• MI5 seeks powers to trawl records in new terror hunt

    As part of the Brown government’s new counterterrorism strategy, which places emphasis on thwarting a cyber-attack on the United Kingdom, MI5 seeks total access to commuters’ travel records to help them meet the threat

  • Age-old communication problem solved using quantum entanglement

    One of the major problems in communication is known as the Byzantine agreement: Messages between three different parties are subject to faulty information; researchers succeeded in overcoming the qutrit difficulties by setting up a system that creates four-qubit entangled states

  • Converting CO2 into fuel

    Scientists suggest mimicking the photosynthetic system of green plants to address the twin needs of readily available fuel and a clean environment: Reacting carbon dioxide with water, two of the major components used to extinguish fire, and turning them into a fuel

  • Climate change to affect U.S. transportation system

    Flooding of roads, railways, transit systems, and airport runways in coastal areas because of rising sea levels and surges will require significant changes in the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation systems

  • EPA to help ports become greener

    Ports are vital to the U.S. economy; port-related activities also pose major environmental challenges, and the EPA wants to help ports and their transportation network in reducing air emissions, improving water quality, and protecting the health of communities near port facilities

  • Invention turns trash into ethanol

    Two University of Maryland researchers develop a process which turns trash into ethanol; the researchers found that a Chesapeake Bay marsh grass bacterium has an enzyme that could quickly break down plant materials into sugar, which can then be converted to biofuel

  • Fuel cell joint venture formed

    In an effort to accelerate the development of fuel cells, two companies form a JV to target the light industrial, commercial, and residential markets in the United Kingdom and Ireland

  • Economic barriers to better IT security

    In the real world, investment in risk avoidance may not be profitable; establishing economic incentives for IT suppliers to produce more secure products is a major problem because software publishers are not held liable for the shortcomings of their products; a new paper examines this conundrum

  • Aussie-Chinese collaboration on clean coal

    Australia, China in collaborative clean coal effort; the goal is to hone the post combustion capture (PCC) process, which uses a liquid to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from power station flue gases

  • Fear of dirty bomb threat as U.K. ships plutonium to France

    Sellafield had an ambitious, £473 million plan: Make new nuclear fuel out of mixture of plutonium and uranium oxides recovered from used fuel; the plan flopped, and the company had to turn to its chief competitor, French firm Cogema, to fulfill its orders for the fuel material; trouble is, shipping the material to France on an unarmed ferry is dangerous, as the material could easily be used to make a dirty bomb

  • Measuring the size of waves

    Surfers — and wave energy converters — benefit from a having more accurate sense of the size and intensity of waves; Scottish researchers developed a technique to make the exploitation of wave energy more efficient with a device that measures the size of each wave approaching the converter

  • Pursuit Dynamics to install ethanol reactor tower in Oregon

    British specialist’s bioethanol system yields 14 percent more ethanol, while reducing overall fermentation time by more than 20 percent; system will be tested in Oregon

  • U.S. officials: "Cyber Warfare Is Already Here"

    U.S. officials say China, Russia, and possibly other nation-states are capable of collecting or exploiting data held on U.S. information systems; Director of National Intelligence says especially worrisome is the ability of other countries to destroy data in the system: “And the destroying data could be something like money supply, electric power distribution, transportation sequencing and that sort of thing”

  • Study of U.K. nuclear power plants employees reveals radiation risks

    More than 65,000 individuals were employed between 1946 and 2002 at nuclear power plants operated by British Nuclear Fuels plc and its predecessors; a team of researchers studied the health histories of these individuals, and found evidence for an association between mortality from noncancer causes of death, particularly circulatory system disease, and external exposure to ionizing radiation

  • Solution offered to wind farm-radar conflict in U.K.

    The blades of turbines at U.K. wind farms interfere with the working of both military radar stations and civilian air-traffic control; a consulting firm offers a solution based on fill-in radar sensors sited at the wind farms themselves to cover the shadowed zone