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For the record
Paper chase simplified
To be wealthy, be wise and stay healthy
Money, not minerals affects tooth decay
BASF buys into new food inventor
Outlook sunny for personal weather forecasts
Hyper HEPA
For
the record
Unilever
chairman Niall Fitzgerald called on the British prime minister Tony Blair
to “trust his instincts” and to make Britain adopt the euro as its
currency. Fitzgerald promised Blair support from himself and other
(unnamed) big businesses.
Mellon Alternative Strategies, a
New York hedge fund that owns preferred shares in German hair care group Wella,
has filed a lawsuit in Germany against Procter & Gamble, which is
offered prefs holders 65 euros per share rather than 92.25 euros received
by holders of the ordinary shares. P&G already has agreement to
control 77.6% of Wella's voting shares.
Coca-Cola’s
foodservice division has renewed a six year preferred supplier agreement
with the 1,100 restaurant IHOP chain in the US and Canada.
Winsoms,
a Washington, US gourmet food retailer, is using Avure’s high pressure
processing technology to sterilise its new line of chopped onion products.
Winsoms’ producer Hairington, is using a 35-litre HPP system, but
expects to install a 215-litre system by the end of the year to cope with
demand.
Dutch retailer Ahold’s
woes deepened as it uncovered a further $29 million loss in pre-tax
earnings. It also asked its bankers to wait an extra two weeks before
seeing the results of its internal investigation into an accounting fraud
at US Foodservice, the US subsidiary at the heart of the scandal.
Chiquita Brands
completed the sale of its vegetable canning subsidiary to Seneca Foods for
$110 million in cash and 968,000 shares worth $16.65 per share.
US retailer 7-Eleven is
offering thirsty shoppers the chance to customise their soft drinks for
free by adding shots of cherry, vanilla or lemon flavouring to any size
fountain drink at selected stores.
Baltic Beverage Holdings
(BBH) has bought the new 60 million litre/y Kazakhstan brewery Ak-Nar for
about $30 million from the European Bank for Reconstruction and a private
investor. Last November BBH bought 76% of Irbis, another Almaty-based
brewery. It will merge Irbis with Ak-Nar, saving $53 million to build a
new brewery. BBH now owns four breweries in the Baltic countries, 10 in
Russia, two in Ukraine, and the two in Kazakhstan. BBH is owned 50/50 by
Carlsberg Breweries and Scottish & Newcastle.
Compliance
Paper chase simplified
US pharmaceutical company
Schering-Plough is to use Documentum’s GXPharma enterprise content
management system for managing compliance documentation for its
pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare products.
GXPharma was developed by
Documentum and IBM. It enables companies to manage content in compliance
with the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) regulatory requirements
for electronic records and signatures (21 CFR Part 11), requirements for
electronic submissions of New Drug Applications (NDAs) and record keeping
required for compliance with Good Clinical Practices and Good
Manufacturing Practices.
Other users include Acurian, Alcon,
Allergan, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pharmacia and Hoffman La Roche.
Health
To be
wealthy, be wise and stay healthy
A new study from Ohio State
University shows that healthy people are six to seven percent less likely
to lose most of their savings as they age.
Married folks can easily deplete
their savings by half while paying for the onset of new chronic
conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, stroke, or
arthritis. Most singles deplete their funds while paying for treatment of
pre-existing chronic conditions.
The study also showed that couples
with supplemental health insurance are 15% less likely to deplete more
than half their wealth.
Before couples enjoy the fruits of
their retirement, they should consider buying additional health insurance,
the study suggests.
“Single and widowed seniors
especially face a problem. Often a widowed spouse will have already
depleted much of the couple's accumulated wealth to save the dying spouse.
After that, many chronic conditions they suffer aren't covered by
insurance," say the researchers.
They are now doing a follow-up
study to gauge long-term effects of health care costs and see how
different diseases affect wealth.
Money,
not minerals affects tooth decay
Poverty may affect tooth decay more
than fluoridation, according to new study from the University of
California and reported in the Winter 2003 Journal of Public Health
Dentistry.
"It may ... be that
fluoridation of drinking water does not have a strong protective effect
against early childhood caries (ECC)," reports dentist Howard Pollick.
Pollick, a staunch fluoridation
advocate and co-chairman of the California Fluoridation Task Force, found
that poor children had the most cavities regardless of fluoridation
status.
Low-income children consume the
poorest diets, and are generally deficient in nutrients, such as
tooth-essential calcium, the study reports. Another study shows calcium,
not fluoride, supplements reduce cavities.
Investment
BASF buys
into new food inventor
German chemicals company BASF’s
venture capital off-shoot is part of a consortium investing $6 million in
Anawah Inc, an agricultural R&D company in Seattle, Washington, USA.
Anawah merges traditional breeding
methods with advanced understanding of molecular biology to improve whole
foods. It uses a proprietary screening process to discover plant
characteristics to deliver food that is better tasting and more wholesome
and nutritious.
BASF investment manager Dr Michael
Seufert said “Anawah’s innovative technology has the potential to
become a key basic technology in food and agriculture. It has proven to be
very time and cost efficient and is applicable to all plant crops.”
Forecasts
Outlook
sunny for personal weather forecasts
Improving the accuracy of local
weather forecasts could save farmers and other weather-dependent producers
billions, but until very recently the cost of the required computer power
made it impossible.
Now more and more companies are
offering almost custom weather forecasts that they can receive on
Web-enabled mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
The National Weather Service
predicts weather for a 12-kilometer by 12-kilometer area. But it can’t
say how it varies within that area. Minneapolis-based Digital Cyclone now
predicts weather events over a 6x6 km area and offers the information over
mobile phones. AccuWeather in State College, PA, generates one-kilometre-resolution
weather maps that are available on personal digital assistants and
Internet-enabled phones.
According to John Dutton of
Pennsylvania State University’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences,
over $3 trillion of the US economy is affected by weather. Farmers,
construction workers, snow removal crews, energy maintenance workers,
railroad dispatchers, and truck drivers depend on accurate and precise
forecasts to effectively manage their time and resources. An unexpected
cool air mass on a summer day could leave a power company with millions of
dollars of unused electricity. A change in wind speed could modify a
farmer’s choice to spray fertilisers, which can disperse and even ruin
neighbouring crops in winds above 11 km per hour. A minor temperature
difference can determine whether a snow removal crew will lay down sand or
salt. Salt is generally only effective above -7°C, and a wrong decision
can be ineffective at reducing ice but also waste thousands of
taxpayers’ dollars.
A few miles to either side of a
weather line can mean the difference between rain and six inches of snow.
Last winter, temperatures in the southern suburbs of Minneapolis hit the
low 20s Celsius while the northern suburbs remained around freezing.
Doubling the resolution of the
forecast cell should require eight times as much calculation. But there is
another way. In the 1990s, researchers at Pennsylvania State University
began incorporating the raw data from the National Weather Service into
their own PC-based models. These do fewer calculations for a smaller area
and so produce high-resolution, localised weather forecasts relatively
quickly.
Digital Cyclone customers can
access city-based information from a Web site complete with radar images
and projected storm tracks. But the real value is that people can get the
information on their Internet-enabled mobile phones. Later this year,
those same phones will carry audible alerts tailored to people’s needs.
As more and more mobile phones come with Global Positioning Satellite
(GPS) software and/or signal receivers that say where they are, Digital
Cyclone is developing ways to offer high-resolution weather maps
automatically cantered on the phone’s location.
Among businesses using weather
services are railways (to monitor wind conditions) and power generation
companies (to predict electricity demand).
Processing
Hyper HEPA
French researchers have designed an
improved particle filtration system that performs as well as the High
Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter, with less maintenance.
In the HEPA filter microscopic
particles in the airflow are attracted to electrically charged filter
materials. This removes biological allergens and contaminants, such as
viruses, bacteria and dust mites.
This French patented device allows
a wet electrostatic scrubber-like particle filtering. An
electro-hydrodynamic atomisation process sprays electrically charged
demineralised water droplets that work as collectors. All airborne
microscopic particles, both neutral and electrically charged, pass through
the sprays and are removed by the collectors.
The system removes pollutant
particles up to 0.1µm in size with an efficiency of at least 99% for
aerosol flow rates as high as 1m³/h, and a liquid flow rate of
approximately 0.0001m³/h.
The new air filtration system might
also improve under specific requirements. Most importantly, it offers more
time between maintenance events. Details from Roche Dale, FIST SA T
+33-1-40510090 E frinnov@fist.fr. |
