NEW YORK -- A building inspector has been arrested after allegedly filing a false inspection of the crane that collapsed last week in Manhattan, city officials said Thursday.

....click the link to read more 

An investigation is underway to determine whether it was human or mechanical error that caused this accident - or, presumably, a more systematic pattern of negligence relating to the construction practices at the site, as has been suggested by a few residents

....click the link to read more 

A leading brain surgeon used a £30 DIY drill to carry out a successful operation on a fully conscious patient.
Henry Marsh used a Bosch PSR960 cordless drill because he did not have his normal equipment on him.

The engineers do-it-yourself 9.6 volt drill cost one thousand times less the price of his preferred tool - a £30,000 compressed air medical drill.

....click the link to read more 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) needs to be more aggressive about policing critical airline maintenance work performed by noncertified shops, a report by the Transportation Department's Inspector General concludes.

....click the link to read more 

Rising health care costs are one of the biggest challenges manufacturers and their employees face. According to a 2006 survey of small- and medium-sized manufacturers conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM, Washington, DC), 87 percent of respondents ranked escalating health care costs as their most pressing problem.

....click the link to read more 

In an open letter on January 17, some 100 Uzbek dissidents and activists abroad and 40 in the country say the forced use of child labor in the Uzbek cotton industry has become a "deliberate state policy" aimed at "acquiring extra profits."

....click the link to read more 

The island of Olkiluoto , off Finland's west coast, seems like the perfect picture of Nordic serenity. Surrounded by the still, idyllic waters of the Gulf of Bothnia, it looks like an ideal spot for a peaceful retreat away from it all. Anyone wanting to visit the island has to travel down a long, lonely road, hugged tightly on each side by a thick forest of spruce and birch, and avoid the many elk that roam freely.

However  the island is home to the problem-plagued construction of Olkiluoto 3, the first nuclear reactor built in Western Europe for more than a decade.

...click the link to read more 

Cars, trucks and airplanes are designed by very smart engineers. But, they wouldn’t be nearly as safe as they are today without help from a bunch of dummies. Crash test dummies , that is

....click the link to read more 

Can human beings work "unnatural" hours without suffering ill effects. 

Can the human body and brain adapt ?
As the pressure of modern life increase, so does the need for more people to be working 24 hours a day. What are the short and long term effects to individuals who change their sleep patterns.  Is the body a machine which can simply be re programed or re engineered with the right inputs ?
....click the links to read more

British Energy has halved the time required to complete some of its basic training and engineering programmes amid an acute shortage of experienced nuclear staff.

Documents show that some of the group’s programmes to train staff to “Suitably Qualified and Experienced Personnel” level (SQEP) – a benchmark industry training standard set by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate – have been trimmed from 18 to nine months.

There's been a lot of media focus lately on the advances that are being made in nanotech and how it's going to solve every problem we currently face.  Very little attention has been give however to the potential dangers of such technology.  The general public doesn't seem at all too worried about it's use,  scientists however are,  and would like a little more research done into the matter.

Extending human life expectancy is not a new story. When our genes evolved thousands of years ago, it was not in the interests of the species for people to live past child-rearing as resources such as food were in very short supply. So human life expectancy was in the 20s a thousand years ago. It was only 37 in 1800. It is now pushing 80, and we have been adding about three months each year for the past several decades.

....click the link to read more