Gardening can make us feel better – mowing the lawn, weeding the flower bed, planting seeds in the potting shed and staying connected with nature can all help to boost our mental and physical health. The way we design our gardens and the features we choose to incorporate can be restorative – from the soothing […]
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Lender will try to reduce unexpectedly high demand in a blow to first-time buyers
HSBC, one of the last banks to offer low-deposit “90%” mortgages, is expected to restrict sales within days, in a move likely to leave first-time buyers struggling to find a loan.
The bank’s 400 mortgage advisers are currently flooded with applications from buyers, with customers forced to wait as long as three to four weeks to be interviewed by the bank. Meanwhile, the bank is opening a daily window of as little as half an hour in the morning for brokers to apply for loans before the daily allocation of money runs out.
Continue reading...Crook, County Durham: Some hoverflies are tricky to identify, but this wasp mimic should be easy for Batman fans
Instinctively, I shied away from the buzzing near my ear, thinking it was a wasp. No, just a harmless hoverfly, a blur of wings and a body fringed with golden hairs, perfectly stationary, as if dangling by an invisible thread in the afternoon sunshine.
Hoverfly flight is a wondrous thing, made possible by halteres: flexible, vibrating, club-shaped rods under each wing. They act like stabilising gyroscopes, constantly feeding back information to the insect about its position, allowing instant, precise flight adjustments. The slightest warping of a wing translates into darting, directional flight. And that’s what happened as I watched, listening to its invisible, barely audible airwaves, spreading like ripples in a puddle from this aerial diadem.
Continue reading...Crook, County Durham: Some hoverflies are tricky to identify, but this wasp mimic should be easy for Batman fans
Instinctively, I shied away from the buzzing near my ear, thinking it was a wasp. No, just a harmless hoverfly, a blur of wings and a body fringed with golden hairs, perfectly stationary, as if dangling by an invisible thread in the afternoon sunshine.
Hoverfly flight is a wondrous thing, made possible by halteres: flexible, vibrating, club-shaped rods under each wing. They act like stabilising gyroscopes, constantly feeding back information to the insect about its position, allowing instant, precise flight adjustments. The slightest warping of a wing translates into darting, directional flight. And that’s what happened as I watched, listening to its invisible, barely audible airwaves, spreading like ripples in a puddle from this aerial diadem.
Continue reading...