News you might have missed: 11 May 2009
Trying to catch up with all the news now that the weekend’s over? Let Greenbang help with our daily roundup of headlines you might have missed:
- Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment, spent today in the North East to see some of the eco-oriented work being done in schools, with sustainable buildings, on farms and on flood prevention in the region;
- Adrian Newton, a Bournemouth University expert in conservation ecology, is working to prevent the loss of rare fruit and nut forests in an area of Central Asia described as a “biological Eden”;
- The Independent reports that some of Britain’s historic homes “have been damaged by climate-change-related incidents, such as flooding, over the past five years, with repair costs running into millions of pounds”;
- A hydrogen-rich compound discovered by Stanford researchers is packed with promise of helping overcome one of the biggest hurdles to using hydrogen for fuel — namely, how do you stuff enough hydrogen into a volume that is small enough to be portable and practical for powering a car?;
- For more than a decade, scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to create continuously emitting light sources from individual molecules because of an optical quirk called “blinking,” but now scientists at the University of Rochester have uncovered the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and along with researchers at the Eastman Kodak Company, created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light;
- Rapidly rising cybercrime and the growing prospect of the Internet being used as a medium for terrorist attacks pose a major challenge for IT security. Cryptography is central to this challenge, since it underpins privacy, confidentiality, and identity, which together provide the fabric for e-commerce and secure communications.
