Gavin O'Reilly, the president of the World Association of Newspapers, which is co-ordinating the campaign, said on Tuesday: "We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building [their business] on the back of kleptomania."

The group of publishers, which includes the International Publishers’ Association, the European Federation of Magazine Publishers and Agence France Presse, is seeking meetings with Charlie McCreevy, the European Union's internal market commissioner, and Viviane Reding, the commissioner responsible for media. It would not rule out legal action to enforce copyright or "collective action", Mr O'Reilly said. "Ultimately, the aggregators need the content providers."

Services such as Google News link to original news stories on the home pages of newspapers and magazines and display only the headline and one paragraph of the story. 'That’s often enough'for readers browsing the top stories, Mr O’Reilly said.

The initiative follows a decision by the American Association of Publishers to seek an injunction against its project to create a digital archive of millions of library books. The lawsuit was filed late last year on behalf of publishers including Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times.

The growth of online news aggregators has coincided with an acceleration in the long-term trend of declining readership for print newspapers and a shift in advertising spending from print to the internet, much of which is not being captured by the newspapers’ own sites.

"The search engines are increasingly aiming their strategic efforts at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper publishers," Mr O’Reilly said. "The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense."

The WAN, which represents 18,000 newspapers and 73 national newspaper associations, said it would examine whether new standards and policies could be drafted to create a commercial relationship between publishers, search engines and content aggregators.

Mr O'Reilly singled out Google for criticism, saying: "As a general rule, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves seem more open to constructive dialogue. It’s only Google which seems to have this absolute view [that all information should be available for free]." Google could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mr O’Reilly likened the initiative to the conflict between the music industry and illegal file-sharing websites and said it was not a sign that publishers had failed to create a competitive online business model of their own.

"I think newspapers have developed very compelling web portals and news channels but the fact here is that we're dealing with basic theft," he said.

The axis of evil is the biggest surprise thrown up by Nasa's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Launched on 30 June 2001, it has, from its vantage point 150 million kilometres beyond the Earth on the extension of the line joining our planet to the Sun, been taking the temperature of big bang afterglow, known as the "cosmic background radiation". Understanding exactly what WMAP has found requires a little diversion into the technicalities of the background radiation.

It is coming from every direction in the sky and its average temperature is minus 270C. Of key importance are subtle variations in temperature from place to place - "hot spots" that are ever-so-slightly warmer than average, and "cold spots" that are ever-so-slightly cooler.

These arise because the matter in the fireball of the big bang was slightly lumpy. (One lump became your home - the Milky Way.)

The hot spots and cold spots in the big bang afterglow come in all sizes. For instance, there are big blotches that stretch across much of the sky and, superimposed on these, smaller goosepimples.

To make sense of it all, astronomers like to break up their "temperature map" of the sky into manageable chunks they call "multipoles". The simplest is the "dipole" - merely one huge hot spot and one huge cold spot. It has nothing to do with the big bang. Rather, it is caused by the motion of the Milky Way, which is flying through space at about a million kilometres per hour. This makes the afterglow of the big bang appear hotter in the direction the Milky Way is flying and colder in the opposite direction.

The second simplest chunk of the cosmic background radiation is the "quadrupole". This is like the dipole, but is made up of two hot regions and two cold regions. Next comes the "octupole", which is comprised of three hot regions and three cold regions.

The simplest multipole chunks of the big bang radiation correspond to the biggest blotches, the more complex to the smallest freckles.

If the standard big bang picture of the Universe is correct, the blotches and freckles should be scattered randomly about the sky. "The big surprise is they are not," says Chris Vale of the University of California at Berkeley. "The quadrupole and octupole blotches are aligned with each other - along the axis of evil."

Nobody knows why. Could it be that all our preconceived notions about the big bang are wrong, or is it something less challenging? Vale leans towards the latter. He notes that the dipole direction is at right angles to the direction of the axis of evil. Recall that the dipole direction has nothing to do with the big bang, whereas the axis direction does, so their positions should not be related. "The fact that they are hints at an unexpected connection," says Vale.

According to Vale, if there is a giant concentration of mass in the local universe, its tremendous gravity could be distorting the cosmic background. The phenomenon is known as "gravitational lensing". It could cause the big hot spot of the dipole to "spill over" into the smaller hot spots. "The dipole hot spot is several hundred times hotter than the quadrupole," says Vale. "So it is not necessary for much to spill over to explain the axis of evil." Vale claims the best candidate for the local mass concentration is the "Shapley Supercluster" in our cosmic backyard, which contains 100,000 galaxies. It is not visible to the naked eye, despite covering at least 1,000 times the apparent size of the full Moon.

Other astronomers think Vale could be on to something. "Vale's model generates a good match of what we see," says WMAP scientist Gary Hinshaw of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It's remarkable."

However, some physicists wonder whether the axis of evil requires a rethink of our ideas about the Universe. They include Joao Magueijo at Imperial College in London, who coined the term "the axis of evil". According to Magueijo, there may be something seriously wrong with our big bang models.

Big bang models come out of Einstein's theory of gravity. The only way theorists can apply the hideously complicated theory to the Universe is to make two simplifying assumptions. One is that the Universe is roughly the same in all places, and the other is that it is roughly the same in all directions.

But if the Universe is the same in all directions, as the big bang models require, that means that the hot spots and cold spots in the afterglow of the big bang should be randomly splattered about the sky - the big temperature splotches and the small temperature goose pimples should have no preferred direction. The fact that they are aligned along the axis of evil leads Magueijo to suggest that maybe the assumptions behind the big bang models are wrong. In other words, the Universe is not the same in all places or directions, but has a special direction.

According to Magueijo, there are a number of ways the Universe could have a special direction. One is if we live in a "slab universe". This is a Universe in which space is infinite in two directions but in the other is only about 20 billion light years across - the diameter of the observable universe.

Another possibility is that we live in torus-shaped universe, like a giant ring doughnut. Yet another is that Universe is spinning.But how would could such a weird state of affairs have arisen? "That's the big question," Magueijo says.

So perplexing is the axis of evil that Hinshaw and WMAP's principal investigator, Chuck Bennett, have obtained a grant for a five-year examination of the WMAP data. They hope to explore the possibilities that the WMAP instrument was in error, or that something else went wrong. "There's no question there's stuff that looks unusual," says Bennett.

We will have to wait and see whether the study reveals the axis of evil to be a cosmic mirage, or shows the big bang model to be in serious trouble.

Marcus Chown is author of The Universe Next Door

While some of the group's software is now used by the FBI and large media organizations such as Reuters, a version written in Java will come out soon that will be easier to use and thereby allow more police and media organizations to sniff out fraud. The current software is written in Matlab, a numerical computing environment.

"I hope to have a beta out in the next six months," Farid said. "Right now, you need someone who is reasonably well-trained to use it."

Photo manipulation is a lot more common than you might think, according to L. Frank Kenney, an analyst at Gartner. That Newsweek cover of Martha Stewart on her release from prison? It's Martha's head, but a model's body. Some people believe hip hop artist Tupac Shakur remains alive, in part because of the images that have cropped up since his reported death in 1996.

Although it's difficult to estimate the size of the market for fraud detection tools, the demand is substantial, according to Kenney.

"How much is the presidency of a country worth, or control of a company? People tend not to read the retractions," he said. "Once the stuff is indelibly embedded in your memory, it is tough to get out."

The Journal of Cell Biology, a premier academic journal, estimates that around 25 percent of manuscripts accepted for publication contain at least one image that has been "inappropriately manipulated" and must be resubmitted. That means it has been touched up, although in the vast majority of cases, the author is only trying to clean the background and the changes do not affect the scientific efficacy of the results. Still, around 1 percent of accepted articles contain manipulated images that do significantly affect the results, said executive editor Mike Rossner. Those papers get rejected.

"Our goal is to have an accurate interpretation of data as possible," Rossner said. "These (images) are (of) things like radioactivity detected on a piece of X-ray film."

Law enforcement officials have also had to turn to the software to prosecute child pornographers. In 2002, the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition overturned parts of the Child Pornography Protection Act for being overly broad, ruling that only images of actual minors, and not computer-generated simulations, are illegal.

Since that decision, a common defense has become that the images found on a hard drive are artificially created.

"The burden is now on the prosecution. These cases used to be slam dunks," Farid said.

How it works
Fraud detection software for images essentially searches for photographic anomalies that the human brain ignores or can't detect.

Humans, for instance, ignore lighting irregularities in two-dimensional images. While the direction of light can be re-adjusted in 3D images from video games, it is difficult to harmonize in 2D photographs. The light in the famous doctored photo that puts Sen. John Kerry next to actress Jane Fonda at a protest rally actually comes from two different directions.

"The lighting is off by 40 degrees," Farid said. "We are insensitive to it, but computers detect it."

Although modern researchers have in clinical studies documented humans' ability to filter out lighting incongruities, 15th-century painters were aware of the way humans process images and exploited that knowledge to create seemingly realistic lighting effects that would have been nearly impossible to replicate in real life.

"The lighting is totally bizarre in some Renaissance paintings," he said.

The software also seeks out areas in photographs where applications like Adobe Photoshop fill in pixels. Every time the photos get mashed together, some modification of one or both of the images is required. Sometimes one person is blown up in size while a second might be rotated slightly. These changes leave empty pixels in the frame.

Photo-retouching applications use probability algorithms to fill in those pixels with colors and imagery and thus make them look realistic. Conversely, Farid's software employs probability to ferret out which of these fringe pixels are fill-ins.

"We're asking, from a mathematical and statistical perspective, can you quantify the manipulation," he said. "There are statistical correlations that don't occur naturally."

The quality of forgeries and touch-up jobs varies widely, but it continually improves. Farid gets consulting requests all the time. Some people call him to see if a photo of an item on eBay has been retouched. Others want advice on the genuineness of photos from online dating services. The Image Science Group has also collaborated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to determine if certain drawings were actually made by Flemish painter Bruegel or were forgeries.

One of the most recent celebrated cases of fraud--South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk's claim that he cloned stem cells--actually didn't need specialized software. Spots and artifacts in the background visible to the naked eye showed that the images of cells that came from the supposedly cloned dog were duplicated, Farid noted.

Farid's interest in fraud detection is somewhat random. As a post-doctoral student at MIT seven years ago, he was meandering through the library looking for something to read. He grabbed the Federal Rules of Evidence, a compendium of laws governing the admission of evidence in trials in federal court.

The rules, at the time, allowed digital images of original photographs to be admitted in court as long as they accurately reflected the original. The footnotes that accompany the rules, however, acknowledged that manipulation was a problem and that government did not yet have a way to deal with it.

When Farid started researching the scientific literature, he found little on fraud detection in digital imagery.

Will you be able to get a copy of the Java-based version of the Image Science Group's applications? Probably not. One of the dilemmas of this type of software is that the more widespread the distribution, the more chance forgers will exploit it to their advantage. Police organizations and news media outlets will likely get access to the application, but he's still unsure of how far he will extend distribution beyond that.

And although Farid charges a fee when asked to serve as a consultant, the software will be made freely available under an open-source license. He doesn't even have plans to form a company around his work. A significant amount of the research, after all, was funded by federal grants.

"Taxpayers," he said, "are paying me to do this research and it needs to go back out."

His supreme example of mathematical beauty is Euler's identity. Discovered by the 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, it links the five most important numbers in mathematics. It is the special case of a broader equation that links the fields of geometry, the study of space, and algebra, the study of structure and quantity.

"[It captures] for a mathematician something very beautiful, which is the interrelationship between different bits of mathematics," said the Oxford University mathematician Marcus du Sautoy.

The flip side is an "ugly" solution to the so-called four-colour theorem. The problem is simple. Take a map and some coloured pens. Colour each country so that no two touching countries are the same colour, and the lowest number of colours you will need is four.

But why? Mathematicians usually eat these kinds of questions for breakfast, but no one has come up with a neat solution.

The best solution they have so far is a clumsy proof by Robin Thomas, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and colleagues. It involves distilling the total number of possible maps to 633 and then checking these separately using a computer.

"No human could realistically check that proof because it would take longer than their lifetime," said Mr Mullins. Instead of insight and panache the solution was brute force and ugliness, he added.

But straying beyond traditional definitions of beauty became a more personal exercise for Mr Mullins. He began giving framed equations as gifts at weddings and christenings. His favourite is the mathematical snapshot of "romance" which he gave to his partner, Sandra, which describes a phenomenon called quantum entanglement discovered by Albert Einstein. It shows how two sub-atomic particles can be "linked in a very deep and fundamental way even though they may be separated by the width of the universe", said Mr Mullins. True love in an equation. "She's now my wife so obviously it worked."

· The exhibition runs until February 12 at Lauderdale House in Highgate, north London

In their quest to reach the so-called "iPod generation", newspaper and magazine publishers, too, are becoming de facto broadcasters. "[Podcasting] is all about updating the brand and creating a buzz around content," says the head of the Association of Online Publishers, Alexandra White. "It's part of a general shift in the way people consume content from passive to more on-demand."

What remains to be seen is if there is any money to be made.

The BBC was one of the first media companies to experiment with the format, trying out Radio Five Live podcasts in 2004. It expanded the pilot scheme last May to offer 20 packages of programme highlights, and this has been so successful - the edited Chris Moyles' breakfast show was downloaded half a million times in December - that it is adding a further 30 podcast packages.

Although some newspaper groups had also been trying out the new technology, it was not until the final months of 2005 that podcasting went mainstream. David Cameron recorded one for the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair did one for the Sun and Ricky Gervais' weekly podcast for the Guardian surpassed all expectations when it registered 2m downloads, the most popular so far. Meanwhile, Emap has begun monthly podcasts of its Kerrang! music magazine and is considering the same for its Mojo and Q titles. ITV is toying with the idea of making audio-only versions for podcast of popular TV series The Bill, Emmerdale and Coronation Street, possibly charging a fee.

The explosion in the popularity of podcasts is linked directly to the phenomenal success of Apple's iPod. Apple sold 32m of the portable players last year, with 14m bought in the Christmas quarter. As podcasting is the third option on the iTunes menu, many curious consumers have stumbled across the technology. Media companies say at least half their podcast users come via iTunes. "If you're not on iTunes, the vast majority of the world will not know you exist," says Computing magazine technology editor Chris Green. "Get yourself on iTunes and you've instantly got a potential 42-million-plus audience."

Traditional media companies have latched on to the new format as a way to satisfy the growing demand for content people can consume when and where they want. "Since tablets of stone, news has been delivered in a style we call 'push' journalism," says the Telegraph's podcast editor Guy Ruddle. "That world is over. From now onwards it's 'pull'. We have to make news available to listeners, viewers, readers in a variety of formats ... Podcasting gives you the opportunity to pick up which bits you want and when." BBC Radio and Music interactive project manager Sarah Prag agrees: "It's all about control and convenience."

Media companies are also using the medium to broaden their appeal, particularly among younger audiences.

Luckily, podcasting comes cheap - Emap spends just £150 a month on its Kerrang! podcast. But having discovered the demand, companies are trying to work out how to make money from it. Most newspaper publishers and broadcasters doubt consumers would be prepared to pay. For these companies podcasting is more about promoting their brand and reaching new audiences.

One broadcaster that has decided to charge is the Chrysalis-owned radio station LBC 97.3FM. Last month the London talk station began charging £2.50 a month for podcasts of full-length programmes, with the price falling if users sign up for longer. More than 1,000 listeners have signed up to pay, with comedy programmes such as Steve Allen's show proving the most popular.

Niche publishers such as Computing magazine, owned by VNU, are also confident they could charge, given people's willingess to pay for music downloads. "Very niche specialist content is easy to charge a premium for because people see value in it," says White, of the Association of Online Publishers.

All media companies are keen to incorporate advertising into their podcasts, but agree that podcasting will become just part of the branded cross-media package sold to advertisers - alongside print and web. "From a commercial standpoint, this is part of a product. This is not standalone," says Ruddle at the Telegraph.

Rather than sandwich ads between programmes, media companies are more likely to sell podcast sponsorships. Although podcasting has yet to attract serious interest from most traditional TV advertisers, some companies, such as Thomas Cook and Honda, have already begun producing their own podcasts.

Dominic Finney, the head of emerging channels at media buyer BLM Quantum, predicts podcasting will become increasingly attractive to advertisers as they realise it enables them to target customers with clearly defined interests. "They can actually give consumers what they really, really want," he said. "They're very much interested in that very high quality customer."

But big advertisers such as Procter & Gamble are unlikely to embrace the medium until an accurate system of audience measurement is developed. Market research companies AC Nielsen and TGI are looking at the problem, which is crucial if podcasting is to become a mature medium.

Media companies are frustrated by the lack of transparency about Apple's dominant iTunes chart. "We're not quite sure what number one means," says Guardian Unlimited assistant editor Neil McIntosh. "Metrics are going to become very important." Ruddle agrees: "Without proper measurement, how are we ever going to get people to buy into it in a really big way?"

If some suggest podcasting is just another technofad, there are media executives who are quick to disagree, predicting the medium's appeal will grow even faster with the mass availability of video and mobile podcasts. But some also caution against the hype. "Podcasting went into the Oxford English Dictionary last year. The word 'bubble' went in a lot earlier," New Scientist online manager John MacFarlane quips. "It's another delivery channel - it's not going to make a cup of tea or pay the bills."

Be your own broadcast star

Podcasts are simple and inexpensive to record. Virtually anyone can become a podcaster. Most of the 25,000 podcasts on the iTunes directory are home made. Apart from a computer and internet access, all you need is a microphone, a portable MP3 voice recorder, some software and a way with words. If you want a simple podcast software program, try Windows' Sound Recorder. For sophisticated recordings, try the open source Audacity or iPodcast Producer, which lets you add sound effects and music.

Before you begin recording, choose your topic, listen to other podcasts to get a feel for the medium, and write an outline of what you plan to say to avoid long pauses and silences. Podcasts run for 20 to 30 minutes, broken into segments of five to eight minutes and interspersed with music. Do a few test recordings to try out the software, adjust sound levels and make sure it works.

After you've finished your podcast, save it as a WAV file, so you have a back-up in case you have problems exporting to MP3. You can then edit the show, cutting out silences and adding music. When the edit is finished, save your recording as an MP3 file. Now it's time to find a site to host your podcast - ourmedia.org is free and doesn't have a bandwidth limit. The last thing you need to do is create a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to share your podcast. Sites such as feedburner.com show you how to create an RSS file. To get the best exposure, publish it in the iTunes Music Store at www.itunes.co.uk.