Novel system to monitor pedestrian crossings

September 30th, 2009 Bernanke asks Congress to empower regulatorsWASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says federal regulators should be responsible for ensuring that the financial institutions they oversee don't become so big and unwieldy that their failure could bring down the economy. In testimony prepared for a House hearing on Thursday, obtained in advance by The Associated Press, Bernanke said Congress should establish a council of regulators to monitor large, influential firms like insurance giant AIG.

September 29th, 2009 LONDON - Reports indicate that an early warning system is being installed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could prevent incidents of the kind which shut the machine last year. The vast physics lab is built inside a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

September 4th, 2009 BERLIN - In a new research work, a team of scientists has shown how optical atomic clocks in the future might become more compact and even portable, maybe even travel to space. The research was done by scientists from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, Germany.

September 2nd, 2009 Auditor: Mexican truck safety rules still unmetWASHINGTON — Some Mexican passenger buses are not being inspected when they enter the U.S. because they cross the border on evenings and weekends, there are no inspectors or the crossings lack safe places for inspections, according to a government audit made public Wednesday.

August 31st, 2009 LONDON - A five-strong group of scientists have developed a new technique that can monitor movements beneath the earth's surface to help understand how earthquakes behave. The scientists, led by Andrew Curtis, Professor of Mathematical Geoscience at Edinburgh University, used computers to simulate the motion of one earthquake at the location of another to discover more in-depth information about underground movements.

August 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists from Manoharbhai Patel Institute of Engineering and Technology, in Gondia, India have developed a novel fetal heart monitor that could save the lives of unborn infants in complicated pregnancies. Dr A.K. Mittra and colleagues have come up with a simple device that is based on a two-microphone system that can monitor fetal heart rate during the mother's rest times and sleep and send an alert to the woman and her physician.

August 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Engineers at UC (University of California) Irvine are planning to outfit the local water system with sensors that monitor pipes after earthquakes and other disasters. The sensors will alert officials when and where pipes crack or break, hastening repair, thanks to nearly 5.7 million dollars over three years from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and several local water groups.

August 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A survey is all set to examine the population of lionfish on the USS Monitor wreck to determine if this fierce predator is harming the site's natural ecosystem. The USS Monitor is located in 240 feet of water 16 miles south of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where the ship sank on a stormy New Year's Eve in 1862.

July 10th, 2009 Rep. Frank: Congress to clamp down on derivativesWASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee says that Congress will "substantially" increase the power of federal regulators to monitor derivatives, a type of financial instrument that contributed to the economic turmoil. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said at a hearing Friday that he cares less about which agency will be given the task than about making sure that it's done.

June 30th, 2009 LONDON - Pedestrians and cyclists in urban areas of the UK are being transformed into mobile pollution sensors, as part of a Government-backed scheme to monitor air quality. According to a report by Sky News, researchers, led by a team at Imperial College London, will trial three new types of sensors on people, vehicles and traffic islands to measure traffic emissions and noise pollution.

June 18th, 2009 Geithner defends plan to step up oversightWASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says it is clear that the government could have done more to prevent the economic downfall. In prepared testimony, Geithner says that gaps and weaknesses in the regulatory framework governing banks and other financial institutions "presented challenges" to the government's ability to monitor and address risky market bets.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Hazards of long-term computer use such as back pain, blurred vision and mouse-related injuries are well documented. But now, a new study has revealed that the number of acute injuries connected to computers is also the rise.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Computer-users need to be more careful -- the number of severe injuries associated with computers is on the rise, according to a recent study. Researchers have found a seven-fold increase in computer-related injuries.

June 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have developed a new non-invasive system to allow much earlier monitoring of the foetal heartbeat. While tiny fluctuations in a foetus' heartbeat can indicate distress, currently there is no way to detect such subtle variations except during labour, when it could be too late to prevent serious or even fatal complications.

May 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - German roboticists have made a mobile robot that rolls up to any humans nearby, and asks for directions to reach its destination. The breakthrough from the Technical University of Munich is the first time that such a robot has been designed that can be properly let loose in the real world, such as city roads.