John and Ann Till, from Petersfield, in Hampshire, spent three months collecting recyclables to pay for their honeymoon flights. The couple earned one reward point, which they converted into BA air miles, for every four items they recycled. In the end, they amassed 36,000 miles. Mr Till, 31, a railways communications manager, said, "We wanted to make our honeymoon special and were trying to think of ways to raise money for it. I saw on the machine that you got a Tesco Clubcard point for every four items you put in. For every 250 points you got 600 British Airways miles. We worked out that it would be possible to turn rubbish into our flights — as long as we had enough."

Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."