Search Results for: Research

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICAN scientists have discovered technology that can detect the sex of insects, helping them to control disease-carrying bugs such as mosquitoes and tsetse flies. Using an agricultural tool normally used to analyse grain kernels, researchers from the federal government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) discovered they could determine the sex of insects using near-infrared (NIR) monitors, which beam light at an organism, which reflects it back with its own its own unique signature.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FEW industries are as touchy about their image as the American gambling business but given the way the industry is portrayed by Hollywood this is understandable. Whether or not people are right to hold the industry in such suspicion these days is debatable.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
A QUEBEC Superior Court judge, in Canada, has given the green light for two class action lawsuits to be launched against Canadian tobacco manufacturers, Imperial Tobacco, Rothmans Benson & Hedges and JTI MacDonald, all of whom could be liable for significant damages.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INTERNATIONAL Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Mohamed ElBaradei has called on governments to make advance preparations for May’s 2005 Review Conference of the parties to the UN Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Listing a series of “fixes” to tighten global controls, ElBaradei said some of these “can be made in May, but only if governments are ready to act.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A STRATEGIC plan has been developed for developing an effective HIV vaccine by the Global HIV/AIDS Vaccine Enterprise, whose membership includes the European Commission plus 140 agencies and research units from 17 European and developing countries. The plan highlights the main roadblocks to developing a vaccine and suggests how to tackle them.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AMERICAN scientists from the USA’s Agricultural Research Service have mapped the entire genetic code of honey bees, which will help breeders rear bees with enhanced honey production skills and increased disease resistance. Bee diseases cost US$5 million annually in crop-pollination losses.…

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
BRITAIN and eight other European countries have signed a memorandum of understanding about constructing a groundbreaking X-ray research laser, so acute it could measure chemical reactions in real time. The UK, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany have agreed to negotiate in detail an inter-governmental arrangement for building an approximately three-kilometre-long underground laser generator.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has launched a Euro 72 million public health campaign designed especially to stop young people taking up smoking. ‘HELP: For a Life Without Tobacco’ will last until 2008 and involves direct actions by the Commission and paid-for advertising on television, posters and at cinemas.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) health and consumer protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou has been angered by the continued use by European food processors of the carcinogen Sudan 1, despite controls being introduced 18 months ago. Brussels’ emergency decision of June 2003 insisted on the testing of food ingredients for the dye to prevent its use in processing and also told member states to test products already on the market.…