Peltier cooling

Nextreme, an NC startup

ew + battery

mPHASE

A New Science, at First Blush

Scientists here are working feverishly to develop new technologies to test cosmetics before a European Union ban on animal testing begins in March 2009.

These advanced materials — including reconstructed eye tissue and tiny circles of skin developed from donor cells harvested from cosmetic operations — are a vital part of the industry’s future as it faces rapidly tightening European regulations, rules that apply to any company wishing to sell in the 27-nation European Union.

The looming European ban is not only forcing multinational companies to adopt new practices. It is also bringing together regulators in Brussels with agencies from the world’s other large cosmetics markets — the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and the Ministry of Health in Japan — to harmonize regulation.

[...]

The stakes are high: Europe is the world’s leading cosmetics market, and it also exports more than $23.4 billion worth of cosmetics every year. Cosmetics exported from the United States to Europe amount to nearly $2 billion a year, about 7 percent of the European market. After the United States, Japan is the second leading provider of cosmetics to Europe.

[...]

The companies worry that costly new European testing regulations could spell the end of many essential oils used in perfumery because the substances are a blend rising out of a distillation process that could fail existing chemical tests for safety.

link

eu, cosmetic, animal testing

Sweden Turns to a Promising Power Source, With Flaws

In Denmark, which pioneered wind energy in Europe, construction of wind farms has stagnated in recent years. The Danes export much of their wind-generated electricity to Norway and Sweden because it comes in unpredictable surges that often outstrip demand.

In 2003, Ireland put a moratorium on connecting wind farms to its electricity grid because of the strains that power surges were putting on the network; it has since begun connecting them again.

In the United States, proposals to build large wind parks in the Atlantic off Long Island and off Cape Cod, Mass., have run into stiff opposition from local residents on aesthetic grounds.

Ant Power

Ants’ muscles are not unlike those of a mammal in many ways. They have muscle fibers of various kinds that contract and expand at varying speeds and strengths. The muscles are attached either directly to internal protrusions of its external skeleton, called apodemes, or indirectly, by filaments attached to the connection points.

Scientists often note that an ant’s strength to lift many times its weight actually depends on its small size, not on any special muscular equipment. With an exoskeleton, the smaller the insect is, the less burden it has in supporting its own tissue, and thus it can routinely lift proportionally larger burdens.

A 1999 paper by researchers in Würzburg, Germany, in The Journal of Experimental Biology, examined the large muscle that closes the mandible of a worker ant. It has two types of muscle fiber: some with long contractile units, called sarcomeres, and some with short sarcomeres. Depending on their shape and biochemistry, the fibers contract either slowly but powerfully or relatively rapidly but less forcefully.

The distribution of the fibers, the ratio of slow fibers to fast ones and their attachment and arrangement determine the speed and force with which each species can close its jaws.

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ant, exoskeleton, scaling, fiber, muscle