A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, say the authors of a study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.

But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.

With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. “It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”

Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. “In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.

New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other land masses in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. “Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird,” said Dr Scofield. “It was the equivalent of a lion.” The eagle is thought to have died out after the arrival, 1,000 years ago, of humans, who exterminated the giant moa. The latest study shows it was a recent immigrant to the islands, related to the little eagle (Aquila morphnoides) an Australian bird weighing less than 1kg.

Remains of Haast’s eagles are rare because there never were many. They lived only on New Zealand’s South Island, with probably not more than 1,000 breeding pairs at any one time.

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.

Estimates of the number of people who need emergency food aid have risen steadily this year from 4.9 million in January to 5.3 million in May and 6.2 million in June. Another 7.5 million are getting aid in return for work on community projects, as part of the National Productive Safety Net Program for people whose food supplies are chronically insecure, bringing the total being fed to 13.7 million.

Donor countries provided sustenance to 12 million Ethiopians last year, more than half of it through the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Having passed that total only eight months into this year, and with the main harvest already in doubt, aid agencies fear the worst is still to come. “We’re extremely worried,” said Howard Taylor, who heads the Department for International Development’s office in Ethiopia. DfID has given £54m in aid to the country this year, and Britain has also contributed through the EU. “This is

“Critical water shortages” were reported in some areas by the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs last week with water-borne diseases such as acute diarrhoea spreading as communities resort to drinking from insanitary wells and ponds. Unicef said that the outbreaks are putting extra pressure on its Out-Patient Therapeutic Programme, which provides healthcare in some of the most needy areas.

In Somali, the hardest hit region with a third of the humanitarian caseload and complications caused by a low-intensity insurgency, the mortality rate for infants has risen above two per 10,000 per day according to a regional nutrition survey, which gives newborns roughly a one-third chance of dying before their fifth birthdays. While there is no clear definition, one widely used threshold for famine is four infant deaths per 10,000 per day.

Declaring a famine is a political decision. While it can galvanise public opinion and bring millions into aid programmes, it is widely seen as a political failure. President George Bush challenged his officials to avoid the word, a policy known as “No famine on my watch”. Ethiopia’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission is charged with preventing famines of the 1984-85 type, the sort that bring down governments, argued Tufts University academics Sue Lautze and Angela Raven-Roberts in a 2004 paper.

Dismissing the warning signals, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said earlier this month that there was no danger of famine this year. And Berhanu Kebede, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Britain, said at the weekend: “We are addressing the problem. Food is in the pipeline.”

The main practical difference between a food crisis and a famine is whether enough aid arrives to keep the starving alive. So while the scope of the problem can be measured in the number of hungry people, the severity depends on the generosity of those in the rich world. And this year they have been miserly. Despite the promise of G8 leaders at their summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last month to provide $20bn (£12bn) to improve food security in poor countries, contributions have slumped dramatically this year as donor states have shifted priorities to supporting banks and stimulating their own economies. “The international community is not living up to its promise to the World Food Programme,” Mr Kebede said.

The WFP had little trouble raising its $6bn budget last year, but in 2009 it has collected less than half of that. Its Ethiopian operation, which had $500m in 2008, is short $127m this year, equivalent to 167,000 tonnes of food. The Famine Early Warning Network forecast this month that the shortfall would reach 300,000 tonnes by December. Rations for the 6.2 million people receiving emergency food aid have, as a result, been slashed by a third from a meagre 15kg of cereals, beans and oil a month to just 10kg. Even if the shortfall were made up today, it would take three months for supplies to be loaded on to ships bound for Djibouti, then transferred to trucks for the arduous overland journey to land-locked Ethiopia.

Aid agencies are worried about the main harvest this autumn, arguing that the time for action is now, not when the food runs out in November – usually the driest month – let alone when starving children with distended bellies capture the attention of the West’s television viewing public. Despite its good intentions, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid came towards the end of the 1984-85 famine, which killed more than a million people. Since then, Ethiopia’s population has doubled to 80 million.

Mr Zenawi’s government has set up a strategic food reserve which has at times reached 500,000 tonnes – though it is currently thought to be just 200,000 tonnes – which it uses to speed up delivery. As soon as they get funds, aid agencies can borrow food from this reserve, replacing it with supplies from abroad when they arrive. Although the government could release this food without promises of replenishment, it would soon run out; after covering the WFP’s 167,000 tonne shortfall, the stockpile would be barely enough to feed a million people for three months.

The underlying problem for Ethiopia is the erratic behaviour of the country’s climate, or rather its regional micro-climates. Moisture-bearing clouds scudding in from the Indian Ocean can pass over the parched eastern lowlands to dump generous amounts of rain on the fertile western highlands. The famine of 1984-85, revealed by BBC reporter Michael Buerk, was actually two separate famines, one in Tigray, in the north, the other in Somali, in the south-east.

Two main rains sustain the people of Ethiopia, the belg in spring and the kiremt, which usually start in July. Both are influenced by variations in sea-surface temperature. The El Niño phenomena in the eastern Pacific usually bring droughts to Ethiopia, and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the current El Niño will strengthen over the next six months. The belg has failed for two years running now, while the kiremt started three weeks late this summer and the amount of rainfall when they did come was below normal. Aid agencies fear that the season could end early, or, equally bad, produce delayed downpours just when farmers need dry weather for the harvest. Even if the kiremt ends on time in October, some crops may not reach maturity because of the late planting.

Ethiopia is overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture, and some 90 per cent of its crops are watered by nature rather than by man-made irrigation systems. During droughts, farmers and nomadic herders tend to sell off their assets to buy food, leaving them with nothing when the next growing season begins. It can take three to five years for pastoral tribes to rebuild their herds.

Although Ethiopia is particularly hard hit, drought has also affected neighbouring countries. Resources in Somali are under additional strain because nomadic tribesmen from Somalia and Kenya have driven unusually large numbers of cattle across the border in search of water and pasture. Estimates of the number of cattle coming into the country range from 95,000 to 200,000.

The spike in global food prices in 2008 exacerbated a worsening situation, hitting the urban poor particularly hard. While they have fallen back this year, the price for grains in the markets of Adis Ababa are still some 50 per cent higher than their average in the four years to 2007.

The Ethiopian government is acutely aware of the danger of famine, not least to itself. Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed a year after the 1973 famine and the Derg military junta led by Lt Col Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown in 1991 after a civil war driven in part by the 1984-85 famine. While most other countries with food shortages allow charities to distribute food, Ethiopia’s government insists that the bulk of food aid must pass through its hands.

The irony is that the Zenawi regime has done a reasonable job of boosting food production, achieving self-sufficiency in the late 1990s. One agency described it as the “bread basket” of Africa, harvesting more grain in a good year than South Africa. The government promotes best practices and distributes fertiliser to farmers. It also has an ambitious scheme to relocate 2.2 million people to more fertile areas. But even it can’t control the rains.

Many Africans blame climate change for the erratic weather patterns and resulting food shortages. Jean Ping, the chairman of the African Union, said last week in Adis Ababa: “Although Africa is least responsible for global warming, it suffers most from a problem it didn’t create.”

Thousands of infertile couples could be spared the pain, anguish and expense of fruitless IVF treatments, thanks to the discovery of a lock-and-key mechanism between sperm and egg cells.

The research could explain why so many couples with no apparent reproductive problems are unable to conceive. Although more than 40,000 in vitro fertilisation cycles are prescribed in Britain each year, only 10,000 births result.

In addition to the £5,000 cost of each cycle, the couples face huge amounts of stress and can suffer severe depression and in some cases divorce. “Our work has quite a lot of relevance for humans and society and one of the main ones is infertility,” said Dr Martin Brinkworth, a member of the team at the universities of Bradford and Leeds that discovered the lock-and-key mechanism.

Some 15 per cent of couples have trouble conceiving, about half of them because the man has a problem. But in only one third of cases is the cause obvious, such as a low sperm count, malformation or poor swimming ability. This leaves 2 per cent of the male population, about 330,000 adult men in the UK (not all of whom will be trying to have children), who are infertile for no discernable reason.

Dr David Miller at the University of Leeds thinks the secret could be that the genetic keys in their sperm don’t quite fit their partners’ locks. “Our research offers a plausible explanation for why some sperm malfunction,” he said.

His colleague Dr David Iles added: “There is a definite pattern to the way DNA is packaged in sperm cells. It is the same in unrelated fertile men, but it is different in the sperm of infertile men.”

If a test could be developed to identify these men, up to a quarter of women who have intrusive fertility checks would be spared the procedures. It could also sharply decrease the 75 per cent failure rate of IVF by filtering out male candidates who have no chance of success. Private patients and the NHS could save as much as £50m a year if all cases of male infertility were identified in advance.

The Leeds-Bradford research, and parallel work by a US team at the University of Utah, fundamentally changes our understanding of the importance sperm has in the developing embryo.

Although the egg and sperm each supply half the DNA for the new baby, the egg provides all the cellular support systems, including enzymes and proteins. Until now, it was thought that sperm simply delivered the father’s tightly packed DNA to the egg, leaving control and regulation of the process to the mother’s DNA.

But the two teams of scientists, have found that some genes are left exposed in sperm, in an “open conformation”, allowing them to play an important role in the development of the embryo. “It contradicts the dogma that the egg does everything,” said Dr Brinkworth, a senior lecturer at the University of Bradford.

The British team has also identified how these “open” areas are formed and evidence that they can be read by the egg, suggesting that they act as a signature or key, revealing the species the sperm comes from and signalling whether the DNA is in good shape.

Although no clinical test is available now, the researchers are hopeful that one can be developed after they’ve identified all the DNA bases in the open areas, some of which might be usable as markers.

The molecule at the heart of the lock-and-key mechanism is a protein called CTCF, say the scientists in a paper published in the journal Genome Research. “CTCF sets the stage during sperm development,” said Dr Iles. “And open bases can be recognised by CTCF in the egg.”

If stretched out end to end, the DNA from a single human cell would be about 1.8m long. But in the cell nucleus, it is wrapped around molecules called histones, which link up to form an efficient three-dimensional scaffold, 40,000 times shorter than the unfolded DNA. Histones also play a role in turning genes on so that their coded instructions can be copied and sent to other parts of the cell.

But sperm don’t have elaborate cells, just a tightly packed nucleus and a tail for swimming to the egg. So when they form, the histones are stripped off and replaced with another molecule called protamine, which shapes the DNA into an even tighter bundle, where the genes cannot be read.

The British researchers have found, however, that CTCF protects some histones in sperm from being replaced, leaving about 4 per cent of the genome in an open conformation, so that its instructions can be copied. Since the pattern of exposed areas is not random, they believe it must have a purpose, and the simplest explanation is that it is a key that influences the developing embryo even before the father’s genetic contribution has been unpacked.

The discovery has implications for research in fields other than human reproduction. Although the bulk of their work involved 50 million human sperm cells from several donors, the Bradford-Leeds team also found similar structures in mouse sperm.

The lock-and-key mechanism could help to explain how closely related species maintain their separate identities, even when individual members have sex. “DNA from different organisms can be extremely similar,” said Dr Iles. “Why do they not produce offspring, or if they do, why is it sterile, like mules and donkeys?”

The team speculates that this may have been the fate of prehistoric couplings between humans and their close cousins, Neanderthals, with incompatible keys and locks ensuring that any offspring would be unable to breed.

This would explain why the human genome has no trace of Neanderthal DNA despite the two similar species living close together for millennia.

The first sign of trouble came when the Eagle was five minutes into its descent, 33,500ft above the Moon’s surface. A shrill alarm rang through the cramped, seatless cabin in which two astronauts stood facing the stars. An error message flashed up on their primitive computer’s tiny read-out: “1202″. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin knew what it meant. It was left to Steve Bales, a 26-year-old technician at Mission Control in Houston to decide they should keep going. The error, he was fairly sure, would fix itself, and he repeatedly called “Go!” as the alarm sounded four more times.

Armstrong later said it was the computer glitch that kept him from dealing with a much more serious problem: when the descent had begun, before they rolled so they were face up, the Apollo 11 astronauts had noticed they were passing landmarks four seconds early. After the lunar module rocked forward, to point the engine nozzle straight down to feather their descent, they should have been able to see their smooth, flat landing site in the Sea of Tranquillity below. But Armstrong recognised nothing when he looked out of his window; the autopilot had taken them four miles beyond their target. “We were landing just short of a large crater with very large rocks covering a high percentage of the surface,” he recalled.

Ten minutes after beginning their descent from orbit, at an altitude of 500ft, Armstrong switched to manual control. His heart rate leapt from 77bpm to 156bpm as he set the engine to hover and sought a safe place to touch down. To his right, Aldrin called out their altitude, rate of descent and forward speed, his hand never far from the button that would explosively abort the landing. Then he added a number: “90 seconds” – the time until their landing fuel ran out. Finally, among the rubble ejected from the crater by a meteor impact millions of years ago, the mission commander saw a gap. Tilting the lunar module, they drifted to port.

At Mission Control, Gene Kranz, the flight director, turned to Charlie Duke, the astronaut charged with communicating with the crew. “Better remind them there ain’t no damn gas stations on the Moon,” he said. Duke’s warning was more concise: “30 seconds.” Aldrin’s tense voice crackled back: “Light’s on,” referring to the low fuel signal. “Thirty feet… Kicking up some dust… Faint shadow… Contact light.” They were down, with just enough fuel left for 16 seconds of flight – less than the time it took you to read this paragraph.

For a 10-year-old boy, nervously fidgeting around his living-room, confirmation came from Armstrong: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was 8.17pm GMT on 20 July 1969. I remember whooping and jumping on and off the sofa in a scene much like the one at Mission Control. The 12-minute descent had been an agony of suspense. There had been no pictures of the descent to watch, and between the distortion of the communications and the technical jargon, the astronaut’s funny accents had conveyed no meaning.

I knew nothing then about how close my heroes had come to disaster. The computer alarm was later blamed on a radar dish which had been left switched on, overloading the tiny computer. (Your mobile phone is about a million times more powerful.) The navigational error was caused by “masscons” – the Moon, like the Earth, is less than perfectly spherical, so its gravity fluctuates as you fly over it. Mass concentrations had pulled the Eagle into a slightly lower orbit, speeding it up, and it was already going at more than one mile a second.

What I did know about Apollo 11 was still pretty impressive for a 10-year-old. I knew, for example, that the 363ft Saturn V rocket was one foot shorter than the dome on St Paul’s Cathedral. I knew the velocity required to escape the Earth’s gravity (seven miles per second), the distance to the Moon (239,000 miles) and the time lag as radio signals travelled there and back (three seconds). Years before the word was invented, I was a geek – a space geek. I knew that the age I was growing up in was neither Modern nor Atomic, nor Post-War. It was the Space Age, and the arrival of men on the Moon, even if they were, disappointingly, not British, was its defining moment. By the time I was an adult, I knew lunar trips would be as routine as taking a jumbo jet from London to New York.

So the past 40 years have been a bit of a letdown, a point I tactfully made to David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, when he visited London last month to open a new ride at the Science Museum. Where was Moon Base One, I demanded. Why couldn’t I just buy a ticket on the internet for a discount break on a space station? “We made it look too easy,” said Scott, the seventh of 12 men to walk on the Moon. “Put it in perspective,” he said, comparing the Apollo missions to the gradual discovery of the Americas. “Columbus has just returned but Cabot and Magellan have not yet made their voyages. And Cook hasn’t even been born.” He’s right about Captain James Cook, but John Cabot and Ferdinand Magellan both sailed within 40 years of Columbus.

I’m not about to argue. Aged 77, Scott is still a commanding figure, tall with a distinguished head of grey hair. He flew with Armstrong in Gemini 8 and was the command module pilot in Apollo 9. On his lapel he wears a gold astronaut’s pin, a shooting star rising to orbit on three streaks. He must have heard the same questions 1,000 times, yet he answers patiently. Moon rocks feel as though they’re made from Styrofoam, he tells one young lad. To me, he describes flying the lunar module as “like trying to run on an ice-covered pond and turn without skates. It’s more difficult than any plane I ever flew,” he says. “You ‘zone’ like an Olympic athlete. You’re totally focused.” Then the former test pilot thinks of a better metaphor: “It’s like riding a pogo stick on a trampoline.”

Our nearest neighbour was hurtling around Earth once every 27 days, seven hours and 43 minutes long before man evolved. It governs the tides, illuminates the night and provides a convenient measure of time between the day and the year. The Greeks believed in Hecate, a three-faced goddess who transformed into Artemis as the satellite waxed and then into Selene when it was full. Plutarch told of cave-dwelling Moon demons. Johannes Kepler wrote that its craters were built by Moon creatures. And as recently as the 1920s, the American astronomer William Pickering thought it might have insects. The superstitious believed sleeping in moonbeams would drive one crazy and werewolves transformed from men into monsters by its light. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare called the crescent moon “a silver bow new-bent in heaven”; Shelley described it in “The Cloud” as “that orbed maiden with white fire laden”. So enamoured were poets and lyricists, particularly bad ones, that by the early 20th century, rhymes with “spoon” and “June” were the worst of clichés.

The first recorded story of a trip to the Moon was a satirical piece by the Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata during the 2nd century AD, who had his hero sucked up in a water spout. In the 1600s, Cyrano de Bergerac imagined being lifted to the Moon by bottles of dew. Two centuries later, Jules Verne fired his crew off from a huge cannon, while in 1901 HG Wells invented anti-gravity. And in 1950, Hergé, Tintin’s author, launched the young reporter and Captain Haddock in a ship that looked suspiciously like a German V2 rocket. They were all wrong – but Hergé came closest.

Wernher von Braun conducted his first rocket experiment in 1924 by attaching fireworks to his sister’s red wagon and setting it off in a busy Berlin street. The police arrested him. By the time he reached university, his love of astronomy and things that go bang was firmly established. He joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, an amateur spaceflight society, and was writing his doctorate when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Von Braun’s connection with the Nazis is controversial. He built weapons for Hitler, notably the V2, joined the SS and employed slave labourers at his factories. (More people died building the V2s than were killed when they landed on London.) But he was also suspected of being a Communist and was arrested for defeatism. He was one of those obsessed people who believe their work is more important than anything around them. His comment when the first V2 exploded in London is revealing: “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.”

At the end of the Second World War, Von Braun and his team arranged to be captured by the Americans and were sent to the US under Operation Paperclip. Eventually, he would build every major US rocket up to the Saturn V. But at first, Washington was uninterested. Then the Soviet space programme scored a series of triumphs: the first artificial satellite (1957), the first animal in space (1957), the first unmanned Moon mission (1959), the first man in space (1961) and the first woman (1963). The space race had begun, and America was losing.

It doesn’t take a cynic to appreciate the significance of Cold War politics on the Apollo programme. The ascendancy of the free market is clear now, but in the 1960s, central planning still seemed viable. The space race looked like a reasonable way to determine which system, capitalist or Communist, was superior, though so many factors were involved, including blind luck, that it could have gone either way.

President Dwight Eisenhower had been caught napping by Sputnik, a fact John Kennedy used in his 1960 campaign. But once in power, Kennedy seemed distracted by the Communist threat. Influential advisers argued that the US should cede space to the Soviets and get on with earthly business. Many space scientists wanted to concentrate on unmanned exploration, which offered richer rewards at lower cost. Yet Kennedy’s hand was forced by the April 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 and the Bay of Pigs fiasco five days later. The president had promised an army of Cuban exiles air support for their invasion, but failed to deliver. Survivors bitterly denounced his treachery, and his standing with the American public hit a record low. Desperate for a distraction, he called on vice president Lyndon Johnson. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting up a laboratory in space?” he asked. “Or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man?” The mission didn’t matter; all that counted was beating the Russians. In a speech to Congress a month later, Kennedy announced: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the Earth.” America was back in the running.

‘Apollo 1′ sat atop a Saturn 1B rocket at Cape Kennedy on 27 January 1967 while its three member-crew went through a tedious five-hour systems check. The atmosphere inside the command module was pressurised pure oxygen. Political pressure was also high; president Johnson wanted an Apollo success to boost his re-election chances. But the command module had been plagued by 20,000 failures, and condemned as “sloppy and unsafe” by a quality-control inspector. Early in the test, the astronauts complained of a sour odour, and static was breaking into their communications. At 6.31pm, something sparked. “I’ve got a fire in the cockpit,” reported mission commander Gus Grissom. “Fire!” shouted Roger Chafee. Then came a garbled, “Get us out!” possibly from Ed White.

In the pure-oxygen atmosphere, almost everything was inflammable. Metal pipes bubbled and dripped, joints melted, cooling lines burst, spraying burning fluid like a blowtorch. The foam cushions on the floor burst into a wall of flame between the crew and the exit. The hatch took 90 seconds to open in ideal circumstances. The crew of Apollo 1 died in 8.5 seconds.

The fatal fire could have brought the programme to a halt, or slowed it so much that the Soviets won. For the first time, public debate turned to whether the huge sums ($25bn in 1965 dollars, about £100bn today) being spent on a Moon shot were worthwhile. An internal investigation was never able to find the point of ignition, listing 10 possible sources. Poor management, carelessness, negligence and failure to consider safety were highlighted. Management at Nasa and the command-module contractor, North American, now part of Boeing, were overhauled. Half-a-billion dollars was spent on redesigning Apollo. Chris Kraft, one of the flight directors, said later: “It was unforgiveable that we allowed that accident to happen. [But] had it not happened, we probably would not have got to the Moon when we did.”

The Russians had not been idle meanwhile, but they had been unlucky. Their first plan was to launch a “direct ascent” mission, with a single vehicle going all the way to the Moon and back. But their massive N-1 rocket was delayed. Under a second plan, “Earth orbit rendezvous”, several smaller rockets would dock in orbit, then head to the Moon. But the first ship in the flotilla, Soyuz 1, crashed, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. A compromise mission, Zond, was devised to send a reduced crew to orbit the Moon and return without landing. Moscow dithered, however, and Nasa swapped its mission plans for Apollos 8 and 9, getting a crew into lunar orbit first. In 1968, Americans were treated to a Christmas Eve broadcast from the Moon. Mission commander Frank Borman looked back at the Earth, calling it “a grand oasis in the vastness of space”.

Nasa’s plan was to employ a technique known as “lunar orbit rendezvous”, in which a two-part lunar module goes to the surface, and the top section blasts off to rejoin the orbiting command module, transferring the astronauts and samples. The command module then heads for Earth. After Apollo 9 practised docking manoeuvres between lander and command module above the Earth, Apollo 10 returned to the Moon, dropping its lander to within nine miles of the surface. (That command module is in the Science Museum in London.)

In February 1969, the Soviet N-1 rocket was at last ready, but it exploded on its first unmanned flight. The Russians were all but beaten. They made one last attempt – a smaller, unmanned mission that would return rock samples to Earth – but it, too, crashed. Only the Americans were left in the race.

Half-a-million people crowded the roads and waterways around Cape Kennedy to watch the launch on 16 July of Apollo 11 and an estimated half-a-billion saw it on television. “It was awe-inspiring,” recalls Dr Allan Needell, curator of the space-history division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “There was a lot of tension in the US over civil rights and the war in Vietnam back then. Apollo 11 overcame some of that strife and conflict. There was a great sense of human accomplishment.” Even a small band of protesters who felt Nasa’s money could be better spent reducing poverty ended up appreciating Nasa’s point of view after being given ringside seats to the launch of Armstrong, Aldrin and the command-module pilot, Michael Collins.

Neil Armstrong never quite matched the image of the first man to walk on the Moon. “How long must it take,” he demanded in 1976, “before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” Unlike many other astronauts, he never jumped on Nasa’s publicity bandwagon. “He was a bit of a recluse even before the mission,” says Dr Needell. “He’s a respected member of the astronaut corps, very knowledgeable. But he has never readily accepted the role of public icon.”

If Armstrong were to be remembered for anything else, it would be as an aeronautical engineer. The son of a state civil servant posted to Wapakoneta, Ohio, he enrolled in the Navy to fund his education at Purdue University. His experience as a pilot in the Korean War helped further his understanding of aircraft, but only after he graduated did he think of becoming a test pilot, and from there of joining the astronaut programme.

Nasa is said to have been divided about whether Armstrong or Aldrin should be the first to set foot on the Moon. In the end, the mission commander got the honour… then flubbed his lines. He intended to say, “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” but left out the definite article, turning it into a tautology. Aldrin’s most memorable quote came shortly after he joined Armstrong on the surface: “Magnificent desolation.”

For the two spacemen, the point of the mission was to get to the Moon and return safely. Science was not their top priority, nor was putting up flags or taking pictures. But they did collect samples, and more were added on the five subsequent missions. In all, some 382kg of Moon rocks were returned to Earth. Two fragments are housed in the Natural History Museum in London: a blackened chunk of anorthosite breccia, a calcium-rich feldspar, brought back by Apollo 16, and a volcanic basalt gathered by the Apollo 17 astronauts.

What started out as a political, Cold War race ended up adding substantially to human knowledge, says Tom Watters, senior scientist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum. Before Apollo, the Moon was thought to have originated either as a passing planetoid captured by Earth’s gravity or by condensing out of the same primordial dust cloud as the Earth. Thanks to evidence including the Apollo rocks, the consensus today is that a Mars-size planet slammed into the early Earth, throwing up a cloud of debris that coalesced into the Moon.

A new space race is shaping up, though the competition will be far less intense than it was 40 years ago. The US plans a return to the Moon, while China, India and Japan are each preparing for manned missions. If they succeed, they will add substantially to our knowledge. Dr Watters is hopeful, for example, that additional seismometers will help locate the sources of the small quakes detected by instruments left by the Apollo missions. It is not yet clear whether these are from unseen impacts or tectonic processes. And little is known about the far side of the Moon.  

For the 10-year-old space geek in me, this flurry of activity also holds out hope. One day, probably too late for me admittedly, someone will build a permanent Moon Base One. And then the Space Age will really start to reach for the stars.

It is more than 1,000ft high, but so unobtrusive that most people in the UK never even realised it existed, let alone that it held a European record. Now, Belmont Transmitting Station, one mile west of the quiet village of Donington on Bain, is about to divest itself of the only thing that made it notable. 

The tower has dominated the skyline of the Lincolnshire Wolds for almost half a century, delivering television signals to viewers as far away as Doncaster. It is the tallest structure in the UK, and also claims for Britain the title of tallest structure in the European Union. But not for much longer.

The 387.75m (1,272ft) tubular steel tower is about to lose its record. Not because anyone is building a bigger one, but because its owner, the telecoms company Arqiva, plans to shorten it by 36m when a new digital aerial is installed in the autumn.

The height reduction will hand the title to the American military’s 370m Torreta de Guardamar radio mast in Spain, followed by towers in Germany and Latvia. Britain’s tallest structure will then be the 365m TV transmitter in Skelton, Cumbria, with Belmont slipping to 14th in the EU tower stakes.

Attempts by a handful of locals to stir up pride in the tower have failed. English Heritage refused to list it and planning approval for the change was granted last month despite two objections. A bemused Bruce Randall, an Arqiva spokesman, said: “Usually we get complaints when we try to make masts taller.”

Some 50 tall transmission towers dot the British landscape, plus more than 1,000 shorter repeater stations. But Belmont has never been much of a tourist attraction. Indeed, its very unobtrusiveness seems to have sealed its fate in the end.

Rejecting the bid to keep Belmont, a spokesperson for English Heritage said: “Although the tower may be of local interest, there are a large number of transmitters in operation in Britain, some of them listed, which have greater architectural quality, evidence of structural or engineering innovation or historic significance.”

The tower has been appreciated by some. One resident quoted in a local newspaper said: “We have restoration programmes trying to preserve pieces of our history from early Roman to the present day: works of art are preserved; museums keep artefacts from past industrial ages; but what about our technological age? Lincolnshire is not awash with technological masterpieces – for goodness sake, keep what you’ve got.”

The last time the tower made the news was during a bitter storm in the winter of 1969 when its sister tower at Emley Moor, Yorkshire, collapsed. Most staff were evacuated from the transmission station at the base of Belmont as it leant five degrees to one side due to the weight of ice on its guy wires, but it survived.

The removal of the lattice section at the top of the tower and three of its 18 guy wires will not be a simple operation. A crew will have to climb up the core of the tower (there is a lift in the 9ft-wide tube but it will not be used) and a derrick and winch will have to be set up at the top. A helicopter may also be required.

The shortening is necessary because the new digital aerial is heavier than the old analogue equipment, and must begin lower down to prevent the tower keeling over.

The new transmitter is not due to take over until 2011, but Arqiva has left itself plenty of time in case poor weather forces it to delay completion of the project into next year. Tower-spotters are advised not to delay.

(Co-written with Kyoko Nishimoto)

Japanese popular culture has few courtroom dramas. There is no Rumpole of the Tokyo Bailey, no Perry Mason in Osaka. Juninin no yasashii nihonjin, a 1991 remake of Henry Fonda’s jury-room classic Twelve Angry Men, is a comedy, its title translating as “Twelve Gentle Japanese“. And Shun Nakahara’s film is also a fantasy; for the past 66 years, no jury has sat in Japan.

Screenwriters and defendants alike should therefore embrace the country’s looming judicial reform. Currently, the pinnacle of court excitement comes when the prosecutor files a stack of summarised affidavits with the judge’s clerk. This is trial by paperwork. Oral testimony is rare, and cross-examination all but unheard of. Trials not only lack drama, they give defendants little hope. Prosecutors have a better than 99.5 per cent chance of winning.

From next month, however, panels comprised of six lay jurors, called saiban-in, and three professional judges will hear serious criminal cases such as murders and rapes. In some ways, they will be even more powerful than their British counterparts, handing down sentences as well as determining guilt .

The potential for unsafe convictions under the existing system is huge. Suspects can be interrogated for 23 days, without counsel, before they’re charged. Witnesses are interviewed by police and prosecutors, but not necessarily the defence. Evidence dug up by the authorities that could help the accused is often kept secret. More than 80 per cent of cases rely on a full confession.

Old-school prosecutors insist that their success rate reflects how careful they are to bring only iron-clad cases to court. “One of the concerns is that defence counsel co-operate [with prosecutors] in most cases,” said Daniel Foote, professor of sociology and law at the University of Tokyo. “And there have been no claims for ineffective assistance of counsel.” Indeed, Japanese has no such term.

Japan’s first experiment with citizen juries came in 1928, but their impact was limited. True, the conviction rate was a more reasonable 82 per cent. But only 460 cases were contested before a jury, probably because defendants were expected to carry the extra cost. The system was dropped, “temporarily”, during the Second World War. Since the list of potential jurors was almost identical to the list of men who could be conscripted, by 1943 few were available.

For liberal Britons, whose right to a jury trial was enshrined in Magna Carta, the need for 12 good men and true may seem obvious. But reform has deeply divided Japan. Some potential jurors worry that they will be asked to make life-or-death decisions in capital cases. Many more simply don’t want to lose their income and freedom for no personal benefit. Critics fear that deferential laymen will convict the innocent, or that – intimidated by yakuza – they will free the guilty. “There is no denying that great submissiveness is part of the national character,” Judge Tomonao Onizawa, the councillor general to the Supreme Court, told The New York Times. “But this will change gradually.”

In the cavernous atrium of the Kyoto train station late last year, members of the Bar Association tried to nudge that change along by staging a not-so-traditional kabuki play about a court case. At the end, the audience were invited to vote on the defendant’s guilt. Lawyers handed passers-by goodie bags labelled “Are you ready?” with Q&A booklets and a manga comic book about a murder on the golf links. Nintendo DS has just launched a new game called Guilty or Not Guilty.

The public education campaign includes three films commissioned by the Supreme Court and the Justice Ministry. Yet many people remain bemused. Unlike LA Law, there are no plot twists. The cinematic jurors end up being reassured that, “yes, the defendant was guilty”, Professor Foote says.

In fact, the reforms are the result of two decades of debate within the legal community after a scandal in which four men on death row were found to be not guilty. One common thread was that their confessions, later recanted, kept shifting so that they matched new evidence found by the police. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations is calling for interrogations to be videotaped, but the Justice Ministry has conceded only that the final signing of statements should be recorded. Trying suspects before a jury of their peers is only one step towards giving defendants their day in court.

Once upon a very recent time, Vancouver had a clean, safe image. Nestled between a spectacular bay and snow-capped mountains, this Canadian city, which is twice the size of Birmingham, was described by The Economist as the most liveable in the world. Not any more. As it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, what it’s got now is not cuddly, eco-friendly publicity, but blood-spattered streets littered with shell casings and corpses.

Vancouver is the battlefield in a war between myriad drug gangs, which include Hell’s Angels, Big Circle Boys, United Nations, Red Scorpions, Independent Soldiers and the 14K Triad. Guns – often machineguns – are fired almost daily. “We’ve always been told by media experts to never admit that there is a gang war,” the chief of police, Jim Chu, said last month. “Let’s get serious. There is a gang war and it’s brutal.” Vancouver’s Mayor, Gregor Robertson, confessed that the police are fighting a losing battle. Since mid-January, the city has recorded 50 gang-related shootings, 18 of them fatal. And the violence is not confined to seedy neighbourhoods. The cross-fire is happening in quiet, residential cul-de-sacs and the car parks of up-scale shopping centres. It’s a suburban civil war.

Nor are hardened criminals the only victims. An attack on one gangster’s car killed a 24-year-old man hired to fit it with a new stereo. In February, Nicole Alemy, 23, the wife of another gangster, was gunned down in her white Cadillac – with her four-year-old son in the back seat. On Friday, police arrested James Bacon – one of three brothers who left the United Nations gang to join the Red Scorpions, intensifying the rivalry between the two – for conspiring in the deaths of four gangsters in their flat in Surrey, south-east of Vancouver. Two innocent men were forced from the hallway into the flat and also killed. Police said they intend to make more arrests over the weekend.

As Vancouver has boomed over the past two decades, attracting wealthy immigrants from across Canada and the Pacific, so too has the illegal drugs trade. It is now the third largest industry in the province, generating between C$7bn (£3.8bn) and C$8bn a year. A young, party-loving population with liberal attitudes to drugs has created strong domestic demand, while the province’s mild climate and a ready supply of well-educated horticulturalists has led to supply of a premium brand of cannabis called “BC bud”, produced mostly in hydroponic “grow-ops”.

The drug’s superior quality – “one puff and you’re anaesthetised,” reported one academic – also found favour with customers in the US, encouraging an imaginative corps of smugglers. Customs agents have found shipments in church vans, hollow logs and even kayaks. One enterprising crew emulated the prisoners of Stalag Luft III, digging a 110m tunnel “under the wire”. The bigger problem for Canada, though, was the return trade. The US drug distributors preferred to pay in kind, with cocaine and guns.

Many commentators think Vancouver’s violence is just a skirmish on the fringe of the much larger war in Mexico, where 6,000 were murdered last year as the state tried to reassert control over territories seized by drug lords. The result has been a 50 per cent rise in the price of cocaine in Canada, and correspondingly higher profits to fight over. But not everyone is convinced. Experts at Simon Fraser University argue that the problem is home-grown, and that it’s exacerbated by police efforts to bang up mob leaders. “All you do is create vacancies as you put people in jail,” said Ehor Boyanowsky, an associate professor of criminology. “Suddenly there’s an opportunity.”

In the short term, say the academics, Vancouver’s problem is one of unco-ordinated enforcement. By one count, as many as 11 different agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local police forces, were responsible for suppressing the drugs trade. The courts are almost as confused. Canadian justice is more tolerant than America’s. No one has been successfully prosecuted for simple possession of marijuana in years, and Amsterdam-style hash cafés operate in a grey zone, only occasionally being shut down. Because of judicial leniency, officers prefer to see their targets collared in the US. The “Great Escape” gang were under surveillance on both sides of the border, but were arrested in Washington.

In the long run, many British Columbians, on both left and right, accept that legalisation and regulation are the answer. Just the sales tax on C$7bn of drugs would pay for several hospitals and schools, policing costs could be reduced, property crime by addicts to pay for their drug habits would be slashed, and the gang wars could be quickly reined in. “But the international politics are unbelievable,” said Dr Rob Gordon, director of Simon Fraser’s school of criminology. “The DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] starts to foam at the mouth at the idea of there being a huge, legal marijuana farm just north of the border. Under George Bush, the concensus was that if Canada ever moved to exercise its economic sovereignty, they would shut the border down by searching every vehicle.”

Until then, the best hope may be that one gang or another comes out on top, allowing it to impose stability, much as the Hell’s Angel’s bike gang used to do up to 15 or 20 years ago. Professor Boyanowsky said: “Those were the good old days.”

For the lucky, a check-up at the GP consists of nothing more sophisticated than a blood-pressure cuff, an icy stethoscope and a jar to pee in. For those with bigger problems, it can involve medicine’s heavy artillery, from bedside ultra-sound devices to giant metal doughnuts that generate magnetic fields several times stronger than the Earth’s.

Medical imaging has come a long way since Wilhelm Roentgen took the first X-ray of his wife’s hand in 1895. Until then, doctors had no way to tell what was going on inside a living body. Autopsies (often illegal) could show them where organs were but not their functions.

If today’s scanning technologies – X-ray, positron emission, magnetic resonance (MRI), computer-aided tomography (CAT), ultrasound and single photon emission – seem impressive, tomorrow’s promise to be wondrous. Doctors will be able to detect not just large-scale structures but the microscopic interplay of proteins and enzymes as they react to diseases and treatments. Early screening will spot many problems before they become terminal. Diagnostic scans will predict which therapy will work best on a given patient, while follow-up images will determine whether all is going to plan.

From biotech start-ups to pharmaceutical and medical equipment giants, all want a piece of this new action, but one British-based company seems particularly well positioned. GE Healthcare, formerly Amersham, the first company to be fully privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1982, was sold to the Americans in 2004 for $10bn. Back then, some in the City professed confusion about a company with a wide range of businesses lumped under the catch-all heading “diagnostic life sciences”. They may still be nonplussed, but one set of numbers is crystal clear. GE Healthcare’s sales have soared from $9bn in the year before the sale to $17bn in 2008.

“We’re at a tipping point,” the company said in a paper last May, comparing the coming transformation to that brought about by Thomas Edison when he invented the light bulb. “To take healthcare into the future, we do not have to wait for technologies that will be available in 2025. We need only look at the technologies we have today and act.”

GE Healthcare’s main campuses are scattered around the Chalfonts, a huddle of leafy villagesnorth-west of London. Dr Patrick Grove, then a 26-year-old organic chemist, established the company at Chilcote House in 1940 to refine radium for instrument dials on aircraft and ships. After the Second World War, it became a national centre for the development of radioactive materials and is still a licensed nuclear site.

Chilcote House is now the campus reception centre; security is tight and before visitors can enter some buildings, they must pin on a dosimeter to measure their radiation exposure. The office of Dr Marivi Mendizabal, GE Healthcare’s head of discovery, is in a less glowing building. Still, the main room is divided in half by a glass wall inscribed with a double helix at waist height, with her lab on the far side. In a soft Spanish accent, Dr Mendizabal introduces a series of techniques, some developed in-house (the R&D budget is $1bn), some by partner companies, and others licensed from academia. They range from products approved for use to those still in early trials. What they share is a simple logic – better imaging means earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment.

While hardware has improved, the big change is in what Dr Mendizabal calls “wet science”. One characteristic of chemistry, and particularly large biological molecules, is that they have counterparts that fit like keys in locks. Find the right key and it will latch on to a particular lock. It’s the same technique used by the body’s immune system to send antibodies after the antigens on invading cells. “It’s not just antigens, though,” she says. “This works on other molecules too.”

Consider AH118635, a synthetic molecule invented at GE Healthcare that’s so new it doesn’t even have a catchy name yet. It reveals whether cancers are growing or not by latching on to a marker called integrin alpha 5 beta 3, which regulates blood-vessel growth. Most tumours are only alive near their surface; the centres die because they can’t get enough blood, says Dr Mendizabal. AH118635, if it gets regulatory approval, will be able to tell how successful a tumour is at building new vessels, both by itself and after it’s attacked with drugs designed to disrupt the process, such as Roche’s Avastin.

Or take Hexvix, a chemical which accumulates in tumour cells and glows when exposed to blue light. Developed by PhotoCure, a Norwegian company, and distributed globally by GE Healthcare, Hexvix is already in clinical use. It increases the number of potentially cancerous cysts detected during optical bladder inspections, reducing the risk to the patient.

Another collaboration, this one with InSightec, combines two technologies, MRI and ultrasound, to replace the knife in treating uterine fibroids, a condition which often leads to hysterectomy. Instead, surgeons locate the fibroids on an MRI scan and focus a beam of high-intensity ultrasound to raise their temperature until it destroys the cells. The procedure takes just three hours and the patient is off work for a day, as opposed to four to eight weeks after a hysterectomy.

Even Roentgen’s X-rays are becoming more useful. Nano agents, the first major development in X-ray technology since the invention of computer-aided tomography 30 years ago, promise to give doctors 1mm resolution of soft tissues as well as bones. The trick is to bundle up a tiny but dense ball of iodine atoms in a shell. Injected into the body, the iodine atoms act as tiny shutters, blocking the X-rays and revealing the internal shapes of organs.

Elsewhere in the Chalfonts, Robert Dann is showing off a virtual colonoscopy. Early treatment of colon cancer is 90 per cent successful, compared with 10 per cent if it is caught late. But the screening process is intrusive and unpleasant, so the take-up rate is low. The virtual colonoscopy turns a CAT scan of the large intestine into a movie, allowing the doctor to “fly” through the colon looking for colour-coded, pre-cancerous polyps. If this raises the screening rate from 30 to 100 per cent, more than 10,000 lives a year could be saved in the UK alone. 

Saving lives is the popular measure for medical successes, but cutting costs is also important. The new wave of scanners promises to do this in two ways. By helping researchers evaluate drugs at an earlier stage, they reduce the cost of pharmaceutical development. And by catching diseases earlier and allowing more targeted treatments, they reduce direct clinical costs.

After generations in which technology drove the cost of medicine ever higher, it’s about time the pendulum began to swing the other way.

Researchers at Sheffield University have tested the new technique on 150 volunteers and used it to examine their lungs. In this way they have detected early signs of emphysema and revealed obstructions caused by cystic fibrosis and asthma.

Until now the best way to see inside lungs was with a CT (computed tomography) scan built up from x-rays. “But that’s just a black-and-white picture without any functional information,” added project leader Dr Jim Wild. “You don’t see any of the micro-structure.” And because x-rays can themselves damage tissues, doctors are reluctant to use them too often.

MRI scanners were invented in 1973 by Nottingham University’s Sir Peter Mansfield, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work, and rely on the way atoms spin like tops.

Using powerful magnets, atoms in a patient are aligned. Then a radio wave is passed through their body, bending the atoms away from the magnetic axis. When the signal is turned off, the atoms release a burst of energy that is picked up by detectors.

Usually the scanners are tuned to work with the hydrogen atoms in the water that makes up most of our bodies. But only one in 100,000 hydrogen atoms stay lined up long enough for a scan, resulting in a weak signal. So Wild has concentrated on using lasers to hyperpolarise xenon or an isotope called helium-3. Both agents remain magnetised so well that one in 10 atoms can be kept in alignment for days.

The company – which uses barcodes and a bank of computers at a secure facility in Britain to check for fake medicines – already has operations in Belgium, Greece and Italy and is looking to roll out its system in another three to four markets this year, said managing director, Gary Noon.

Its expansion into Ireland involves hooking up all 1,500 chemists in the country. Initially, pharmacists will only be able to confirm the batch that the medicine comes from, but within a year, each individual packet will have a unique 74-digit number.

Spun off from PA Consulting two years ago, and backed by venture capital outfit Ipex Capital, Aegate offers a secure system similar to those used by banks to confirm debit and credit cards used in shops and cash machines.

Counterfeiters have built on their success in selling fake Viagra over the internet and are now targeting the world’s top-selling drug, Lipitor, as well as medicines to treat heart attacks, cancer and even schizophrenia. Some packaging is so convincing that it takes a lab test to show that the pills inside are phoney.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 1 per cent of drugs sold through legitimate channels in the developed world are counterfeit. In Britain, over the past three years, the authorities have identified 14 batches of drugs as fakes.

Half a million counterfeit medicines were seized at the EU’s borders in 2005 and officials expect recent figures to be higher. The WHO estimates the illegal trade will be worth $75bn (£50bn) globally by 2010.

If, as expected, Günter Verheugen, the EU enterprise commissioner, recommends legislation requiring point-of-sale authentication in his pharmaceuticals proposal due to be published in April, Aegate is in a strong position. While several other companies have tested systems, the British firm is the only one in Europe with operations up and running.