Sommaire pour May/Jun 2020 de WIRED UK

Amit Katwala Katwala writes about the race for “quantum supremacy”, and the rewards it can bring to areas as diverse as medicine, energy and finance. “The tech companies are as different as their approaches,” he says. “At Google, there’s a fun, almost startup vibe; Microsoft, as you might expect, is very corporate. But the prize is the same: computers that can solve currently impossible problems.” Kassia St Clair Colour specialist and author Kassia St Clair brings to light Specimen, an addictive colour-matching smartphone game that is providing data to scientists working to make OLED screens longer lasting and personalised to how we each perceive hues. “I’ve been obsessed with colour for years – it’s vital in all sorts of areas of our lives,” she says. “It’s why I play Specimen…

Spag ball Pasta gets some of the highest engagement rates. Pair it with meatballs, and you can break 100 million views. Choc of the new Over the last three years, chocolate recipes have been viewed ten per cent more than Twisted’s average on Facebook, and 15 per cent more on Instagram. Spud you like Recipes with a starring role for potatoes are a comment driver – doubling the average for Twisted videos. Supersize it By October 2019, Twisted’s giant spaghetti-stuffed meatball had 36 million views – 10x the “giant” video average. Cheese, toasted Cheese recipes get an average of 3.1 million views – and can drive up the comments by 32 per cent.…

Deep in the bowels of a vast, disused postal sorting office in the Austrian city of Linz, Dmitry Morozov is strapping on something that looks like a cross between a gas mask and a church organ. Four floors above, the Ars Electronica arts festival is dazzling audiences. In the basement, the lighting is dim and the atmosphere funereal. It’s an appropriate setting for an instrument designed to be played by a person on the verge of death. In last breath, the wearer’s breathing is turned into sparse, forlorn organ music. The sound is synthesised based on the breath’s pressure and flow, so it can be used by those barely capable of exerting themselves. It’s part of Morozov’s unfolding exploration of how our bodily data can be used to express ourselves,…

William Gibson’s novel, Zero History, features the ugliest T-shirt in the world – a ridiculous garment that magically renders the wearer invisible to CCTV. Now, as states across the world deploy digital surveillance systems to track, trace and monitor citizens, we may soon be wearing hideous T-shirts of our own. Researchers in the US at Northeastern University, MIT and IBM have designed an “adversarial” top printed with a kaleidoscopic patch of colour that renders the wearer undetectable to AI. “The adversarial T-shirt works on the neural networks used for object detection,” explains Xue Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern. Normally, a neural network recognises someone or something in an image, draws a “bounding box” around it, and assigns a label to that object. By finding the…

Oliver Prill, chief executive of fintech startup Tide, has a particular approach to recruiting. Instead of only hiring the people at a level he can afford, he spends more to attract talent that can turbocharge the growth of his business. The London-based B2B bank, which provides low-interest, online-only accounts for companies, is staffed by the sort of people Prill likes to call “forward hires” – talented people who can push parts of the business to grow quickly. This is a core concept in Tide’s hiring strategy, and Prill uses his own company to convey what he means. Every business will find critical areas of the operation that need a step-change at certain points of its growth, he explains: “At Tide, we have a very sound technology basis, but we are…

Michael Common’s first job was at Barclays – he joined the graduate scheme – but after the financial crash of 2008 he couldn’t stop thinking how banking didn’t work for consumers. So he created a potential fix, building a prototype that offered services digitally. And then he pitched it to his employers. Barclays didn’t want it. But it did kick-start a journey for Common to develop the idea, pivot to an instant messaging product, and eventually spin out his own company, Nivo – all of this with the support of his manager and the bank. At least two other colleagues have followed the same path since, Common says. Common is an “intrapreneur”: an innovator who works inside a company, rather than starting up their own. It is a way to…

iPad Pro (2020) Perfect for on-the-go creativity. £769 apple.com Genusee Cookies n’ Cream eyewear Made from recycled single-use bottles from Flint, Michigan. $99 genusee.com SanDisk iXpand Charger Imparts wireless power at 10W and backs up photos and videos. From £89.99 shop.westerndigital.com Wonderboom 2 Ultimate Ears’ original speaker, upgraded. £89.99 ultimateears.com Osuza Canvas backpack A hardcore creative carry. $349 osuza.com Copic Original, set of 72 Pens for pro illustrators. £410.95 copic-shop.co.uk FoldEat It’s time to stop clogging the keyboard with crumbs from your meal deal and invest in this multi-functional modular lunch box that opens out to create a picnic blanket for your desk. Featuring square bento-style microwaveable containers, each 16.5cm wide by 5cm tall box has movable dividers, a separate option for your favourite drink, and plenty of space for condiment…

Brass Carpenter’s Pen The ballpoint pen is a pretty ingenious bit of tech, but for the maker who needs more in their chore jacket pocket, this solid brass design shoehorns in eight other practical extras, including a touchscreen stylus, Philips and flathead screwdrivers, 4in (10cm) ruler markings precision-etched into the length, a tiny spirit level, and two scale functions. Stylish and practical, keep it shiny, or let it develop a lovely patina. $28 bestmadeco.com Kanejun Mitsukawa Juntaro Saw Set Third-generation sawmaker Daizo Mitsukawa has handcrafted five blades inspired by the Japanese woodworking technique sashimono (which creates intricate and decorative wood joints that lock without nails). They are designed for precision cross-, rip-, diagonal-, flush- and keyhole-cutting, the purpose of each signalled by an engraving on the Paulownia wood handle. £299…

One day in 2018, Apple vice-president Sumbul Desai received a letter from a woman thanking Desai for saving her life. A few weeks after having a baby, an alert from the mother’s Apple Watch indicated an abnormally high heart rate. This prompted her to go to hospital, where she was diagnosed with thyroid storm, a condition that can be fatal. “Had she not paid attention, her outcome could have been much worse,” Desai recalls. “Her letter is incredibly moving because she talks about how she’s with her child… she’s healthy now.” Saving the lives of Apple Watch users is perhaps what comes to mind when CEO Tim Cook states that he hopes healthcare will ultimately be the company’s “most important contribution to humankind”. According to Desai, the catalyst was the…

Apple unveiled a new status symbol for the brand’s fans in 2019: a sleek grey credit card made of titanium. It had no number, no sort code and no associated bank account. Many analysts have pointed out that it offers fewer perks than rival cards already on the market, such as the American Express Blue Cash Preferred and Amazon Prime Rewards Visa cards. “I was pretty underwhelmed, and I think a lot of folks felt that way,” says Matt Shulz, chief analyst at CompareCards. And the Apple Card – launched in partnership with Goldman Sachs, and currently available only in the US – has already run into controversy. The metal itself seems on the impractical side: users are told to avoid putting it in a leather wallet to prevent discolouration,…

The launch of Apple’s new U1 chip in September 2019 was conspicuous for the lack of fanfare. But do not be fooled: it could be the basis for applications that will be core to future Apple products and services. U1 utilises a wireless technology called ultra-wideband (UWB), which Apple dubs “GPS at the scale of your living room”. This technology is similar to Wi-Fi, but operates in a different range of frequencies that will generally suffer less interference – so boosting performance. It sends a rapid series of pulses over a wide spectrum to nearby UWB-enabled devices to determine their exact positions, and to transfer large amounts of data – much more than is possible with Bluetooth. UWB has been used in commercial contexts for decades (for tagging and retrieving…

Light touch The first qubits were made by trapping ions in tiny wells and flipping their state with beams of light. Baltimore-based IonQ is attempting to commercialise trapped-ion qubits – though whether they can be scaled and miniaturised is uncertain. Ice cold Google and IBM are building superconducting qubits, which rely on extreme cold and a ring of metal with a nanometre gap called a Josephson junction. Microwave pulses flip the qubit between states. IBM varies the pulse frequency variations, while Google uses a magnetic field to “tune” the qubits. Magic spells Superconducting and trapped-ion qubits live for fractions of a second. Microsoft is working on “topological qubits”, which store the information in several places at once, like a Harry Potter Horcrux – but they might be impossible to make.…

From the late 60s onwards, Nasa would wake orbiting astronauts with music. “Everybody on board looked forward to it,” says astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who was part of the ISS crew from April 4 to September 25, 2010. “It was fun, in a team-building way.” Early missions were dominated by classical and military, switching to jazz and pop in the 70s, as astronauts began spending months in space on Skylab. The Space Shuttle programme meant pilots were increasingly sourced from the US Navy and Air force, and scientists from top universities. Music from this period skews toward military marches and university anthems. Over the later years of the Shuttle programme, tastes softened – especially after the Cold War ended – and Mission Control began asking astronauts’ families to pick songs,…

We may be in the era of artificial intelligence, but there is still much we do not know about natural intelligence – such as how it develops, what kinds of physiological factors play a part, and how interaction with others influences it. However, a missing chapter in the brain’s story may soon emerge from a lab that will use wireless and wearable technologies to get inside the heads of toddlers as they learn by exploring and playing in the world around them. The Wohl Wolfson ToddlerLab, part of Birkbeck University’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development (CBCD), will open in London’s Torrington Square in June 2020. Scientists will scan the brains, monitor the gaze, and chart the hormones of one- to three-year-olds as they play in a series of real…

Tudor Black Bay Bronze watch £3,110 tudorwatch.com Tudor takes personalisation to the next level with a 43mm satin-brushed bronze case that develops a unique patina over time. Inside, the calibre MT5601’s 70-hour power reserve keeps things ticking along. Octomore 10.4 Single Malt Whisky £160 whiskyshop.com Challenging the idea that older is better, 10.4 is Octomore’s youngest whisky, aged for just three years in virgin Limousin oak casks. The result is a deep, complex, smoky spirit that defies convention. LG SIGNATURE Wine Cellar £5,499.99 lg.com Peep at your collection of up to 65 bottles with LG’s InstaView™ technology – knock twice on the UV-resistant glass, and it becomes see-through. There’s also Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands to help manage temperature. Molecule 05 fragrance by Escentric Molecules £80 harveynichols.com Despite being…

In the early 2000s, Radiohead almost invented social media. “We came up with something we called a ziggurat, like a weird, twisted Facebook,” lead singer Thom Yorke explains in a video call from the studio. They never did build their Facebook, but in the mid-90s were one of the first bands to build a website. They’ve “actively tried to create a community outside of seriously fucking lame-arse websites that major record companies would build”, says Yorke. Back then, labels were keen for artists to use websites to post data on how many records they’d sold. “It was like… I don’t think we want to do that,” remembers bassist Colin Greenwood with a chuckle. In January 2020, the strange iterations of Radiohead’s websites were brought back to life when the band…

Being involved in a car crash is just the beginning of a painful process of dealing with car insurance firms. Determining the extent of the damage suffered by a vehicle and the cost of repairing it requires experts to inspect the car or view pictures of it. But such specialists are not always at hand, and it can take time to settle a claim. In late 2014, Alex Dalyac and Razvan Ranca, two AI researchers who had met through London-based company-builder Entrepreneur First, joined forces with e-commerce entrepreneur Adrien Cohen to found a business fast-tracking car accident settlements after realising the sector was in need of a shake-up. What convinced them, Cohen says, “was that it’s first and foremost visual: people assess accidents by looking at photos of damaged cars.”…

FLIP FLOPS Flip flops and army pants might have been a legitimate look in 2006, but only on beaches – and that’s where they should remain. VESTS Never display your bare shoulders in a job interview. A vest under a shirt (buttoned, of course) is OK, but abstain from wearing one on its own. SWEATPANTS A no-go area when it comes to trying to impress. Sure, Timothée Chalamet looks good in a pair – but he’s famous and he wore his on a Starbucks run. NOVELTY TIES Nope. Go for a plain, solid-colour design, or a simple collegiate stripe – though in the creative sector, the best tie is often no tie.…

Why now? Technological advances, new regulation, or the lowering of barriers, may have created an opportunity. Who is your customer? If your idea hinges on customer demand, you must know to whom it will appeal – and where to find them. How will you beat the competition? Show a clear advantage – whether you’re a first-mover, or rivals are missing a trick. Is it aligned to your company’s strategy? This is a vital consideration to justify all the investment and resources your project needs. Do you still have the mindset of an employee? As an intrapreneur, you’ll need to step up and take charge of your targets – and hit them. How will it make money? Consider what a realistic price point might be – and whether the bottom line…

Dell Luxuriously machined from aluminium and sporting a white faux-carbon-fibre shell, Dell’s chic laptop pairs brains with beauty. The 16:10 ratio, 3,840 x 2,400 4K screen dazzles, while a 10th-gen Intel processor pushes the pixels. At 1.2kg it’s not a featherweight, but at just 30cm wide and 2cm deep, it’s bag-friendly. From £1,399 dell.com Verpan Reflect Table Lamp Designed in 1980, but never produced, Verpan has raided the archives of Verner Panton to finally realise his Reflect steel table lamp. Standing 30cm tall in red or grey powder coated steel, a rod holds the lamp’s slanted, disc-shaped shade, which reflects the light beamed on to it, producing a diffused glow. £450 verpan.com Good Grips Sweep & Swipe Address that mysteriously sticky ctrl key and your murky display with this unexpectedly…

Lodge Cast Iron Double Dutch Oven Taste the history from the last cast-iron cookware manufacturer in the US. £114.99 lakeland.co.uk Falastin: A Cookbook Ottolenghi collaborators Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley dive into Palestinian cuisine. £28 penguin.co.uk Petal Chopping Board This natural beechwood chopping board blends style, function and value. £27 casefurniture.com AJAX 1905 Chef’s Knife Based on a design dating back to 1905, this blade looks like a classic meat cleaver, but is equally adept at trimming a rib, slicing veggies or finely chopping herbs. €109.90 dick.de Chrome Industries Chef’s Roll With space for 11 knives (up to a maximum length of 43cm) this heavy-duty chef’s pack was co-designed with San Franciscan celeb chef Chris Cosentino. Made using 1,050-denier nylon, it has four extra pockets, rugged clasps and a slice-proof…

Dressed in a sombre suit and tie, Apple CEO Tim Cook spent an afternoon in November 2019 showing Donald Trump around a large Texas manufacturing plant, where the tech giant plans to make its new MacBook Pro. At one point, Cook handed the US President a ceremonial silver plaque emblazoned with the words: “Mac Pro. Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in USA.” The visit was designed to showcase Apple’s commitment to American manufacturing. But behind it lay a much larger question hanging over the company’s future: what to do about the vast majority of its products that still carry the words “Assembled in China”? China is Apple’s largest market after the US and Europe,but, as China’s own smartphone market matures and its economy slows, iPhone sales have declined. Such…

Type “LoveFrom” into Google and you’ll find obscure domain names snapped up by design fans in a bid to get the attention of one man: Jony Ive. In June 2019, Ive announced he was leaving his machined aluminium pedestal as Apple’s chief design officer. After 27 years at the company, he was starting a new design firm called LoveFrom with fellow industrial designer Marc Newson, who was leaving Apple after five years. Since then, Ive has trade-marked “LoveFrom Jony” on a wide range of product categories including drones, beauty items and appliances. For those who believe he checked out creatively from the day-to-day of Cupertino years ago, it appears he is now finally free to design in any mode and category he likes. That leaves a major question for Apple:…

Three years after launch, Apple’s AirPods earn more revenue than AMD, Spotify, Twitter, Snap or Shopify. That’s $7.3 billion in revenue in 2019, up from $3.3 billion in 2018 – a 121 per cent year-on-year increase. Not bad for a product that got just five minutes of stage time at Apple’s iPhone and Apple Watch event in September 2016. “It was like wildfire how quickly it spread,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, says. “It’s done better than we ever imagined.” Estimates suggest that in 2019, Apple sold 35 million pairs of AirPods. Though Apple never shares its figures of individual product sales, in the company’s most recent earnings call for the first quarter of 2020, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that the “demand for AirPods continues to…

INSIDE THE STRUGGLE FOR QUANTUM SUPREMACY On June 4, 2019, Sergio Boixo gathered his colleagues on Google’s quantum research team for an urgent meeting. The group, split across two sites in southern California, had spent the better part of a decade trying to build a working quantum computer – a revolutionary device that works according to the laws of quantum mechanics. For months, Google had been inching closer to a milestone known as quantum supremacy – the point at which a quantum computer can accomplish something beyond even the world’s best classical super-computers. But there was a problem. Boixo, a tall Spaniard with a greying beard, had designed an experiment that was meant to be virtually impossible for a classical computer to solve, but easy for Google’s Sycamore quantum chip.…

IT DIDN’T SOUND LIKE THE HOTTEST TICKET IN PARIS: a debate on the theme of “property” between two of the city’s economists, Frédéric Lordon and Thomas Piketty, on a January night in a dingy hall at the Bourse du Travail, the old Labour Exchange. Just to be sure, I arrived ten minutes early to get a good seat - only to find every one taken. Dozens of disappointed fans filled the pavement outside. Piketty’s 753-page book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker Capital and Ideology, may prove still more influential. The book is a global history of inequality and the stories that societies tell to justify it, from pre-modern…

Some of Elizabeth Nyeko’s earliest memories are of civil war. In Uganda, bedding down outdoors in case the family home was bombed, she would seek sanctuary in the night sky, gazing at satellites, and wondering where their energy came from. At the age of five, Nyeko became a refugee, but her passion for energy has survived all the upheavals. Today, she is on a mission to help her homeland with a plan for affordable, reliable, low-carbon electricity. According to the World Bank, over 11 per cent of the world’s population do not have access to electricity. Mini-grids – small-scale, self-sufficient networks – are slowly democratising the utilities landscape, helping communities not served by the main grid. In 2012, when studying medicine at the University of Oxford, Nyeko set up a…

Annie Mitchell Founder of Bottleshot Cold Brew “I recommend to all my friends an app called CookBook. You copy a recipe link from Instagram or the web, and it imports the information, so all your favourite meals are on your phone. It makes it easy to pop to the store without planning ahead to make a quick meal.” Phil Hutcheon Founder and CEO of DICE “I was excited to see what Jesse Armstrong [writer of Peep Show and The Thick of It] would do next. No one watched the first season of Succession, but now? It’s a great example of huge growth initiating from a passionate fan base.” Natalia Ramsden Founder of SOFOS Associates “The Better Brain Solution, by Steven Masley, really changed how I thought about the impact of food…

After six operations, Fadel, an 18-year-old from Gaza with a severe bomb-blast hand injury, was still unable to work, shower or dress. In 2016, his surgeon contacted Nadine Hachach-Haram, a reconstructive surgeon in London, to ask for help. Hachach-Haram is the founder of Proximie, a web-based dashboard that allows a remote expert to guide a surgeon step by step through an operation via audio, video and augmented reality. In 2015, an early version was tested in Peru in partnership with the Global Smile Foundation, which provides cleft palate surgery. The results were “phenomenal”, says Hachach-Haram. “The local surgeon’s skills improved significantly, and she was able to train other surgeons.” But Proximie had not been used in real time until Fadel’s case. Within days, Hachach-Haram recruited a trauma surgeon in Beirut…

Aaron Levant watched as more than 100,000 people simultaneously tried to buy a pair of trainers on his app, NTWRK, in January 2019. The previous year, the 36-year-old entrepreneur and creator of the Agenda clothing trade show had noticed the confluence of physical and digital shopping: stores were becoming more like entertainment experiences, and online influencers were making significant sums from selling merchandise. Levant believed that if home shopping channels like QVC could hawk a celebrity-branded sweater to a 65-year-old in middle America over the phone, he could sell Travis Scott trainers or DJ Khaled headphones via a mobile-only, live-streaming, e-commerce app. NTWRK, based in LA, sells just one or two products a day at appointed times and in limited runs via its Android and iOS apps – in effect…

1. Invest in some flora: 15 per cent boost University of Exeter research found greenery makes employees more cognitively involved in their work. 2. Sit near the window: 2 per cent boost Natural light can increase productivity, according to a Daylight and Workplace study at Cornell University. 3. Set the thermostat to 22°C: 10-20 per cent boost Productivity increases with temperatures of 21-22°C, claims the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 4. Work from home: 13.5 per cent boost Remote workers make more calls than office ones, says Harvard Business Review – almost an extra day’s worth.…

Ace the task Bulb filters job applications via a “non discriminatory” performance test. “We lose 25 per cent of applicants because they can’t be bothered to do that task.” “I” not “we” People can be too polite in selling the collective achievement. “We’re interested in your contribution as a driver, not a passenger.” Harness the data Look at everything: social media strategy, financial reports, competitors. Go beyond the superficial things we say about ourselves on our website. Don’t be a robot Build relationships with people you work with; go to meet-ups and events. “Talk about what you’re interested in – don’t be a complete robot.” Follow up Bulb’s head of PR got the job a year after her initial pitch. She came back with: “This is what’s happened to me.…

Table football is no longer standard issue for a hip startup’s office – and all the ball pits, unlimited coffee stations and comfy sleeping pods in the world aren’t enough to stop employees jumping ship. Playtime, it seems, is over, and companies are now waking up to the reality that employees are primarily motivated by cold, hard cash. The main reason people choose an employer is salary, according to research from insurance company Aviva: 44 per cent prioritise 22 to 35 days of paid annual leave; 41 per cent think a decent pension scheme is top of the tree; and for 25 per cent, bonuses or share options are key. More recently, British companies have sought inspiration from Silicon Valley, realising the value of offering a stake in a business…

Neumann KU100 Designed to bring drama and realism to recordings of radio plays and classical concerts, this binaural stereo microphone, shaped as a life-size foam head, has two omnidirectional condenser capsules built into its artificial ears. This means playback (through high-quality headphones) of sound captured this way will be the closest reproduction you’ll get of being in the room where the audio was produced. £6,502 gear4music.com RØDECaster Pro Intuitive enough for beginners, but with pro features for experienced podcasters, this classy production studio has four mic channels with automatic level setting and one-touch recording to a microSD card. Eight programmable effect pads mean that adding your favourite jingles or music – or, heaven forbid, canned laughter – is a button-press away. £553 rode.com JBL Professional One Series 104-BT A superb-value…

In August 2019, Google rattled Apple. Researchers from its Project Zero security team released details of a zero-day attack targeting iPhone users, to conduct surveillance on Uighurs, a Muslim minority oppressed by the Chinese government – one of the worst hacks ever seen against iPhone and iPad security. Google’s researchers said it had been undetected for over two years. Apple disputes the length of the hack, as well as claims that thousands of people were affected – but it has conceded that this was a sophisticated effort designed to break its systems. Apple fixed the vulnerabilities in February 2019, one month after Google had, privately, raised the alarm. iPhones and iPads are among the safest devices that people can buy. Apple spends huge sums on protecting its products and frequently…

Conventional wisdom says the public appetite for paying for journalism is waning. Apple News+ – a £9.99 per month, all-you-can-eat subscription service that launched in 2019 – is trying to buck the trend. The “+” differentiates the app from the free Apple News aggregator. But primarily it stands for the prestige of print: quality reporting, an editorial voice, beautifully designed editions Elle and Rolling Stone available in the UK. (WIRED UK publisher Condé Nast Britain has not signed up.) The problem? Apple has declined to release subscriber numbers, but reports from CNBC in late 2019 suggest that an initial cohort of 200,000 paying users in the US has failed to substantially increase. The competition comes from magazine platforms such as Readly, which offers 5,000 titles for £7.99 a month, and…

Classical computer Almost every computer made – from wartime code-breaker to smartphone – they work with millions of switches called bits. Moore’s law In 1965 Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, predicted a doubling of the number of switches (known as transistors) able to fit on a chip every two years. Qubit Instead of representing just “1” or “0”, a qubit – short for “quantum bit” – can represent both at the same time. Superposition The state of being both “1” and “0” simultaneously: think of it as a flipped coin that hasn’t landed yet. Entanglement The way two particles can become linked, so that anything you do to one happens to the other, no matter the distance. Quantum supremacy The point at which quantum computers will do can’t (regardless…

US The top ten per cent of earners in the US had a 48 per cent share of national income in 2018, while the bottom half had only ten per cent. Europe Given the income gap between east and west, inequality is higher when you consider eastern and western Europe together, than western Europe alone. China Inequality in China rose rapidly between 1980 and 2018, but the gap between the top ten per cent and bottom 50 is still smaller than in the US. Middle East The Middle East is the most inegalitarian region, with the top ten per cent commanding a 64 per cent share of total income Africa The top ten per cent have a 65 per cent share of income in South Africa, compared to 54 per…

Caledonian Sleeper from London to Fort William – a hotel on rails with private bedrooms that winds through the West Highlands. The Bernina Express – through the Swiss Alps, it’s a slow but scenic way to get from Zurich to Milan. The Glacier Express: Zermatt to St Moritz, across Switzerland on a narrow-gauge panoramic train. Rhine Valley, Cologne to Mainz – this classic route along the Rhine passes vineyards, castles and the Lorelei Rock at Sankt Goarshausen. Belgrade to Bar – a train journey from the Serbian capital to the Montenegrin Adriatic, which takes in a spectacular mountain route. Venice Simplon Orient Express – a luxury “cruise train” linking London, Paris and Venice, using vintage rail cars. Oslo to Bergen, with a side trip along the Flam Railway – the…