P3P gives people more control over use of personal information on the Web

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, representing cross-industry agreement on an XML-based language for expressing Web site privacy policies. Declaring P3P a W3C Recommendation indicates that it is a stable document, contributes to Web interoperability, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favor its widespread adoption.

Random vibrations can generate rotation.

A simple top converts foghorn noise to one-way spin. The device raises the hope that useful energy could be collected from ambient sounds. Normally, random vibrations, which physicists and engineers call noise, produce useless random motion. You can’t move a cart from A to B by shoving it randomly in every direction.

But in the new device, made by Yaroslav Zolotaryuk of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby and colleagues

Chemists put biological catalysts to work in clean industrial solvents.

In a move towards cleaner chemical processing, researchers in Spain and France have worked out how to use enzymes as catalysts using two ’green’ solvents: one to dissolve the enzyme, the other to dissolve the materials it transforms.

In some industrial processes chemists have replaced polluting organic solvents, such as chlorine and benzene, with supercritical carbon dioxide. This is the liquid

Research chemists have a found a class of synthetic molecules that could quite literally act as a key which could lock away sections of DNA into a closely wound coil preventing proteins from interacting with particular sections of DNA code. By locking up the DNA in this way scientists could stop particular sequences of DNA from activating biological changes that doctors or scientists would rather avoid, or wish to regulate closely.

Until now researchers trying to devise synthetic molecules t

A team of researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in coordination with the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial Esteban Terradas (INTA – Esteban Terradas National Institute of Aerospace Technology), is preparing for a person to jump from an altitude of 38,000 metres, on the edge of the stratosphere. This will be the highest altitude from which anybody has ever jumped, allowing for the first ever studies of human behaviour in such an extreme situation.

Parachutist Miguel

The first steps in a new method of detecting landmines by determining the presence of tiny quantities of the explosive TNT (trinitrotoluene) are described in research published today in the Institute of Physics publication Journal of Physics D. Markus Nolte, Alexei Privalov and Franz Fujara of Darmstadt Technical University in Germany, together with Jurgen Altmann of Dortmund University and Vladimir Anferov from the Kalingrad State University in Russia, describe in the journal how they have devised a