Designing the first fuel-cell manned intercity aircraft is the goal of a recently launched EU-funded project.

The Environmentally Friendly Inter City Aircraft powered by Fuel Cells (ENFICA-FC) project is receiving €2.9 million from the EU as part of the aeronautics and space priority of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).

Belgian mathematician hopes to use the science of chaos, the butterfly effect and strange attractors to help build a complete model of climate and resources that will lead to a new approach to sustainable development. Jacques Nihoul of the department of Model Environment at the University of Liège, in Belgium, writing in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Computing Science and Mathematics published by Inderscience, explains how a new approach to sustainable development and climate change could emerge from his research.

It was a grainy image of a baby—just 5 centimeters by 5 centimeters—but it turned out to be the well from which satellite imaging, CAT scans, bar codes on packaging, desktop publishing, digital photography and a host of other imaging technologies sprang.

Particles of light serving as “quantum keys”—the latest in encryption technology—have been sent over a record-setting 200-kilometer fiber-optic link by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NTT Corp. in Japan, and Stanford University.

The experiment, using mostly standard components and transmitting at telecommunications frequencies, offers an approach for making practical inter-city terrestrial quantum communications networks as well as long-range wireless systems using communication satellites.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that humans’ ability to walk upright developed from ancestors foraging for food in forest tree tops and not from walking on all fours on open land.

It was traditionally thought that humans became upright walkers in a slow process which had its origins in ‘knuckle-walking’ – movement on all fours – just as chimpanzees and gorillas walk today. It was believed that this developed once human ancestors moved out of the forests into the savannahs of East Africa.

A new test for diagnosing Tuberculosis offers a quick and simple alternative to existing three-day methods, according to research published today in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The study shows that the test, which involves taking three sputum samples from a patient over the course of one day, is just as effective as other more invasive and complicated testing methods, which take three days.