Search Results for: England

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has launched an investigation into Britain’s planned Euro 115 million SBS Incubation Fund, which would provide soft loans to businesses intending to develop and operate office premises for small firms. Brussels thinks that the scheme could break European Union state aid rules, because it does not appear to follow existing regional aid rules, notably in terms of imposing caps on the proportion of costs that can be covered.…

BY PHILIP FINE

A TEAM of inventors for American ice-cream maker, Good Humor-Breyers, have won a patent for using proteins from fish that thrive in freezing seas to improve water ices, sorbet, granitas and frozen fruit purées. One of the drawbacks of many ice treats is that most of the colour and flavour can be sucked away in the first few tastes, leaving plain ice behind.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON, in Newcastle, England, PHILIP FINE and MONICA DOBIE, in Montreal, Canada

SPACE may be Star Trek’s final frontier, but in reality innovations used on rockets and satellites do not stay in orbit; they are often brought back to Earth where they have been used by auto-manufacturers to break their own technological boundaries.…

BY ALAN OSBORN, in London, PHILIP FINE, in Montreal, and MATTHEW BRACE, in Sydney

WITH a new crackdown on counterfeiting being prepared by the

European Commission, some industry watchers will be surprised to hear that soft drinks is one the sectors that Brussels thinks needs close attention.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL AND MARK ROWE
RESEARCHERS at the University of Essex have developed a new method of measuring rainfall accurately, that they claim could help improve the control of floods and reduce the potentially devastating losses that they can cause.…

BY MARK ROWE
THE CURRENT ATM system is flawed in many ways – one key problem being the inherent inefficiencies of an airway system relying on ground-based navigational aids and routes set up around 50 years ago. ANSPs have a responsibility to ensure the environment – in the air and on the ground – is protected as much as possible from wasteful engine emissions of noxious substances.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank has drawn up plans to lend Britain’s National Grid Euro 200 million to help it finance its Euro 1 billion multi-annual investment programme to renew, reinforce and extend England and Wales’ transmission system.

Assuming the loan is approved by the bank’s board, the money would help pay for new connections, including distributed and renewable generation, as well as initiatives to reduce power losses.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has taken an important step towards giving EU water legislation more teeth, by moving against Belgium’s system of “tacit approvals” of pollution. Belgian law allows companies to assume that they have a right to pollute if they make an application to regulators and then receive no reply.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is signalling a possible move from its ban on hybrid or inter-specific vines being used in appellation brands by paying for a research project into their quality and disease resistance, “taking into account all the scientific elements in order to provide a basis for decision.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE NATIONAL Coal Mining Museum for England is to receive a share of Euro 69 million in grants made by the European Commission under the EU LIFE Environment scheme. The museum’s INWATCO project has been selected for funding; it aims to demonstrate and evaluate innovative techniques and procedures for the integrated management of groundwater resources in coal mining areas.…