Packaging on YouTube

packagingnews.co.uk: "Michaela Watson of Charapak responded to our call to let us know your favourite packaging videos from YouTube. Here is her choice, a video featuring one of her company's shelf-ready packaging products."

Can triniobium tin shrink accelerators?

Nature News: "The superconducting cavities that drive most of the world's particle accelerators are running out of room for improvement. But new theoretical work suggests that overlooked superconducting ma terials could be used to make cavities that accelerate particles to higher energies over shorter distances ? thereby doing the job more cheaply.

Still, it would take years to develop and test new accelerator components made of materials such as triniobium tin"

"The excuse has been, 'We've worked so hard on niobium, why try these other materials?'" says Sethna. "All of a sudden, we're telling them, 'you've been listening to the wrong theorists'."

Hasan Padamsee, a superconductivity expert at Cornell University, is excited by Sethna's work. In the late 1990s he made a test cavity out of triniobium tin, and it performed less well than niobium alone. But the new work gives Padamsee confidence that the result was due to a problem with the particular sample rather than a fundamental quality of the material.

Peter Kneisel, a senior staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, is less optimistic. He would prefer to wring incremental advances out of niobium cavities, and accept their limitations.

"The grass on the other side of the fence is always greener," says Kneisel, who has spent 40 years working to improve niobium. "It will take, I don't know, 40 years again to bring it to some practical use in accelerators."

New Report on World Catalyst Markets

Reportlinker: World catalyst demand will expand at a 6.3 percent annual pace to $16.5 billion in 2012, with volume demand growing at a 1.9 percent annual pace to 5.3 million metric tons. Growth will be strong across all market segments as high energy prices help support increased catalyst demand as a means of improving productivity. Average prices will also continue to advance due to a combination of underlying support from strong demand, and a shifting product mix toward higher cost/ more efficient products.

Rapidly rising energy prices over the 2002 to 2007 time period have dramatically increased raw material and production costs throughout the chemical, re- fining and polymer industries. Companies have responded by looking to increase both energy efficiency and productivity in their processes and operations, which in turn has boosted demand for catalysts.

Tin soars 10 percent on China stockpile plans

Reuters: "London Metal Exchange tin prices leapt 9.8 percent on Monday after news that China's Yunnan province would build a 1 million tonne stockpile of base metals, including 100,000 tonnes of tin."