katine villagers

Meat's on the menu - just for Christmas


Children from the Tiriri primary school in Katine stand behind one of the many signs on the school grounds that aim to promote good behaviour.

'All I want for Christmas is a motorcycle'

wilder parks

Wilder parks can tame climate change threat


Peat bog in the North York Moors

Huge tracts of Britain's landscape should be reclaimed from farming and go back to nature to lock up carbon dioxide and counter global warming, says a government ecology expert...

study reveals european birds' decline

Study reveals severe decline of Europe's common birds


A grey partridge: Once common on British farmland, numbers have fallen by 79% since 1980.

Almost half of common European birds are heading towards 'continental extinction', a new report warns

x'mas

25 top wines for Christmas

10 easy dishes for a festive feast

A little place I know

An A-Z of unusual ingredients
At a loss over agar-agar, befuddled by boletes and confused by your cardoon? Follow Rachel Dixon's three-part guide to weird and wonderful foods. Part one: A-I
Muddled over megrim, nonplussed by nopales and quizzical about quinoa? Follow Rachel Dixon's three-part guide to weird and wonderful foods. Part two: J-Q

Food directory 2007
Find more than 1,000 independent food shops and suppliers across Britain and Ireland

scottish reindeer

See wild reindeer in Britain this Christmas

This Christmas, you can see free-ranging reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in Britain, at the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre near Aviemore, in Scotland


Reindeer were introduced to Scotland in 1952 by a Swedish reindeer herder, Mikel Utsi. He visited the Rothiemurchus forest in Invernessshire in 1947 and it reminded him of reindeer pastures in his native Lapland. Starting from 29 reindeer which bred successfully, the herd has grown in numbers over the years and there are now between 130 and 150 animals living in a natural environment on the Cairngorm mountains and the Cromdale hills

mystery of sun's atmosphere unravels

Gallery: data from the Japanese Hinode satellite is helping scientists to understand what causes solar flares

The Japanese Hinode satellite has discovered a type of magnetic wave that ripples through the plasma of the sun’s atmosphere or “corona”. The waves may heat the corona to extreme temperatures by releasing energy as they travel outward from the sun along magnetic field lines. This could help explain the “corona problem” - the fact that the sun’s surface is only about 6,000 kelvin while the corona is at least 1 million kelvin


The edge of the sun’s visible surface, captured by Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope, showing the bright surface or "photosphere" and matter being ejected into the sun's atmosphere


A sunspot surrounded by the "chromosphere" - a thin, almost transparent layer of the sun's atmosphere roughly 10,000 kilometers deep (about the diameter of the Earth)


This is the same region as the previous image, but shows the photosphere that lies immediately beneath the chromosphere. The photosphere is the layer where visible sunlight comes from and is composed of convection cells called granules - cells of gas each around 1000 kilometres in diameter. Each granule has a lifespan of about eight minutes, resulting in the photosphere's continually shifting "boiling" appearance


Close-up of a sunspot


The north pole of the sun. The black streak (just right of centre) is a solar jet: a spurt of matter shooting upwards from the photosphere at 20 kilometres per second. Jets are about 500 kilometres across and reach several thousand kilometres high


The planet Mercury passing across the face of the sun on November 8 2006

half of amazon will be lost

More than half of Amazon will be lost by 2030, report warns




Rainforest in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

Climate change could speed up the large-scale destruction of the Amazon rainforest and bring the "point of no return" much closer than previously thought, conservationists warned today.

Almost 60% of the region's forests could be wiped out or severely damaged by 2030, as a result of climate change and deforestation, according to a report published today by WWF...