The year 2040 could see many people working from home several days a week staying in touch with colleagues through videophone and internet connections. When planning a holiday, people will be limited to a certain number of air miles per year, although additional air miles may be purchased from others at auctions. This will reflect the true environmental cost of air travel.

This is one possible vision of people who participated in research at the University of Surrey’s Psychology Department,

ESA’s Mars Express is due to arrive at Mars in December 2003, and its Beagle 2 lander will be making a touchdown in the middle of the Martian winter. Will it see a ’’white Christmas’’ on the Red Planet? Also, if humans one day go to Mars, would they need to take a sunscreen?

Over its four-year lifetime, Mars Express will be returning data to refine the latest computer models of the Martian climate. It will be closely watching the clouds, fog, dust devils, and storms,

The most important antibiotics in general use today are the b-lactam family of products, but the medical community faces a serious problem with these antibiotics: the increasing development of drug resistance. The resistance is caused by hydrolysis of the b-lactam by a bacterial lactamase enzyme, but fortunately it can often be overcome by the use of a serine b-lactamase inhibitor in combination with the drug. This approach is successfully used already, for example clavulanic acid is used in combinat

Hundreds of species with small ranges seen vulnerable

The Caribbean Sea has the greatest concentration of marine life in the entire Atlantic and is home to hundreds of species that live only in precariously small areas, making life there far richer and more delicate than previously thought, according to a new study.

An analysis of the ranges of 1,172 marine species revealed that some 253, or 22 percent, are endemic to the Caribbean region, meaning they are found nowhere else

Nanotechnologists could have a firmer handle on the forces at play in their microscopic world thanks to recent physics research at Purdue University.

The latest in a series of experiments aimed at revealing fundamental knowledge of the universe has yielded precise measurement of the so-called Casimir force – a force that could make tiny machines behave erratically, causing a thorn in the side of nanotechnology manufacturers. A team, including Purdue physicist Ephraim Fischbach, has answered

System detects tissue changes

Mammograms, X-rays and other pricey medical scans do little good if doctors can’t see the tiny changes that signal early stages of disease. But such warning signs are often too subtle to spot by eye, and too complex for computers to interpret. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory have developed the Change Detection System, technology that highlights slight differences between digit