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Issues related to investing in art are examined, focusing on advice to potential collectors about buying and selling art. Topics include handling and holding costs, art education for collectors, capital gains tax, and trends in Australian art collection since the 1970s.

This article focuses on the safety of genetically modified foods. In the developed world consumers have the luxury of worrying about hypothetical fears while people suffer and die in the developing world from very real food hazards that are preventable by better technology. Satisfying the concerns of wealthy western Europeans about hypothetical food hazards can interfere with the provision of better nutrition for the poor in countries like India, Brazil and Bangladesh. The basic theme explored in this article is that decisions about the safety of GM food need to be comprehensive in assessing safety emphasise actual hazards, and balance the possible harm of using a novel food against the harm that can come from interfering with its availability and making food innovation impossible by excessive precaution. Plants are not mtrinsically safe to eat. They are selected by evolution not to provide perfectly nutritious and safe food for humans but to be successful in producing seeds that flourish for succeeding generations. Potentially hazardous foods can be eaten because humans have discovered ways of cooking and processing the food so that the poisons are eliminated or destroyed, and because humans have a high tolerance to many toxins because the human liver produces special enzymes that neutralise many of the plant's chemical defences against being eaten.

In the USA, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium(VREF) is endemic in hospitals, despite lack of carriage among healthy individuals. In Europe, however, hospital outbreaks are rare, but VREF carriage among healthy individuals and livestock is common. We used amplified fragment-length polymorphism analysis to genotype 120 VREF isolates associated with hospital outbreaks and 45 non-epidemic isolates from the USA, Europe, and Australia. We also looked for the espvirulence gene in these isolates and in 98 VREF from animals. A specific E faeciumsubpopulation genetically distinct from non-epidemic VREF isolates was found to be the cause of the hospital epidemics in all three continents. This subpopulation contained a variant of the espgene that was absent in all non-epidemic and animal isolates. Identification of the variant espgene will be important in guiding infection-control strategies, and the Esp protein could be a new target for antibacterial therapy.