: "She actually hates me." He'd sent it because my mum had given him a baked potato for dinner, and he'd taken the gesture either the presentation or the potato itself as a sign of violent hostility on her part. Pete is 30 years old. For the life of me, I can't work out what he found so catastrophically offensive about a baked potato. But this was bound to happen at some point. They live together, after all.
Pete has moved back in with Mum and Dad for a few months while he waits to get the keys to his new flat. He has been there for about three weeks, and already the situation has transformed into an inadvertently hilarious psychodrama of epic proportions. Pete who, as far as I'm aware, exists on a diet of nothing but poultry and creatine doesn't like the food that Mum gives him. Mum who, until about 1998, wrote pasta off as something unnecessarily exotic thinks that Pete has turned into a snob. Pete doesn't like yappy little dogs. Mum has two yappy little dogs. I'm going to visit them all on Saturday, and I'm already quietly bracing myself to walk in on the aftermath of a grisly murder-suicide.
President Xi Jinping has put the burden of modernisation squarely on the single ruling party. It is quite an experiment
Victims of domestic abuse face devastating funding cuts, while their plight is ignored by our media and political elite
When Margaret Thatcher's government took on the miners 30 years ago, she confronted an enemy that was organised: they had collective strength and a voice. The sides were not equal, but the miners' strike could nonetheless be described as a "war" of sorts. Many of the targets of this government, on the other hand, are deeply fragmented, rarely seen or heard and often airbrushed out of existence by our media and political elite. Women who face domestic violence and abuse are just one chilling example.
To understand the attack on some of Britain's most vulnerable women, let's take East Sussex as an example. A year ago, the discretionary social fund which provided crisis loans to cover living expenses for people in desperate circumstances as well as community care grants was scrapped across Britain. It was replaced by a local welfare assistance fund that was devolved to local authorities, but with around £150m less cash. It was up to councils to set up their own initiatives, and Conservative-run East Sussex county council set up a support scheme that could help, among many others, women fleeing abusive partners.
L'Wren Scott, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Winehouse Why do we grieve when we hear about the death of someone famous? We didn't know them, so why does it hurt?
It wasn't that I cared a whole lot about Princess Diana, or that I was particularly sad when she died. It was that I drove around London that night with my mum, through the crowds of red-eyed strangers in their jackets, and I smelled the flowers. Do you remember? They were piled up in the places she'd stayed like bonfires, higher than people, and the whole city was like a scented candle. The petrol stations had signs up saying they'd sold out of bouquets. And in that smog of roses I understood, suddenly, that each of these people, strangers to the woman, were honestly and deeply affected by her death. But in the same moment I felt sad for them, I felt sort of mortified, too. Were their lives so lacking in emotion that they found it here, on a pavement, on the very edge of their realities?
You see it today on Twitter, that first rush of celebrity RIPs a mixture of shock, of competition, people rushing to report it first, and in between it all, the people who feel truly bruised by the loss. Not because they knew them, and not because they played a part in their lives her song was not the first dance at their wedding, for instance; her face was not tattooed on their shin but because something about her story reminded them of something about theirs. And she was a person, and so are they.
Ukip could do well in the European elections, but better times will chip away at its bedrock of insecurity and nostalgia
The second Clegg-Farage bout may be even more engaging than the first. Snap polling last week judged Nigel Farage the winner. But Nick Clegg won too. He was seen as a conviction politician prepared to mix it for his unpopular beliefs, and as the champion of pro-European sentiment that spreads wider than his party.
There was also a straw in the wind pointing to happier times: YouGov just found more people saying they would vote Lib Dem in the European elections in May than in the general election. If true, that reverses the norm, whereby the Lib Dems poll lower in the European elections than in local or Westminster competitions.
Hall's art package and the closure of BBC3 - risk alienating the young but could make some old friends happier
After a week of unexpected and uncharacteristic wobbling in the face of the campaign to decriminalise licence fee evasion, BBC director general Tony Hall was back on the front foot in no time announcing "the biggest arts push in a generation". It is a subject close to his heart after all he returned to the BBC a year ago after more than a decade at the Royal Opera House and having overseen the Cultural Olympiad. In a speech to assembled arts-world worthies, Hall promised among other things a new arts strand BBC Arts At to bring greater prominence to events and performances (many of which the BBC already covers); a remake of Kenneth Clark's landmark 1969 series Civilisation; a new arts space on iPlayer; an increase in the television arts budget of £2.75m; and a new "director of arts" to "join up" output across the whole BBC.
Looked at dispassionately, the package is one that might well improve the visibility and accessibility of BBC arts coverage of which there is already probably more than many people realise. It contains very little new money, though, and with no budget or commissioning power the new director of arts could struggle to make an appreciable impact on ratings-driven channel controllers and commissioners. But in truth that might not matter much if other aspects of what Hall said go on to have the desired effect.
Westminster's parade of day-trippers fail to grasp that devolution is not a destination but a process
They don't know whodunnit. But they sure as hell know what he done. By suggesting a post-independence currency union was still on the table, the anonymous coalition mole who spoke to the Guardian on Friday has burrowed deep into the already shaky confidence of Better Together.
Deep enough for the Scotland secretary, Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dems' Dr No, to warn colleagues that the yes campaign was gathering momentum. You know things are serious when John Major is being winkled out to embark on a tartan charm offensive. Not to mention a brigade of northern English MPs being dispatched across the border to tell Scots they love them really. No really.
The maverick scientist on the advantages of nuclear power, Fukushima meltdown 'lies' and how humans could become robo-people
James Lovelock lives with his wife, Sandy, in an old coastguard's cottage less than 100 metres from Chesil beach in Dorset. To reach it, you have to drive along a rough, mile-long road, which in stretches has collapsed because of the winter storms that pounded the shingle spit. You must have had a devastating winter, I say when I eventually find the cottage. Not devastating, he insists, despite having been cut off by floods for four days, fascinating. Which sums up Jim Lovelock perfectly. The inventor/scientist/environmentalist is captivated by and curious about everything, which is why at 94 he radiates joie de vivre. He is the youngest 94-year-old you could ever hope to meet.
His new book, A Rough Ride to the Future, is part memoir of his long life in science and part prediction of whether humankind can survive. I had intended to ask him whether it was a final testament, but the question dies in my throat. He so obviously doesn't plan his life that way. He has mastered the art of getting old by not giving it a moment's thought.
After a taxi crashed into his hotel room, doctors said that DJ Jonathan Toubin had sustained more injuries than they had ever seen on one person. Now he's back behind the decks
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Toubin a renowned New York DJ popped a little glass nugget out of his leg while he was taking a bath. It had been lodged in his thigh muscle for over two years, following a freak accident in which a taxi crashed through the wall of a hotel room in Portland, Oregon and crushed him while he slept. "I've had hundreds of fragments, from little slivers to big chunks that were surgically removed one was as big as a small marble," he says. The jagged end of the piece in question had started poking out a month or so previously, "so I started trying to pull it out with tweezers. It eventually got so far out that you could move it around, but it was surrounded by scar tissue and skin, and its time had not yet come."
Since the accident, Toubin has become a master of Zen-like forbearance. The doctors who treated him in an intensive care unit in Portland told him that he had sustained the biggest combination of injuries they had ever tackled on one body.
A trove of 2,500 photographs taken by Christina Broom, the UK's first female press photographer, is on show at museum
The grinning young officer with the thick spectacles is called Jack, and it was because of his terrible eyesight that his father had to pull strings to get him into the army and out to the western front. A year after the image was taken he was dead at the Battle of Loos.
The father in question was Rudyard Kipling who, as is well known, was wracked with guilt over the death, writing about it in his poem My Boy Jack.
The current affairs show is scrutinising the political record of Lutfur Rahman and other directly elected town hall chiefs
Two things are always said about the London borough of Tower Hamlets. One, that it's a place of extreme contrasts, from the historic East End to the shimmering banker megaliths of Canary Wharf, and two, that its politics are vicious. Both are true.
At the centre of all this stands Lutfur Rahman, the borough's first executive mayor and the country's most controversial local authority leader. Rahman attracts a lot of media attention; not least on Monday evening, when the BBC's Panorama programme will examine his record and those of other directly elected town hall chiefs.