French Government Pushes Double Merger between Alstom and Siemens
The French government has pushed a “double merger” between the energy and transport business of Alstom and its European arch-rival, the German engineering company Siemens.
UK Economy Shows Growth for Fifth Straight Quarter
For the fifth time in a row, Britain’s economy has expanded, although growth rates were still slightly lower than expected.
Nokia Reveals New CEO and Q1 Profit Rise
Telecommunications firm Nokia has unveiled a new CEO and reported a net profit for its network equipment business, beating expectations.
CoralFISH : Conserving Biodiversity for the Future of the Planet
CoralFISH has uncovered information on how fish use their habitats in the deep sea, and as a result new tools and methodologies have been developed to address this lack of data.
OPTICHINA : International Horizons in Crop Breeding
OPTICHINA (Breeding to Optimise Chinese Agriculture) is a partnership between the European Union (EU) and China focused on crop breeding.
Engineering Possibilities versus Practical Implementation: Electric Vehicles
This is the second of five roundtable discussions that will be published each Friday on Europe Outlook in the lead up to POWER-GEN Europe. Next week, David, Simon, Jacob and Ulla discuss the pros and cons of nuclear energy.
EU Plans to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 40 per cent
The EU have ambitious plans to cut CO2 emissions by 40 per cent by 2030, however this is predicted to lead to a drop in the continent’s GDP by between 0.1 and 0.45 per cent based on current trends.
EU Serious about Decarbonising its Economy
This week, the European Commission and senior officials from Member States will sit down for the first time to discuss the Commission’s proposals for EU climate and energy governance reform.
New Stem Cell Based Treatment for Rheumatoid Arthritis
EU-funded researchers have developed a new potential treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, based on adult stem cells from body fat, or adipose tissue.
How Plants Evolved and What This Means For Our Food Supply
An EU-funded project investigating how oxygen in the air millions of years ago might have affected the evolution of plants is making important discoveries that could inform our approach to climate change, space exploration and ensuring future food supplies. Today, scientists in areas as varied as food security, climate change and space exploration need to know more about plants – how they live and grow and what effect environmental conditions can have on them. A key part of understanding plants is knowing how they evolved. The EU-funded OXYEVOL project is investigating how variations in atmospheric oxygen levels over millions of years might have affected the appearance of new plant species. “We are exploring the relationship between oxygen concentration and plant evolution,” says University College Dublin’s Prof. Jennifer McElwain, who received a European Research Council Starting Grant to undertake the project. OXYEVOL’s researchers are looking closely at the plant fossil record and comparing it to the known history of atmospheric oxygen content. Meanwhile, they are also undertaking a series of highly novel ‘mini-world’ experiments, in which living plant species with diverse evolutionary histories are being exposed to different atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations in a growth chamber. The most significant result so far is the observation that greater numbers of plant species seem to have originated when atmospheric oxygen concentrations were highest. We already know that the appearance of complex organisms over a billion years ago was linked to a rise in atmospheric oxygen levels. OXYEVOL’s results suggest that oxygen has also been an important evolutionary…
