Grandfather clock in the corner of the room strikes 3pm, the door opens, and the most recognisable haircut in eastern Europe arrives into the room. Beneath it is Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister and — perhaps — its future president.

If you can be sure of one thing, then surely it is that you exist. Even if the world were a dream or a hallucination, it would still need you to be dreaming or hallucinating it. And if you know nothing else about yourself, surely you know that you have a mind, one perspective on the world, one unified consciousness?

It�s hard to ignore the peacocks. It�s dinner time in Mumbai, India, but Freida Pinto, international movie star, is being distracted by birds.�I think I see peacocks,� the 26-year-old actress says, speaking by telephone from the set of the upcoming film Trishna.

With the rising demand for smartphones, health concerns related to its use have also increased.

Nobody calls me anymore — and that’s just fine. With the exception of immediate family members, who mostly phone to discuss medical symptoms and arrange child care, and the Roundabout Theatre fundraising team, which takes a diabolical delight in phoning me every few weeks at precisely the moment I am tucking in my children, people just don’t call.

The decision to opt for medical care that relies on the most costly technology is often based on blind faith that newer, elaborate and expensive must be better.

Local societies of amateur astronomers are reporting a flood of interest in the quiet and patient art of watching the night sky after a series of high-profile television programmes about the visual wonders of the planets, stars and wider universe, fronted by Professor Brian Cox.

Wanda Jackson was ready to make a new album in 2010. It had, after all, been four years since I Remember Elvis (2006), a tribute to her onetime boyfriend Elvis Presley, and seven years since her last album of original material, the guest-laden Heart Trouble (2003).

She’s the richest and most successful diva in pop. No wonder millions envy 29-year-old Beyonce Knowles her looks, her talent, her career--- and her husband.

Can you recall when you first felt like a star?

It was only a few months ago that Colin, his partner of three years, actress Alicja Bachleda and their baby son Henry moved into a period mansion outside Dublin-- and Colin claimed he was settling down and becoming a family man.

He mega-buyouts have turned out to be anything but mega-busts. Many of the multibillion-dollar private equity deals struck during the buyout boom of 2006 and 2007 were seen as vulnerable during the recession as they tottered under the weight of their own debt.

More than the immediate safety of the local population hangs on the ability of Japanese engineers to control the three damaged atomic reactors at Fukushima. In the balance is the whole future of the world’s “nuclear renaissance”.

With a modest amount of expertise, computer hackers could gain remote access to someone’s car — just as they do to people’s personal computers — and take over the vehicle’s basic functions, including control of its engine, according to a report by computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Washington.

For years scientists have dreamed of developing a genuine memory booster, a drug that could tune the brain’s biological search engine so that it’s better at retrieving not only recently learned facts, like last night’s dinner menu, but details that seem all but lost in the fog of time, like childhood classmates’ names and antics.

Anyone contemplating the ravages which humans are going to effect on non-human species in the 21st century should turn their attention to a remote area of southern Ethiopia, and a small plain near the town of Negele.

The fashion industry is in the business of creating moments out of moods, and trends from the temporal. And it does this, of course, to persuade us to part with our money, to buy into the new and the exotic, the other and the extraordinary.

FROM simply taking another breath to having to make complex moral judgments, the brain is the operations centre for the entire body. Yet science is still uncovering crucial secrets on exactly how it works and how it can be affected by our behaviour and environment.

If there’s one aspect of gardening that worries most people it’s pruning. Roses are a bigger worry than most and rose pruning isn’t something you can do easily by following step-by-step stages in a book.

Steve Lukather remembers his first moment of clarity well.