ski

La Plagne revisited


Ski incentive ... you don't get to see this from the learner slopes

new plans to protect amphibians from extinction

The world's weirdest amphibians

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has launched a new conservation and fundraising initiative which aims to highlight some of the world’s most extraordinary creatures currently threatened with extinction.
The new programme assesses all amphibian species according to how Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (Edge) they are.
ZSL has identified a gigantic, ancient relative of the newt, a drawing-pin sized frog, a limbless, tentacled amphibian and a blind see-through salamander as 10 of the most endangered and is starting work to protect them


A purple frog. This purple-pigmented frog that lives in India was only discovered in 2003 because it spends most of the year buried up to 4m underground


Heleophryne rosei - Table mountain ghost frog
Also known as Rose’s ghost frog, this rare species is only found on Table Mountain in Cape Town, where it lives in streams and moist, forested gorges


Malagasy rainbow frog - a highly-decorated frog that inflates itself when under threat and can climb vertical rock surfaces


Rhinoderma darwinii - Darwin frog
This is a photograph of Darwin’s frog – a close releative of the Chile Darwin’s frog, which has not been photographed alive and has not been officially seen since 1978


A Betic midwife toad. These toads evolved from all others over 150m years ago – the males carry the fertilised eggs wrapped around their hind legs


Gardiner's Seychelles frog is perhaps the world’s smallest, with adults growing up to just 11mm in length – the size of a drawing pin

astronomers create most detailed map yet of dark matter

Mapping dark matter


The purple in this picture, taken by Hubble, indicates areas of dark matter. The clusters of galaxies circled show particularly large clumps of the mysterious substance.

Astronomers have created the most detailed map yet of the mysterious dark matter that fills much of the space between galaxies.

Dark matter accounts for almost all the mass of the universe, but because it does not emit or reflect radiation, it is impossible to observe directly. However, because it has mass, scientists can infer its presence by its gravitational effects on the normal matter surrounding it.

Meghan Gray, of the University of Nottingham, and Catherine Heymans, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, led a team who stitched together 80 images made by the Hubble space telescope in 2006 of the Abell 901 and 902 supercluster of galaxies, which is 2.6bn light years from Earth. Before reaching Hubble, the light from the 60,000 galaxies was bent by gravity due to the dark matter. Heymans studied this distortion, called gravitational lensing, to work out the distribution of the dark matter. "This lensing effect alters the apparent shapes of galaxies behind the supercluster; a circular galaxy becomes more banana-shaped," she said.

The map, unveiled yesterday at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting in Austin, Texas, is 2.5 times sharper than a previous survey of the cluster performed by ground-based instruments. The analysis pinpointed four main areas (circled) where dark matter has pooled into dense clumps, 100 trillion times the sun's mass in total. Scientists are interested in clusters of galaxies because they help them understand how a galaxy's environment shapes its subsequent evolution.

green heros

The 50 people most able to save the planet



Stranded polar bears, melting glaciers, dried-out rivers and flooding on a horrific scale - these were the iconic images of 2007. So who is most able to stop this destruction to our world?