In recent years, new food packaging concepts have been developed to respond on consumption trends towards mildly preserved, fresh convenient food products. Fresh-cut vegetables are an example of fresh-like, healthy convenience foods, developed in the ‘80s in the UK. Their market is yearly increasing with 25% in West Europe.
Packaging fresh-cut vegetables under an Equilibrium Modified Atmosphere (EMA) is one of the new applied food packaging technologies offering a prolonged shelf-life of re
In the 1960s, scientists anticipated a `New Ice Age`. Later, they warned of humans triggering a ‘Nuclear Winter’. Now, it’s ‘Global Warming’. Why this change in emphasis? And why did it take 100 years for the theory behind ‘Global Warming’ to take hold?
New research by scientists from the University of Gloucestershire indicates that a remarkable combination of circumstances sparked widespread scientific interest in ‘Global Warming’ in the later decades of the 20th Century.
Prof.
An inventive idea from Dr Chris Solomon of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) has beaten top International competition and won first prize in the prestigious European Digital Information Contents (DICON) competition.
Dr Solomon who has an active research programme in forensic imaging and a longstanding interest in the computational modelling, encoding and recognition of the human face said: `I was truly impressed by the quality of some of the prese
New devices boost optical networks
Several technical requirements must be met until data from computers, TV stations or telephone network providers can be transported via fiber-optic cables to their destinations. Specialists from Infineon Technologies leverage their combined expertise to continuously improve the conditions for today’s and tomorrow’s fiber-optic applications with innovative chip designs. For example, the German technology foundry has developed a special device that ca
The European Space Agency warmly welcomes the decision taken today by the European Union Transport Ministers, meeting in Brussels.
Galileo has now been given the official go-ahead but for ESA that simply means that work on Galileo can continue! ESA teams have already been working for a number of years on satellite navigation systems, including the development of critical technologies such as atomic clocks and signal generators.
Developed by ESA in collaboration with the European U
The international used tyre trade is bringing unwanted visitors to Europe – exotic mosquitoes. Species such as the Asian ‘Tiger Mosquito’ are able to survive in temperate climates, spread diseases (such as dengue and West Nile virus, among others) and may be poised to take Britain by surprise, unless monitoring systems are put in place.
Tiger mosquitoes lay their eggs around places that are prone to flooding. Their eggs can survive long periods of drought and, when a pool forms, the larvae
The planet Jupiter has spectacular rings of auroras around each pole but until now scientists have not been able to explain how they form. All auroras are caused by energetic charged particles crashing into the top of the atmosphere and making it glow. In the Earth’s auroras, these particles come from the Sun in a flow of charged particles known as the solar wind. But this can’t account for Jupiter’s auroras because the solar wind does not reach to the region where the brightest are found. Space phys
Scientists make strides in the study of women’s sports injuries.
Straighter legs and knock-knees may be causing female athletes to tear knee ligaments more frequently than males. The finding could help coaches to shape women’s training to reduce such injuries.
When researchers at the University of North Carolina spotted that women land with their knees straighter and closer together than do men, they asked the athletes to spring on and off platforms that measure force in sev
Scientists have developed a blood test that may reveal changes in the brain caused by Alzheimer’s disease. The technique, tested so far only in mice, predicts the amount of amyloid plaque (formed from clumps of proteins that kill surrounding cells) in an animal’s brain. The research, detailed in a report in the current issue of the journal Science, holds promise for the development of predictive methods to diagnose the disease years ahead of the onset of clinical symptoms.
David Holtzman of
Astronomers using the Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea report that they have created a three-dimensional movie of a powerful, active galaxy located some 70 million light years away. The addition of a new instrument, the Integral Field Unit (IFU), to the Gemini telescope enabled the group to study light from the galaxy NGC1068 in much greater detail. From a single still of NGC1068, the IFU generated data on the physical conditions and velocities of galactic material throughout the image.
Two Basque companies, Enerlim and NECESA, have developed a new wind generator, a wind reservoir to make use of wind energy.
This wind reservoir is much lighter than ordinary three-arm wind generators; hence, it is more economical and easier to install. On the other side, the machine is completely modular, as columns, pulleys and plates can be divided in order to make easier the production, transport and installation. The largest piece to be transported and installed is 12 meters long and 2
Astronomers Dr Simon Jeffery of the Armagh Observatory and Dr Hideyuki Saio of Tohoku University, Japan, have finally solved a long-standing mystery concerning the creation of two particular kinds of rare stars. They have found that a class of variable stars named after their prototype R Coronae Borealis (RCrB), and a related group called `extreme helium stars` are the products of mergers between pairs of white dwarf stars. What kind of star results from the merger depends on the composition of the w
Every kilogram of predator needs a fixed amount of prey.
Every kilogram of meat-eating mammal needs 111 kilograms of prey to sustain it, say two ecologists. The rule holds from weasels to bears.
With many species of carnivore endangered, the discovery could help conservationists work out how to maintain a species’ resource base.
Chris Carbone, of the Institute of Zoology, London, and John Gittleman, of the University of Virginia, found the rule when they compare
Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are of zoonotic origin , and the closest simian relatives of HIV-1 and HIV-2 have been found in the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys) respectively. Given that humans come in frequent contact with primates in many parts of subsaharan Africa, particularly through hunting and handling primate bushmeat the possibility of additional zoonotic transfers of primate lentiviruses from species other than chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys has to be co
Severe headaches are not a sign of high blood pressure, as is commonly thought, finds research in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. If anything, high blood pressure seems to reduce the risk of these headaches, the study shows.
The findings are based on the blood pressure readings of over 22,000 adults who responded to a survey 11 years later in 1995 to 1997 about headache frequency.
The questionnaire showed that 28 per cent of them suffered repeated headaches, of
Women with early breast cancer could avoid needless chemotherapy thanks to work carried out in Chicago on identifying biochemical markers which indicate whether or not cancer is likely to spread to other parts of the body, the 3rd European Breast Cancer Conference in Barcelona heard today (Saturday 23 March).
Ruth Heimann, Associate Professor in the department of radiation and cellular oncology at the University of Chicago, USA, said that patients with early breast cancer which has not sprea
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