Search Results for: Environmental Health⊂mit=Search

BY MARK ROWE
IN the days of the Soviet Union, many millions of men and women had a choice of one state-manufactured brand of shampoo, toothpaste or soap. If anything, the authorities managed to limit even further access to such “indulgences” as perfume.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
AUSTRALIAN firm Dynamic Automation Systems (DAS) has invented an autonomous navigation system called MINEGEM? (which it has dubbed the “smart loader”), allowing operators to control machines remotely from the surface.

Using an autopilot system the operator can control several machines at once, ordering them to pick up materials, carry them to a dump point and return to the draw point.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TECHNOLOGY is being developed by a European Commission funded research project to allow curators to effectively monitor environmental pollution that can damage ancient treasures in museums and galleries. The MIMIC (microclimate indoor monitoring in cultural heritage preservation) project has adapted airborne particle detectors called dosimeters to assess the effects of combinations of pollutants, densities at which they could cause damage and microclimatic anomalies.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Free Trade Area (EFTA) Court has thrown out a bid by two environmental groups to stop the Norwegian government offering tax privileges to natural gas exploration companies working in the inhospitable Snøhvit field, off the far north coast of Norway.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EVERY year it seems, the international community has a pet topic in which it is fashionable to promote good behaviour, and this year the favoured cause seems to be water conservation. The World Bank, the UN Environment Programme and others have all produced weighty tomes on the need to conserve drinking water stocks.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION from European Union-funded research has continued to offer improvements to the way that EU water utilities work. For instance, the European Commission-funded MicroChem initiative has developed miniaturised laboratory-on-a-chip systems suitable for rapid field testing of water streams. They examine water in tiny pictolitre quantities, flowing through microbore channels produced by photolithographic etching.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament is preparing to strengthen the proposed European Union (EU) directive on environmental liability, which is designed to ensure that polluters pay for damage that they cause through intent or negligence.

MEP’s on the parliament’s legal affairs and internal market committee are supporting amendments that would extend the scope of this legislation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
New EU-wide rules to regulate waste from extractive industries like mining and quarrying have been proposed by the European Commission in a move to prevent the pollution of water and soil arising out of the long-term storage of waste in tailings ponds, waste heaps, lakes and rivers.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WHAT a complex and mysterious thing wheat is! Scientists tell us that modern wheat is a hexaploid, which means that the long-distant ancestors of wheat “hybridised in a way that combined three copies of the original genome to produce a genome with over 150,000 genes.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GLOOMY report from a consortium of high ranking European research teams has predicted that the world’s efforts to prevent greenhouse gas emissions are doomed to failure, even while the European Commission strives to force EU Member States to meet their Kyoto commitments.…