Going Green Podcast, Video blog and Daily News

  Can You Train Your Brain Like You Train Your Body? We accept that our bodies need exercise. Why do we sometimes assume our brains don't? Most of us understand the basic argument for physical exercise. If we want to remain mobile, we need to move. If we want to maintain strength, we need to use our muscles. If we want to improve at swimming, cycling, sailing or running, we practise. We don't expect to become physically fitter by sitting in a chair thinking about exercise. But when it comes to our brains, we sometimes behave rather differently. We leave school or university, establish ourselves in a career, become comfortable with the things we already know — and gradually stop deliberately learning new things. That seems a shame. I don't think "training your brain" needs to mean buying an expensive brain-training programme or spending hours completing specially designed puzzles. It can mean something much simpler: Keep giving yourself things to learn. Read someth...

  The Autumn Garden Jobs That Help Wildlife Rather Than Destroy Its Winter Home The urge to make the garden beautifully tidy this autumn may be exactly what its wildlife doesn't need. There is something enormously satisfying about an autumn tidy-up. The flowers have gone over. Leaves are falling. Stems are turning brown. The lawn looks untidy around the edges. So out come the secateurs, rake and garden-waste bags. Cut everything down. Rake everything up. Remove every fallen branch. Sweep the patio. Clear the borders. By the end of the weekend the garden looks immaculate. Unfortunately, to a surprising amount of wildlife, we may just have demolished the neighbourhood. What looks to us like a dead flower stem may be somewhere an insect spends the winter. What looks like a pile of unwanted leaves may be shelter. What looks like an old log may actually be a miniature ecosystem. And those brown seed heads we are so tempted to cut off may become a winter food supply for birds. Perhaps on...

  Should You Finally Buy a Heat Pump? What Has Changed? The question is no longer simply “Do heat pumps work?” — it is “Will one work well in my house?” For several years, discussion about heat pumps has tended to become polarised remarkably quickly. One side says they are the obvious future of domestic heating. The other says they are expensive, noisy, incapable of heating older houses and certain to produce enormous electricity bills. Neither position is particularly helpful if you are standing in your own kitchen wondering whether to replace a perfectly conventional gas boiler. By 2026, we really ought to have moved beyond asking whether heat pumps work. They clearly do. The more useful questions are: How much heat does your particular house actually lose? Can your radiators deliver enough heat at a lower water temperature? What electricity tariff will you use? What heating system are you replacing? How good is the proposed design? What will the installation cost after grants? A...