All about purse - Matoumba

Poor outlook for services sector raises likelihood of big interest rate cut

- 1 days and 1 hours ago

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/83042?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+Poor+outlook+for+services+sector+raises+likelihood+of+big+interest+rate+cutch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=Economics+%28Business%29%2CInterest+rates+%28Business%29%2CBank+of+England+%28Business%29%2CCredit+crunch+%28Business%29%2CRetail+industry+%28Business%29%2CCurrencies+%28dollar%2C+pound+etc%29%2CManufacturing+sector+%28Business%29%2COil+and+gas+companies+%28Business%29%2CBusinessc5=Credit+Crunch%2CBusiness+Markets%2CProperty+Mortgages+and+Interest+Ratesc6=Ashley+Seagerc7=2008_12_04c8=1128392c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=Economicsc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FEconomics" width="1" height="1" //divpThe Bank of England looks likely to slash interest rates by at least another percentage point today after evidence yesterday of the slump in the services sector pointed to a dramatic deterioration in the economy./ppIf the Bank's monetary policy committee cuts rates to 2%, as is widely expected in the City, that would be the lowest rate since late 1951, itself the lowest since the Bank was founded in 1694. If it cuts by more than 1%, as some predict, then rates will be at an all-time low./ppYesterday's monthly snapshot of the dominant services sector - which includes businesses from banks to airlines and hairdressers - hit a record low. The poor economic outlook saw the pound fall sharply to its lowest for 13 years against a basket of major currencies. It dropped to below $1.47 and to just above euro;1.16./ppThe services sector survey's purchasing managers' index, which measures everything from output to orders and jobs, tumbled to 40.1 last month, the lowest since the report began in 1996. As the figure is far below the 50 level that divides expansion from contraction, the survey suggests that the sector, which accounts for about two-thirds of the economy, is contracting rapidly./ppRoy Ayliffe, of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, said: "Purchasing managers in the services sector reported record falls across activity, new business and employment as the economic climate continued to worsen."/ppHe said optimism had turned to pessimism for the first time in 12 years of the survey. Financial services, restaurants and hotels were particularly badly hit./ppSimilar surveys of the manufacturing and construction sectors this week also showed record drops. /ppJames Knightley, of ING Financial Markets, said: "Given the weakness across all purchasing managers' indices, it looks as though we could see the economy contract by close to 1% in the fourth quarter./pp"The first quarter of 2009 is likely to be similarly weak given the long lead times before the policy stimulus we have seen can take effect ... This will put pressure on the BoE to continue delivering aggressive monetary easing and we expect to see a further 100 basis point [one percentage point] of rate cuts tomorrow. Rates are then expected to fall to 1% early in the new year."/ppHoward Archer, economist at IHS Global Insight, said: "This is a desperately worrying survey given the importance of the dominant service sector to the UK economy. The heightened financial sector crisis has obviously taken a particularly heavy toll on the services sector, while the deep housing market downturn and markedly reduced consumer spending on services is also hitting the sector hard."/ppConsumer spending has been hard hit as well. Nationwide said yesterday that its monthly index of consumer confidence fell again and to the lowest since its survey began in 2004. The index reading of 50 for November compares with 56 in October and 83 in November last year./ppFionnuala Earley, Nationwide's chief economist, said: "Reports of job cuts have almost certainly impacted on sentiment about the ... employment situation, causing purse strings to tighten further."/ppA similar survey yesterday of the services sector in the eurozone was equally weak, leading analysts to predict another interest rate cut from the European Central Bank today. Eurozone rates are at 3.25% and analysts expect the ECB to cut them to 2.5% or even lower./ppThere was also gloomy news from the US, where a survey of services also hit a record low last month, while other figures showed that private-sector employers slashed an unexpectedly high 250,000 jobs in November. The world's biggest economy was confirmed as being in recession this week and yesterday's data showed things are getting worse./ppThe Institute for Supply Management said its non-manufacturing index came in at 37.3, the worst in the gauge's 11-year history and below October's weak 44.4. It was also much worse than expected./ppPierre Ellis, senior economist at Decision Economics in New York, said: "The severe damage to the service industry is another indication of the extraordinary force of this recession." /ppEvery major category in the ISM survey hit a record low, which is particularly bad news for the US, where 80% of the economy is driven by the services sector./ppThere was some good news, as oil prices fell to their lowest level in three and a half years. US light crude futures fell to $46.78 a barrel, their lowest since May 2005 and more than $100 a barrel below the all-time high reached in July. That is likely to lead to further drops in petrol prices at the pump, though for British motorists the effect of lower oil prices is blunted by the drop in the pound's value against the dollar, in which oil is priced./ppStephen Schork, an oil analyst, said that the trend in prices was still down. "Just because we are nearly as close to $40 as we are to $50 does not, in and of itself, mean we are near some theoretical bottom."/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics"Economics/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interestrates"Interest rates/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/bankofenglandgovernor"Bank of England/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/creditcrunch"Credit crunch/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/retail"Retail industry/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/currencies"Currencies/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/manufacturing"Manufacturing sector/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oilandgascompanies"Oil and gas companies/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/9-qJLtTXT1PC23k_Ie5HDgIyUGs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/9-qJLtTXT1PC23k_Ie5HDgIyUGs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

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Pedal Pure - Providing clean water for all could be as easy as riding a bike

MAKE Magazine

- 1 days and 17 hours ago

MOE_pedal
Photograph by Nicolas Zurcher

Providing clean water for all could be as easy as riding a bike. Or a trike, if Aquaduct has an influence. Winner of the 2007 Innovate or Die pedal power competition, the Aquaduct Mobile Filtration Vehicle stores, transports, and purifies water as it goes.

"We came up with ideas ranging from ways to clean up oil spills in the Bay to how to boil an egg," says Brian Mason, one of Aquaduct's five designers, all of whom work at the Palo Alto, Calif., design firm IDEO. "But we kept coming back to the need for clean water in the developing world."

More than 1 billion people lack access to clean water. Trekking miles to fetch it can take hours, and boiling it for sanitation uses precious resources. Aquaduct reduces the strain of hauling water, and its closed system prevents contamination.

Simply ride to a source, fill the 20-gallon storage tank -- a day's supply for a family of four -- and pedal home, filtering all the way. Clean water drains into a removable container that can be brought indoors. Once that's empty, the pedals can be disengaged from the wheels and the vehicle ridden in a stationary position to filter the rest.

"The answers are out there," says another of Aquaduct's designers, Paul Silberschatz. "Through design and innovation, we can find simple solutions to even the most challenging problems."

The team, including Adam Mack, Eleanor Morgan, and John Lai, used 2D and 3D modeling to help them modify a Miami Sun tricycle frame, custom-build a peristaltic pump that draws water through a simple filter, and cover surfboard foam in fiberglass to round out the body. Simple sanding and automotive paint finished the job, explains Silberschatz, who, luckily, used to build race cars.

The IDEO crew donated the contest's $5,000 purse -- along with a $10,000 match from sponsors Google and Specialized -- to Kickstart, a nonprofit that develops and markets new technologies in Africa. But they did ride away with something: each member got a brand-new urban commuter bicycle called the Globe.

>> Aquaduct in Action: makezine.com/go/aquaduct

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 14, page 19 - Megan Mansell Williams.

a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/made_on_earth_pedal_pure.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/made_on_earth_pedal_pure.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" / Permalink/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/made_on_earth_pedal_pure.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890#comments" /Comments/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/made_on_earth/?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more articles in Made On Earth/a | a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=blog.makezine.com%2Farchive%2F2008%2F12%2Fmade_on_earth_pedal_pure.htmltitle=Pedal%20Pure%20-%20Providing%20clean%20water%20for%20all%20could%20be%20as%bodytext=%20Photograph%20by%20Nicolas%20Zurcher%20Providing%20clean%20water%20for%20all%20could%20be%20as%20easy%20as%20riding%20a%20bike.%20Or%20a%20trike%2C%20if%20Aquaduct%20has%20an%20influence.%20Winner%20of%20the%202007%20Innovate%20or%20Die%20pedal%20power%20competition%2C%20the%20Aquaduct%20Mobile%20Filtration...topic=tech_news" /Digg this!/a

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Schoolgirl killer Peter Tobin suspected of four more murders

Guardian Unlimited

- 2 days and 1 hours ago

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/59046?ns=guardianpageName=UK+news%3A+Schoolgirl+killer+suspected+of+four+more+murdersch=UK+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=Crime+-+UK+%28News%29%2CUK+newsc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Severin+Carrellc7=2008_12_03c8=1127773c9=articlec10=GUc11=UK+newsc12=Crimec13=c14=h2=GU%2FUK+news%2FCrime" width="1" height="1" //divpPolice forces across Britain have reopened a series of unsolved murder cases involving young women after an itinerant handyman was convicted yesterday of raping and killing a schoolgirl who went missing 17 years ago./ppPeter Tobin, 62, was given a life sentence for murder after a jury found him guilty of abducting, raping and murdering Vicky Hamilton, 15, who disappeared in the centre of Bathgate, near Edinburgh, in February 1991. Her body was dug up in the back garden of Tobin's former home in Margate, Kent, last year./ppDetectives are understood to be re-examining at least four cases involving missing girls and women after drawing up a detailed profile of Tobin's life and movements since he was born near Paisley, Renfrewshire, in 1946./ppTobin is already serving life for the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk, a Polish student. Her body was discovered bound and gagged under the floor of a Catholic church in Glasgow in September 2006, where Tobin had been working as a handyman under an assumed name./ppDetective Supt David Swindle, of Strathclyde police, said yesterday that Tobin had travelled extensively across Britain during his life and police were working on "any potential links between Tobin's movements and outstanding missing females or victims of crime". The detective said no house searches were planned but that might change "should the intelligence and evidence warrant it"./ppDetective Chief Supt Malcolm Graham, head of CID at Lothian and Borders police, told reporters before Tobin's conviction that police across the UK were re-examining unsolved cases. There had been "information-sharing with a variety of other forces throughout the UK", he said, and that would continue "to establish whether Peter Tobin had committed any other crimes"./ppThe jury in Dundee took less than two and a half hours to deliver the guilty verdict yesterday. It was greeted with cries of "yes" from Vicky's family and friends. Her father, Michael, shouted "rot in hell" as the judge, Lord Emslie, sentenced Tobin to a minimum of 30 years in jail./ppLord Emslie told Tobin he was guilty of a "truly evil" crime, adding: "Yet again you have shown yourself to be unfit to live in a decent society." He continued: "It is hard for me to convey the loathing and revulsion that ordinary people will feel for what you have done. Abducting and killing a child on her way home from a happy weekend with her sister and then desecrating her body must rank among the most evil and horrific acts."/ppTobin was also convicted in 1994 of raping and sexually assaulting two girls aged 14 and 15 at his flat in Havant, Hampshire, after he drugged them with the sedative amitriptyline - the same drug found in Vicky's remains - and gave them alcohol./ppIn a joint statement read out by her sister, Lindsay Brown, Vicky's family thanked the jury, prosecutors and police. "Vicky was much more than a girl who was abducted and killed by a stranger, or the girl on a 'missing' poster. Our sister was a warm, clever, generous girl who shared many happy years with us./pp"We will always remember Vicky as she lived, not as she died."/ppVicky's dismembered body was recovered, wrapped in layers of plastic bags, from a carefully dug pit in the garden of Tobin's former home in Margate in November last year after Lothian and Borders police uncovered DNA evidence linking him to her disappearance./ppForensic tests on Vicky's purse, which was found in Edinburgh shortly after she disappeared, disclosed that Tobin's son, Daniel, then aged three, appeared to have bitten it while staying with his father in Bathgate. Further tests on a knife hidden in the attic of the house in Bathgate, found after police searched the property last year, detected a fragment of human tissue that belonged to Vicky. Four of Tobin's fingerprints were also found on one of the plastic bags covering her remains in Margate, and partial DNA fragments similar to Tobin's detected on her body./ppTobin had denied all the charges and claimed he had been in Portsmouth on the day Vicky disappeared. His defence advocate, Donald Findlay QC, told the jury there was "not one solitary scrap" of evidence that Tobin had met, abducted or killed her./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ukcrime"Crime/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/9QCDzJObif8FVMD67RQeyINcQq0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/9QCDzJObif8FVMD67RQeyINcQq0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

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Tobin conviction prompts reopening of murder cases

Guardian Unlimited

- 2 days and 6 hours ago

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/70751?ns=guardianpageName=UK+news%3A+Tobin+guilty+verdict+prompts+reopening+of+murder+casesch=UK+newsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Crime+-+UK+%28News%29c5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Severin+Carrellc7=2008_12_02c8=1127677c9=articlec10=GUc11=UK+newsc12=Crimec13=c14=h2=GU%2FUK+news%2FCrime" width="1" height="1" //divpPolice forces across Britain have reopened a series of unsolved murder cases involving young women after an itinerant handyman was convicted today of raping and killing a schoolgirl who went missing 17 years ago./ppPeter Tobin, 62, was given a life sentence for murder after a jury found him guilty of abducting, raping and murdering Vicky Hamilton, 15, who disappeared in the centre of Bathgate, near Edinburgh, in February 1991. Her body was dug up in the back garden of Tobin's former home in Margate, Kent, last year./ppDetectives are understood to be re-examining at least four further cases involving missing girls and women after drawing up a detailed profile of Tobin's life and movements since he was born near Paisley, Renfrewshire, in 1946./ppDetective Superintendent David Swindle, from Strathclyde police, said Tobin had travelled "extensively" across Britain during his life, and police were working on "any potential links between Tobin's movements and outstanding missing females or victims of crime"./ppThe senior detective said there were no current plans to search houses, "but these options will be considered should the intelligence and evidence warrant it"./ppDetective Chief Superintendent Malcolm Graham, the head of CID at Lothian and Borders police, told reporters before Tobin's conviction that police across the UK were re-examining old and unsolved cases. /ppThere had been "information sharing with a variety of other forces throughout the UK," he said. /ppGraham said there would be "further joint work between police forces across the UK" to establish whether Peter Tobin had committed any other crimes./pp"Although the inquiries are potentially in progress in terms of checking unsolved cases or missing persons who have not been found, it is my expectation that we will begin that work more overtly and in earnest after the conclusion of this case," he said.br / br /Tobin is already serving life for the brutal rape and murder of Angelika Kluk, a Polish student. Her body was discovered in September 2006, bound and gagged under the floor of a Catholic church in Glasgow where Tobin had been working as a handyman under an assumed name./ppThe jury in Dundee took less than two and a half hours to deliver its guilty verdict today. This was greeted with cries of "yes" from Vicky's family and friends. Her father, Michael, shouted "Rot in hell" as the judge, Lord Emslie, sentenced Tobin to a minimum of 30 years in jail./ppLord Emslie told Tobin he was guilty of a "truly evil" crime: "Yet again, you have shown yourself to be unfit to live in a decent society," he said./pp"It is hard for me to convey the loathing and revulsion that ordinary people will feel for what you have done. You already have an appalling record of convictions for sexual and violent crimes./pp"Abducting and killing a child on her way home from a happy weekend with her sister and then desecrating her body must rank among the most evil and horrific acts that any human being could commit."/ppTobin was also convicted in 1994 of raping and sexually assaulting two girls, aged 14 and 15, at his flat in Havant, Hampshire, after he drugged them with the sedative amitriptyline - the same drug found in Vicky's remains - and gave them alcohol./ppIn a joint statement read out by her sister Lindsay Brown, Vicky's family thanked the jury, prosecutors and police. "Vicky was much more than a girl who was abducted and killed by a stranger, or the girl on a 'missing' poster. Our sister was a warm, clever, generous girl who shared many happy years with us./pp"We will always remember Vicky as she lived, not as she died."/ppHamilton's dismembered body was recovered, wrapped in layers of plastic bags, in two separate portions from a carefully dug pit in the back garden of Tobin's former home in Margate, Kent, in November last year after Lothian and Borders police uncovered DNA evidence linking him to the teenager's disappearance./ppForensic tests on Hamilton's purse, which was found in Edinburgh soon after she disappeared, disclosed that Tobin's son, then aged three, appeared to have bitten the purse while he was staying with his father in Bathgate. /ppFurther tests on a knife hidden in the attic of the house in Bathgate, found after police searched the property last year, detected a fragment of human tissue belonging to Vicky. Four of Tobin's fingerprints were then found on one of the plastic bags covering her remains in Margate, and partial DNA fragments similar to Tobin's were detected on her body./ppTobin had denied all the charges, claiming he had been in Portsmouth on the day Hamilton disappeared. His defence advocate, Donald Findlay QC, told the jury there was "not one solitary scrap" of evidence that Tobin had met, abducted or killed Hamilton./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ukcrime"Crime/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/JkuNgFj2IDrRpx4esOPvD9IwpPQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/JkuNgFj2IDrRpx4esOPvD9IwpPQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

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How Vicky Hamilton's purse helped trap her killer Peter Tobin

How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic

Wired Top Stories

- 2 days and 21 hours ago

!-- pageType= magazinewide slug= ff_diamonds section= science subsection= planetearth headline= How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic authorName= Carl Hoffman creditType= photo credit= Andrew Hetherington caption= Diamond hunter Chuck Fipke with maps of potential new discoveries. -- pBehind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt./p p"We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world," Fipke says. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds./p pEighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond mdash; as far as anyone knew. Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial "a href="http://www.un.org/peace/africa/Diamond.html"blood diamonds/a," sold to fund African wars./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice2_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Stones from the Ekati Mine.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div /div /div pToday, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. In the Northwest Territories, a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/"BHP Billiton/a's Ekati a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/ourBusinesses/diamondsSpecialtyProducts/ekatiDiamondMine.jsp"mine/a has been producing since 1998 and Rio Tinto's a href="http://www.diavik.ca/"Diavik mine/a since 2003. De Beers opened its first Canadian mine, at Snap Lake, in July mdash; a confirmation that Canada is the new center of the world./p pThe story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to one man: a short, absentminded Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke. When he discovered diamonds in a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_de_Gras"Lac de Gras/a, Northwest Territories, in 1991, he started the largest staking rush in North America since a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Articleid=4614"George Carmack/a found gold in the Klondike a century earlier. And he's not finished: He's prospecting around the world, toting gravel samples back to his lab in British Columbia to figure out where to look for his next big strike./p pstrongIn 1970, fresh out of/strong the University of British Columbia with a degree in geology, Chuck Fipke signed on with mining company a href="http://www.kennecott.com/"Kennecott Copper/a to look for gold and copper in Papua New Guinea. A helicopter would drop him off alone in the middle of a jungle, and pick him up at the end of the day. The terrain was so rough that the chopper often couldn't land mdash; Fipke would just leap out as it hovered close to the ground. One day he turned around to face 20 locals, arrows strung. He raised his arms, slowly removed his vest, and offered it to "the one who looked like the chief." By the time the helo returned for him, Fipke was in his underpants clutching a fine array of tribal shields, bows and arrows, and fetishes. "I've got an amazing collection of stuff!" he says./p pFipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy./p pAfter stints in the Amazon, Australia, and South Africa, Fipke opened a mineral separation laboratory in British Columbia in 1977. A year later, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Oil_Company"Superior Oil/a hired him to go back into the field mdash; to look not for metals but gems./p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice3_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The wilderness around Snap Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories, conceals a trove of diamonds.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/div br/br/ pThe company already had a search method. A couple of years prior, a geologist named a href="http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/geolsci/people/staff/johng.htm"John Gurney/a, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called a href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/diamonds/kimberlite.html"kimberlite pipes/a mdash; the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds mdash; and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_map_250.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"The Snap Lake site is one of four diamond mines established in Canada in recent years.br / emIllustration: Bryan Christie/em/div /div /div pFipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' a href="http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/finsch/"Finsch Mine/a in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals mdash; combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling. Superior had worked with Fipke before, back in his gold mining days, so by the time the company wanted someone to go look for kimberlite pipes northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Fipke was the best choice. He found half a dozen, but like 98 percent of the kimberlite formations in the world, they didn't contain diamonds in commercially viable quantities./p pBut Fipke knew that, 100 miles under those pipes, was a craton, a thick, old chunk of continental plate where diamonds form. Kimberlite pipes are created when magma bubbles up through a craton, expanding and cooling on its way up. If the craton has diamonds in it, the result is either a carrot-shaped, diamond-studded pipe reaching up to the surface or a wide, flat underground structure called a dike./p pFipke also knew that the craton underneath the pipes he had found ran all the way up the Rockies. With Superior's backing, he teamed up with a geologist and pilot named Stewart Blusson, formed a href="http://www.diamet.com/"Dia Met Minerals/a, and headed north./p pBy 1981, the two men were sampling the ground in Canada; they would eventually secure mining concessions on 80,000 square miles. "It was just me and Sewart and a floatplane," Fipke says. "We took all the supplies and all the samples in ourselves."/p pDe Beers geologists, it turned out, were already there, relying on their own indicator mineral formulas. But Fipke and Blusson surmised that the indicators De Beers found had in fact been dragged far from the kimberlite pipe eons ago by a passing glacier. What they needed to do was look "upstream" for the point of origin. Fipke got a helicopter and flew back and forth over the Arctic Circle, using a magnetometer to track variations in magnetic field that would suggest kimberlite. After thousands of miles and hundreds of hours in the air, he found a promising site near Lac de Gras, a barren world of lakes and rock and muskeg a few hundred miles outside the Arctic Circle./p pHe'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons mdash; with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat mdash; 0.2 grams mdash; per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons mdash; the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion./p pToday Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars./p pShortly before Fipke sold most of his Ekati claim to BHP Billiton, his marriage, faltering for years after so much time in the field, fell apart. At the time it was the a href="http://www.nnsl.com/frames/newspapers/2000-02/feb28_00dia.html"largest divorce settlement/a in Canadian history. "Cost me $200 million, hey," Fipke says. "Best money I ever spent!"/p pstrongFipke now has mining/strong projects in Morocco, Greenland, Canada, Angola, and Brazil. His laboratory bookshelves are heavy with mineral guides mdash; and the family histories of thoroughbreds. Besides diamonds, he's now obsessed with horse racing. "It's a huge challenge, hey, and I like challenges even if they're risky," he says. "And I think I'm really going to do spectacularly well with horses." So far, so good: He has more than 50 brood mares in Ireland and Kentucky and 20 racehorses all over the world. His horse a href="http://www.kentuckyderby.com/2008/contenders/tale-ekati"Tale of Ekati/a placed fifth in this year's Kentucky Derby. "I always go to the Derby with Bo Derek," he says, unlocking the door to a windowless room piled with maps and electron microscopes and computers. "She's a good rider, and she knows horses. And she's a lot of fun, hey! I'm gonna do for horse racing what I did for diamonds!"/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_debeers_630.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The De Beers mine at Snap Lake is a labyrinth of crushers and separators. br/ emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/divbr/br/ pWhether or not Fipke actually turns out to have an eye for horseflesh, his eye for the characteristics of crystals is unparalleled. He shows me rooms of glass flasks and tubes, the equipment for analyzing all those gravel samples. I peek through a microscope and see a rainbow treasure of sparkling gems: green chrome diopsides and red garnets mdash; the low-calcium, high-chrome G-10s that mean diamonds are nearby./p pOver many years in the field and the lab, Fipke has refined his understanding of this unique stew of minerals. "Everyone now knows that G-10 garnets with low calcium might lead you to diamonds, hey," Fipke says. "But how do you distinguish between a Group 1 eclogitic garnet that grew with a diamond and a Group 2 eclogitic garnet that didn't? They look the same." Custom software compares the grains' shapes and chemical compositions, analyzes them against 1,000 minerals that are intergrown with diamonds, and compares them against 10 fields of mineral groupings. If seven to 10 of the fields from one pipe overlap, Fipke says, "there's no doubt; it's full of diamonds. No one else out there can distinguish between these similar tiny particles of minerals that grow with a diamond and ones that don't."/p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice5_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Miners prepare to blow up a rock face.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em /div /div /div p"Look," he says, opening a folder on a table. He has thousands of photos of mineral grains magnified to the size of golf balls. Some are all sharp corners and jagged edges, some rounded. Since erosion and age wear the minerals down, "we can tell when we're getting closer to the source. If the edges are sharp, hey, we know they haven't traveled far from the pipe."/p pThat level of geographic precision has allowed Fipke to stake more claims. He's even working in areas of Brazil where De Beers hasn't been able to turn a profit. "And Angola. Angola has the richest alluvial diamond river in the world," he says, "and there are thousands of diamond works there. But we're looking for the source pipes." Five years ago Fipke started making magnetometer survey flights over the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwango_River"Kwango River/a. Having identified 100 possible targets, he now has 40 men taking core samples 900 to 1,200 feet under the riverbed. "I'm there at the camp at least three times a year, hey, and it's much harder than in the Arctic. Your drilling equipment just gets buried in enormous piles at customs in Luanda and you can't get it. In the Northwest Territories it was cold, hey, and full of snow, but you get a good parka and you're a bug in a rug. Angola is the most inefficient place on earth!"/p pI start to ask another question, but Fipke has something else in mind. "I'm hungry, hey," he barks, as the door to the map room slams shut behind us. "Do you like oysters?" But we're not going anywhere: He has locked his keys in the room and has to call someone to drive in and open up his office./p pWe finally head into town. "Hi, Chuck!" says the hostess, leading us to the back room of a hip Asian fusion place. Around a long table sit 23 young women, all sporting stilettos and big hair. "Chuck!" they shout. We have, it seems, shown up at the bachelorette party for Fipke's granddaughter. The hostess seats us at the next table. Fipke orders four dozen oysters and a bottle of wine that has to be driven to the restaurant from some special cellar, and a young women shimmies into the booth next to Fipke. "Chuck," she says, kissing him on the cheek, "do you think you can pay for us all tonight?"/p p"Sure," Fipke says, beaming./p p"Do you remember this?" says another woman mdash; his daughter, it turns out, who slides in next to him, holding up a purse. "You bought it for me!"/p pWith Fipke suddenly bankrolling the night, the girls break loose, and the restaurant staff starts hauling out the bottles of champagne. Pretty soon a couple of lasses are dancing on the tables, the oysters are slipping down, a second bottle of rare wine is being decanted, and Fipke is remixing the menu like Danny DeVito in ema href="http://www.imdb.com/Title?0113161"citeGet Shorty/cite/a/em./p pAnd the tales spill forth: three week forays into the Peruvian Amazon, travels with the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa, visits to the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo. "I'd just leave my family and go, hey," he says. "I was really into native culture."/p pSomebody asks him about Brazil, and it reminds him of something important. "Caipirinhas!" he shouts out of the blue. "I want 25 caipirinhas!"/p pWhen the bill arrives, it's 3 feet long and $4,000. Fipke pays up, and we spill into the night mdash; his daughter and granddaughter and their friends and now boyfriends, who joined us in the restaurant. On the street, Fipke suddenly leaps into the air and delivers a solid, suede loafer-clad foot to the head of a parking meter. "I fucking hate parking meters, hey!" he shouts. He jumps and kicks another one, and then erupts into a fit of giggles./p pWe are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone. Three generations of Fipkes pound drinks as naked women dangle upside down from poles onstage./p pThe room is spinning by the time Fipke takes me aside and lays a big warm hand on my arm. "Hey," he says, "here's the thing. I learned that I did my best. I mean, I really tried my best. How many people can say that? I worked hard, and I mean really hard. I worked seven days a week from 8 am until 3 am. Every day. We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy. But most people just never do their best, hey. And I did."/p pemContributing editor Carl Hoffman /em(a href="mailto:carlhoffmn@earthlink.net"carlhoffmn@earthlink.net/a) emwrote about the private space company SpaceX in issue 15.06./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:0627ce3c3b6ae327e5f06dd2f229cc5e:%2FfMZEsh%2BwKLICU5UU6f2XvNPdawcsXbrPL0IgcNmb1HkbkovTIq34grsdoe%2FarsA5BIV0olmUO5vOg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:f6c60dd504b07078bdbc6b09258399fa:z9re7O%2Fr9g7IWr4dUnV7qrGpZcrb8Jda0z5wA4Ind8sbvwvuCjEcWeHZ3OMoIQ2%2FlAqrQu%2BxQ%2Fwj'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:eabae8e0f643b5c7f7a103cea954fefd:B7poPN8AgcPsLABfHqfLdvTArLYNDoIDfq7hJXfovsGgeK1C%2FXxzP9gLrcWMNRJZSzyblLz%2BiS6g'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:3669b8286376e46e06956252ef17c5b1:cfCGfTXzx74lBKekrETCStAWLWyBnGkD8fTmyGqiNQWrC6%2FmqUtSmWQQxfC2zORnD6oE0JLZc9DD'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=IAu4eH"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=IAu4eH" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/472101281" height="1" width="1"/

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