Issue 28
25 June - 22 July 1996
STAFF NEWSPAPER OF IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE
Media mentions
London moves underground
Dr Gabriel Khoury, Civil Engineering, was reported in the Daily Mail (7 June) and the Independent (8 June), as well as numerous radio interviews including London News Radio, for his plans aimed at alleviating the capital's traffic problem. Dr Khoury has just won government and industry backing to take his studies into building a series of underground tunnels further. Double-decker tunnels 40 to 50 metres below ground level would carry vehicles from the edge of London to massive underground car parks in the centre where lifts to the surface meet public transport facilities. The key benefit according to Dr Khoury would be to regenerate the inner city: "The idea is not to allow a lot of extra traffic into London, but to improve the environment which is increasingly important in determining where companies locate their offices".
It's the law... isn't it?
Professor Richard Macrory and Martin Hession of the Denton Hall Environmental Law group at ICCET, argued in The Guardian (11 June) that the law is about to move to centre stage in the EC's ban on British beef after 'political brinkmanship and consumer uncertainties previously obscured the underlying legal arguments'. They accept that it is over-optimistic to think that the legal process could make sense of the beef crisis where politics and science have to date failed to provide reassurance to the public. But fundamental questions of public health and environmental law have been raised, and need to be addressed. The article concludes: 'The BSE litigation provides an opportunity to revise the simplistic attitude traditionally taken by lawyers and politicians to issues of uncertainty. Without the input of a more transparent and legally structured approach to precaution, the current politicisation of science merely reinforces the ebbing of public trust in the authority of political institutions and in the scientific expertise upon which these institutions rely at national, European and international levels.'
Size is everything
Dimitri Vvedensky, professor of condensed matter theory, wrote in his Guardian Offline column (6 June) about the limits of what can be squeezed on to a silicon chip. Since the early 1970s the number of transistors on a chip has doubled every twelve to eighteen months, a process known as Moore's Law. Texas Instruments now claims to have put 125 million transistors onto one chip. Professor Vvedensky reflects that 'the physical principles underlying chip production suggest that there are obstacles to unabated technical progress looming on the horizon.' But he added that it would be a 'very foolhardy soothsayer who predicted when (and if) these limitations will bring the semiconductor industry to a screeching halt. The inventiveness of scientists and engineers have proved such predictions wrong too many times in the past.'
(c) Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, 1996
Last Revised: 21 June 1996