Highway columns of glass or carbon fibre help structures meet and exceed building code requirements

Just how trustworthy are disintegrating columns that bulge and expose bent, rusting steel on elevated highways? “They are sitting ducks that, in an earthquake, could crumble,” says Professor Shamim Sheikh of U of T’s Department of Civil Engineering. His team has devised a strong, cost-effective method of structural reinforcement that is already proving its worth on highways and ot

That bar code on your cereal box holds information read by a laser scanner. It’s not much information, but it’s enough to let the supermarket take your money, keep track of inventory, follow trends in customer preference, and restock its shelves. Scanners and bar codes speed up checkout, but they’ve got a few limitations. The scanning laser needs a direct line of sight to the bar code, and the bar code itself needs to be reasonably clean and undamaged – one reason your cashier might ha

Your outlook on life not only may help you live longer, but it appears to have an impact on your quality of life. Mayo Clinic researchers say that optimists report a higher level of physical and mental functioning than their pessimist counterparts.

“The wellness of being is not just physical, but attitudinal,” said Toshihiko Maruta, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic Department of Psychiatry and Psychology in Rochester and the principal author of the study, which appears in the August issue of Mayo C

Commercial fishing practices can reduce genetic diversity in fish populations, possibly threatening their productivity and adaptability to environmental change, new research has found.

An Australian zoologist now at the University of Melbourne, along with colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand, was the first to record a decline in the genetic diversity of a commercially exploited marine species.

Their findings, published in the latest volume of the “Proceedings of the

Investment from the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund (WRTSF) – the venture capital fund owned by the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York (UK) – has funded the completion of a series of significant technical milestones in the development of a new family of `immunologically-rational` adjuvants for vaccines, which are materially very different from the existing adjuvants based on aluminium salts and bacterial cell wall components.

Sheffield-based life science company Adjuvantix Ltd is

On the eve of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, scientists at UCL have detected a flaw in the Kyoto protocol`s global plans to reduce the impact of global warming, all because of something as simple as atmospheric dust.

Dr Mark Maslin of UCL`s Environmental Change Research Centre explains: “Dust is vital to the health of the planet. This is not household dust, but tiny fragments of rock and soil, almost too small to see with the naked eye”.

Billions of tons of this dust are blown a