In a few billion years, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, with catastrophic results. And there’s nothing we can do about it, even if we humans, as a race, survive that long.

So given the bleak, long-term future of the Earth, why are some this planet’s country leaders still fanning the flames of war? Get your heads out of the ashtray, I say, and watch where the smoke rises. Then maybe you’d realize there’s a sky up there too, and that we all live under it.

That’s enough of the ‘Lessons of the Week’. Talking about war and armies – the latter of which marches on its stomach – actually the Israeli army seems to be marching over the stomachs and dead bodies of the Palestinians, but that’s another, bloodier story – US army scientists have come up with a super sandwich capable of surviving a 10,000ft airdrop, freezing Arctic battlefields, scorching desert manoeuvres, bacteria and moisture.

It will also stay fresh for up to three years, but God only knows what it would taste like.

Some say they got the idea from McDonald’s Big Mac (well the packaging it comes in, anyway), or perhaps it was the old, green and curly British Rail cheese sandwich. At present, we don’t know if the US army intends to feed their soldiers with them, or use these invulnerable sandwiches to bomb the Taliban.

Talking about returning unwanted goods, an EU law has just been passed making manufacturers responsible for recycling electrical and battery-operated equipment in specially-built plants. Under the same law, EU householders also face fines for throwing away unwanted electrical goods.

So what, I wonder, will happen to all those unexploded missiles and mines dumped by the US, the Brits and other countries. Will they be carefully dug up, packed in a straw-filled box, and labelled with the sticker, ‘Return to Sender’?

But the best news, for suicidal smokers, is the fact that the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (sic!) has officially recommended that anti-smoking treatments, including the controversial drug Zyban, should be available on Britain’s National Health Service.

Zyban, or buproprion, has been available on prescription in Britain since it was launched here two years ago. The tablet, which acts on the brain to quash the craving for nicotine, was originally hailed as a "wonder-drug". However, there have since been almost 7,000 reports of adverse reaction to Zyban among around 500,000 users in Britain, who were conned into taking it. And, not least, 57 patients have died of it.

Indeed, in February, the European Medicines Evaluation Agency announced a review into Zyban after a three-fold increase in the number of deaths of British patients who took it, although the Agency stresses that no link between the drugs and the deaths has been proven, and that other factors relating to its use, i.e. nicotine withdrawal or underlying illnesses, may have played a part.