This white paper examines the current challenges for clean energy infrastructure and identifies solutions that industrial clusters, transport and logistics industries, and the wider clean energy value chain can jointly explore in order to accelerate its deployment. Thirteen new industrial clusters from Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, …
Sunflowers and spinach could be used to clean up spillage of radioactivity from around nuclear plants if an experiment by the British nuclear industry proves successful. British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) is growing dwarf sunflowers, spinach, sugar beet and Indian mustard on an 80-metre-stretch of land contaminated by leaks from the …
A DEBATE similar to the one raised during the time when scientists were busy harnessing atomic power is taking place in the field of agriculture. The issue this time is genetically modified crops. Those in favour are claiming that production will go up many folds while those opposing it believe …
Island sheep may help resolve a fierce debate in ecology about population crashes. British researchers are using sheep populations on St Kilda, a remote archipelago off the west coast of Scotland, to check the relative importance of climate and local factors such as the availability of food. Ecologists usually do …
THE flow of radioactive waste into the Irish Sea will be rapidly cut, Britain promised recently. But the clean-up will take much longer than what the government has suggested, say expert calculations. At a meeting of the member nations at the Oslo-Paris (OSPAR) convention on marine pollution in the northeast …
BRITISH government experts have revealed that thousands of people may have died because they were given albumin - a blood product instead of a simple saline drip. According to the experts, albumin treatment could have caused deaths to six out of every hundred patients treated. Albumin was first used to …
BRITISH doctors have discovered new cases of a sleeping disease which swept the world in the 1920s but was thought - till now - to have died out equally mysteriously. Encephalitis Lethargica affected five million people and killed over a million. Thousands were left in a seemingly- permanent and bizarre …
EVEN as we count off the days to the next century, scientists and computer professionals are hard at work, wracking their brains to come up with a solution to the millennium bug, a problem that promises to acquire fearful proportions in the next few years. What exactly is this bug? …
At night police using spotter helicopters find it hard to tell cops from robbers on the ground. The simple answer, according to Richard Harvey of Newport in South Wales, UK, is for each officer on the ground to wear a small infrared transmitter on his or her head. Driven by …
Scientists may soon explain the mys-terious behaviour of some icebergs. They have discovered a submerged "ice foot" extending more than 50 metres (m) out to sea from the wall of a glacier. This could explain why icebergs sometimes suddenly come up to the ocean surface in unexpec-ted places. Researchers suspect …
CONSERVATIONISTS in the UK plan to use explosions and gunfire to scare migrant birds away from parts of a wintering site poisoned by an environmental disaster. They will lay down food in less polluted areas of a Spanish nature reserve that is home to thousands of birds flying south from …
Plastic electronics is by now fairly common; polymer-based transis-tors and fabricated polymer light emitting diodes (LEDs). But now researchers in the US and the UK have reported integrating the two to develop an organic transistor. They are using it to drive a polymer-based LED which is built on top of …
WHEN it comes to writing reports, British Telecom's (BT's) research engineers have resorted to using Radar to make sure that their output is up-to-date and contains all references to relevant research. The Radar in question is a clever computer program named after the underdog character in MASH, the television comedy …
A FEW decades ago, David Croxton, farmer and consultant agronomist, would have struggled to support his family finances. But not today. At present, Croxton owns about 150 hectare (ha) farm near Kingsbridge in south Devon, UK. And this achievement follows an advice to use "elephant grass" - miscanthus - as …
In the wake of the recent forest fire disasters the world over, Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), has said that governments, UN agencies, on-governmental organisations and those directly involved in fire-fighting operations must strengthen their cooperation, in order to be better prepared and jointly …
People with poor eyesight or severe memory problems could soon be a lot more streetwise, thanks to the Auditory location Finder (ALF) - a wonderful invention being devel-oped by a team at the Edinburgh-based Napier University's Transport Research Institute. The ALF uses short-range radio beacons to put its users in …
GIVE it another decade, and the robot will gather enough medical knowledge in its microchips to perform complex surgeries on human patients. And the process, according to doctors and scientists, has already begun. Over a decade ago, medical experts developed something called laparoscopic surgery - in which instruments arc inserted …
WHEN it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, all our accusing fingers point towards the industries, blaming them profusely for reducing our once-green Earth to a sick, polluted planet. Having thus shifted our responsibilities, we carry on happily with our daily lives, without ever recognising our own share of the blame. …
IMPERIAL, Gallagher, Rothmans and British American Tobacco (BAT), the four biggest tobacco companies in the UK, will challenge a report from a government advisory committee that recommends a ban on tobacco advertising and smoking in public places. On July 6, the companies got permission from a high court judge in …
Elite mountaineers and trainee soldiers are stronger if they have inherited a particular variant of a gene that helps regulate blood pressure. This claim has been made by Hugh Montgomery of University College, London, UK, and his team. The researchers monitored the effects of two common variants of the gene …
THE British government have planned to press for a complete ban on the dumping of steel oil installations in the sea. The proposal will come during meeting of environment ministers in Sintra, Portugal. According to Michael Meacher, UK's environment minister, the country is all set to propose a "near-zero option …
