New devices boost optical networks

Several technical requirements must be met until data from computers, TV stations or telephone network providers can be transported via fiber-optic cables to their destinations. Specialists from Infineon Technologies leverage their combined expertise to continuously improve the conditions for today’s and tomorrow’s fiber-optic applications with innovative chip designs. For example, the German technology foundry has developed a special device that ca

An inventive idea from Dr Chris Solomon of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) has beaten top International competition and won first prize in the prestigious European Digital Information Contents (DICON) competition.

Dr Solomon who has an active research programme in forensic imaging and a longstanding interest in the computational modelling, encoding and recognition of the human face said: `I was truly impressed by the quality of some of the prese

In the 1960s, scientists anticipated a `New Ice Age`. Later, they warned of humans triggering a ‘Nuclear Winter’. Now, it’s ‘Global Warming’. Why this change in emphasis? And why did it take 100 years for the theory behind ‘Global Warming’ to take hold?

New research by scientists from the University of Gloucestershire indicates that a remarkable combination of circumstances sparked widespread scientific interest in ‘Global Warming’ in the later decades of the 20th Century.

Prof.

Severe headaches are not a sign of high blood pressure, as is commonly thought, finds research in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. If anything, high blood pressure seems to reduce the risk of these headaches, the study shows.

The findings are based on the blood pressure readings of over 22,000 adults who responded to a survey 11 years later in 1995 to 1997 about headache frequency.

The questionnaire showed that 28 per cent of them suffered repeated headaches, of

Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are of zoonotic origin , and the closest simian relatives of HIV-1 and HIV-2 have been found in the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys) respectively. Given that humans come in frequent contact with primates in many parts of subsaharan Africa, particularly through hunting and handling primate bushmeat the possibility of additional zoonotic transfers of primate lentiviruses from species other than chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys has to be co

Every kilogram of predator needs a fixed amount of prey.

Every kilogram of meat-eating mammal needs 111 kilograms of prey to sustain it, say two ecologists. The rule holds from weasels to bears.

With many species of carnivore endangered, the discovery could help conservationists work out how to maintain a species’ resource base.

Chris Carbone, of the Institute of Zoology, London, and John Gittleman, of the University of Virginia, found the rule when they compare