Britain returns to thrifty domesticity

A revival of 1950s style domesticity has swept Britain due to the economic downturn. Consumers are applying a do-it-yourself attitude to all areas of daily life by making clothes, growing vegetables and dying their own hair.Sales of knitting and dressmaking equipment are powering ahead - knitting needles are up by 7 per cent and sewing machines by 34 per cent according to the department store chain John Lewis.

Meanwhile garden centres are reporting strong demand for fruit bushes - up 68 per cent last year - and hardware stores have brought out budget gardening tool ranges. Although the motivation for the return to the thrifty, homely appears to be money, the new habits may stay once the economic good times return, at least according to one expert.

"When the economy starts to recover people will have adopted old domestic skills which they will continue to use. The focus will be on sustainability; people will be more self sufficient," predicted Reshema White, of St Andrews University. One of the easiest ways for people to save money is to colour their hair at home rather than at the hairdresser.

Sales of hair-dying kits are up 17 per cent rise at Superdrug, while Sainsbury's is selling a third more hair dyes. "For the cost of one salon hair treatment you can colour your hair at home for an entire year - and still have change for hairspray," said Daniel Hadley, Superdrug's hair dye buyer.

A new generation of twenty and thirty- somethings are taking up hearth-side social activities such as knitting instead of going out. Knitting clubs are opening across the country, attracting young professionals who are keen to save cash. I Knit London have begun to run three times as many knitting classes for beginners as last year due to a sharp rise in demand.
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GM reveals Vauxhall electric car

Vauxhall has revealed the first image of its version of the electrically-powered Chevrolet Volt, which will be shown at the Geneva motor show in March.

Known as the Ampera, the five-seat, four-door hatchback will go on sale in 2011 in right-hand-drive form shortly after the Opel - also part of General Motors - version appears in Europe. The car is based on the Vauxhall Astra, with a 400lb, T-shaped lithium-ion battery positioned under the body floor. The Ampere shares the same battery/electric hybrid driveline as the Volt, which General Motors terms an extended-range electric vehicle. The advanced 16kWh lithium-ion battery can be charged via mains electricity to provide a 40-mile range with zero tailpipe emissions. When the battery is exhausted, the specially-modified 1.4-litre petrol engine will generate electricity to supply power to the 111kW electric drive motor and provide a similar range to that of a conventional Vauxhall Astra. The car recycles about half its battery capacity and the recharging time, using a household 240 volt supply, is claimed to be about three hours.
GM says that 80 per cent of European motorists drive no more than 31 miles a day, so in most cases the Ampera's petrol engine will never need to be started

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Scientists to stop global warming with 100,000 square mile sun shade

According to astronomer Dr Roger Angel, at the University of Arizona, the trillions of mirrors would have to be fired one million miles above the earth using a huge cannon with a barrel of 0.6 miles across.
The gun would pack 100 times the power of conventional weapons and need an exclusion zone of several miles before being fired.
Despite the obvious obstacles - including an estimated $350 trillion (£244trn) price tag for the project - Dr Angel is confident of getting the project off the ground.
He said: "What we have developed is certainly effective and a method guaranteed to work.
"Tests are ongoing but we expect to be ready to launch within 20 or 30 years time. Things that take a few decades are not that futuristic."
Dr Angel has already secured NASA funding for a pilot project and British inventor Tod Todeschini, 38, was commissioned to build a scaled-down version of the gun.
He constructed the four-metre long cannon in his workshop in Sandlake, Oxfordshire, for a TV documentary investigating the sun shield theory.
He said: "The gun was horrendously dangerous. This was the first gun I'd ever built.
"I knew I could put it together safely but at the end of it all I didn't know what I was going to get.
"It was immensely dangerous. I was attempting to build a gun to produce 1,500G of force but it ended up creating about 10,000G and we had to turn the power down.
"Most weapons used by the army produce 100Gs of force so our gun was about 100 times more powerful.
"The main danger was electrocution because it used enough power to boil 44,000 kettles.
"If you were working with normal levels of electricity you could get a shock and be fine, but if you got a shock off this you would be dead - no question.
"We've proved it's possible to build a scaled-down version of the gun needed to get these lenses into the air so it's just a matter of scaling up the designs for the real thing."
If Dr Angel's sun shield is successful he says the mirrors will last 50 years before needing to be replaced.
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US toilet paper 'worse for planet' than gas guzzling cars

The vast majority of the paper used by American consumers is produced from virgin forests, while Europeans are more open to using recycled lavatory paper.
Greenpeace this week launched a guide about the ecological impact of the use of toilet paper. Lindsey Allen, a forestry expert with the envirnmental campaign group, said: "We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it's like cardboard."
More than 98 per cent of the toilet paper sold in the US is from virgin forests, with the figure just under 60 per cent in Europe.
US consumers consume significantly more of the paper than Europeans - reportedly three times as much. They are said to use 100 times paper per head of population than the Chinese.
Allen Hershkowitz, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council, said: "Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving [petrol-thirsty cars] in terms of global warming pollution."
American producers of the products maintain that there is ample choice for consumers, with recycled toilet paper - which involves less use of chemicals when manufactured - available widely in the US.
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