A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

"This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

Cows are methane-making machines, with their inefficient digestion producing hundreds of liters of the greenhouse gas every day. Now scientists are looking at ways to make things go down a little more gently for the ruminanting grass-munchers.

Cows are burping too much methane for the world's good. While people are being asked to reduce the amounts of flights they take and make their homes more energy efficient, what they put on their plates could be having as big an impact on climate change. Gas-guzzling SUVs and badly insulated buildings are partly to blame for the earth's greenhouse gas emissions, but it seems the humble grass-munching cow is also a major culprit.

Agriculture is responsible for producing 37 percent of global methane emissions, a gas that is 23 times more potent than CO2 when it comes to global warming. And much of this gas comes from the burps of ruminating animals such as cows and sheep. If a cow's manners could be improved a bit, then the world might just stop warming quite so fast. And it could be as simple as getting them to graze on different types of plants. Scientists at the University of Aberystwyth are now working on using plant-breeding methods to develop new diets for livestock.

Its tail is lopsided. Close up, it looks suspiciously like a small, and unremarkable, Asian elephant.

But scientists were yesterday hailing the sensational discovery of a perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth, which died around 10,000 years ago and was found in the frozen tundra of northern Russia. Experts said the six-month-old female calf was a rare complete specimen. The animal's trunk and eyes are intact. It even has fur.

A reindeer herder, Yuri Khudi, stumbled across the carcass in May near the Yuribei river in Russia's Yamal-Nenents autonomous district, in a virtually inaccessible part of north-western Siberia.

Extinct woolly mammoths - and giant tusks - have turned up in Siberia for centuries. But it is unusual for a complete example to be recovered. The last major find was in 1997 when a family in the neighbouring Taymyr Peninsula came across a tusk attached to what turned out to be a 20,380-year-old mammoth carcass.

The latest 130cm tall, 50kg Siberian specimen appears to have died just as the species was heading for extinction during the last ice age. It is being sent to Japan for further tests.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2123314,00.html

One troubling sign is that Washington rumour has it that Bob Shrum, the political consultant who advised Michael Dukakis, Gore and Kerry, and who boasts a staggering record of eight defeats in eight US presidential elections, is set to move to London - to advise his old pal, Brown

Campbell's failing was the opposite of the one usually laid at his door, that he used the power of government to corrupt the press. From the moment he entered Downing Street he used the power of the press to corrupt government. To him a good decision was anything that next day's Murdoch or Rothermere editors would applaud. If Campbell declared a policy unacceptable to the media (such as drugs reform), it was dead. Since he operated with the authority of the prime minister, ministers had to take his word as gospel. Soon government was operating on a strict 24-hour cycle, measured not in policy outcomes but in headlines, news snatches, soundbites. Success was a good picture that edged out a bad one, an "initiative", however vacuous, that smothered bad news.