Although the commercial fallout from any decision to pull
the drug from the market in Europe would be limited, it would be
a blow to Merck’s reputation.

Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson estimates Tredaptive sales in
Europe and other non-U.S. markets are running at only around $50
million a year, compared with Merck’s overall revenue of $47
billion.

The drug is designed to raise “good” HDL cholesterol but the
25,000 patient U.S. study found it didn’t do better at
preventing heart attacks, deaths or strokes than traditional
statin drugs that lower “bad” LDL cholesterol.

The large-scale trial also found that patients taking the
drug suffered more non-fatal but serious side effects than those
only taking statins.

The medicine was approved for use in Europe in 2008, but
U.S. regulators were unwilling to approve it until Merck
conducted the costly long-term study to better assess its safety
and effectiveness.

Launching the review, the European Medicines Agency on
Friday defended its decision to approve the drug, saying it was
based on a full assessment of the evidence available at the
time, including results from trials involving several thousand
patients, which showed the benefits outweighed the risks.

“A risk management programme was established at the time to
follow up on various issues concerning the use of the product,”
the agency told Reuters. “This included a requirement for the
company to submit the results of a large, long-term study, the
HPS2-THRIVE Study, which are now being made available.”

Merck said on Thursday it no longer planned to seek
regulatory approval for the drug in the United States and
recommended doctors did not start new patients on Tredaptive in
countries where it is already available.

The regulator backed that advice on Friday, but added
patients currently using the drug should speak to a doctor at
their next appointment and not stop their treatment.

Tredaptive is sold under the brand name Pelzont in Italy and
Trevaclyn in both Italy and Portugal. A decision on the future
of the drug in Europe is expected in January.

Jan Scheuermann, 53, from Pittsburgh, was diagnosed with a
degenerative brain disorder 13 years ago and is paralysed from
the neck down.

“It’s so cool,” said Scheuermann during a news conference.
“I’m moving things. I have not moved things for about 10 years
… It’s not a matter of thinking which direction anymore it’s
just a matter of thinking ‘I want to do that’.”

She was shown feeding herself string cheese and chocolate
unaided as well as moving a series of objects in tests designed
for recovering stroke victims, and she was able to do it with
speeds comparable to the able bodied.

Experts are calling it a remarkable step forward for
prosthetics controlled directly by the brain. Other systems have
already allowed paralysed patients to type or write in freehand
simply by thinking about the letters they want.

In the past month, researchers in Switzerland also used
electrodes implanted directly on the retina to enable a blind
patient to read.

The development of brain-machine interfaces is moving
quickly and scientists predict the technology could eventually
be used to bypass nerve damage and re-awaken a person’s own
paralysed muscles.

In the meantime, they say, systems like the one developed by
the U.S. researchers could be paired with robotic “exoskeletons”
that allow paraplegics and quadriplegics to walk.

For Scheuermann, the experience has already been
transforming.

“It’s given her a renewed purpose,” Michael Boninger, who
worked on the study published in The Lancet, told Reuters. “On
the first day that we had her move the arm, there was this
amazing smile of joy. She could think about moving her wrist and
something happened.”

COMPLEX ALGORITHM

The research team from the University of Pittsburgh Medical
Center implanted two microelectrode devices into the woman’s
left motor cortex, the part of the brain that initiates
movement.

The medics used a real-time brain scanning technique called
functional magnetic resonance imaging to find the exact part of
the brain that lit up after the patient was asked to think about
moving her now unresponsive arms.

The electrodes were connected to the robotic hand via a
computer running a complex algorithm to translate the signals
that mimics the way an unimpaired brain controls healthy limbs.

“These electrodes are remarkable devices in that they are
very small,” Boninger said. “You can’t buy them in Radio Shack.”

But Boninger said the way the algorithm operates is the main
advance. Accurately translating brain signals has been one of
the biggest challenges in mind-controlled prosthetics.

“There is no limit now to decoding human motion,” he said.
“It gets more complex when you work on parts like the hand, but
I think that, once you can tap into desired motion in the brain,
then how that motion is effected has a wide range of
possibilities.”

It took weeks of training for Scheuermann to master control
of the hand, but she was able to move it after just two days,
and over time she completed tasks – such as picking up objects,
orientating them, and moving them to a target position – with a
91.6 percent success rate. Her speed increased with practice.

The researchers plan to incorporate wireless technology to
remove the need for a wired connection between the patient’s
head and the prosthesis.

They also believe a sensory loop could be added that gives
feedback to the brain, allowing the user to tell the difference
between hot and cold, or smooth and rough surfaces.

Grégoire Courtine, at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Lausanne, hailed the project. “This bioinspired
brain-machine interface is a remarkable technological and
biomedical achievement.”

“Though plenty of challenges lie ahead, these sorts of
systems are rapidly approaching the point of clinical fruition,”
Courtine, who was not involved in the study, said in a comment
piece in the Lancet linked to the study.

ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Although using technology to restore movement, sight or
hearing in the disabled would for many seem uncontroversial,
some disability rights groups and ethicists are wary.

They argue that restoring hearing, for instance, could fuel
a prejudice that a deaf life is less rich, or less well lived.

Andy Miah, a professor at the University of the West of
Scotland who has written extensively about human enhancement in
the context of the Paralympics, says it is far from
straightforward.

“For instance, a few years ago, there was a case of a deaf
lesbian couple who sought to use in vitro fertilisation to
select for deafness,” he said.

“They argued that absence of hearing is precisely not an
impairment, but allows access to a rich community.”

The ethics become more complex with the prospect of using
these technologies to enhance the able-bodied.

“It’s quite likely that therapy is the back door to
enhancement in these kinds of technological interventions,” says
Miah. “People will question whether this is desirable, but we
already live in a society that tolerates such modifications.

“Laser eye surgery interventions have grown astronomically
over the last decade and nobody complains that it is making
people superhuman.”

(Editing by Alison Williams)

Jan Scheuermann, a 52 year-old woman who was diagnosed with
a degenerative brain disorder 13 years ago and is paralysed from
the neck down, was able operate the robotic arm with a level of
control and fluidity not seen before in this type of advanced
prosthesis.

Experts are calling it a remarkable step forward for
prosthetics controlled directly by the brain. Other systems have
already allowed paralysed patients to type or write in freehand
simply by thinking about the letters they want.

And in the last month, researchers in Switzerland used
electrodes implanted directly on the retina to enable a blind
patient to read.

The development of brain-machine interfaces is moving
quickly and scientists predict the technology could eventually
be used to bypass nerve damage and re-awaken a person’s own
paralysed muscles.

In the meantime, they say, systems like this could be paired
with robotic ‘exoskeletons’ that allow paraplegics and
quadraplegics to walk.

COMPLEX ALGORITHM

In the latest study, published in the Lancet, a research
team from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center implanted
two microelectrode devices into the woman’s left motor cortex,
the part of the brain that initiates movement.

The medics used a real-time brain scanning technique called
functional magnetic resonance imaging to find the exact part of
the brain that lit up after the patient was asked to think about
moving her now unresponsive arms.

The electrodes were connected to the robotic hand via a
computer running a complex algorithm to translate the signals
that mimics the way an unimpaired brain controls healthy limbs.

“These electrodes are remarkable devices in that they are
very small,” Michael Boninger, who worked on the study, told
Reuters. “You can’t buy them in Radio Shack.”

But Boninger said the way the algorithm operates is the main
advance. Accurately translating brain signals has been one of
the biggest challenges in mind-controlled prosthetics.

“There is no limit now to decoding human motion,” he said.
“It gets more complex when you work on parts like the hand, but
I think that, once you can tap into desired motion in the brain,
then how that motion is effected has a wide range of
possibilities.”

It took weeks of training for Scheuermann to master control
of the hand, but she was able to move it after two days, and
over time she completed tasks – such as picking up objects,
orientating them, and moving them to a target position – with a
91.6 percent success rate. Her speed increased with practice.

The researchers plan to incorporate wireless technology to
remove the need for a wired connection between the patient’s
head and the prosthesis.

They also believe a sensory loop could be added that gives
feedback to the brain, allowing the user to tell the difference
between hot and cold, or smooth and rough surfaces.

“This bioinspired brain-machine interface is a remarkable
technological and biomedical achievement,” said Grégoire
Courtine at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne, who was not involved in the study.

“Though plenty of challenges lie ahead, these sorts of
systems are rapidly approaching the point of clinical fruition,”
Courtine said in a comment piece in the Lancet linked to the
study.

ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Although using technology to restore movement, sight or
hearing in the disabled would for many seem uncontroversial,
some disability rights groups and ethicists are wary.

They argue that restoring hearing, for instance, could fuel
a prejudice that a deaf life is less rich, or less well lived.

Andy Miah, a professor at the University of the West of
Scotland who has written extensively about human enhancement in
the context of the Paralympics, says it is far from
straightforward.

“For instance, a few years ago, there was a case of a deaf
lesbian couple who sought to use in vitro fertilisation to
select for deafness.

“They argued that absence of hearing is precisely not an
impairment, but allows access to a rich community.”

The ethics become more complex with the prospect of using
these technologies to enhance the able-bodied.

“It’s quite likely that therapy is the back door to
enhancement in these kinds of technological interventions,” says
Miah. “People will question whether this is desirable, but we
already live in a society that tolerates such modifications.

“Laser eye surgery interventions have grown astronomically
over the last decade and nobody complains that it is making
people superhuman.”

For Jan Scheuermann, the experience has been transforming.

“It’s given her a renewed purpose,” said Boninger. “On the
first day that we had her move the arm, there was this amazing
smile of joy. She could think about moving her wrist and
something happened.”

(Editing by Rosalind Russell)

The stretchable electronics industry is in its infancy but
devices that are able to flex without breaking could
revolutionise devices from smartphones and solar cells to
medical implants.

Futurists have long predicted clothes with sensors that
monitor the vital signs of the wearer, or smartphones and
screens woven into the fabric of shirts or jackets.

But while circuits and wiring are quite happy on rigid
surfaces like those in a tablet computer, they break easily when
combined with materials that stretch.

“You have two materials with very different mechanical
properties,” Andre Studart, a researcher at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich, told Reuters. “The challenge
is to bridge these different properties.”

Studart and his team have overcome the problem with a
stretchy material made from polyurethane that contains “islands”
stiff enough to house and protect delicate circuits.

While the soft part can stretch by 350 percent, the stiff
regions created by impregnating the material with tiny platelets
of aluminium oxide and a synthetic clay called laponite, hardly
deform and can protect the electronics.

The material, presented in research published in the journal
Nature Communications, is made from bonded layers and because
the concentration of the platelets is gradually increased, the
junction between the stretchy and stiff parts is also durable.

“There are many biological materials that have these
properties as well, like the way tendons link muscle to bone,”
said Studart. “But there are not so many examples in synthetic
materials.”

MARKET POTENTIAL

One of the companies trying to commercialise stretchable
electronics is MC10 Inc, a Massachusetts-based start-up born out
of research by John Rogers and his team at the University of
Illinois.

The firm recently announced plans to start selling a
sensor-laden, flexible skullcap that monitors impacts to the
head during sports. It was developed with Reebok and
goes on sale next year.

Amar Kendale, the company’s strategist, said the skullcap
gives a level of contact with the head that previous attempts to
put sensors in helmets or gum shields have not been able to
achieve.

MC10 is using a different approach from the Zurich team. The
company uses extremely thin silicon chips sandwiched in a
stretchable polymer and connected by tiny wires in a concertina
configuration that can stretch about 60 percent, about the same
as the body’s soft tissues.

MC10 has also developed a balloon catheter with built-in
electronic sensors for heart patients, which researchers plan to
start testing on people in the next year or so.

“Decorating the surface of the balloon with sensors or a
mechanism that delivers energy gives a good way of delivering
therapy to soft tissue, like the heart, to correct arrhythmia,”
Kendale said.

Market potential is difficult to estimate but Kendale said
the technology could be applied to the monitoring and management
of chronic diseases from diabetes to hypertension.

The Swiss researchers say their technique could also be used
to build synthetic cartilage or false teeth with better matches
to their natural counterparts.

Currently the ceramics used for dental fillings are so hard
they can damage natural teeth if a patient bites too hard. And
one treatment for women with crumbling vertebrae from
osteoporosis involves injecting a stiff polymer that over time
can damage the surrounding healthy vertebrae.

“The problem is that it is equally stiff everywhere,” said
Studart. “The vision is that you will be able to make materials
that are as heterogeneous as the biological ones.”

Wheelchair-bound Hawking won $3 million from Russian Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner, who set up his prize this year to address what he regards as a lack of recognition in the modern world for leading scientists.

Alongside Hawking, a second $3 million award has gone to the scientists behind the discovery this year of a new subatomic particle that behaves like the theoretical Higgs boson, imagined almost half a century ago and responsible for bestowing mass on other fundamental particles.

Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and told in 1963 he had two years to live, Hawking, now 70, has become one of the world’s most recognizable scientists after guest appearances on The Simpsons and on Star Trek.

At the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in London in August, speaking through his computerized voice system, he said: “Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious.”

He was awarded the Special Fundamental Physics prize for what the committee called his “deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe” as well has his discovery that black holes emit radiation.

“No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before,” Hawking said in comments emailed to Reuters.

“Nevertheless prizes like these prizes play an important role in giving public recognition for achievement in physics. They increase the stature of physics and interest in it.”

Hawking said he planned to use the money to help his daughter with her autistic son and may also buy a holiday home – “not that I take many holidays because I the enjoy my work in theoretical physics”.

HIGGS DISCOVERY

He shares the limelight with leaders of the project to build and run the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at the CERN research centre near Geneva, which led to the discovery of a new particle that is thought to be the boson imagined by theorist Peter Higgs in 1964.

In the Standard Model, which governs scientific understanding of the basic make-up of the universe, the Higgs boson gives mass to other fundamental particles.

But in the half century before scientists at CERN started smashing particles together in the LHC and study the results, it sat in the realm of theory.

Although the work of building the LHC and running experiments in the particle accelerator involved thousands of scientists and engineers, the prize has been awarded to past and present team leaders.

The winners include the head of the LHC Lyn Evans, and the two spokespeople, Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela, who presented the discovery to applause and cheers from the gathered physicists at CERN earlier this year.

Michel Della Negra, another prize-winner who for 15 years from 1990 led a team that built one of the two giant detectors used to find the Higgs at the LHC, told Reuters the award was a big surprise.

“For me it was totally unexpected,” he said. “I didn’t even know the prize existed.”

Della Negra receives $250,000 because the $3 million is being split three ways between Evans, and the two teams working on the Atlas and CMS detectors. Two leaders of the Atlas team will get $500,000 each while the four from CMS get $250,000 apiece.

Although some of the recipients have pledged to put the money into projects to support science, singling out so few individuals from such a large project is sure to raise some eyebrows at CERN.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

The new money follows a string of recent decisions to spend
more on science, including 50 million pounds for a graphene
research centre in Manchester and a 30 percent increase in
Britain’s contribution to the European Space Agency.

Osborne’s announcement in an Autumn budget update to
parliament on Wednesday goes some way to reversing previous cuts
and was welcomed by campaigners and leaders of British science.

“The announcement today of an additional 600 million pounds
of capital investment will hopefully help ensure that our world
leading scientists have world leading facilities with which to
work,” said Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society,
Britain’s national science academy.

Mark Walport, head of the Wellcome Trust medical research
charity, said Osborne was “right to recognise that investment in
world-class science and the world-class infrastructure it
requires must be integral to any strategy for driving growth,
even in times of austerity.”

The latest investment is in stark contrast to the cuts in
other areas of government spending aimed at paying down the
debts from the financial crisis.

The new funds will be used to back what the government sees
as areas of scientific research that offer the best economic
return.

Priority areas like advanced materials research, energy
efficient computing and energy storage were outlined by Osborne
in a speech at the Royal Society last month.

After that speech, Paul Nurse told Osborne: “Please remember
to put your money where your mouth is.”

Nurse welcomed Wednesday’s announcement, saying innovation
is key to economic growth and science is the raw material for
that innovation.

“The Chancellor clearly understands this and his ongoing
commitment to investing in science, despite the difficult
financial circumstances, is very welcome.”

In the wake of Osborne’s November speech some critics warned
of the danger of government trying to pick scientific “winners”
and argued that focusing on particular areas could backfire.

Nurse echoed those fears on Wednesday, warning: “We must
also make sure that we maintain capital and other support across
a broad range of science.”

Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and
Engineering and a strong critic of the government’s previous
cuts to the science capital budget, welcomed the new money and
told Reuters it means previous cuts have “mostly” been reversed.

“In the coming decades we won’t be able to compete
internationally on natural resources or cheap labour, so the
government’s plan to build British excellence in areas like
synthetic biology and energy-efficient computing instead is
absolutely critical,” said Khan.

A mysterious fossil specimen that has been in the museum’s collection for decades has now been identified as most likely coming from a dinosaur that lived about 245 million years ago – 10 to 15 million years earlier than any previously discovered examples.

The creature was about the size of a Labrador dog and has been named Nyasasaurus parringtoni after southern Africa’s Lake Nyasa, today called Lake Malawi, and Cambridge University’s Rex Parrington, who collected the specimen at a site near the lake in the 1930s.

“It was a case of looking at the material with a fresh pair of eyes,” Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum, who worked on the study, told Reuters. “This closes a gap in the fossil record and pushes back the existence of dinosaurs.”

The London fossil was studied by researchers in the 1950s but no conclusion was reached and nothing was published, said Barrett. “It was a mystery what it was … It just became this mythical animal.”

Two features of the London fossil, together with a similar sample subsequently spotted at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, are strong evidence that the animal belongs with the dinosaurs, the researchers said.

The bone tissues in the upper arm show marks of rapid growth, common in dinosaurs, and they also have a feature known as an elongated deltopectoral crest that anchored the upper arm muscles, a feature unique to dinosaurs.

“Although we only know Nyasasaurus from fossil fragments, the anatomy of its upper arm bone and hips have features that are unique to dinosaurs, making us confident that we’re dealing with an animal very close to dinosaur origin,” said Barrett.

The researchers believe Nyasasaurus probably stood upright, was a meter tall at the hip, 2-3 meters long from head to tail, and weighed 20-60 kg.

When it was alive, the world’s continents were joined in a vast landmass called Pangaea, and the area of Tanzania where the fossils were found would have been part of the southern Pangaea that included Africa, South America, Antarctica and Australia.

Theorists have long argued there should have been dinosaurs walking the Earth in the Middle Triassic period, which ended about 237 million years ago, but until now the evidence has been ambiguous, said Sterling Nesbitt at the University of Washington in Seattle who led the study, published in the journal Biology Letters.

“If the newly named Nyasasaurus parringtoni is not the earliest dinosaur, then it is the closest relative found so far,” said Nesbitt.

“What’s really neat about this specimen is that it has a lot of history. Found in the ’30s, first described in the 1950s … Now 80 years later, we’re putting it all together.”

The researchers plan further field work in Tanzania to find more fossils and build a better picture of the animal’s anatomy.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

Reaction Engines Ltd believes its Sabre engine, which would operate like a jet engine in the atmosphere and a rocket in space, could displace rockets for space access and transform air travel by bringing any destination on Earth to no more than four hours away.

That ambition was given a boost on Wednesday by ESA, which has acted as an independent auditor on the Sabre test program.

“ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the Sabre engine development,” the agency’s head of propulsion engineering Mark Ford told a news conference.

“One of the major obstacles to a re-usable vehicle has been removed,” he said. “The gateway is now open to move beyond the jet age.”

The space plane, dubbed Skylon, only exists on paper. What the company has right now is a remarkable heat exchanger that is able to cool air sucked into the engine at high speed from 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one hundredth of a second.

This core piece of technology solves one of the constraints that limit jet engines to a top speed of about 2.5 times the speed of sound, which Reaction Engines believes it could double.

SHROUDED IN SECRECY

With the Sabre engine in jet mode, the air has to be compressed before being injected into the engine’s combustion chambers. Without pre-cooling, the heat generated by compression would make the air hot enough to melt the engine.

The challenge for the engineers was to find a way to cool the air quickly without frost forming on the heat exchanger, which would clog it up and stop it working.

Using a nest of fine pipes that resemble a large wire coil, the engineers have managed to get round this fatal problem that would normally follow from such rapid cooling of the moisture in atmospheric air.

They are tight-lipped on exactly how they managed to do it.

“We are not going to tell you how this works,” said the company’s chief designer Richard Varvill, who started his career at the military engine division of Rolls-Royce. “It is our most closely guarded secret.”

The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works – particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost – becoming public.

The Sabre engine could take a plane to five times the speed of sound and an altitude of 25 km, about 20 percent of the speed and altitude needed to reach orbit. For space access, the engines would then switch to rocket mode to do the remaining 80 percent.

IT COULD EVEN MAKE THE TEA

Reaction Engines believes Sabre is the only engine of its kind in development and the company now needs to raise about 250 million pounds ($400 million) to fund the next three-year development phase in which it plans to build a small-scale version of the complete engine.

Chief executive Tim Hayter believes the company could have an operational engine ready for sale within 10 years if it can raise the development funding.

The company reckons the engine technology could win a healthy chunk of four key markets together worth $112 billion a year, including space access, hypersonic air travel, and modified jet engines that use the heat exchanger to save fuel.

The fourth market is unrelated to aerospace. Reaction Engines believes the technology could also be used to raise the efficiency of so-called multistage flash desalination plants by 15 percent. These plants, largely in the Middle East, use heat exchangers to distil water by flash heating sea water into steam in multiple stages.

The firm has so far received 90 percent of its funding from private sources, mainly rich individuals including chairman Nigel McNair Scott, the former mining industry executive who also chairs property developer Helical Bar.

Chief executive Tim Hayter told Reuters he would welcome government investment in the company, mainly because of the credibility that would add to the project.

But the focus will be on raising the majority of the 250 million pounds it needs now from a mix of institutional investors, high net worth individuals and possibly potential partners in the aerospace industry.

STANDING START

Sabre produces thrust by burning hydrogen and oxygen, but inside the atmosphere it would take that oxygen from the air, reducing the amount it would have to carry in fuel tanks for rocket mode, cutting weight and allowing Skylon to go into orbit in one stage.

Scramjets on test vehicles like the U.S. Air Force Waverider also use atmospheric air to create thrust but they have to be accelerated to their operating speed by normal jet engines or rockets before they kick in. The Sabre engine can operate from a standing start.

If the developers are successful, Sabre would be the first engine in history to send a vehicle into space without using disposable, multi-stage rockets.

Skylon is years away, but in the meantime the technology is attracting interest from the global aerospace industry and governments because it effectively doubles the technical limits of current jet engines and could cut the cost of space access.

The heat exchanger technology could also be incorporated into a new jet engine design that could cut 5 to 10 percent – or $10-20 billion – off airline fuel bills.

That would be significant in an industry where incremental efficiency gains of one percent or so, from improvements in wing design for instance, are big news.

Reaction Engines Ltd believes its novel Sabre engine, which
would operate like a jet engine in the atmosphere and a rocket
in space, could displace rockets for space access and transform
air travel by bringing any destination on earth to no more than
four hours away.

That ambition was given a boost on Wednesday by ESA, which
has acted as an independent auditor on the Sabre test programme.

“ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology
required for the Sabre engine development,” the agency’s head of
propulsion engineering Mark Ford told a news conference.

“One of the major obstacles to a re-usable vehicle has been
removed,” he said. “The gateway is now open to move beyond the
jet age.”

The space plane, dubbed Skylon, only exists on paper. What
the company has right now is a remarkable heat exchanger that is
able to cool air sucked into the engine at high speed from 1,000
degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one hundredth of a
second.

This core piece of technology solves one of the constraints
that limit jet engines to a top speed of about 2.5 times the
speed of sound, which Reaction Engines believes it could double.

SHROUDED IN SECRECY

With the Sabre engine in jet mode, the air has to be
compressed before being injected into the engine’s combustion
chambers. Without pre-cooling, the heat generated by compression
would make the air hot enough to melt the engine.

The challenge for the engineers was to find a way to cool
the air quickly without frost forming on the heat exchanger,
which would clog it up and stop it working.

Using a nest of fine pipes that resemble a large wire coil,
the engineers have managed to get round this fatal problem that
would normally follow from such rapid cooling of the moisture in
atmospheric air.

They are tight-lipped on exactly how they managed to do it.

“We are not going to tell you how this works,” said the
company’s chief designer Richard Varvill, who started his career
at the military engine division of Rolls-Royce. “It is
our most closely guarded secret.”

The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its
heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works -
particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost -
becoming public.

The Sabre engine could take a plane to five times the speed
of sound and an altitude of 25 km, about 20 percent of the speed
and altitude needed to reach orbit. For space access, the
engines would then switch to rocket mode to do the remaining 80
percent.

Reaction Engines believes Sabre is the only engine of its
kind in development and the company now needs to raise about 250
million pounds ($400 million) to fund the next three-year
development phase in which it plans to build a small-scale
version of the complete engine.

Scramjets on test vehicles like the U.S. Air Force
Waverider, also use atmospheric air to create thrust but they
have to be accelerated to their operating speed by normal jet
engines or rockets before they kick in. The Sabre engine can
operate from a standing start.

Sabre produces thrust by burning hyrdrogen and oxygen but
inside the atmosphere it would take that oxygen from the air,
reducing the amount it would have to carry in fuel tanks for
rocket mode, cutting weight and allowing Skylon to go into orbit
in one stage.

If the developers are successful, Sabre would be the first
engine in history to send a vehicle into space without using
disposable, multi-stage rockets.

Skylon is years away, but in the meantime the technology is
attracting interest from the global aerospace industry and
governments because it effectively doubles the technical limits
of current jet engines and could cut the cost of space access.

The heat exchanger technology could also be incorporated
into a new jet engine design that could cut 5 to 10 percent off
airline fuel bills.

That would be significant in an industry where incremental
efficiency gains of one percent or so, from improvements in wing
design for instance, are big news.

“We believe it would be deeply damaging to future economic growth if we were to cut funding now,” Andrew Harrison, director general of Grenoble-based neutron research centre the Institut Laue-Langevin, told Reuters.

EU leaders on Friday abandoned talks to find a deal on the bloc’s budget for 2014-2020 but European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, who chaired the summit, proposed cuts in a number of areas, including research and innovation, in an effort to reach a deal.

According to a document seen by Reuters, Van Rompuy’s proposal penciled in a 139.5 billion euro ($180.8 billion) budget under the competitiveness-for-growth heading, which includes the EU’s flagship Horizon 2020 research funding program.

This is a further cut from a Van Rompuy proposal earlier this week of 152 billion euros and down sharply from an original Commission proposal of 164 billion euros.

Although it is unclear if there would be any knock-on effect from the proposed cuts on Horizon 2020 when talks resume early next year, the original budget for the research program was 80 billion euros, roughly half the original pot.

European scientists, whose funding is already under pressure from the economic downturn, will be alarmed at the prospect of cuts to one of the biggest science budgets in the world.

Harrison, of the Grenoble-based research centre, joined in a lobbying effort with seven other world-leading research organisations calling on the Commission to defend science funding ahead of the budget summit.

In a letter to Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso that was also signed by Rolf Heuer, director general of the CERN research centre near Geneva, the organisations warned that science should be central to Europe’s long-term prosperity.

“At a time when a return to growth is the most pressing policy priority across Europe, it is absolutely vital that investment in our scientific resources (both human and technical) is sustained,” they said.

The signatories also included Iain Mattaj, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; Alvaro Gimenez Canete, director of science and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency and Tim de Zeeuw, head of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

“We are all world leading in our fields,” said Harrison. “We are cautioning very strongly against cuts now.”

LONG-TERM BENEFITS

Harrison said that although researchers needed to do a better job in demonstrating the economic value of research, there was no doubt about the long-term benefits of investment in science.

“Europe is not going to compete in the mass labour market or in natural resources, we are only going to compete because we are smarter,” he said. “Right now I’m not fantastically confident.”

Van Rompuy’s proposal earmarked nearly 13 billion euros for specific projects, including Galileo, the European replacement for the Global Positioning System satellite network, and the ITER nuclear fusion research project.

But Horizon 2020 will be the mainstay of EU research grants and the implications for the funding program remain unclear.

“Science isn’t going to die if they don’t implement Horizon 2020 fully,” said Bruno Leibundgut, director for science at ESO. “But these countries are going to suffer from this five or 10 years down the line.”

($1 = 0.7717 euros)

(Additional reporting by Paul Taylor and Charlie Dunmore in Brussels; Editing by Michael Roddy)