Warnings issued to protect belongings and property from flood

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The Environment Agency has tonight issued 13 flood warnings and 28 alerts telling residents along the Norfolk and Sussex coast to take immediate action.

Locals are being warned to move their possessions to safety as storm waters surge towards the north Norfolk coast, before moving along the Suffolk shoreline.

The Anglian region has been hit with nine warnings for the Norfolk coast at Salthouse and Wells Quay, as well as Blythburgh in Suffolk and Lowestoft seafront and docks.

Flood warnings have also been issued for the Norfolk Coast from Old Hunstanton to Great Yarmouth and down the Suffolk coast towards Southwold.

The North East has also been warned to take immediate action with flooding expected around Whitby, Bridlington and Easington.

A flood alert, which warns flooding is possible, has also been issued along the River Thames from the coast to London’s riverside, including the stretch from Putney Bridge to Teddington Weir.

According to the UK National Oceanography Centre, the high tide at Lowestoft is expected to reach its peak at 10.43pm on Sunday evening – at around the same time the storm surge is forecast to reach the same point of coastline after sweeping down the North Sea.

A statement issued by the Environment Agency tonight said: “A large surge is expected to affect the east coast of England. This coincides with a period of spring tides, so already high water levels will be increased, with some flooding possible at coastal locations.

“Elsewhere the flood risk remains very low for the next 3 days, despite the risk of some heavy rain affecting western parts of England and Wales during Tuesday.”

And the Met Office has tonight issued a series of severe weather warnings for areas of Scotland for Tuesday.

The advisory, which extends across the Highlands, Strathclyde, Central areas, Tayside Fife, South West Scotland and Lothian Borders, between 3pm and 6pm on Tuesday, warns: “Rain will become heavy for a time on Tuesday, and this will fall on already saturated ground, leading to the risk of localised flooding and some travel disruption.

“The rain will clear from the west later in the afternoon.”

In the event of a flood, the Environment Agency urges households to take items upstairs or to a high point in the property, including moving important documents such as insurance papers, items of personal value such as photos, family videos or treasured mementos.

It also suggests moving lightweight household belongings that can be picked up easily and quickly, moving or raising items of furniture that are expensive or harder to repair before cheaper ones.

If the flood water hasn’t reached you, the Environment Agency advice is to move your car to higher ground and move outdoor pets to safety.

It also suggests taking action to stop water entering your home such as covering air bricks and cat flaps and sealing doors, put plugs in sinks and baths and weigh them down with a sandbag, a pillowcase or plastic bag filled with garden soil, or a heavy object. This will stop water/sewerage backing up through blocked or overloaded systems into your sinks and toilets.

For properties that do not have non-return valves fitted, the Environment Agency advises occupants to plug water inlet pipes with towels or cloths, disconnect any equipment that uses water, such as washing machines and dishwashers and turn off the water, gas and electricity supply at the mains.

The full list of areas affected by Flood Warnings, issued by the Environment Agency at 10.30pm on Sunday evening, was:

* Isolated riverside properties on the Deben Estuary

* Felixstowe Ferry Bawdsey Quay

* Tidal River Waveney from, and including Ellingham to Breydon Water

* Snape, Iken and surrounding marshland

* Tidal Yare from Thorpe St Andrew to Breydon Water

* Lowestoft Seafront and Docks

* Southwold and surrounding marshes

* Blythburgh and marshes upstream of A12

* The North Norfolk Coast at Salthouse

* The North Norfolk Coast at Wells Quay

* Whitby Harbourside

* Bridlington

* Easington and Kilnsea

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by Himanshu Singh on Nov 28, 2011 at 04:55

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Michael Theodoulou

(Foreign Correspondent)

An Iranian MP chants anti-Britain slogans yesterday. The parliament approved a draft bill to slash diplomatic and economic relations with the UK after it increased sanctions on Tehran.

Raheb Homavandi / Reuters

Amid chants of “death to England”, Iran’s parliament voted by a large majority yesterday to expel the British ambassador just weeks after Dominick Chilcott took up his post.

A stage-managed protest against “evil” London’s sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme is due today outside Britain’s fortresslike embassy in central Tehran, the scene of sometimes violent anti-western demonstrations.

One parliamentarian warned that Iranians could storm the compound as they did the US embassy in 1979.

London infuriated Iranian politicians this month by sanctioning Iran’s central bank, which Britain accused of helping to fund Iran’s nuclear programme.

Tehran warned that other countries “behaving in a similar manner” would also be punished.

“This is only the beginning,” Ali Larijani, the powerful parliamentary speaker, vowed.

The EU will consider this week a French call to go for Iran’s economic jugular by banning Iranian oil exports. Britain called the move to expel Mr Chilcott “regrettable” and “unwarranted”.

It would do “nothing to help the regime address their growing isolation or international concerns about their nuclear programme and human rights record,” said a spokesman for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

“If the Iranian government acts on this we will respond robustly in consultation with our international partners,” he added

The bill, which gives Mr Chilcott two weeks to pack his bags, must be approved by Iran’s hardline Guardians Council.

This is likely to be a formality, according to analysts.

Tehran intends to scale down economic relations with Britain, which are already in decline, to a “minimum”.

The bill was approved by 171 of the 196 parliamentarians present.

London and Tehran will still maintain diplomatic relations, although at the reduced level of charge d’affaires.

Several MPs wanted ties severed completely.

“We must place a lock on the British embassy and ignore them until they come begging like the Americans,” said Mahmoud Ahmadi Bighash, an MP.

The US severed ties with Iran in 1980 after its embassy was seized by militant students who held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days.

“The British government should know that if they insist on their evil stances, the Iranian people will punch them in the mouth, exactly as happened against America’s den of spies,” Mehdi Kuchakzadeh, an MP, said.

The effect of Mr Chilcott’s expulsion will be mainly symbolic.

Until his arrival last month, Britain was represented at charge d’affaires level for several months by Jane Marriott, who is regarded as highly competent.

She will once more head the diplomatic mission if Mr Chilcott is forced to leave. Britain may find it hard to retaliate in kind against Iran, which has long chosen to be represented only at charge d’affaires level in London and so has no ambassador to expel.

Britain sanctioned Iran’s central bank after a report by the UN’s nuclear watchdog earlier this month strongly suggested that the Islamic republic had conducted research into nuclear weapons.

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is designed solely to generate electricity.

The US, which has spearheaded the drive for punitive measures against Iran, stopped short of sanctioning the country’s central bank over fears about the potential effects on the oil market and the global economy.

mtheodoulou@thenational.ae

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By
Michael Purcell

Last updated at 1:12 AM on 28th November 2011

Packing his bags: Dominick Chilcott has been given two weeks to leave Iran after a vote in the nation’s parliament

Amid chants of ‘Death to England’, Iran’s parliament voted overwhelmingly yesterday to expel the British Ambassador.

Dominick Chilcott, who took up the post only recently, was given two weeks to pack his bags.

A stage-managed protest against London’s latest sanctions against Iran is due today outside Britain’s fortress-like embassy in central Tehran, the scene of violent anti-Western demonstrations in recent years.

There were fears that angry Iranians could storm the compound as they did the U.S. embassy in 1979.

London infuriated Iranian politicians this month by taking out sanctions against Iran’s central bank, which Britain accused of helping to fund the country’s nuclear weapons programme. Tehran warned that other countries ‘behaving  in a similar manner’ would also  be punished.

The EU will this week consider a French call to go for Iran’s economic jugular by banning its oil exports.

Britain described the move to expel  Mr Chilcott as ‘regrettable’ and ‘unwarranted’.

Motion: The Iranian parliament approved by 171 votes to four to expel Mr Chilcott from the country

It would do ‘nothing to help the regime
address their growing isolation or international concerns about their
nuclear programme and human rights record’, said a spokesman for the
Foreign Office.

Chants: An Iranian MP shakes his first and shouts ‘Death to England’ during the parliamentary session which saw a vote to cue back ties with Britain

‘If the Iranian government acts on this we will respond robustly in consultation with our international partners.’

The motion to expel Mr Chilcott was approved by 171 votes to four. London and Tehran will still maintain diplomatic relations, although at the reduced level of chargé d’affaires. Several MPs wanted ties severed completely.

Britain imposed sanctions on Iran’s central bank after a report by the  United Nations nuclear watchdog strongly suggested that the Islamic republic had conducted research into  nuclear weapons.

Foreign Secretary William Hague also refused to rule out military action against Iran in the long term if there is no progress in Tehran’s co-operation with the International Atomic  Energy Agency.

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is designed solely to generate electricity.

The U.S. severed ties with Iran in 1980 after its embassy was seized by militant students who held 52 diplomats  hostage for 444 days.

The building now houses a detachment of Revolutionary Guards.

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27 November 2011
Last updated at 19:01 ET

By James Gallagher
Health reporter, BBC News

Electrodes are placed directly onto the brain

Scientists in Canada have raised a tantalising prospect – reversing Alzheimer’s disease.

Brain shrinkage, declining function and memory loss had been thought to be irreversible.

They used a technique known as deep brain stimulation – applying electricity directly to regions of the brain. In two patients, the brain’s memory hub reversed its expected decline and actually grew.

Deep brain stimulation has been used in tens of thousands of patients with Parkinson’s as well as having an emerging role in Tourette’s Syndrome and depression.

Yet precisely how it works is still unknown.

The procedure is all done under a local anaesthetic. An MRI scan identifies the target within the brain. The head is held in a fixed position, a small region of the brain is exposed and thin electrodes are positioned next to the region of the brain to be stimulated.

The electrodes are hooked up to a battery which is implanted under the skin next to the collar bone.

Prof John Stein, from the University of Oxford, said: “Most people would say we do not know why this works.”

His theory is that in Parkinson’s, brain cells become trapped in a pattern of electrical bursts, followed by silences, then bursts and silences and so on. Continuous high frequency stimulation then disrupts the rhythm. However, he accepts that “not everyone will accept this account”.

Mystery

How deep brain stimulation could have a role in Alzheimer’s is even more of an unknown.

A patient with Parkinson’s having surgery to implant electrodes

In Alzheimer’s, the hippocampus is one of the first regions to shrink. It is the memory hub converting short-term memory to long-term memory. Damage leads to some of the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s – memory loss and disorientation.

By late stage Alzheimer’s brain cells are dead or dying across the whole of the brain.

The study at the University of Toronto took six patients with the condition. Deep brain stimulation was applied to the fornix – a part of the brain which passes messages onto the hippocampus.

Lead researcher Prof Andres Lozano said you would expect the hippocampus to shrink by five per cent on average in a year in patients with Alzheimer’s.

After 12 months of stimulation, he said one patient had a five per cent increase and another had an eight per cent increase.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

His Alzheimer’s has reversed”

End Quote
Andres Lozano
University of Toronto

“How big a deal is 8%? It is huge. We’ve never seen the hippocampus grow in Alzheimer’s under any circumstance. It was an amazing finding for us,” he told the BBC.

“This is the first time that brain stimulation in a human being has been shown to grow an area of your brain.

When it came to the symptoms he said: “In one of the patients, he is better after a year’s stimulation than when he started, so his Alzheimer’s has reversed if you like.”

Early days

The findings were presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in November but they have yet to be published in an academic journal.

Prof Lozano said experiments in animals showed that this kind of stimulation could create new nerve cells.

Prof Stein said he was “very encouraged” by the early findings, but the key would be showing “whether their memory improved”.

“It is not unexpected that there might be some saviour of the brain which is dying if you can keep it going,” he added.

Thousands of patients with Parkinson’s have had deep brain stimulation.

Dr Marie Janson, from Alzheimer’s Research UK, said “it would be very significant” if you could reverse brain shrinkage and that “if you could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s for five years you would halve the number of people affected.”

To test whether this is really working, rather than being a fluke result, the researchers are going to perform a larger trial.

Prof Lozano says that for now: “a word of caution is appropriate, these are very early days and a very small number of patients are involved.”

Starting in April they are aiming to enrol around 50 patients with mild Alzheimer’s. All will be implanted with electrodes, but they will be turned on in only half of them. The researchers will then see if there is any difference in the hippocampus between the two groups.

They are specifically looking at patients with mild Alzheimer’s because of the six patients with the condition, it was only the two with the mildest symptoms that improved.

One theory they are considering is that after a certain level of damage patients reach a point of no return.

By
Gareth Finighan

Last updated at 11:17 PM on 27th November 2011

A crematorium has come up with a novel way to cut down on its fuel bill – by hooking up its furnaces to the National Grid.

Durham Crematorium has submitted plans to install turbines in its three burners which can convert the huge amounts of heat generated during the cremation process into electricity.

The first turbine will provide around £2,500 of heating for the facility’s chapel and offices each month through a ‘heat recovery’ system.

Feeling the heat: Durham Crematorium could be the first to divert energy created by its burners onto the National Grid

But crematorium bosses believe surplus energy from the other two turbines – enough to power around 1,500 television sets – could be fed into the National Grid.

The turbines will be powered by steam released by cooling hot gases used in the cremation process, rather than bodies.

Crematorium superintendent Alan José told the Telegraph: ‘We calculate that we will have far more electricity than we can possibly need so we would be feeding a reasonable amount into the grid.

‘If there is genuine spare capacity to generate electricity then we are certainly interested in investigating that. And if it was thought to be acceptable in the eyes of the public we would almost certainly pursue that.

‘Apart from it being common sense for us to try to conserve energy, it also enables us to keep the fees down.

‘We don’t want to become known as a power station rather than a crematorium because we try to provide a reverend and decent place for people to have a cremation service.’

The scheme is part of a £2.3million upgrade of the facility.

And it could be adopted by other crematoria across the country forced to revamp their systems in order to meet Government targets on harmful mercury emissions.

Almost one fifth of mercury pollution in the UK comes from crematoria emissions through dental fillings. Crematoria have been ordered to eliminate such emissions by 2020. 

 

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The company which distributes electricity to 2.4m properties in the north west has secured funding from Ofgem for a £10.7m trial which could double the capacity of power networks without the need for new cables or overhead lines.

Electricity North West, based in Warrington, said it plans to open up the half of the regional network currently reserved as a back-up and use it to distribute power to homes and businesses to meet increased demand.

If it proves successful, the project could reduce the need for costly new infrastructure and will provide additional capacity to developments more quickly.

Ofgem is providing £9.2m for the trial through its Low Carbon Networks Fund. ENW and other partners will invest £1.5m. Steve Johnson, chief executive of ENW, said: “This project aims to get more out of what’s already built by bringing together new technology and partners to transform the way companies like Electricity North West operate networks.

“Half of the electricity in the region isn’t used and is on stand-by to kick in when there’s an emergency. This isn’t the most productive use of assets that cost billions to build. Our new project will release this latent capacity.

“This could have a profound effect on the way distribution is managed.”

ENW owns and manages 13,000km of overhead lines, 43,000km of underground cables and 38,000 transformers and serves 5m people across the region.

The trial will run for three years from January and, if successful, could be implemented across the UK by other network operators. Firms including Parsons Brinckerhoff, GE Energy, npower and National Grid as well as Manchester University will work with ENW on the project.

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Mazda is going to roll out its latest innovation in braking across its model range as of next year. The new i-ELOOP system, a regenerative braking system that aims to improve fuel economy by up to 10%, and the first model in the UK to benefit from the technology will be the next Mazda CX-5 compact SUV. This is expected to launch next spring and Mazda is promising that the new model will have better fuel economy and lower CO2 emissions than ever before.

So how does this newfangled technology work? The i-ELOOP converts the car’s kinetic energy into electricity as the car decelerates and then this newly generated electricity is used to power functions such as the climate control, audio system and other electrical components. The system can also store generated electricity and, unlike batteries, it can be charged and discharged rapidly and is less likely to deteriorate through excessive use.

It works in conjunction with the car’s stop-start function, extending the period of time that the engine can be shut off. The i-ELOOP will be unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in the TAKERI concept car, a mid-sized saloon.

www.mazda.co.uk

By Georgia Lewis 

Follow us @totallymotor

 

Hundreds of scientific experiments are being dropped by British universities because there is too little money to run one of the country’s major research facilities.

Work on high priority fields from green energy and drug design to biotechnology and microchips has been disrupted, threatening the UK’s research base and the country’s standing internationally, scientists said.

The government spent £400m on building the Isis neutron source, a world-class laboratory in Oxfordshire, but the machine goes unused much of the time for the lack of £3m a year to pay electricity and other running costs. The lab has been forced into part-time dormancy since the government cut the science budget and research funders allocated too little money to pay the full operating costs of the facility.

The Isis facility uses intense beams of neutrons to show where atoms are in materials and how they move. The machine can reveal structural details and microscopic processes impossible to see with other techniques but which are crucial to understanding how complex materials behave.

Concerns over the Isis lab come weeks after David Cameron gave a speech at the Science Museum in London in which he emphasised the need to “rebalance the economy” through more high-value manufacturing and engineering.

Scientists will only have use of the Isis facility for 120 days this year instead of an anticipated 180. The machine could run for more than 220 days a year, researchers at the site told the Guardian. Isis receives twice as many applications than it can accommodate, and many scientists have given up applying.

“The damage to the research base in UK universities across a number of disciplines is out of all proportion to the cost saving,” said Prof Jon Goff, a University of London physicist. “The saving comes mainly from electricity costs, and it equates in financial value to a single research grant to one group in a university,” he said.

“For this we lose a third of the science. Hundreds of experiments are lost, affecting research groups in many universities … This substantially affects the international competitiveness of UK research. Very often these experiments are crucial elements of a PhD student’s thesis.”

Another senior scientist who asked not to be named said that Britain’s reputation was being harmed by the situation. “No one outside the UK can understand the decision to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a facility and not use it properly. A lot of excellent science is not going to get done,” he said.

The Isis neutron source is home to a community of 2,000 researchers at the Harwell science and innovation campus near Didcot. Despite its global reputation, Isis became a soft target for financial cuts because it has a lower profile than the nearby Diamond light source facility, which is part-owned by the Wellcome Trust. There were fears that Isis may have to be mothballed altogether.

The researchers who use Isis come from a broad range of disciplines and the diversity has meant they are not well organised to lobby for the facility.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Campaign for Science and Engineering (Case) confirmed that Isis is running at only two-thirds capacity and that to operate for an extra 60 days a year would cost only £3.4m.

“It’s like Manchester United having a £400m stadium which they can’t play in a third of the time because they can’t afford to turn the lights on,” said Case’s director, Imran Khan.

“It is staggeringly inefficient. We’ve got a unique resource here, which could be delivering advances in everything from new drugs to clean energy storage, but it’s sitting dormant for much of the year because scientists don’t have the funds to keep the doors open. As a nation, we need to invest in discovery and innovation if we’re to have sustainable economic growth. It’s really sad to see us not making the most of our potential,” he said.

In September, a report from Case showed that British researchers faced a £1.5bn funding cut over the next four years despite government claims of “freezing” spending on science.

Prof Paolo Radaelli at Oxford University said research councils could make more effort to attract international teams – and their funds – to the Isis facility. “Isis is at the very top of the game, but not all my colleagues in continental Europe know that. This is a lost opportunity,” he said.

“The Diamond synchrotron runs for around 250 days a year and this is what Isis should be doing. There is no question that the demand is there to use it.”

A spokeswoman for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which manages Isis, said British research councils were developing a new funding model for domestic facilities that aimed to provide “greater clarity and certainty for future years”.