Search Results for: Belgium

BY KEITH NUTHALL

BRITAIN is comparatively free of particulate matter PM10 which can cause serious respiratory problems, the latest Europe-wide pollution survey from the European Environment Agency (EEA) has concluded. It said the "highest urban concentrations were observed in Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain" plus western Balkan cities, with northern Italy’s Po Valley, parts of Belgium and the Netherlands, and southern Spain being the worst affected.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Union (EU) researchers have devised a way of reducing the weight of noise insulation materials in cars without making them noisier. The EU research network Eureka says the Euro 4 million France-led project E!2411 ERTAC has discovered that by layering compressed felt with a low density felt, the weight of sound insulation could be cut by 50%.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE NEED to limit particulate matter in Britain and continental western Europe has been underlined by the European Environment Agency’s (EEA) latest assessment of pollution in Europe. In its fourth annual environmental health check of Europe, central Asia and Asiatic Russia, the agency concluded that much of western, central and south east Europe, especially urban areas, "experience daily average PM10 concentrations in excess of 50 ?g/m3…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

Brussels

A TEAM of European and Asian researchers has linked more than 40,000 computers across 45 countries to speed studies into developing an anti-viral drug that can defeat bird flu. Funded by the European Union’s (EU) Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project, the computing grid is analysing the potential of more than 500,000 drug-like molecules.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A CHINK of light has emerged in the perennially taut energy relations between the European Union (EU) and Russia: both sides have agreed to establish a committee to examine how a system of gas unbundling ‘reciprocity’ might work.…

Keith Nuthall

Brussels

A EUROPEAN Union (EU)-funded research team, working with scientists from the USA’s Stanford University and the European synchrotron radiation facility, in Grenoble, has mapped the structure of a protein which plays a crucial role in spreading diseases around the body.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

European Commission officials are deciding whether to launch legal action against 22 member states of the European Union (EU) who have failed to implement key legislation allowing researchers to move between EU universities. Because non-EU researchers have faced burdensome immigration procedures when undertaking research projects involving working at different European universities, the EU approved a ‘researchers’ visa’ directive in 2005, ordering member states to introduce a fast-track immigration system.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

IT is common currency amongst extreme British Eurosceptics that business and government on the continent of Europe is a cesspit of dishonesty and corruption, against which Britain shines like a beacon of virtue and decency.

Allowing "Europeans" who lack Britain’s traditional sense of fair play and transparency control over the laws and regulations mandated by the "Mother of Parliaments" is heresy to such folk.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE OUTCOME of the political struggle about this month’s (Sept) release of a comprehensive proposed package of European Union (EU) energy directives and regulations insisting on some unbundling between power producers and transmitters will test the EU’s ability to threaten core interests of national governments.…

BY PHILIPPA JONES, in Paris

STEM cells leapt to the attention of the cosmetics world earlier this year when US-based Voss Laboratories used Russian biotechnology to launch Amatokin, a ‘miracle’anti-wrinkle skin cream that uses stem cell technology. LVMH Recherche, the research arm of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the luxury perfume and cosmetics group, believes stem cells are central to creating ever-more effective cosmetics.…