05 January 2005 - New Scientist Discarded plastic has become a potentially dangerous staple in the diet of seabirds.
The stomachs of 95 per cent of all fulmars that researchers found washed up dead around the North Sea contained fragments of plastic. One dead bird from Denmark had 20.6 grams of plastic in its belly, equivalent to about 2 kilograms in a human-sized stomach.
25 August 2004 - New Scientist THE world's first plastic magnet to work at room temperature has passed the elementary test of magnetism. Its creators at the University of Durham in the UK have used it to pick up iron filings from a laboratory bench. In 2001, chemists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln claimed to have created the world's first plastic magnet, but it only worked below 10 kelvin. Other researchers have made plastic magnets, but typically they only function at extremely low temperatures, or their magnetism at room temperature is too feeble to be of commercial use. So the Durham team can claim to have made the first plastic magnet that could be used in everyday products.
19 March 2003 - New Scientist WHAT do you get if you give a delicate thread of spider's silk a glassy coating- and then extract the silk by baking? Yushan Yan reckons you will solve a major problem in photonics: how to make ultra-thin, hollow optical fibres narrow enough to carry light beams around the fastest nanoscale optical circuits. Using this technique, Yan and a team of engineers from the University of California at Riverside say they soon expect to be able to make hollow fibres with cores just 2 nanometres wide- or 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.
