No artist has ever carried out his ideas without having a private income or financial support from

No artist has ever carried out his ideas without having a private income or financial support from people who believed in him. I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct. This fact is disguised and complicated by the existence of an art scene that is really a branch of publicity and commerce, and by the proliferation of substitutes for art - eg, cinema. Living in such a cultural void, perhaps fashion has become more noticed.Who are your favourite writers/artists? B Dorey, BlackburnIf I could select only one from each category, it would be Huxley, Vermeer (how can I betray my love for Titian?), and Chopin.Do you think the media portrays you fairly? Cassandra Riddell, by e-mailI may be deluded in thinking it at all important, but I do know that I have originated many ideas which other people use but which are not acknowledged.How important is fashion in the wider scheme of things? K Blythyn, LondonFashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.Are you a happy person? C Lowe, LondonYes I think that I've been very lucky..

All babies start out in life with perfect pitch - the ability to identify a note without any reference sounds - but only a few continue to possess it in later life, according to the latest findings of research into why only one in 10,000 people retains this unusual talent. All babies start out in life with perfect pitch - the ability to identify a note without any reference sounds - but only a few continue to possess it in later life, according to the latest findings of research into why only one in 10,000 people retains this unusual talent. A study of eight-month-old babies found that all possess perfect pitch which is lost within a few years. Only a tiny minority of people - which has included Mozart, J S Bach, Yehudi Menuhin, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra - are able to keep their innate ability to determine perfect pitch.Jenny Saffran, director of the Infant Learning Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that everyone is born with perfect pitch. She bases the conclusion on tests that identified perfect pitch in babies who had yet to learn to talk.Most adults are better at recognising relative pitch - the difference between two musical notes - than babies, who have to learn it."If [perfect pitch] is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear," Professor Saffran said. "If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we wouldn't understand that 'Happy Birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man and a woman was the same word."The experiments involved the manipulation of songs to determine whether the babies were able to follow changes in absolute or relative pitch. The "songs" were actually a continuous three-minute stream of bell-like tones.After infants listened to the three-minute sequences, they were played segments of the song that were identical in relative pitch but different in perfect pitch. By monitoring how they turned their heads to the sounds - an indication that they are listening to something unexpected - Professor Saffran could tell whether the babies were able to identify changes in perfect pitch."With absolute pitch, it might be a case of use it or lose it," Professor Saffran said.

She added that it is well established that children who learn musical instruments at an early age are more likely than other children to have perfect pitch.. Astronomers have found indirect evidence for the existence of hundreds of millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, raising the chances of there being other intelligent life-forms inhabiting our small corner of the Universe. Astronomers have found indirect evidence for the existence of hundreds of millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, raising the chances of there being other intelligent life-forms inhabiting our small corner of the Universe. A study investigating the probability of there being "extra-solar planets" beyond our own solar system has found that most of the stars in the galaxy have terrestrial objects orbiting them. These appear as huge collections of loose rocks which, in some cases, have almost certainly formed small Earth-like planets.Although astronomers have up to now confirmed the existence of 55 "exoplanets" orbiting other suns, all of them are massive, Jupiter-like "gas giants" that could not support life. Finding evidence of a large number of smaller, rocky planets significantly increases the chances of scientists one day discovering a twin of planet Earth.The research, carried out by a team led by Norman Murray of the University of Toronto, found in a sample of 466 stars in the galaxy that well over half are candidates for having their own Earths.

As the Milky Way alone contains an estimated 100 billion stars - and there are another 100 billion galaxies in the universe - it is not unlikely that another Earth exist somewhere in the vicinity.Professor Murray told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco: "We tentatively conclude that terrestrial-type material is common around solar-type stars in the solar neighbourhood"If there are terrestrial bodies in orbit around other stars, then at least the probability that there is life similar to what we consider to be life has to be more likely than it would have been before we discovered this evidence. It is one indication that life might be common in the galaxy."The research focused on the iron content of stars, which the astronomers believe can be used as a measure of how much rocky material isorbiting a sun and whether there are any planets made of these rocky objects in that solar system.Iron is a key element to study because terrestrialplanets, such as Earth, would have it in large quantities. Earth, for instance, has an iron core and about a third of the solid material of our planet is composed of iron.Studies of our own star, the Sun, have shown that it has swallowed up massive quantities of iron-containing rocky asteroids and comets over many hundreds of millions of years. Scientists can detect enough iron in the Sun to suggest that the equivalent of up to twice the weight of the Earth in rocky material has crashed into our star.

This shows two things: that this material, the building blocks of rocky planets, is abundant in our own solar system and that there are other huge objects, notably the planet Jupiter, with big enough gravities to knock the iron containing rocks out of their orbits, and send them crashing into the Sun.Using the same approach, Professor Murray has examined the amount of iron that has "polluted" other stars. The results, which are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal later this year, show that more than half of the sample of 466 stars have enough iron to accommodate massive quantities of rocky material in the form of asteroids and small planets.Professor Murray said that this amount of iron-containing rock in a distant solar system would almost certainly, over time, form small, rocky planets some of which might be similar enough to Earth and be orbiting in the "habitable zone" of its own sun - where it is not too cold or too hot to support life.. Government scientists have hit on the answer to meeting Britain's future energy needs - elephant grass. They are drawing up plans to plant thousands of hectares of the humble miscanthus, a favourite feature of suburbia. Government scientists have hit on the answer to meeting Britain's future energy needs - elephant grass. They are drawing up plans to plant thousands of hectares of the humble miscanthus, a favourite feature of suburbia. Nick Brown, the Agriculture Minister, will today tell a conference he is delighted with the success of a straw-burning power station at Ely in Cambridgeshire, which produces enough electricity for a city twice the size of Cambridge.Mr Brown is now backing trials of elephant grass for use in generating power. Research is under way in 10 centres in Britain, with a view to beginning production late next year.Scientists, including experts from Kew Gardens, have flown to the Far East, where the plant originates, to find the species most suited to the British climate.