Much of the excitement in modern Solar Physics has come from the realisation that the Sun is a plasma and that this plasma is interacting with the magnetic field in a wide variety of subtle ways. As well as being of great interest in their own right the observed plasma phenomena on the Sun are of much wider importance, since they reveal to us details of basic phenomena that are expected to be occurring throughout the universe. It was with this in mind that 173 solar physicists from 17 countries gathered together in Bangalore with an air of anticipation. We were not disappointed as we received...

One of the great problems of astrophysics is the unanswered question about the origin and mechanism of chromospheric and coronal heating. Just how these outer stellar envelopes are heated is of fundamental importance, since all stars have hot chromospheric and coronal shells where the temperature rises to millions of degrees, comparable to the temperatures in the stars' cores. Here for the first time is a comprehensive inventory of the proposed chromospheric and coronal heating theories. The proposed heating processes are critically compared, and the observational evidence for the various...