Figures from the Met Office show that by 22 July, the three months from May to July were already the wettest in England and Wales since records began in 1766. While a grim harvest update from the National Farmers’ Union confirms that it’s unlikely to be a bumper year for hay, the prolonged above-average rainfall means that most of the country’s reservoirs are at least above their normal level.

This BBC News article points out the potential role of rainwater storage in reducing groundwater flooding, and in eking out the most from the rain that falls. The simplest domestic systems can store enough of the water gathered by your home’s guttering for car washing and watering the garden. Larger, more sophisticated systems can collect water from driveways and other paved areas, and can even supply rainwater for flushing toilets or doing the washing.

Although in some drier parts of the world you can get a grant to install rainwater harvesting, we couldn’t find one available in the UK. We asked DEFRA, who told us: “There are no grants for householders, but businesses can get enhanced capital allowances for water efficient technology.”

The Environment Agency says that some rivers and reservoirs are still only at their average level or lower, but the Met Office is forecasting above-average rain for the next couple of weeks. Anyone worried about further severe weather this summer can subscribe to their useful news feed.

IMAGE

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Originally posted 2007-07-27 13:49:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

to 628 places) would have trouble working out how much is enough when it comes to air travel.

For today the Queen opened Heathrow’s long-awaited (and long-fought) fifth terminal – to the delight of some and the despair of others.

Several industry figures have seized the opportunity to attack the “absurdly protracted” planning laws, which meant that it took 15 years for the terminal to be built.

“Terminal 5 has taken far too long to come to fruition,” said Gareth Elliott of the British Chambers of Commerce. “This cannot be allowed to happen again.”

Others, however, see the completion of the building as a capitulation by the government in the face of climate change.

Greenpeace transport campaigner Anita Goldsmith blasted Terminal 5 as a “monument to the binge-flying culture this government has done so much to encourage”.

We wonder what the Queen, who described the terminal in glowing terms today, makes of the controversy.

Just four days ago, she urged action to back up rhetoric on climate change:

In the Commonwealth, governments, businesses, communities and individuals should each strive to match words and good intentions with deeds.

IMAGE by Flickr user emdot

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Originally posted 2008-03-14 09:43:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

It’s just too cold and dark to venture out in the evening. Okay, I may be making excuses here. And my New Year’s resolution was not to get fit but to give up smoking (seven days and counting) so I don’t have anything to live up to. But far more enjoyable than donning your jogging gear and braving the ice on a cold January weekend, I feel, is watching others get physical from the comfort of your settee.

Yes, believe it or not, January isn’t an entirely dry month in the world of televised sport. There are, in fact, a fair few events to get excited about. Here’s my top five.

Snooker – The Masters: 11 Jan – 18 Jan

Since moving from Wembley Conference Centre to Wembley Arena in 2007, The Masters has attracted ever bigger crowds and last year saw Mark Selby win his first major snooker championship when he beat Stephen Lee 10–3 to the title. This year, the event will feature all of snooker’s top 16 players plus two ‘wild card’ competitors – Ricky Walden and teenager Judd Trump – who won their place via qualifying tournaments at the end of last year. Trump will face either Mark King or former World Amateur Champion Mark Allen.

Motor Racing – World Rally Championship Rally Ireland: 30 Jan – 1 Feb

Voted the second best rally in the World Rally Championship (WRC) 2007, and attracting the largest television audience of the series that year, Rally Ireland has been rewarded with the honour of opening the WRC 2009. The event has replaced the traditional Monte Carlo Rally and will span eight counties both north and south of the border. With many drivers facing roads they’ve never seen before, it’s bound to be an exciting ride, and concludes on Sunday with a ’super special stage’ in Donegal.

Cycling – UCI Pro Tour – Tour Down Under: 20 Jan – 25 Jan

The Tour Down Under gives international riders the perfect opportunity to prepare for the European season and last year became the first cycling event outside of Europe to be included in the prestigious ProTour circuit. Styled on major races such as the Tour de France, the Tour Down Under consists of six stages running through South Australia. The highlight of a lean month in the cycling world, one British cycling fanatic says of the tour: “It reminds us frozen cyclists what riding in hot sunny conditions is like and you get a reasonable sprinkling of the top riders.”

Swimming – FINA 10KM Marathon Swimming World Cup: 24 Jan
Open water swimming enjoyed its first year as an Olympic sport in Beijing last summer, and has consequently won some new fans. Even more so because it seems that we Brits are quite good at it – team GB’s Keri-Anne Payne and Cassie Patten took the silver and bronze medals in the Olympic 10km open water swimming event. January sees the first event of the year-round global FINA 10km Marathon Swimming series kick off in Santos, Brazil.

For more TV sport to settle down to this January, check out the BBC’s sport calendar.

IMAGES by Flickr users

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Originally posted 2009-01-07 09:06:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

For those of you who don’t remember Saturday mornings with Noel, Maggie, John and Cheggers, the hapless Keith would be dispatched to outside broadcasts in town parks across the country, trying to match up kids who wanted to swap toys. As often as not, it was raining.

It’s easy for the Swap Shop generation to succumb to misty-eyed nostalgia, but the idea of swapping various things is still going strong, particularly online. Here are a few sites that aim to match up people with time, skills or belongings to exchange.

Freecycle

Probably the best known community recycling site, Freecycle started four years ago in Tucson, Arizona, and has spread to 75 countries. Like all good ideas, this one is simple: anyone with a useful item they no longer need can offer it to their local Freecycle group. Anyone who wants it can have it for free, but they’ll generally need to collect it.

The group says that each day across the world it keeps more than 300 tons of perfectly good items out of landfill sites. As the name suggests, it’s free to use.

TeamUpHere.com

Say you’re happy getting stuck in to a bit of gardening, but you’re hopeless on a computer. Somewhere over the other side of town there may be an IT wizard with a jungle outside their back door. Wait, we think we see a way out of this!

TeamUpHere.com is a free site that lets people get together to exchange their skills. You don’t have to be a professional to offer a skill, but you need to be honest about your level of expertise. It’s up to both users to agree a fair trade, but the site suggests that an equal amount of time from each party “might suit everyone”.

SwapShop

No Cheggers, we’re afraid, but this SwapShop does a similar job for people with items small enough to be sent by post. Once you’ve registered, you tell it about all the items you’d like to swap, and it gives each a value in Swap Points. If another member contacts you to request one of your items, you stick it in the post. When it arrives with them, SwapShop credits you with the Swap Points you asked for.

Points don’t make prizes, but they can be exchanged for other users’ items. Using the site is free, but if you don’t have enough points for the Matt Bianco box set you can buy more for ?Similar Posts:

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Originally posted 2007-09-11 01:02:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Most organic matter (and the fuels derived from it) contains large quantities of carbon, and when it burns this gets combined with oxygen to produce a lot of CO2. The gas’ moniker comes from the fact that each of its molecules is made up from one carbon © atom, bonded to two oxygen (O) atoms. It’s not to be confused with toxic carbon monoxide which is produced when there’s not enough oxygen around – its molecules contain only one oxygen atom.

Carbon dioxide is also released as waste when living things extract energy from their food, which is why we breath the stuff out in higher concentrations than we breath it in. With so many of us belching it out, levels would quickly build up, but plants use the gas as a building block for the sugars they produce during photosynthesis, removing it from the atmosphere almost as quickly as it’s produced.

Still with us?

In the atmosphere it’s also a greenhouse gas; absorbing heat from the sun that bounces back off the earth’s surface, and reflecting some of it back downwards. Without this effect, the earth would be too cool for us to live on, but CO2 levels have increased markedly since the industrial revolution, increasing the amount of heat that gets trapped by the atmosphere – it’s one of the main factors thought to cause global warming.

IMAGES

While looking for pictures to illustrate this post, we happened on these amazing shots by Flickr user jurvetson. They’re pictures of an art-come-science exhibit by Shawn Lani that pitched chips of dry ice into a bowl of water. There’s some stunning video of Icy Bodies on the Shawn Lani Studios website.

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Originally posted 2008-03-20 11:02:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

The good news is, then, that since Tuesday there have been two fewer large orbiting objects – a result of a high-speed collision between two communication satellites. The bad news is that said two objects have been reduced to several hundred smaller ones, the number and path of which nobody is yet able to predict.

The explosive smash happened 485 miles above the earth’s surface, when a live US satellite and a decommissioned Russian one crossed paths over Siberia.

It’s hard to grasp just how unlikely such a collision is, and how hard the two must have hit each other. Satellites in a low-earth orbit (LEO), as both Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 were, are subject to almost the same gravity as they would be on the planet’s surface, so they need to travel at huge speeds to avoid simply being claimed by the earth.

Really huge speeds: a typical LEO orbital velocity is above 17,000 miles per hour, or more than 30 times the speed of an airliner. While the two satellites might not have hit each other head on, even the most gentle of nudges would have seen them close on each other at a daunting rate. A head-on smash would have brought them together at more than nine miles per second.

Trying to work out the amount of energy involved in that kind of crash makes me want to lie down in a dark room. The BBC says that Iridium 33 weighed 560kg and that Kosmos 2251 tipped the scales at 950kg. Some rough calculations tell me that smashing the two satellites together could release as much energy as exploding 22 tonnes of TNT.

Which makes the BBC’s animated reconstruction seem just a little quaint.

IMAGE by Flickr user Mulad

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Originally posted 2009-02-12 17:24:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

But a couple of days ago I read a statistic that transported me. It made me shudder. It took me back to a warm summer night in 1986. I was 17. I was at the wheel of a third-hand blue Vauxhall Chevette having passed my driving test a month or two back. In the car with me, my best mate in the passenger seat. And three girls – one of whom I secretly fancied – wedged into the back, chattering and laughing. No rear seatbelts in those days. We’d been to a barn dance and we’d had fun. As one of the oldest in my year group I was one of the first to pass my test. And driving home was my chance to show off a little. I like to think I was a fairly responsible teenager. But there I was hurtling round bends on narrow country roads in the dark, gunning the engine, breaking late, changing down the gears… driving like a lunatic… just waiting for one of the girls to ask me to slow down. But they didn’t.

So I drove faster.

And then there was the blind bend. I had one of those ‘life flashing before the eyes’ moments, hit the break peddle as hard as I could, briefly aware that no one else in the car realised quite how much danger we were in, amazed at how much longer it took for the car to slow down, fully loaded with passengers. Somehow we came to a halt a couple of feet from a high brick wall on the wrong side of the road. If there had been a car coming the other way, we’d have been seriously hurt. I dread to think what would have happened to the girls without seatbelts on.

The risk of a fatal collision is almost three times greater for a young driver with three or more passengers than for one driving alone.

The ABI was quoting from a wide-ranging government consultation paper about learning to drive.

A couple more numbers from this paper make the message even clearer:

- 500,000 people under the age of 25 pass their driving test each year. A fifth of them have an accident within 6 months of qualifying.

- Whilst the overall figures for deaths on the road in the UK have fallen consistently since the mid-1990s, around 16% MORE young drivers (aged 16 to 19) are killed today than 15 years ago.

For me – as someone who nearly became one of these stastics – the bit about carrying passengers remains particularly striking. Whilst drinking and driving, and driving in the dark seem like obvious things that could increase the risk of an accident, having friends in the car just wouldn’t have crossed my mind as presenting greater risk.

Getting new, young drivers to understand just how responsible they are for the safety of the people they are carrying in their cars seems like something to be doing right now. In particular making young males keep cool heads despite the surge of testosterone-fueled excitement about being behind the wheel with a bunch of mates in the car… And telling girls not to be afraid to shout ‘Slow down!’ if they feel unsafe as passengers has to be part of that as well.

Peer pressure can be a powerful thing.

IMAGE by Flickr users

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Originally posted 2008-10-10 16:09:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

But then I’m someone who didn’t even embrace CDs until the mid 1990s, at the point when everyone else had moved on to hurling minidiscs out of skyscrapers to demonstrate the incorruptibility of the future.

So, as a gleeful technological Luddite, not to mention a mean-spirited musical misery-guts, I was a good test subject to try out the wonders of Spotify, the newest way to enjoy music instantly – and legally free – online (no downloads).

It promises “A world of music”, though after watching the introductory video, featuring a user adding a song to a “dinner party” playlist which was headed up by a five track Coldplay blitz, I wasn’t sure it was a world in which I wanted to live. Was I too hasty?

What manner of beast?

So what does Spotify do? Well, as a new user to internet radio sites, I was happy that I was able to get my head around it fairly quickly.

I was lucky enough to get an instant invite from a friend. Early users are granted immediate access – otherwise you may have to register your email with Spotify to wait for a free invitation.

At its core is a user-friendly ‘radio station’ which cranks out music based on your specifications. You select from a range of 18 music genres in decade-long time frames, ranging from pre-1950 to 21st Century.

For instance, if you harbour a particular love of 90s alternative music, you can content yourself with the randomised selection which Spotify will pump forth from those narrow criteria.

However, if you wanted to explore beyond this, you can try expanding the time frame from the 80s to the present day, or throw an interesting counterpoint of country or hip hop into the mix.

And this is where it becomes clever. As well as naturally alerting you to albums and artists you have never heard of within your particular interests, by throwing various genres and time frames into the melting pot you can sit back and experience a genuine musical education.

In addition there is a feature which takes any artist and suggests similar bands, allowing you to play a ‘radio station’ dedicated to the spirit of your favourite singer.

It doesn’t go anything like as far as Last.fm (explored recently by Jo) in terms of the overall package it offers, but for some people this could be part of the attraction. I have a faint horror of an algorithm telling me what I may?Similar Posts:

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Originally posted 2009-02-11 16:17:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Last year, the Beeb screened a documentary about the deformation and disease-prone nature of some pedigree dogs celebrated at Crufts.

The programme highlighted the many health problems caused by in-breeding, which has made Boxers more prone to heart disease and epilepsy, put Dalmatians at greater risk of deafness and given Golden Retrievers a propensity for cancer.

So as Crufts events begin today, dog-lovers will have to go online to watch the action rather than settling down in front of their TV sets. Crufts organisers the Kennel Club will stream the four days of events at www.cruftslive.tv, with highlights available from ?Similar Posts:

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Originally posted 2009-03-05 11:29:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Suddenly there were butterflies – I counted four this weekend, a couple of whites of some description, and two pristine lemon-coloured Brimstones, rather like this one.

There were two-tone Chiffchaffs singing away in a couple of places. And everywhere there were oversize bumblebees, crashing around madly as if drunk on the sun.

I had my camera out for much of the weekend, but I think the warm air must have gone to my head too, because I failed to get any great shots to remember it by.

Happily, the ever-impressive community at Flickr have done the job: here are a couple of our favourites.

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Originally posted 2009-03-16 10:49:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter