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Imagine working for an employer who, aware that you're probably not sleeping enough at night, allows you to down tools and nap as part of your regular work duties - and not just forty winks at your desk, but a restorative snooze in a quiet room.

These are some of the measures being used by a growing number of companies in Japan to counter an epidemic of sleeplessness that costs its economy an estimated $138bn (£108bn) a year.

Tech startups have been quickest to address the "sleep debt" among irritable and unproductive employees.

Last year, Nextbeat, an IT service provider, went as far as setting up two "strategic sleeping rooms" - one for men, the other for women - at its headquarters in Tokyo. The aroma-infused rooms feature devices that block out background noise, allowing workers to stretch out on sofas for an undisturbed kip. Mobile phones, tablets and laptops are banned.

"Napping can do as much to improve someone's efficiency as a balanced diet and exercise," Emiko Sumikawa, a member of the Nextbeat board, told Kyodo news agency.

Nextbeat also asks employees leave work by 9pm and to refrain from doing excessive overtime, which has been blamed on a rising incidence of , or death from overwork.

One company even offers financial incentives to persuade its employees to shun overtime and get to bed at a reasonable hour. Crazy, a wedding planning company, awards employees who sleep at least six hours a night with points that can then be exchanged for food in the company cafeteria. Using an app to monitor their sleep, workers can accumulate points worth as much as 64,000 yen (£458) a year.

Japanese workers have more reason than most to submit to the urge for a daytime snooze, whether at work or during long commutes.

A survey conducted using fitness trackers in 28 countries found that Japanese men and women sleep, on average, just 6 hours and 35 minutes a night - 45 minutes less than the international average - making them the most sleep deprived of all.

Finnish women, by contrast, sleep almost an hour longer, with an average of 7.45 hours. Estonians, Canadians, Belgians, Austrians, as well as the Dutch and French, all get a comparatively decent night's sleep, according to the survey.

A separate poll by the health products maker Fuji Ryoki found that 92.6% of Japanese over the age of 20 said they were not getting enough sleep.

Even weary workers whose employers have yet to officially sanction power naps at least know that resting their head on their desk for a few minutes probably won't get them into trouble. Companies generally tolerate inemuri - or "sleeping while present" - as a demonstration of their employees' commitment rather than as a sign of sloth, although nappers should generally remain seated and avoid appearing too comfortable.

The government has also come to appreciate the personal and professional benefits of a well-rested workforce, with the health ministry recommending that all working-age people take a nap of up to 30 minutes in the early afternoon - advice readily embraced by some of the country's politicians.

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Snoozing on the job: Japanese firms tackle epidemic of sleeplessness

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Imagine working for an employer who, aware that you're probably not sleeping enough at night, allows you to down tools and nap as part of your regular work duties - and not just forty winks at your desk, but a restorative snooze in a quiet room.

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Chinese tech employees are pushing back against the industry's notoriously long hours, known as the "996" schedule of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

Over the past few weeks, a project that began in part as a joke among tired Chinese developers has turned into a nationwide debate about work culture and a rare protest against practices at some of the country's largest companies.

In late March, a group of developers started a project on the code-sharing platform Github called "996.icu" - a reference to a comment by a programmer that working such a schedule could land an employee in the intensive care unit.

The discussion gained momentum, as users added to a blacklist of more than 150 companies that push their staff to work excessive hours, posting evidence of unpaid, often compulsory or heavily encouraged overtime.

According to Chinese law, businesses should not allow their staff to work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, and overtime is restricted to 36 hours a month.
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But former and current employees of companies included on the blacklist - including Bytedance, the creator of the video app TikTok, Huawei and the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo - say such laws are regularly flouted.

Users have uploaded screenshots of conversations where employers ask them to work late in the evening. Each company listed is given a number for the type of hours they tend to push, in some cases beyond the 996 work schedule.

Ant Financial, a financial services company affiliated with Alibaba, is listed as having a "9106" work schedule - starting at 9am, ending at 10pm, for six days a week. In another case, staff at a software firm in Shandong province said they were required to work more than 100 hours of overtime in a month.

The long hours at Chinese tech firms are a relatively new development as China's tech industry has expanded with startups modelling themselves more after those in Silicon Valley.

Chinese tech companies are known for encouraging an obsession with work: Huawei reportedly promotes an aggressive, cut-throat " wolf culture " among its ranks.

Chinese tech executives have defended the long hours at their companies. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, one of the companies included in the blacklist, called the 996 schedule "a huge blessing" and said workers should consider it an honour rather than a burden.

"If you join Alibaba, you should get ready to work 12 hours a day. Otherwise why did you come to Alibaba? We don't need those who comfortably work eight hours," he said, according to comments posted on the company's Wechat account on Friday.

Richard Liu, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, also defended the 996 schedule. In a note on Friday, Liu recalled how in the early days of the company he would wake up every two hours so that he could offer customers a 24-hour service.

Liu said that since then, the number of "slackers" in his company had grown. "If this carries on, JD will have no hope and the company will be heartlessly kicked out of the market! Slackers are not my brothers."

As China's economy has slowed and bubbles have emerged in the tech sector, more employees are starting to reconsider the merits of working long hours.

"They [employees] were willing to accept long hours when business was good and they were being well rewarded but that is not the case any more. Staff are being laid off and pay is stagnating so staff are less willing to work as hard," said Geoffrey Crothall of China Labour Bulletin.

China's primary school students to learn how to avoid stock market pitfalls

The debate has spread across Chinese social media, where many users have criticised the tech industry's work culture as "inhumane". Even Chinese state media has weighed in. In an editorial on Sunday the People's Daily said: "Employees who object to 996 cannot be labelled as 'slackers' or 'not fighters'. Their real needs should be considered."

The topic has also prompted a broader debate about the kind of work-life balance - or lack of it - engendered by Chinese companies.

One user commented on the discussion forum Zhihu: "Most of today's companies are machines that cannot stop running. We are all screws on top. If the screw is rusty, just polish it, put a little lubricant on, then twist it on again and use it. If it breaks, they'll find a new screw to replace you. The machine cannot stop."
Additional reporting by Lillian Yang. Topics

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Working 9 to 9: Chinese tech workers push back against long hours

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Chinese tech employees are pushing back against the industry's notoriously long hours, known as the "996" schedule of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Over the past few weeks, a project that began in part as a joke among tired Chinese developers has turned into a nationwide debate about work culture and a rare protest against practices at some of the country's largest companies.

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10 of the best words in the world that don

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As genome sequencing costs continue to fall and artificial intelligence gets to work on analysing all this new data, the era of personalised medicine draws closer.

More than half of Icelanders have now had their precise genetic make-up sequenced and analysed.

Tens of thousands of their genomes have been fully sequenced by specialist firm Decode Genetics at a cost of around $600 (£487) a head.

"Compared with the cost of an MRI scan, it isn't that huge," says founder and chief executive Kári Stefánsson.

The aim of such projects is not only to learn more about disease in the general population, but also to create personalised medicine based on individuals' particular genetic quirks.

Some people, for example, metabolise medicines more quickly than others, with implications for treatment regimes. Others may have lifestyles that increase their chances of developing a condition from which they are particularly at risk.

"We have started to apply artificial intelligence to mine these enormous datasets," says Mr Stefánsson. "And all of this is generating insights into the diversity of man, into the nature of disease and the response to treatment."

The first human genome sequence took 13 years to complete and cost around $2.7bn, but thanks to new techniques, the cost of DNA analysis has plummeted and more and more large-scale "biobanks" of genetic profiles are being created around the world.

For example, a similar project is underway in Estonia, where citizens are being invited to volunteer their DNA. This is then analysed using a test known as an SNP array - "a poor man's sequence of the genome", according to Prof Andres Metspalu, head of the Estonian Biobank at the Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu. This test costs just €50 (£45) a head.

The data is being analysed for 700,000 gene mutations linked to medical conditions. And the results are now being made available to participants for the first time.

"Looking at all the genetic associations, we've found that there is plenty of information that we can return to individuals to use in the healthcare system," says Prof Lili Milani, group leader in pharmacogenomics and deputy director of the Institute.

"For example, people carrying mutations giving high risk of certain diseases, and also monogenic conditions such as breast cancer mutations."

Whether people are at higher or lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease or type-2 diabetes, for example, can depend on a combination of their genetic predisposition and their lifestyle - diet, exercise and so on, explains Prof Milani.

So sharing this kind of data with participants requires care. News of a predisposition to a serious illness would be extremely distressing to hear.

When the results are handed over, participants sign a new informed consent form and have a second sample taken to confirm the original data. This is followed by appointments with specialists, counselling, a letter to share with family members and follow-up consultations.

"What's unique in Estonia is that we're returning results - we've already done several pilots where we returned results of breast cancer and familial hypercholesterolemia in collaboration with clinicians," she says.

"It's very careful and conservative."

But as more testing and sequencing projects get going around the world, a potentially serious problem is emerging.

Most of the projects are disproportionately slanted towards populations of European descent.

"If we keep focusing on the populations that are easy to study - those that have been studied before - we make existing disparities in health data worse," warns Dr Lucia Hindorff, a programme director at the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

"We're seeing evidence that adding 50,000 people that are European as opposed to 50,000 people who are not European adds a different value to the data. If you add 50,000 more non-Europeans, you end up discovering more variations," she says.

In the US, as part of a project called Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology, Dr Hindorff and other researchers have been gathering genetic data from nearly 50,000 African-Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, Asians, Native Hawaiians, Native Americans and others.

They have already identified 27 new genomic variants associated with conditions such as blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, cigarette use and chronic kidney disease.

In one example, a strong association between a new genomic variant and smokers' daily cigarette usage was found in Native Hawaiian participants, but not in most other populations.
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Similarly, the team found that a variant in the haemoglobin gene - a gene known for its role in sickle cell anaemia - is associated with a greater amount of blood glucose attached to haemoglobin in African-Americans.

As genome sequencing costs continue to fall and the volume of data to be analysed increases, the era of personalised medicine looks more achievable.

The time may come when babies are routinely genetically profiled at birth - Prof Milani says senior Estonian health officials have been proposing just that.

Mr Stefánsson agrees: "I think it is very likely that we will be using this sequence capacity to implement preventative medicine in such a way that we will sequence people at birth," he says.

"Because why wouldn't we?"

Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebook

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Genetic testing: What secrets could it reveal about you?

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As genome sequencing costs continue to fall and artificial intelligence gets to work on analysing all this new data, the era of personalised medicine draws closer. More than half of Icelanders have now had their precise genetic make-up sequenced and analysed.

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Professional cuddler makes $100 an hour snuggling clients in need of therapeutic touch

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ne of the many great things about languages worldwide is the sizeable number of words for which there is no real English translation. Often they tell us about concepts and ideas that we are missing out on in the anglophone world.

As the northern hemisphere heads abroad in the coming holiday season, here are a few to be looking out for:

SPAIN: sobremesa

You may have witnessed the ritual, knowingly or not, while on the hunt for a coffee or a cold beer towards the end of another long Spanish afternoon.

Sitting clumped around tables inside restaurants or spilling out on to their terrazas, are friends, families and colleagues, preserved in the post-prandial moment like replete insects in amber.

Lunch - and it is more usually lunch than dinner - will long since have yielded to the important act of the sobremesa, that languid time when food gives way to hours of talking, drinking and joking. Coffee and digestivoswill have been taken, or perhaps the large gin and tonic that follows a meal rather than precedes it here.

The sobremesais a digestive period that allows for the slow settling of food, gossip, ideas and conversations. It is also a sybaritic time; a recognition that there is more to life than working long hours and that few pleasures are greater than sharing a table and then chatting nonsense for a hefty portion of what remains of the day.

The world may not have been put completely to rights by the end of the sobremesa, but it will seem a calmer, more benign place.

Ask Mariano Rajoy. At the end of May, as it became clear that he was going to be turfed out of office in a no-confidence vote, the then-prime minister did something very Spanish: he and his close circle retreated to a private room in a smart Madrid restaurant. Lunch was followed by a seven-hour sobremesa, and, reportedly, a couple of bottles of whisky.

After all, what does the loss of a premiership matter after a fine meal, a good cigar and some booze-soaked reminiscing? ¡Salud! Sam Jones in Madrid

PORTUGAL: esperto/esperta

It feels almost counterintuitive to have to explain what esperto/esperta means, a Portuguese word without true parallel in the English dictionary.

There are words that come close, that encapsulate something of the spirit of this word - and the word itself is spirited. On the ball, quick-witted, with-it, canny, having common sense, intuitive, someone who gets things done: these all help shade in the space occupied by esperto.

I grew up in Portugal and have always felt an undercurrent of admiration, almost affection, for the espertas.

A Brazilian friend, Tatiana, though, warns of a negative sense. Someone esperto can, she says, use his or her instincts to take advantage of others; to trap or fool them into trouble.

Sometimes it's easier to understand something by what it is not. Esperta is definitely not slow, dim, unimaginative. If these characteristics were on a spectrum, esperto would be at one end, with "plodding" at the other.

If you understand it, you probably are. Juliette Jowit

ITALY: bella figura

Before celebrating a confirmation in Sicily last year, my aunt breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that her British niece was dressed appropriately enough so as not to make a bad impression in front of the extended family.

I was also relieved, as it meant I had not inflicted the curse of the brutta figura, which literally translates as bad figure, on my family.

In pretty much all areas of life, whether it be in the way people dress, how they behave, how well their homes are kept or how impeccably a cake is presented and a gift wrapped, Italians strive to achieve the bella figura, or beautiful figure.

Such importance is placed on keeping up appearances and the finer detail that for unwitting foreigners there's a sense of being sized up in everything you do, even going as far as to what you eat and drink and at what time of the day you indulge in such activities.

"What matters is not what you do but how you appear," said an Italian friend, likening it to posting the perfect photograph on social media. It's a tactic that enables people to get promoted at work and politicians to win over admirers while giving the impression that they are achieving something.

"I call it 'selfie and spot'," the friend said. "For example, the politician takes a selfie against a beautiful backdrop, posts it on Facebook with a promise to do something, but then doesn't follow it through. With a good selfie and a good spot, you can survive an entire career without doing anything." Angela Giuffrida in Rome

GERMANY: Feierabend

One of the most misleading, but also most enduring, myths about German culture is that it values hard work over a good siesta. Northern Europeans, the legend goes, have a "Protestant work ethic" that means they get the job done even if it means staying in the office late into the night, while the southern Europeans wave it off with a mañana, mañana.

Anyone who sincerely believes that to be the case has never tried to call a German office at one minute past five. When German workers say Ich mach' Feierabend("I am calling it a day"), it rarely carries an apologetic undertone but usually comes with the confidence of someone claiming an ancient right.

Dating back to the 16 th century, the term Feierabend, or "celebration evening", used to denote the evening before a public holiday, but has come to refer to the free time between leaving the office and bedtime on any working day.

The key to understanding Feierabendis that it isn't time for going to the cinema or gym, but time for doing nothing. In 1880, the cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl described the conceptas "an atmosphere of carefree wellbeing, of deep inner reconciliation, of the pure and clear quiet of the evening".

Germany's adherence to the Feierabendrulebook can frustrate when you are trying to make a work call on a Friday afternoon or buy an aspirin from a pharmacy on a Sunday (Sundays being a 24-hour celebration evening).

But as a philosophy, it underpins the proudest achievements of the German labour movement and may just explain why the country has some of the highest productivity levels in Europe: to truly cherish the evening, you make sure you get the job done before five o'clock. Philip Oltermann in Berlin

FINLAND: sisu

Sisu is an untranslatable Finnish term that blends resilience, tenacity, persistence, determination, perseverance and sustained, rather than momentary, courage: the psychological strength to ensure that regardless of the cost or the consequences, what has to be done will be done.

It originates from the word sisus, meaning "intestines" or "guts"; Daniel Juslenius, author of the first Finnish-language dictionary in 1745, defined sisucunda as the place in the body where strong emotions live. In a harsh environment and with powerful neighbours, it was what a young nation needed.

Sisu is what, in 1939-40, allowed an army of 350,000 Finns to twice fight off Soviet forces three times their number, inflicting losses five times heavier than those they sustained.

More prosaically, it has helped Finns get through a lot of long, lonely, dark and freezing winters, building in the process one of the wealthiest, safest, most stable and best-governed countries in the world. It is not all good, of course. Sisu can lead to stubbornness, a refusal to take advice, an inability to admit weakness, a lack of compassion.

It has become a bit of cliché in Finland - a brand name for trucks and strongly-flavoured sweets. Research shows it holds little appeal to the young. But ask a Finn to define the national character, and it's the word most still reach for. Jon Henley

IRAN: Ta'arof

Ta'arofis a Persian word that has no English equivalent, referring to the art of etiquette ubiquitous in everyday Iranian life.

"You go first," says Mr A as he meets Mr B at the doorstep, as they try to enter a building. "No, it's not possible, you go first," Mr B insists in response. Ta'arof dictates a ritual that may see them both waiting for a couple of unnecessary minutes before one steps forward to enter.

It is an etiquette that is seen almost in all aspects of Iranian life, from hosts insisting on guests taking more food from the table, to the exchanges in the bazaar. "How much is this carpet?" asks Ms A after choosing her favourite in the shop. "It's worthless, you can just take it," responds the seller, quite disingenuously.

Although Ms A in reality cannot take the carpet out of the shop without paying for it, the seller might insist up to three times that she should just do that, until the amount of the price is finally mentioned.

The awkward exchanges may have originated out of politeness; ultimately, they may work to the seller's favour, as the buyer feels a certain obligation to respond to such deference with a purchase, even if the final price is more than she expected.

Another example: you are walking with a friend and you end up doing Ta'arof, asking him to come to yours for lunch, even though you don't have anything prepared and you don't really want him to accept.

The friend insists out of Ta'arof that he wouldn't come because he knows you're tired and doesn't want to be a burden, even though deep down he really wants to have lunch at your place.

"Oh, don't Ta'arof," you say in a Ta'arof asking your friend not to Ta'arof. He ends up accepting your reluctant Ta'arof. You're a bit irked, but you'll have to be all smiles. Not all Taa'rofs are insincere; some are, some aren't. You'd Ta'arof even if you badly want something, saying you don't want it; you'd Ta'arof if you really hate something, pretending you want it. Saeed Kamali Dehghan

RUSSIA: тоска (toska)

Leave it to Russia to serve up the melancholy: toska translates as yearning or ennui. Except it doesn't, because no English word can accurately reflect all the shades of the word, to paraphrase Vladimir Nabokov.

What can toska (pronounced tahs- kah) mean? Spiritual anguish, a deep pining, perhaps the product of nostalgia or love-sickness, toskais depression plus longing, an unbearable feeling that you need to escape but lack the hope or energy to do so.

Visually to me, toska conjures up an endless field of birch on the edge of St Petersburg, in the dead of winter when the clouds never part, and it's only light for five hours a day anyway.

Toska is the stuff of great literature. Evgeny Onegin, the foundational Russian novel-in-verse about superfluous men, unrequited love and duels? Loads of toska.

Anton Chekhov wrote an entire short story called Toska about a cabman who recently lost his son and searches for someone to talk to about his grief. He ends up talking to his horse. All that broodiness in the great (and not-so-great) Russian novels? You get the picture.

So why choose toska for this list of positivity? Because if the Russian soul s the place where great emotions reside, then toska pays the rent. Without toska there cannot be delirious happiness, endless heartfelt conversations at 4am at the kitchen table, boundless generosity at obvious personal expense.

Toska is a sign that your emotions go beyond logic and that you are really, truly living your emotions. Perhaps you've felt toska and you didn't realise it, but it's a good thing: it means you've got a little bit of the Russian soul in you. Andrew Roth in Moscow

JAPAN: shoganai

As inhabitants of an archipelago that is regularly struck by earthquakes and tsunamis, and - as recent events have tragically demonstrated - floods and landslides, it is little wonder that the Japanese have a well-developed sense of fatalism. Any verbal reflection on humans' powerlessness to control nature's most destructive forces often elicit the phrase shoganai.

The expression, meaning, "it can't be helped," is Japan's catchall response to any situation, large or small, over which people believe they have no influence. A more voguish translation might be "it is what it is". A French person would immediately recognise it as a version of "c'est la vie".

It could be heard, delivered with deep reflection, amid the rubble of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and, in resigned tones, after Japan's agonising exit from the World Cup in Russia.

Shoganai, and its synonymshikata ga nai, are verbal coping mechanisms that apply equally to unwelcome developments in everyday life, from getting struck in a traffic jam to having to spend Friday evening at the office.

With its roots in the Zen Buddhist belief that suffering is a natural part of life, it could perhaps be described as Japan's version of the serenity prayer - a personal and communal recognition that, on occasion, passive acceptance of an unfortunate truth is far easier than trying to deny it.

But resigning oneself to one's fate with a muttered "shoganai" has its drawbacks. Some observers of Japanese culture note that it is too often applied in situations in which humans have more influence than they think.

For much of the seven decades since the end of the second world war, there has been a general acceptance of the dominance of the conservative Liberal Democratic party, even among liberal voters. Some have pointed to its role in allowing the rise of Japanese militarism in the first half of the 20th century.

Shikata ga nai is, then, partly to blame for weaknesses at the heart of Japan's democracy, allowing one party to dominate even, as is the case today, when it is mired in scandal.

In a country with few energy resources of its own, nuclear power was for decades the beneficiary of the shoganai mindset, one that accepted the construction of dozens of nuclear reactors along the coastline as a necessary evil.

It took Fukushima to prove that Japan's lauded sense of fatalism can sometimes be downright dangerous. Justin McCurry in Tokyo

NETHERLANDS: polderen

Het poldermodeland its associated verb, polderen, derive from the Dutch habit of working together to reclaim parts of their country from the sea. Since the Middle Ages, everyone on the same polder, regardless of religion, politics, class and local rivalries, has had to cooperate in maintaining the complex but vital system of windmills and dykes that kept their land dry.

The term, which has been defined as "pragmatic cooperation despite differences", has been used since the mid-1970s to describe the kind of consensus political decision-making common in the Netherlands, which has been governed by coalitions for over a century, since no single party has ever held a majority.

In policymaking, the concept is exemplified by a Dutch institution known as the Social-Economic Council, a tripartite forum in which government, employers' federations and unions air their differences, generally reaching consensus on issues such as wage restraint, working hours, job creation and productivity.

In politics, Dutch governments - the latest, a coalition between four parties with widely different views, took a record 208 days to hammer out - are the embodiment of the poldermodel, which has come in for increasing criticism, particularly from the radical right, since the financial crisis of 2008.

Politicians such as Thierry Baudet of the nativist, right-wing Forum for Democracy argue the poldermodel has led to a "political cartel" in which endless compromise has robbed the major parties of all distinguishing features and left them incapable of taking essential decisions. Jon Henley

CHINA: tiáo 条

How do we categorise or classify things, thereby imagining them as one thing and not another? Unlike French or German, gender does not provide categories in Chinese, which groups things by something else entirely: shape.

Tiáo is one of at least 140 classifiers and measure words in the Chinese language. It's a measure word for long-narrow-shape things. For example, bed sheets, fish, ships, bars of soap, cartons of cigarettes, avenues, trousers, dragons, rivers.

These measure words embrace the ways in which shape imprints itself upon us, while playfully noticing the relationships between all things. The measure word kē 颗 (kernel) is used for small, roundish things, or objects that appear small: pearls, teeth, bullets and seeds, as well as distant stars and satellites.

Gēn 根, for thin-slender objects, will appear before needles, bananas, fried chicken legs, lollipops, chopsticks, guitar strings and matches, among a thousand other things. "Flower-like" objects gather under the word duo 朵: bunches of flowers, clouds, mushrooms and ears.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how we attempt to group anything or anyone together, and how formations change. Philosopher Wang Lianqing charts how tiáowas first applied to objects we can pick up by hand (belts, branches, string) and then expanded outward (streets, rivers, mountain ranges).

And finallytiáo extended metaphorically. News and events are also classified with tiáo, perhaps because news was written in long vertical lines, and events, as the 7th-century scholar Yan Shigu wrote, arrive in lists "one by one, as (arranging) long-shaped twigs".

Onwards the idea broadened, so that an idea or opinion is also "long-shaped news," and in the 14th century, tiáo was used for spirit, which was imagined as straight, high and lofty. In language, another geometry is at work, gathering recurrences through time and space. Madeleine Thien
What is your favourite word, concept or idea in the country you live in? Let us know in the comments, or at theupside@theguardian.com

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10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)

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As millions head abroad, our correspondents pick out the words that for them speak volumes about the countries they love and live in

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Avista Language School Commercial - Fish and Cat.flv

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4-year-old Russian girl stuns crowd by speaking fluently in 7 languages

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4-year-old Bella from Moscow easily speaks Russian, English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic! She was performing on the "Amazing people" talent show, which gives participants the opportunity to show their own unique abilities.

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Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library - Norfolk County Council

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What to expect from libraries in the 21st century: Pam Sandlian Smith at TEDxMileHigh

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Idea Stores featured on BBC Breakfast as part of a report on libraries. September 2010.