With growing pollution and staggering waste levels, the world's largest continent is fast emerging as the most lucrative hunting ground for firms hawking clean up technologies

A Japanese company, Hitachi, has developed the technology for making pocket-sized camcorders -- video cameras which are becoming essential family items (New Scientist, Vol 143, No 1945). The

Clean-air campaigners can't always pin down the source of a pollutant, by no means an easy task at best. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a way to solve the

In arguments concerning weight, the final arbiter is a cylindrical piece of a platinum-iridium alloy kept in an airtight chamber in Sevres, France, which is deemed to weigh exactly I kg. But a

Zooms may soon be out of the picture. At least 5 Japanese companies are close to developing a filrsmart enough to do a zoom's job (New SciennVol 143, No 1941). The Dew film, detaile cc which

A tip from nature brings better insulation for industries

Scientists at the US's Argonne National Laboratory have found a cheap and quick method to produce diamond films by using soccer ball-shaped carbon molecules called fullerenes (Science, Vol 265, No

Remote sensing devices for measuring vehicular emissions have come of age

Opening the refrigerator door can sometimes be a smelly jolt and conventional deodorants are not much help. But now a Japanese firm, Arromic Co Ltd, has come up with a ceramic-based deodorant that

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Testing in Maryland, USA, have developed an instrument that can detect gases present in infinitesimal amounts (Environmental Science &