The Birmingham Brief archive Contensis: http://www.contentmanagement.co.uk http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/index.aspx?SyndicationType=2 2013-05-25T05:10:15Z Thomas Straw

Many years ago a British politician, on learning that he was about to be appointed Minister for Transport, exclaimed: 'Some enemy hath done this!' It is not hard to see why he might have said this. The transport portfolio is often brimming over with some extremely difficult issues; and the HS2 (High Speed Rail 2) proposal is certainly no exception.

2013-01-31T09:52:00Z 2013-01-31T10:05:00Z http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/hs2-proposal.aspx Catherine Byerley

The recently reported Coalition cabinet dialogues on future energy policy, ahead of the long awaited Energy bill due to be published in November, have highlighted the many choices that need to be made if the UK is to enjoy affordable and resilient energy systems.

2012-10-24T11:24:00Z 2012-11-01T15:08:00Z http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/energy-storage.aspx Ben Hill

The tragic events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant constitute the worst nuclear disaster in more than two decades. Whilst the human cost is of paramount importance and rightly dominates the headlines there will also be significant implications for the future of the world wide nuclear industry, which suffered a 20 year decline after the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island and the disaster at Chernobyl. Both events reinforced the negative public perception toward nuclear power that had emerged over the course of the 1970s.

2011-03-18T00:00:00Z 2011-06-30T16:24:00Z http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/18mar-nuclear-industry.aspx Claire Hawkins

The recent terror plot to transport printers containing the explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, from Yemen to Chicago synagogues has once again focused attention on the need to detect explosives reliably and in real-time. PETN is the same explosive that the so-called 'shoe-bomber' tried to set off on an American Airlines jet to Miami in 2001.

2010-11-11T16:45:00Z 2010-11-11T16:38:00Z http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/sorrel-detectingexplosives.aspx Claire Hawkins

Few can have been unaffected by the disturbing scenes following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January. More than one million displaced survivors are now housed in camps around the capital, Port-au-Prince, with squalid sanitation facilities and little access to clean drinking water. Poor sanitation is known to give rise to disease and so it is unsurprising that, at the time of writing, there are more than 2,600 known cases of cholera in Haiti, with more than 250 people having lost their lives.

2010-10-28T00:00:00Z 2010-11-02T14:26:00Z http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/Cholera.aspx Claire Hawkins

This was the question at a debate at the University of Birmingham last week held as part of the British Science Festival. Around one-fifth of the power stations in Great Britain will close within five years as air pollution rules get tougher, and most of our nuclear stations will reach the end of their expected lifetimes soon after 2020.

2010-09-23T00:00:00Z 2010-10-14T14:40:00Z http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/energyconsumption.aspx