Search Results for: England

BY KEITH NUTHALL
NEUROTICS and introverts often find it harder to quit smoking than extroverted happy people, according to research from the University of Warwick, England. It suggests that improving the social skills of these smokers may be more effective as an anti-smoking aid than a nicotine patch.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
TECHNOLOGY may have produced many different ways of checking underground networks of pipes and sewers by remote control, but one problem remains the same: secure access. Even the smallest aperture can invite vandalism or, at its worst, deliberate contamination if it can be forced or broken easily.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON, in Newcastle, England, MATTHEW BRACE, in Brisbane and RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg
ASK a human to find a needle in a haystack and they would probably spend five minutes at the most sifting through the stalks, then get bored and walk away.…

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 MICHAEL FOX
TANKS and vessels are used to store a huge range of hazardous liquids. But if they leak either from a failure of the storage system or during handling, many can pose a major threat to the environment and to groundwater.…

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 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 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.…