A creative team is currently deciding how much crossover there should be between the parent show and its offspring. When the BBC's drama department decided to show viewers what was happening in the wards that formed the backdrop to Casualty, its long-running medical drama Holby City was created. Seven years on, BBC1 is now planning a spin-off of a spin-off - a drama set in a police station close to the fictional hospital. It is the latest in a long line of programmes to have spawned new shows, both in drama and comedy, with varying degrees of success, from the hugely popular Cheers spin-off, Frasier, to the less successful Friends follow-up, Joey.Provisionally titled Holby Blue, the series is co-produced by Tony Jordan - the veteran EastEnders writer who created the recent BBC1 hit Life on Mars and the slick con artist drama Hustle.His company, Red Planet, is in the early stages of making the pre-watershed show, which is likely to fill the poorly performing Wednesday night slot that BBC1 controllers have struggled to fill. We also know that the Moon sometimes determines animal behaviour and has long been linked with aspects of our lives as diverse as a women's menstrual cycle and mental disturbance, hence the word lunatic..

The massive power of waves and the tides that cause them are, it is universally accepted, a direct consequence of the gravitational influences of the Moon and the Sun upon Earth. There is one very simple answer that those who accept the principles of astrology give to sceptics who condemn it as a load of mumbo-jumbo: don't look at the stars for an explanation, go to the coast and look at the sea. This would mean the Minoan civilisation was not contemporary with the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt - which began in the 16th century BC - as many archaeologists believed.A separate study published in Science by Professor Sturt Manning of Cornell University in New York shows radiocarbon dating of 127 objects recovered from the Theran town of Akrotiri - which was buried by the eruption - support the findings.Professor Colin Renfrew, a Cambridge archaeologist, said the studies appeared to provide convincing evidence to put a firm date on the eruption in Thera.. The scientists suggest it is highly unlikely the Minoans were able to survive the environmental impact of the eruption, which meant their civilisation ended 100 to 150 years earlier than thought.

Using radiocarbon dating, they worked out the year of the tree's death to an accuracy of 13 years each way.The study, published in the journal Science, suggests Thera blew apart a century or so prior to the conventional date when the Minoan civilisation was thought to have gone into demise, based on evidence from archaeological objects. The researchers are convinced the tree was alive when it was smothered. The scientists found 72 growth rings, including the final year's ring, inside the branch. If we can date it precisely we have an important tool to correlate the times of different cultures," Dr Friedrich said.Tom Pfeiffer, a student of Dr Friedrich, discovered the olive branch buried inside a rock face formed from volcanic debris. They have also discovered signs of frost damage caused by the volcano on preserved plant material excavated in Ireland and California.Walter Friedrich, of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and his colleagues have analysed the olive branch's growth rings and combined the findings with radiocarbon dating to show the tree must have died between 1627BC and 1600BC."It is important to have a very precise date for the explosion because this eruption is a global time marker. Vulcanologists believe the explosion generated violent tsunamis that destroyed Crete's ports, threw thousands of tons of ash and pumice into the atmosphere and created a "nuclear winter" that led to successive crop failures in the region.Scientists have detected ash from the explosion as far away as Greenland, the Black Sea and Egypt.