Children who wear glasses are being bullied at school, to the extent that some play truant to avoid playground taunts - and it's because of the glasses, not because some kids are just not cool, says Specsavers.

Research commissioned by them to mark the inaugural National Glasses Day on Friday September 19th reveals that a quarter of children were sad when they were told that they had to wear specs.

Being told 'Johnny Depp wears glasses' did not seem to help so Specsavers has commissioned iconic specs wearer Gok Wan, presenter of C4's "How to Look Good Naked", and anti-bullying charity Kidscape to encourage all specs wearers to wear their glasses with pride and draw attention to bullies who ridicule people because of how they look.

All 3,000 Virgin Trains staff (that get seen by customers) will be sporting a new look today following the delivery of new uniforms.

The difference? All of the Wensum-supplied garments are 'eco-friendly.'

What does that mean? Leave it to Richard Branson to make clothes that can be thrown in a washing machine an ecological PR move. Both the garments and the package are also recycleable, they say, and the manufacturer treats its workforce within full Human Rights conditions, though that would seem to be a bonus outside the environment.

To build a hospital, nuclear power station or a large dam you need to know the possible earthquake risks of the terrain. Now, researchers from the Universities of Granada and Jaen, alongside scientists from the University of California (Santa Barbara, USA), have developed, based on relief data from the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada, a geomorphological index that analyses land form in relation to active tectonics, applicable to any mountain chain on the planet.

Active tectonics comprise the most up-to-date deformation processes that affect the Earth's crust, resulting in earthquakes or recent deformations in the planet’s faults and folds. This phenomena is analysed in geology research carried out before commencing engineering works.

A team of scientists from the University of Sunderland have developed a hydrogen-powered car that they believe is a significant step forward in creating a mass-produced 'green' machine.

The team, led by Dirk Kok from the Institute of Automotive and Manufacturing Advanced Practice (AMAP), in partnership with the Centre for Process Innovation at Wilton and Lambda One Autogas at Gateshead, have successfully adapted a Nissan Almera to run on hydrogen so that it only emits water from its exhaust.

The HyPower Nissan Almera will be unveiled at the Partners4Automotive 2008 conference September 17th at the University of Sunderland’s Sir Tom Cowie Campus. This international event will look at alternative fuel technologies for vehicles and transport systems, giving local business the chance to see cutting edge developments from around the world.

Invisibility once belonged squarely in the realm of science fiction but in the last few years advancements in metamaterials have made it an exciting possibility, though not yet in the range of normal human vision or on a cost-effective basis.

Scientists in the Departments of Applied Physics and Electromagnetism at the University of Granada have taken a different tack, using the Transmission Line Method(TLM).

In 1885, Oliver Heaviside created the first transmission line model to understand the behavior of wires in the telegraph. That's right, pre-telephone Morse Code stuff. Future tech like invisibility can learn a thing or two from James Clerk Maxwell even today, it seems.

Rheumatoid arthritis is often a more painful experience for women than it is for men, though the visible symptoms are the same, and doctors should take more account of these subjective differences when assessing the need for medication, according to findings presented at a congress on gender medicine arranged by Karolinska Institutet.

For reasons yet unknown, rheumatoid arthritis is roughly three times more common amongst women than men. Moreover, several studies also suggest that rheumatoid arthritis eventually impairs the life quality of female suffers more than it does that of male sufferers. Here, too, the underlying reasons are unclear, but scientists have speculated that the medicines used affect women and men differently.