Search Results for: Research

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EURATOM has released its 2002 report on inquiries carried out by its European Commission officials tasked with checking the safety and security of nuclear installations across the European Union (EU); although the paper’s conclusions was generally satisfactory, it notes a number of problems detected that required resolution.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FUTURE European Union (EU) research programmes affecting meat production should be reoriented towards consumer protection, animal welfare standards and environmental good practice rather than food production technology, the European Parliament has said. Its suggestions came in a report on the current and next EU (sixth and seventh) framework programme for research.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE NEW York Times is reporting that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been pressuring its scientific experts to approve meat products not yet deemed safe. An unnamed senior USDA scientist said department researchers had been pressured to approve cattle from Mexico at risk of tuberculosis and, in August, following their BSE scare, boneless meat from Canadian cattle, prior to the conclusion of an in-house study.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has approved a three-year supplementary research programme at the EU’s joint research centre high flux reactor, at Petten, the Netherlands. Funded largely by the Dutch government, the Euro 30.6 million studies should improve reactor safety, waste management and develop nuclear fuel unable to be transformed into weapon grade plutonium.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GRANTS worth Euro 1.35 million have been awarded by the Dutch government to fund two new research centres carrying out multidisciplinary studies into the prevention, management and treatment of infectious diseases in the Netherlands and developing countries. The centres will be virtual institutions, recruiting researchers from around the country.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
SCIENTISTS in the United States have found new evidence that carbon dioxide, the main emission linked to global warming, is cooling and shrinking the atmosphere’s outermost layers, causing its air to be thinner. According to research conducted by scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington, the average density of air 60 miles upwards has dropped by 10 per cent over the last 36 years, and could decline by 50 per cent by the end of the century.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INITIAL results from the world’s largest ever study into whether mobile phone use causes cancer suggest that the technology is safe. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says that research carried out in Denmark, forming part of the global INTERPHONE study, has concluded: “Use of a cell phone for 10 years or more did not increase acoustic neuroma risk over that of short term users.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AN ONLINE database of information on how pathogenic bacteria respond to different environmental conditions in food has been established by Britain’s Institute of Food Research and the Eastern Regional Research Centre’s Microbial Food Safety Research Unit, in the United States.…

BY MARK ROWE
IN tough economic times, an industry has to sell itself harder. It is no surprise, then, that if you glance at the websites of Singapore’s leading paint companies, you will see plenty of buzzwords such as “technology”, “improvement” and “development”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GROUP of countries have formed a network of excellence developing expertise in the deep underground storage of radioactive waste. Coordinated by the International Atomic Energy Agency, participants include Belgium’s Hades Underground Research Facility in Mol; Canada’s Underground Research Laboratory of Lac-du-Bonnet, Manitoba; Switzerland’s Grimsel Test Site and Mont-Terri Underground Research Laboratory; Britain’s Geo-Environmental Research Centre, Cardiff; and the USA’s WIPP facility, New Mexico, the Yucca Mountain Project, Nevada, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, San Francisco.…