New nuclear unit at Rolls-Royce

Rolls-Royce estimates worldwide civil nuclear power market could be worth £50 billion a year in fifteen years time; company wants a piece of the action

Stanley closes Oberon acquisition

Purchase puts integrator on the biometrics fast track, enabling it to compete with some of the largest systems integrators in the government market for opportunities with the Defense Department

Blackstone, Windland in North Sea wind farm project

U.S. investment group and German energy company forms partnership to construct one of the North Sea's largest wind farms

Important deals in the chemical sector

Ashland acquires Hercules, and Dow announces its plans to acquire Rohm and Haas; Ashland values Hercules at $3.3 billion; Dow is willing to pay $18.8 billion for Rohm and Haas

U.K. nursery chain install biometric access control

Fourteen Busy Bees children's nurseries install biometric access control from UK Biometric; access control will allow entry only to parents and care-givers

Bank customers can designate one finger as "panic finger"

Can biometrics make banking more secure? Perhaps this will: New system allows customers to designate one finger as 'panic finger": swipe the said digit across the scanner and the transaction will appear to go through as normal even as the bank is alerted that something fishy is going on

Voice biometrics solves PINs-related security problems

Survey shows that bank customers are worried that PINs, passwords, and security questions may not be the most viable ways of identifying individuals when it comes to accessing their details; researchers say voice biometrics is the solution

Sagem Morpho shows TWIC-compliant biometric reader

Card is designed to read encrypted biometric data, such as a digital fingerprint, perform the match to the card holder, and perform an active card authentication across a contactless interface

Biodefense and food supply safety

Avalanche of drugs, scarcely any oversight, II

Yesterday we wrote about the growing discrepancy -- a yawning gap --between the sheer amount of drug and food imported into the United States, and the resources available to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to inspect these imports and the companies which manufacture them to make sure they meet U.S. safety and health standards. Instead, U.S. drug companies, battling mightily to protect public health and their corporate reputations -- and congressional pressures -- often step in where FDA inspections have not. The Chicago Tribune's David Greising and Bruce Japsen write that Baxter, for example, attempted to do so: In September 2007 a Baxter team visited the Chinese plant from which it was buying herapin. By that time, though, timelines produced by Baxter, the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show the suspect heparin already was making its way through the Baxter supply chain.