From today's UK papers

Financial Times

Nanostructures that have been imaged and analysed by US researchers at Northwestern University might make a hard coating for gears or an oxidation-resistant coating for aircraft windows.

The e-Generation scheme helps graduates from northeast England's five universities to develop their fledgling commercial activities.

The Guardian

The Israeli siege of Bir Zeit University has attracted media attention, but daily deaths in the latest intifada are ignored.

Jacques Benveniste claimed to have explained how homeopathy works but failed to convince most scientists. New experiments by Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University Belfast lend support to his theory.

The Independent

New teachers are to have their student loans written off over 10 years. Should new lecturers be offered a similar deal?

Daily Mail

The behaviour of children is directly affected by the time parents devote to reciting them stories, rhymes and songs, according to a study from Birkbeck College, London.

Daily Telegraph

Freud suggested the existence of a repression mechanism that pushes unwanted memories into the unconscious. Scientists at Oregon University now think they can explain how it works.  (from Nature )

Urban background noise can be enough to raise children's blood pressure, affect motivation and lead to "learned helplessness", scientists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and Cornell University in New York have said.

The Times

Scientists at the University of Toronto and London's Hospital for Sick Children say that babies need not wait for a compatible heart for transplant because their immune systems are still immature.

Cathy MacGregor, a drama lecturer at Wolverhampton University, has been exempted from Nottingham's ban on strip shows to enable her to dance naked around a pole as an "artistic exercise" at Nottingham Trent University.

By a large margin, most students wish to work in information technology and the internet rather than any other sector when they leave university, according to a poll of 10,000 students from 40 universities.

Miscellany

Psychologists at Florida Atlantic University found that students writing essays with music in the background produced 60 fewer words per hour ( Daily Mail , Times from New Scientist magazine).