LONDON, Nov 21 (Reuters) – Autonomy, a British software
group at the heart of an accounting storm with owner
Hewlett-Packard, applies theory from the 18th century to
extract meaning and value from a modern world swamped with
unstructured information and data.

Its founder Michael Lynch, 47, and a former student of
mathematical computing at Cambridge University, developed a
system to impose order on information from the chaotic
avalanches of emails, audio, video and social media.

LONDON (Reuters) – British researchers have come up with a new body scanning device that gives accurate measurements and could boost online clothes shopping.

Shoppers are still nervous about ordering clothes online because they often do not fit and, some say, there will never be a substitute for trying something on – one reason why the boom in online retail has not had the same impact on clothing as on music, books and electronics retailing.

LONDON (Reuters) – Researchers have come up with a way of protecting telecoms networks using quantum cryptography without the need for expensive dedicated optical fiber links.

The technique, developed by Toshiba’s European research laboratory in Britain and Cambridge University engineers, is a step towards perfect security for everything from credit card transactions to private health records.

LONDON (Reuters) – More than half of Europeans are obese or overweight, adding significant pressure to healthcare costs at a time when spending is being cut by governments, the OECD and European Commission said on Friday.

On average across the European Union, health spending per capita rose by 4.6 percent a year in real terms between 2000 and 2009, but fell 0.6 percent in 2010.

LONDON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Military drone technology, which
has revolutionised warfare over the last decade, will be ready
for civilian use within four years and could create a market
worth more than $400 billion.

That’s the prediction from a UK research project backed by
the government and top aerospace companies hoping for a windfall
as many of the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs done by manned
aircraft are replaced by drones.

LONDON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Scientists have mapped the genome
of the domestic pig in a project that could enhance the animal’s
use for meat production and the testing of drugs for human
disease.

A study published in science journal Nature identified genes
that could be linked with illnesses suffered by farmed pigs,
providing a reference tool for selective breeding to increase
their resistance to disease.

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have mapped the genome of the domestic pig in a project that could enhance the animal’s use in the testing of drugs for human disease.

A study, published in science journal Nature, identified genes that could be linked with illnesses suffered by farmed pigs, providing a reference tool for selective breeding to increase their resistance to disease.

LONDON (Reuters) – An international team of astronomers has produced the first map of the universe as it was 11 billion years ago, filling a gap between the Big Bang and the rapid expansion that followed.

The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, shows the universe went through a phase roughly three billion years after the Big Bang when expansion actually started to slow, before the force of so-called ‘dark energy’ kicked in and sent galaxies accelerating away from each other.

LONDON, Nov 9 (Reuters) – Britain will pump an extra 300
million pounds into the European Space Agency (ESA) over the
next five years, it said on Friday, securing a bigger role in
ESA’s operations as Britain aims to triple the size of its space
industry.

As part of the funding deal, the Paris-based agency will
transfer its telecoms satellite headquarters to Harwell,
Oxfordshire, with the creation of around 100 jobs.

LONDON (Reuters) – An Anglo-German team of astronomers has discovered a new planet orbiting a nearby sun at just the right distance for an Earth-like climate that could support life.

The team actually found three new planets orbiting the star 44 light years away, but only one of them is in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, the band around a sun where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist.