- Email: [email protected]
Mobile phones a pollution risk
PAUL SOUNDERS/CORBIS
Technology PROVING FOOD’S ETHICAL ORIGIN You know the price of a jar of fair-trade coffee before you reach the checkout, but how can you be sure of its ethical cost? Now techniques are being developed to tag goods with information about their entire production history, to reassure consumers that what they are buying has genuinely been ethically made. The Fair Tracing project was established by a UK team including Ann Light at Sheffield Hallam University. ”When consumers buy something they want to know: is this really part of a fair process? Is it really organic, as it claims?” says Light. The researchers are exploring techniques to store information in barcodes, to be read by consumers using hand-held readers such as camera phones. Products would be tagged
when they are made and further information added at each point in the production process, for example, how much the item cost the trader and how much it was sold on for. “You could work out whether the traders along the chain have been paying their workers a decent wage by looking at the profits they are reporting,” says Light. “It’s an attempt to use technology to give a voice to people who are being exploited and otherwise wouldn’t be heard.” Light and her colleagues have already begun working with coffee growers in southern India and vineyards in Santiago, Chile, with positive responses. “We’ve been explaining the benefits to ethical traders of giving out this information,” says Light. “They can get credit from consumers for their good practices.”
–Life history included–
200 clips were removed from YouTube after a prank by a 15-year-old claiming to represent the “Australian Broddcasting Corperation”
SOURCE: SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
YOUR mobile phone may be an environmental hazard. In 2006 the European Union and Japan banned phones containing several pollutants, including lead and chromium, to prevent them leaching out of landfills and into the water supply. Now a study says such measures don’t go far enough. Oladele Ogunseitan’s team at the University of California, Irvine, tested 34 phones and showed that they could leak enough unregulated pollutants, such as zinc, copper, nickel and antimony, into water supplies to pose a health risk (Environmental Science & Technology, vol 41, p 2572). Recycling programmes do not help much either, as loopholes in international law allow phones to be shipped overseas, where they can be dumped. Phones should be redesigned, Ogunseitan says.
Poachers to blame for patent delays
The US Environmental Protection Agency wants road vehicles to make more use of biofuels Bush’s pledge for 2017 (litres/year)
A fetal heart monitor small enough to be worn by pregnant women while they sleep could help prevent stillbirths by detecting abnormalities and raising the alarm. The cellphone-sized device uses four electrodes on a woman’s abdomen to pick up the nanovolt-strength electrical signals of a fetal heartbeat. The device has been developed by Monica Healthcare, a spin-off from the University of Nottingham in the UK, and is due for launch in October after clinical trials in the Netherlands.
132bn
EPA targets for alternative fuel use in US (litres/year)
17.8bn 2007
28.3bn 2012
NANOTECHNOLOGY companies have only themselves to blame for the sluggish rate at which their US patents are being awarded. That was the message at a recent Department of Commerce meeting in Portland, Oregon, when undersecretary for technology Robert Crescanti heard start-ups complaining that delayed patent decisions are
losing them the chance to raise crucial venture capital. Crescanti countered that the delays are the result of firms poaching nanotech-trained examiners en masse from the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington DC to draft their own patents. San Francisco-based patent expert Greg Aharonian says the problem goes beyond nanotech: “Delays in some areas of software and business methods are just as long for the same reason – the good examiners are gone.”
GIZMO
KICKING THE PETROLEUM HABIT
SOURCE: EPA
Mobile phones a pollution risk
Retinal implants could get smart thanks to software that can be trained to send signals which give the user’s brain the clearest possible picture. Sighted users using head-mounted cameras are training the software, developed at the University of Bonn in Germany, on simple geometric shapes.
“It is David versus Goliath, and Google Earth just gave David a stone” John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group on an initiative launched last week by Google Earth and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC that allows users to zoom in to watch videos, view photographs and read witness accounts of attacks in Darfur, Sudan (The Washington Post, 14 April).
www.newscientist.com
070421_N_Tech Up_p23.indd 23
21 April 2007 | NewScientist | 23
16/4/07 5:28:24 pm
Technology PROVING FOOD’S ETHICAL ORIGIN You know the price of a jar of fair-trade coffee before you reach the checkout, but how can you be sure of its ethical cost? Now techniques are being developed to tag goods with information about their entire production history, to reassure consumers that what they are buying has genuinely been ethically made. The Fair Tracing project was established by a UK team including Ann Light at Sheffield Hallam University. ”When consumers buy something they want to know: is this really part of a fair process? Is it really organic, as it claims?” says Light. The researchers are exploring techniques to store information in barcodes, to be read by consumers using hand-held readers such as camera phones. Products would be tagged
when they are made and further information added at each point in the production process, for example, how much the item cost the trader and how much it was sold on for. “You could work out whether the traders along the chain have been paying their workers a decent wage by looking at the profits they are reporting,” says Light. “It’s an attempt to use technology to give a voice to people who are being exploited and otherwise wouldn’t be heard.” Light and her colleagues have already begun working with coffee growers in southern India and vineyards in Santiago, Chile, with positive responses. “We’ve been explaining the benefits to ethical traders of giving out this information,” says Light. “They can get credit from consumers for their good practices.”
–Life history included–
200 clips were removed from YouTube after a prank by a 15-year-old claiming to represent the “Australian Broddcasting Corperation”
SOURCE: SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
YOUR mobile phone may be an environmental hazard. In 2006 the European Union and Japan banned phones containing several pollutants, including lead and chromium, to prevent them leaching out of landfills and into the water supply. Now a study says such measures don’t go far enough. Oladele Ogunseitan’s team at the University of California, Irvine, tested 34 phones and showed that they could leak enough unregulated pollutants, such as zinc, copper, nickel and antimony, into water supplies to pose a health risk (Environmental Science & Technology, vol 41, p 2572). Recycling programmes do not help much either, as loopholes in international law allow phones to be shipped overseas, where they can be dumped. Phones should be redesigned, Ogunseitan says.
Poachers to blame for patent delays
The US Environmental Protection Agency wants road vehicles to make more use of biofuels Bush’s pledge for 2017 (litres/year)
A fetal heart monitor small enough to be worn by pregnant women while they sleep could help prevent stillbirths by detecting abnormalities and raising the alarm. The cellphone-sized device uses four electrodes on a woman’s abdomen to pick up the nanovolt-strength electrical signals of a fetal heartbeat. The device has been developed by Monica Healthcare, a spin-off from the University of Nottingham in the UK, and is due for launch in October after clinical trials in the Netherlands.
132bn
EPA targets for alternative fuel use in US (litres/year)
17.8bn 2007
28.3bn 2012
NANOTECHNOLOGY companies have only themselves to blame for the sluggish rate at which their US patents are being awarded. That was the message at a recent Department of Commerce meeting in Portland, Oregon, when undersecretary for technology Robert Crescanti heard start-ups complaining that delayed patent decisions are
losing them the chance to raise crucial venture capital. Crescanti countered that the delays are the result of firms poaching nanotech-trained examiners en masse from the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington DC to draft their own patents. San Francisco-based patent expert Greg Aharonian says the problem goes beyond nanotech: “Delays in some areas of software and business methods are just as long for the same reason – the good examiners are gone.”
GIZMO
KICKING THE PETROLEUM HABIT
SOURCE: EPA
Mobile phones a pollution risk
Retinal implants could get smart thanks to software that can be trained to send signals which give the user’s brain the clearest possible picture. Sighted users using head-mounted cameras are training the software, developed at the University of Bonn in Germany, on simple geometric shapes.
“It is David versus Goliath, and Google Earth just gave David a stone” John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group on an initiative launched last week by Google Earth and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC that allows users to zoom in to watch videos, view photographs and read witness accounts of attacks in Darfur, Sudan (The Washington Post, 14 April).
www.newscientist.com
070421_N_Tech Up_p23.indd 23
21 April 2007 | NewScientist | 23
16/4/07 5:28:24 pm