Search Results for: Research

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A NEW European Union (EU)-funded research project is helping the European dye industry survive against intense overseas competition by developing new ecologically-sound niche products. The Euro 10 million SOPHIED project should wrap up next year. Its aims, said an in house technical note, are:

*Identifying new dye molecules which are less toxic and synthesised biotechnologically for high added value markets;

*Creating new safe enzyme-assisted processes for the production of existing dyes;

*Inventing new clean-up technologies for detoxifying dye-contaminated wastewaters.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A PAN-EUROPEAN research project is investigating how nano-particles can best be incorporated in liquids such as body-lotions, improving their effectiveness. For instance, the three-year PROFORM project thinks nano-particles can make body-lotions less visible on the skin, but only if these tiny elements are consistently distributed within a liquid, a tall order given the gaps in knowledge about their behaviour and properties.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) research network Eureka is developing a research project to extract pure collagen hydrolysates from solid leather production wastes. The study currently has a Euro 1.8 million budget, which should grow over its four-year life, until 2008.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE COUNCIL of the Bars and Law Societies of Europe is pressing the European Commission to delay proposals to reform for a third time, European Union (EU) anti-money laundering legislation. It fears it would further erode guarantees of client confidentiality, already attacked by the EU’s second money laundering directive, which for instance insists lawyers tip off authorities if a client requests information on laundering cash.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has called for additional research into the presence of a potentially toxic insecticide in farmed fish. EFSA has concluded that while there is wide knowledge possibly harmful levels of camphechlor are present in fish and fish oil (for human and livestock consumption), it fears “substantial data gaps…on oral toxicity for farmed fish.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
*Copper

Copper dropped in production between 2003-04 and the previous year. However, the Mt Lyell Copper Mine in Queenstown has deemed copper priced sufficiently to continue its development of a decline to the next production level. Copper prices made significant gains throughout 2003-4, notably in the second half of the financial year and reached the A$4,000 (UK Pounds 1,600) mark by June, a price not achieved since 1995.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Health Organisation (WHO) has called for international cooperation on testing potential vaccines for HIV/AIDS because it is concerned that the current boom in research could exhaust available clinical trial capacity. WHO vaccine research director Marie-Paule Kieny (CORRECT SPELLING) has called for trials to be shared amongst a number of sites, each of whom were responsible for testing vaccines on a particular strain of the disease.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN consortium claims to have successfully developed a mobile and self-erecting crane, “to create a single crane that can do the work of five”. The six participating Belgian, German, Italian and Dutch companies – linked under the banner of European research network Eureka – say the crane “features an anti-sway device which makes it safer as well as more efficient”.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AN AMERICAN company from Michigan recently gave his employees a choice: quit smoking or lose your job. Four employees from Weyco, a firm that manages benefit plans for workers on behalf of other companies, were sacked in January after refusing to take a nicotine test on whether they had smoked since a deadline of January 1, this year.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
SINGAPORE’S economy is rejuvenating after the horrors of early 2004 when the threat of terrorism (both internationally and closer to home in South East Asia), and then the SARS virus hit the city state hard, shrinking demand for construction and hence the amount of money to be made by the coatings sector.…