Nextreme, an NC startup

mPHASE

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.

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eu, cosmetic, animal testing

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.

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The United States, which is considered a pioneer in wind, added more generating capacity in 2006 than any year on record. With 11,575 megawatts, the United States is the world’s third largest wind country, after Germany and Spain, and it is adding more capacity than any other.

[...]

In Germany, where 20,000 wind turbines generate 5 percent of the electricity, advocates say wind will be critical to meeting the government’s goal of generating at least 20 percent of all power from renewable methods by 2020. But the industry’s growth is slowing for a variety of reasons.

Germany is running out of places to put the turbines because of restrictions on the location and height of the devices. And rising raw material prices are making wind farms more expensive to build.

“Under the current circumstances, Germany’s climate protection targets are not achievable,” said Hermann Albers, the president of the German Wind Energy Association.

Open land is not a problem in the United States, but wind parks have faced resistance, particularly in scenic locales near the shore. A private developer, Cape Wind, wants to erect 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound, off Cape Cod. It has drawn protests from some well-connected locals, including the Kennedy family.

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Sweden has historically invested little in wind projects because it has two reliable sources of energy, nuclear and hydro, which each supply roughly half its power. And because hydro is renewable, Sweden already does well on the environmental balance sheet.

But these energy sources have their vulnerabilities: hydro, to low water levels; nuclear, to technical breakdowns. The Swedish government has also pledged not to build any new nuclear power plants.

“One of the key energy priorities for Sweden is to establish a third leg of energy production,” said Anders Nyberg, political adviser in the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications.

Of course, Sweden does not need to build wind parks to get wind power. It could simply buy more surplus wind power from Denmark, which it uses, as does Norway, to pump underground water into elevated reservoirs…

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Malmo, sweden, wind, renewable, Norway, Kennedy, cape cod, ma, Denmark, germany, energy, nuclear

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