The use of mobile phones on planes is currently prohibited because these gadgets cause interference with on-board communication and navigation systems. Interestingly, we found out today that members of the European Union are devising a technology that would permit passengers to make calls 3,000 meters above Earth.

The said technology uses an on-board base station called pico cell that will communicate with the headsets of the passengers. Aside from having low power consumption, this pico cell is able to create a network area that will re-route the phone calls to a satellite.

The satellite, then, will be the one responsible for connecting the phone calls to mobile networks on the ground. Because of these processes, making calls from a plane will cost significantly higher than normal mobile phone calls. Regulators around Europe are saying, however, that they will monitor the rates charged by networks to avoid abuse.

One spokesperson from carrier Virgin Atlantic said, "We are monitoring customer demand and will act if they say they want to use their mobile phones. If we were to introduce this service in the future we want to ensure we do it in a socially acceptable way." EU regulators added that the technology could be available next year.

Ar first, this will only be implemented with 2G phones. But if consumers respond favorably to the service, the same will also be offered to 3G phones and other standards.

61-year-old Israeli pediatrician Igal Kushnir and his company Deep Breeze has developed a new technology called Vibration Response Imaging (VRI). What it does is measure energy generated in the lungs, analyze it, and then display an image of the person's lungs in one go.

This new technology has been found to accurately diagnose lung conditions such as asthma, pneumonia, and lung tumors.
 
What makes this method so amazing is the fact that it uses no radiation. It works by analyzing acoustic vibrations resonating or sounds from a person's lungs, much like a stethoscope. The lung vibrations are then fed to a computer, where it's displayed as images.

Deep Breeze was given approval by the US Food and Drug Administration last July 23 to begin marketing a VRI device in the U.S. Other countries such as Israel, the European Union, and South Korea have also cleared the product for distribution.

While the technology is still expensive at an average price of US$ 40,000 to US$ 50,000 per unit. Deep Breeze is working to create cheaper versions of it which will go for as low as US$ 10,000 per machine. This is big news in the medical community as this device will undoubtedly save a lot of lives by removing a lot of the guesswork usually experienced in using the common stethoscope.

The European Union has once again shown its commitment to fight global warming by taking the initiative to replace most of its current lighting systems with energy-saving light bulbs.

By the end of the decade, the 27 member states of the European Union hopes that all of the lighting systems from homes to offices and even street light will be energy efficient. "We're not saying people should throw out all the bulbs in their house today but people should start looking at what's in the shops" says German Chancellor Angela Markel.

Multinational light bulb makers like Philips may get their shot at contributing to the action by developing means to improve the current lighting technology. The average European is willing to use energy savers, they say, but energy-efficient lights aren't quite as bright as the conventional ones.

Energy-efficient lights help slow down global warming because they consume less power. When less power is consumed, there is less need to burn fossil fuels, thus less smoke is emitted by generators, thereby preserving the integrity of the ozone layer and lessening chlorofluorocarbons which trap the heat in our planet.

Cow and chicken dung has long been used as fertilizer - but human sewage?!?

With an exploding population, it may be an idea whose time has come - and British scientist Michael Rogers and his colleagues at London's Imperial College are saying it may not be as harmful as it seems.

The main concern has been a strain of bacteria known as E. Coli, recently implicated in a spate of food-borne illnesses in the U.S. earlier this week. The scientists are now saying that the bacteria may actually die off relatively quickly when sewage sludge is applied to crop fields.

Until 1998, the U.K. dumped 25% of its sewage sludge into the North Sea. 50% was spread on farmland, and only 10% was incinerated or put into landfills. That increased to 20% when the EU banned the dumping of sludge into oceans.  Rogers has discovered that the levels of E.Coli drop significantly when the sludge is spread onto fields. At the annual meeting of the UK Society for General Microbiology, Rogers reported that "Within 70 days, they went down to as little as 10 bacteria per gram, from 100,000 per gram initially."

Farmers in Great Britain can feel better about using sewage sludge to improve soil quality. It's being experimented with in the US as well, specifically in Iowa. Considering what comes out of Congress every year, there should be no shortage of material to work with...