Give You Watches

Home Sweet Home is not just for humans. Swifts, the rapidly declining birds of the high summer skies, are overwhelmingly dependent on houses for nesting sites, a survey has found.

More than 75 per cent of the birds were found to be nesting in people's homes, during a survey carried out across Britain by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds last summer.

The RSPB believes that home and business owners, builders and developers can play a fundamental role in protecting the species, a summer visitor from sub-Saharan Africa which has plunged in numbers in recent years. Swift populations fell by 47 per cent between 1994 and 2007.

The traditional nesting site for the swift is on a beam under the eaves of a house. But due to properties being renovated and improved these sites are disappearing – a trend which may be playing a significant role in the bird's decline in Britain. The RSPB and swift conservation groups will now be seeking to speak to developers, local councils and building companies about how they can help retain or replace nest sites.

Other migrant birds, such as turtle doves, nightingales and wood warblers, are also shrinking dramatically in numbers for reasons which are not clear.

The survey, which checked nest sites at more than 3,400 locations, and for the first time recorded exactly what sort of buildings the birds were using, found that they much prefer to nest in older parts of towns, under the eaves of older housing stock.

Of the houses swifts were using, more than half were built before 1919, while exactly a quarter were built between 1919 and 1944. More than half had been known swift nesting sites for more than 10 years, and almost a fifth were considered threatened.

Almost 5 per cent of swifts were recorded in churches, proving that old buildings prove ideal nesting sites. Many churches are undergoing preservation work which could unintentionally cause the loss of nesting sites, so church groups can also play a role in helping the birds, the RSPB says. The remaining 20 per cent of swifts were in buildings such as schools and flats.

If you have swifts nesting on or near your property, you are unlikely to miss them, because on summer evenings the birds gather in "screaming parties" and swoop low around the area uttering wild cries.

"The scream of the swift marks the start of the summer for many people," said Sarah Niemann, RSPB species recovery officer. "To think that we are losing them at such a fast rate is devastating. It was imperative that we find out exactly where they nest in the UK so that efforts to help them can be effectively targeted. This is the first time we've had swift data available on this scale, and it's a great start.

"Now we want to continue building these records, which will make a huge difference to the future of swifts in Britain."

Emma Teuten, RSPB Data Management Officer, said that mapping the results had been a massive undertaking: "They will enable us to do even more work to halt the swift's decline and enthuse people to help the birds, such as those who actually have them living close by, or may be planning work that could affect existing nest sites," she said.

"These are birds that don't touch down for two years or more after they leave the nest, and we need to ensure they have a safe, secure site to settle in when they come down to breed themselves. Swifts are very site faithful, so once they move in, then the same site may be used for many, many years."

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Mole populations are soaring across Britain and the explosion in numbers has left traditional molecatchers struggling to keep up. Experts say exact numbers for Britain's moles are difficult to calculate but the most recent estimate is 33 million. However, pest controllers say the number could be as high as 40 million.

Molecatchers are reporting triple the number of call-outs in the past two years, as despairing gardeners try to get rid of the pests.

The increase is being attributed to the combined effects of a ban on the use of strychnine, a popular DIY extermination method, and the foot and mouth epidemic, which prevented pest controllers and molecatchers from travelling to rural areas for months and left mole populations free to expand unchecked.
The British Traditional Molecatchers Register, which represents 300 mole trappers, reports rocketing enquiries. The number of people using its online directory rose 50 per cent in the past year, with 1,500 users a week. Brian Alderton, who established the register in 2007, said: "Ever since the banning of strychnine, and foot and mouth, moles have been a growing problem. In the past two years we've seen a massive increase in calls for help."

Rory Collins, a molecatcher from Northumberland, has been inundated with requests from farmers and gardeners. "It's seven days a week – it's been completely crazy. In the past two years my work has tripled."

Bernard Hogarth, 57, from Sand Hutton near York, called in a trapper when a paddock he owns was invaded. "I levelled the ground and planted the grass and then, all of a sudden, these little eruptions started to appear. And soon they weren't so little. Now there are around 25 molehills and some of them are a foot high."

Farmer Roy Lunn, 68, from Bardsey, near Leeds, West Yorkshire, said moles were a threat to his farm. "The fields are a mess. It's not good for farm machinery and all the soil they throw up ruins good hay," he said. "We've always had moles but this year has been different; our molecatcher got 85 in one go."

Before the 2006 ban on strychnine the Government estimates more than 3,000 farmers and landowners would have poisoned the moles themselves. Now they must choose between expensive pest control, traditional methods, or leaving the moles to it.

David Wembridge, of the People's Trust for Endangered Species, said we need to stop seeing moles as pests. "I know gardeners may be upset if their lawns are disturbed but moles can be useful too.

"They are insectivores and their diet could include such common nasties as cockchafer larvae and wire worms which can do an awful lot of damage to plants."

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If you thought that setting up your home PC was tough and that persuading IT support to sort out your desktop almost impossible, spare a thought for the engineers, astronauts and explorers trying to keep their computers working in the most inhospitable places on Earth and beyond.

A blue screen of death is more than just annoying if you are floating somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean or orbiting the earth. Computer advice is a luxury if you're working in extreme conditions like these.

With winter temperatures plummeting to -80 Celsius, Antarctica has some of the harshest conditions on the earth. Desktops kept in the sealed and heated bases work fine, but the extreme cold outside cracks screens, immobilises moving parts and renders batteries almost completely useless.

Brendan Pope ran a computer repair business in the US before moving to Antarctica where he worked in construction at Palmer research station, and blogged about his experiences on Frozennerd.blogspot.com.

"Batteries do not last very long in the cold at all," he says. "We had some Panasonic Toughbooks and while they may last for two or three hours on the battery normally, when you take them outside in those conditions you are lucky to get 20 minutes. At the South Pole, where it gets ridiculously cold, you just can't use anything battery-powered outside. People I knew there would often carry cameras inside their jackets and only whip them out to take a picture and then quickly stuff them back in."

Then there are the moving parts to worry about. Like most consumer goods, laptops are built to work optimally at room temperature. Below freezing, moving parts in the hard drive and motor start to seize up. Screens can be particularly susceptible to the cold too: sharp contractions caused by the cold air make glass crack, with LCD screens on laptops, phones or cameras being particularly vulnerable. Leaving a camera in an unheated area means you'll come back to a gadget with a ruined display. Bringing it inside too quickly can be a problem as well because the sudden change in temperature can cause the screen to shatter too.

It's rapid temperature change that causes another of the biggest problems for computers in the Antarctic – condensation. Coming in from an outside world that could be on average -40 Celsius to a station which would be heated to about 15 to 20 Celsius means a temperature shift of 60 degrees. Warm air hitting a cold laptop can cause condensation to form on its surfaces, a massive problem when the condensation forms on the inside too. The accumulation of water droplets inside will make the computer short circuit.

"Condensation is a big problem," explains Pope. "What you usually have to do is keep laptops in some sort of insulating material – like a styrofoam case which will let it warm up again slowly so it doesn't condense. Otherwise it will eventually short it out. That kills the laptop. It happens with cameras too."

The research base keeps spare parts on hand for laptop first aid, but if your laptop shorts or cracks, the only option is to watch penguins for several weeks because the small station is only supplied by ship once a month.

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Most of us drink it in some form or another some of the time: over cereal, in our tea, in our bedtime hot chocolate. And we cook with it: scrambled eggs, cake, lasagne, custard. Milk occupies a curious place in the national psyche. It is vaguely romantic, conjuring up images of pastures green. Take away our milk and risk national outrage, as Margaret Thatcher learned to future governments' peril.

Recently, however, milk – in the good old fashioned, cow-in-a-field sense of the word – has found itself under attack. From every angle. It isn't just the Government's truncated flirtation with removing the white stuff from nurseries, it's everything: the diets that frown upon it (Atkins, Cabbage Soup, Master Cleanse), the shops that won't pay full price for it, the bottles of soya, of nut, of goat alternatives, that teeter on the shelf alongside it. Recent reports suggest that camel's milk may be winging its way to the UK before long, boasting an array of health benefits as exotic as its origin.

Camel's milk is lower in fat and cholesterol than dairy milk. It also has much higher levels of vitamin C and boasts a number of other, admittedly unsubstantiated, health benefits, from helping to control Type 2 diabetes to protecting against cancer. Even so, British palates might take a while to adjust to the strong and salty taste, and there's unlikely to come a time when we'll be pouring it in our tea.

Milk consumption has declined by more than 14 per cent in the past decade – despite an increasing population. It has also changed. We consume our milk very differently. Last time a Tory government found itself under fire for lactose-snatching, milk was being brought to our doors. Just five years ago some 480 million bottles were still deposited on people's doorsteps. Now that number has more than halved, and websites like findmeamilkman.net service those who indulge in daily delivery.

Squeamish about the milk factory-bred cows produce, we opt for organic: 165 million litres of the stuff. And we go skinny, with skimmed and semi-skimmed. These days, we drink our milk outside the home. For countless consumers, their biggest dose of milk is steamed, poured over a shot (or three) of espresso. Chugging warm, milky coffee from oversized paper cups has become the pedestrian tic of our age.

Unless it is steamed soya milk you like in your coffee. The rise of the milk alternative has been formidable. It is almost impossible to find a supermarket or café that doesn't stock non-bovine "milk". As senior grocery buyer of Whole Foods UK, Linda Katz oversees the company's considerable stock. Over the years, she says, demand has grown not just for soy but also for the other varieties the store now sells: oat, almond, rice, hazelnut – even quinoa. "It is partly the customers' initiative. We will educate people on why they might want to try this or that milk – for instance, if people choose soya for allergy reasons, they might want to know that soya is also high in allergens."

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A revolutionary way of screening the entire human genome for the genetic signposts of disease has produced its latest success – the first inherited link to common migraine and a possible reason for extreme headaches.

The technique, which scans all 23 pairs of human chromosomes in a single sweep, has found the first genetic risk factor that predisposes someone to the common form of migraine, which affects one in six women and one in 12 men. The discovery has immediately led to a new possible cause of migraine by alerting scientists to DNA defects involved in the build-up of a substance in the nerves of sufferers that could be the trigger for their migraines.

Scientists believe the findings could lead both to a better understanding as well as new treatments for the chronic and debilitating condition which is estimated to be one of the most costly brain-related disorders in society, causing countless lost working days.
Scanning the entire blueprint of human DNA by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has had a profound effect on the understanding of a range of other medical conditions over the past few years, from heart disease and obesity to bipolar disorder and testicular cancer. The study of migraine, published in the journal Nature Genetics, was an archetypal example of the new approach of medical genetics using the GWAS technique. Scientists analysed the genomes of some 5,000 people with migraine and compared their DNA to that of unaffected people to see if there were any significant differences that could be linked statistically to the condition.

The GWAS test uses arrays of specially designed fragments of DNA that could identify different sets of "markers" or genetic signposts in a person's genome. By analysing thousands of genomes, the scientists are able to build up a picture of DNA markers in a patient's genome pointing to the presence of defective genes that could predispose someone to migraine or any other common illness known to have a genetic element.

"This is the first time we have been able to peer into the genomes of many thousands of people and find genetic clues to understand common migraine," said Dr Aarno Palotie, chair of the international headache genetics consortium at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. "Studies of this kind are possible only through large-scale international collaboration so that we could pick out this genetic variant. This discovery opens new doors to understanding common human diseases."

The scientists behind the migraine study scanned the entire genomes of some 50,000 people in total, a huge undertaking that was only possible because of the availability of relatively cheap commercial GWAS kits that can be used to screen all of a person's 46 chromosomes in a single sweep.

The insight that this approach has given scientists could only be dreamed of 10 or 15 years ago. Suddenly, it is becoming possible to tease out the influences of the many different genes that may be involved in raising the risk of developing a particular condition, whether it is heart disease or Alzheimer's. A decade or two ago, this genetic component to common diseases was only known about from a person's family history of disease.

The children of parents who had both died of heart disease were known to be statistically more likely to die of the disease themselves, but the nature of the genes involved in causing this predisposition was largely a mystery until GWAS came along.

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A man mourns his missing relatives in the landslide-hit Gannan Tibetan autonomous prefecture, Gansu province, China, 10 August 2010. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters

as the death toll from this weekend's landslides in the Tibetan-majority region of Gansu province climbs above 1,100, the world is once again turning its attention to the plight of China's most infamous minority.

But as rescue efforts continue in the "Shangri La" of Gansu, a slow-motion disaster of a more bureaucratic sort is unfolding in the nearby Tibetan refugee capital of Nepal. And unless this crisis is averted, the damage there could be more lasting than the slurry of mud and rock scouring China's northwest.

In June, after years of adhering to an UN-brokered agreement that allows Tibetan refugees free passage through the Himalayan nation, Nepal sent packing a group of three Tibetans that had crossed the Tibet-Nepal border illegally. They have since met stiff Chinese justice: one, a monk, has returned to his monastery, but the other two are reportedly serving six-month prison terms in China.

At issue, rights groups say, is Nepal's failure to adhere to a so-called "gentlemen's agreement" in place since 1989, a measure meant to offer a diplomatically tactful way of enabling Tibetans escaping Chinese brutality. Mary Beth Markey, whose organisation, the International Campaign for Tibet, broke news of the deportation in July, says "Nepal is duty-bound" to honour the spirit of the agreement, and not to put Tibetans at "risk of imprisonment and torture" at home.

Nepal is not alone in bearing responsibility: the international community – led by the US – is also duty-bound to urge the swift restoration of the UN-backed agreement. Without it, Tibetans escaping Chinese oppression would be left with no avenue to escape religious and cultural persecution that has dogged them for decades. But to date, the United States has said nothing publicly about the June deportation and ongoing gentlemen's disagreement. The UN, meanwhile, has expressed concern, but not with the force needed to alter Nepal's calculations.

There is one primary reason for the muted responses, observers say: pressure from China.

Following protests across Tibet in March 2008, Beijing moved to tighten the freedoms of Tibetans within its borders in a bid to maintain internal stability. China also called on nations hosting exile communities to crack down on the political activities of Tibetans abroad. Beijing often blames Tibetans in exile for fomenting unrest at home.

Such pressure has had a visible impact on governments hosting the Dalai Lama. Chinese opposition is widely believed to have played in role in President Obama's decision to postpone a meeting with the exiled leader last year, for instance.

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British-grown mangetout will go on sale on the UK high street for the first time this week in a boost for shoppers keen to avoid produce that has racked up air miles.

The vegetable is typically grown in Kenya, and British growers have until now been unable to provide retailers and supermarkets with the volume they need. The new British mangetout will be available for a limited time until the end of August.

The first British crop has been grown in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds by the Haines family. They have supplied Marks & Spencer with peas, broad beans and sugar snap peas since the 1970s, and will produce the mangetout for M&S stores nationwide.

M&S vegetable expert Simon Coupe said: "We know our customers love to buy British where possible and are delighted to offer our customers the first British mangetout.

William Haines said: "The British mangetout will be available for a limited time only, but we are sure M&S customers will love it and we will work to have a bigger crop for next year."

No other major supermarket stocks British-grown mangetout. Waitrose sells mangetout from Kenya, and offers financial incentives to farmers through its Waitrose Foundation.

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In the teeming mass of jumbled lanes and haphazard buildings that is Old Delhi's Chandni Chowk, silk saris, bunches of green chilli, bicycles laden with steel water flagons and an overhanging web of gnarled electricity lines provide an unlikely backdrop for scientists in white polo shirts. Add the rolling video camera and the busy photographer and our touring brigade becomes quite the attraction.

But we aren't here to be ogled. We are here to eat – in a manner of speaking – at the paratha house Baburam Parathewale. In the entrance to the miniscule eatery sits Mr Om Prakesh, cross-legged and hunched over a blackened pot of bubbling ghee. He scoops a little dough, flips it, stuffs it, moulds it and throws it into the hot fat, showing us how to make one of his famed parathas. Up a creaking set of stairs Klaus Gassenmeier, head of analytical science for Givaudan's Europe office, has set up a headspace capture unit: a travelling laboratory set up to trap a food's aroma molecules. Parathas, fizzing with hot oil, are rushed to Gassenmeier, who secures glass domes over them and lets evaporation work. Aroma molecules are trapped in and then flushed from minute porous filters leading from the glass domes. It takes around an hour to collect a sufficient sample by headspace capture and the result is a mere 30 microlitres of flavour-infused, concentrated solvent. A paratha in a teardrop.

The liquid will be fed into a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer (GCMS). The resulting molecular breakdown provides a fingerprint of the food's aromas and will enable Gassenmeier and others to chemically recreate the fundamental flavour of that perfect Delhi paratha.

It's day four of a six-day Givaudan "Culinary Trek", a trans-India fact-finding mission by the Swiss flavour house's research team who, responding to a burgeoning market for processed foods with ethnic tastes, are seeking flavours to define modern India.

Based near Zurich, Givaudan is a megalith in the processed food world. If you have eaten crisps, or a ready meal or sipped a fizzy drink, you are more than likely to have tried one of their creations. Food flavourings – natural, nature-identical or artificial – are in almost every processed or packaged food, from boutique chocolates to oven chips. Since 1999, Givaudan's taste and culinary treks have taken scientists from Gabon to Columbia in search of the next big thing (a success on the scale of Coca-Cola is the holy grail).

"Some of the Trek is about having an idea about what the client is looking for and some of it fills gaps in our portfolio. Some of it is seeing directionally where the industry is going," explains Jeff Peppet, Givaudan's director of marketing communications.

Whether a brand wants to turn a "base" of corn or soy (the "building blocks of fast food" as Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma put it) into a tasty meal, boost a puttanesca sauce or add oomph to an otherwise-nondescript low-calorie snack, it's likely to turn to a flavour house for help. Our freshly captured paratha aroma, courtesy of Mr Prakesh, may one day manifest in a hint of butteriness in, say, a branded wheat cracker.

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Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough specialise in making a single ingredient sing. Partners in life and in food writing, the pair are well known in the US for their wildly successful series of "Ultimate" cookbooks, beginning with The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies since it was first published 10 years ago. The approach has its disadvantages, however. "When we got done writing The Ultimate Shrimp Book," says Weinstein, "I couldn't eat shrimp for six months. We did The Ultimate Brownie Book, and I didn't know until then that the smell of melting chocolate could make a person nauseous."

Their latest book, Ham: An Obsession With the Hindquarter, also required them to spend a lot of time with a singular cut from a particular beast. But, says Weinstein, "We're going to be eating a smoked ham on Tuesday. I didn't know just how versatile it was before we started working on the book. I got fed up of shrimps and brownies, but even after writing an entire book I'm not tired of ham." That versatility is evident from the book, which contains more than 100 recipes filled with flavours from across the globe, from the $1,800 Iberico ham that graces its cover, to Weinstein's avant-garde sounding jerk ham and pineapple tamales.

"Most people think of ham as what they have in a ham and cheese sandwich," he says. "The wet-cured, honey-baked, spiral-cut ham that you get in the supermarket. There are so many other different types of ham around the world, besides wet-cured: the European dry-cured hams; or American country ham, which most people outside the American South have never tasted.

"Then there's fresh ham, which even some of our foodie friends didn't know about. We wanted to show all the different ways to cook ham with international flavours. So we've covered everything from roast fresh ham to stir-fries to curries."

Weinstein and Scarbrough travelled far and wide to research the book, but many of the recipes were cooked and written at their home in the Berkshires, in rural Connecticut.

Since moving there from Manhattan three years ago, the couple have raised one pig each year. The first, whom they named Wilbur, was the book's inspiration, after they tried to produce their prosciutto from one of his hams – with mildly disastrous results. Thankfully, Wilbur's second ham survived to feature in some of the book's first dishes. His eminent bloodline continues: the smoked ham they're eating on Tuesday is from Son of Wilbur, and next year they'll be dining on Grandson of Wilbur.

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15 Leigh Street, London WC1 (020 7383 3135). Meal for two, including tea and service £45

"I am sweating, my hearing's going and the top of my head is pulsing!'' My companion has a note of panic in his voice. Our main courses have arrived before the starters and – crucially – before our bowls of cooling rice. He starts sneezing and anxiously scans the room for a waiter. "We ordered tea, starters and plain rice?" he pleads. "Yeah," she smiles reassuringly as she plonks another bowl of fiery red meat on our table.

There is a careful structure in Sichuan cooking, with cooler dishes building to warmer, meatier, spicier mains (they don't do desserts). But at Chilli Cool in London's Kings Cross there are two cafés and two kitchens next door to each other and it seems the main-course kitchen is faster (the other does hotpots and appetisers for both).

So we'd started with "sliced beef Sichuan style lavishly topped". I think it was the "lavishly topped" that swung it for me. That and the fact that the Chinese group at the neighbouring table was happily tucking into theirs. If, like me, you are too easily persuaded that the Chinese restaurant with the most Chinese faces must be the best, then Chilli Cool is for you. But this is no Cantonese Chinatown crowd. This is a younger Bloomsbury clientele, largely drawn, I suspect, from the School of Oriental and African Studies not far from here, though we are still the only people speaking English.

Our beef swims, or more accurately drowns, in a sea of rusty red oil. "The meat tastes sweaty, tripey, intestiney," says my seriously alarmed companion who now wishes he was eating anywhere else. But a trawl around the bottom of the bowl reveals a pile of spring greens and bean sprouts whose slightly bitter crunch transforms the textures from mildly unpleasant to interesting.

Next up, our "sea spicy shredded pork" arrives. This is the most famous of the Sichuan "fish fragrant" dishes and for the first time my companion begins to relax. The scared squint around his eyes starts to recede. This is a wonderfully complex and accomplished plate of food, though trying to discern all the flavour sensations is like a Masterchef taste test. They are all here: sweet, sour, spicy, salty. The slippery black strips are fungus ("agaric", according to our waiter). Bamboo shoots add bite to the tender meat. Sichuan peppers bring lip-tingling, almost flowery notes. But it is in the oil where all the competing noises are contained and tamed, providing a background hum where the flavours swim together.

The dry fried beans usually come with minced pork, but we had asked for the vegetarian option. It didn't disappoint – the beans were puckered but still moist inside.

Then, almost too late, our starters appear. Aubergine with red and green chop chilli consists of room-temperature, scarcely cooked vegetable scattered with sesame seeds and dressed with (you guessed it) warm red oil. The aubergine is fruity, almost appley, and gently spicy. The fresh chilli slices add a strangely subtle sour element. But the star starter is the cold sliced pork belly with mashed garlic sauce. Here, wafer-thin slices of luscious soft, fatty meat come with cool cucumber. "Refreshing and summery," says my amazed companion, now visibly content, as though pork belly marinating in a big bowl of chilli oil could almost be a breezy summer salad.

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