[en] The main reason for climate change is the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The main reasons for this increase are the burning of fossil fuels, certain farming practices and deforestation. The burning of fossil fuels is a major factor. The high carbon dioxide emissions per person of Australia and the USA are noted and some of the consequences of the increase in temperature are indicated. Graphs and maps highlight the world's disappearing forests, the ecological footprint of selected countries, the increase in carbon dioxide levels over the centuries, the way in which world temperatures are rising, the increase in the height of the oceans, lowest annual ozone levels and the worst countries in terms of carbon dioxide emissions

[en] This article traces the development of clockwork wind-up battery chargers that can be used to recharge mobile phones, laptop computers, torches or radio batteries from the pioneering research of the British inventor Trevor Baylis to the marketing of the wind-up gadgets by Freeplay Energy who turned the idea into a commercial product. The amount of cranking needed to power wind-up devices is discussed along with a hand-cranked charger for mobile phones, upgrading the phone charger's mechanism, and drawbacks of the charger. Details are given of another invention using a hand-cranked generator with a supercapacitor as a storage device which has a very much higher capacity for storing electrical charge

[en] Cleaning up the dump in Washington State, where waste from the Cold War necessitated plutonium industry was deposited will require robots as the hazards from radiation and chemical wastes are too great to allow human involvement. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation covers an area of 1456 square kilometres, and waste has been dumped indiscriminately throughout the site. The first task is to map the contents of the 177 underground tasks using wall crawler robots, which are preprogrammed for maximum efficiency. (UK)

[en] Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), although almost twenty years old, has yet to be satisfactorily proved and completed. Yet it continues to be a cornerstone of particle physics as the only serious contender to explain the strong nuclear force and is the basis against which particle collision experimental results are compared. The author seeks to assess QCD by comparing its predictions with results from new experiments, new accelerators and the latest supercomputers. Several key issues remain unresolved, confinement still needs to be proved (despite some encouraging work on lattice QCD research), the non-perturbative issue and the absence of a definitive experimental test for the theory. (UK)

[en] With changing political relations between the United States and the former Soviet Block, the urgency of stockpiling uranium for weapons production has eased. However warheads continue to be discarded and civilian reactors continue to generate plutonium. As little as 5kg of plutonium is needed to make a bomb. This article looks at the political and security implications of stockpiling this dangerous chemical. (UK)

[en] Despite a recent explosion at the Tomsk uranium reprocessing plant in Siberia, and the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, support for nuclear power is still firm in Russia. The Russian nuclear industry employs around two million people and their employment security is one of the chief factors in support of the nuclear power industry despite its safety record. The other major reason is energy shortages. Despite huge natural deposits of petroleum and gas, electric power shortages are widespread. Eighty per cent of Russia's electric power comes from oil-fired power stations, but oil supplies are unreliable. Production is dropping and, at the same time, an increasing proportion of the oil produced is exported to earn foreign currency. The concerns of environmental groups may have to be shelved, until Russia's infrastructure is efficient enough to maintain power supplies reliably. (UK)

[en] The proposal by the Dutch to extract natural gas from the 40 billion cubic metres beneath the Wadden Sea has been cited as a serious cause for concern by environmentalists. The new right wing government is less concerned than was the recently ousted left wing government and stands to gain directly through increased revenue. The Wadden Sea is a vast area of tidal channels, mudflats, shifting sandbanks, salt marshes, wet meadows and dunes, and provides a safe haven for numerous protected plants and animals. It is also a sanctuary for migrating birds and a feeding ground for herring, sole and plaice. Subsidence is cited by the environmentalists as a major potential problem and pollution is said to be always a risk

[en] A rush on microprocessors is good news for silicon chip makers, but it could spell disaster for the solar energy revolution. (author)

[en] The author describes how the idea of quarks as fundamental particles and constituents of protons and neutrons came to be established. One of the successes of the ideas behind the quark model has been the prediction and subsequent discovery of the omega minus particle. Observations on groups of hadrons led researchers to propose that quarks had fractional electric charges, 1/3 and 2/3 that of the electron in direct contravention of Faraday's experimental observations which had held sway for so long. Although controversial at first, these three fractionally charged quarks (known as up, down and strange) where shown to make up all the hadrons, or particles subject to the strong interaction when grouped together in threes. Pairs of quarks and antiquarks were shown to make up the meson family. Later studies revealed the existence of a fourth ''charm'' quark and a fifth ''bottom'' quark which added to understanding of high energy interactions. The search for the, as yet theoretical, sixth, or top quark continues. (UK)

[en] Scientists at the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) at CERN are now attempting to upgrade the machine built in the 1980s to study the W boson, and to search for the Higgs boson. This project, known as LEP2, is described in this article and aims to double LEP's energy at a cost of Pound 180 million. The many technical difficulties encountered are described, and the experimental aims and complexities of LEP2 are explained. (UK)