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Young children should stay out of the kitchen, and not just because of hot stoves. Most kitchens with a gas oven are polluted with unsafe levels of nitrogen dioxide, according to a survey of 876 homes in England by the Building Research Establishment in Watford. The concentrations of NO2 in the air frequently exceeded both the World Health Organization annual limit of 40 micrograms per cubic metre and the hourly limit of 200 milligrams per cubic metre, says Jeff Llewellyn of the BRE. That's high enough to make breathing difficult for young children.

NASA's experimental Ultra Long Duration Balloon sprang a leak less than two hours after being launched on its test flight from Alice Springs in Australia last Sunday, forcing it to land about 250 km west of the launch site. It's a bit of a mystery says Henry Cathey, ULDB's vehicle manager. "It was a beautiful launch, and it went exactly as we planned." The balloon is designed to float up to 35 km above the Earth for 100 days, doing the work of a satellite at a fraction of the cost.

Tests on a man who can recognise Charlie Chaplin but not a camel reinforce the notion that our brains store information about people and objects separately. The man, who had had a stroke, had no trouble naming famous people such as Chaplin and Bob Geldof. But he struggled with objects such as camels or moles. There have been plenty of reports of stroke patients who can no longer recognise people. But this study, lead by Rick Hanley at Essex University, is the first to describe the reverse syndrome.

Gentle exercise can help dieters avoid putting weight back on after the end of their diet, according to researchers in the Netherlands.

Dieting often slows the rate at which the body burns fat. Marleen van Baak and her colleagues at Maastricht University put 40 obese men on a strict diet. Half of the men also did an hour of gentle exercise such as walking, four times a week. The team found that those who had exercised showed no decline in the rate at which they burnt fat.

Winters across north-west Europe have become much wetter over the past century, according to a new analysis by the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen. Torben Schmith found average increases in precipitation of between 10 and 20 per cent, at 40 monitoring points from Britain to the Arctic shores of Norway. The Belgian town of Chimay had the largest increase of 35 per cent. Detailed statistical analysis revealed that half of the increase could be explained by changes in weather patterns, such as those caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation. But the other half is harder to explain. "One possibility is that because of global warming the atmosphere contains more water vapour today," says Schmith.

A potentially dangerous asthma treatment is poised to get safer. Patients on immunotherapy get small but increasing doses of an allergen to desensitize their immune systems and stop asthma attacks. But occasionally, patients suffer life-threatening anaphylactic shock.

Prem Bhalla's team at the University of Melbourne has made tiny changes to a ryegrass protein to disable the parts that stick to the IgE antibodies in the airway capillaries and trigger asthma or shock. But the parts of the protein that nudge the immune system towards tolerance are unaffected.

Soft, weather-sensitive helmets could become the latest accesory for cyclists, constuction workers and people doing dangerous sports. Instead of the usual hard shell with rigid foam lining, the new hats consist of a shaped fabric bag filled with liquid. Rubbery plastic beads suspended in the liquid help soften any blows. According to inventor Bill Courtenay of Altrincham, Cheshire, the liquid could be chosen to cool the wearer or to keep them warm, depending upon the weather. For instance, choosing a waxy liquid would let the liquid absorb heat on a sunny day, keeping the heat from your head. The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts is funding the research.

Cars could one day spill the beans on hit-and-run drivers, says the German component maker Bosch. It suggests building a pair of pressure-sensitive strips into new cars to reveal whether a vehicle has collided with a pedestrian. One strip is built into the front bumper, while a second strip is mounted higher up, on the front edge of the bonnet. Minor parking accidents are registered by one sensor only. But collision with a pedestrian leaves the telltale record of a hit from the front bumper sensor, followed a split second later by a hit from the bonnet sensor. The data is time-stamped and stored in a tamper-proof data logger for future comparison.

British opponents of gene patenting this week exposed deals that give a tobacco company exclusive rights to develop and sell vaccines against lung cancer. "It's cynical for tobacco companies to profit from diseases that their own products cause," says Helen Wallace of GeneWatch. The pressure group highlights two deals struck by Japan Tobacco, which makes three of the world's five top-selling cigarette brands. In one deal, Corixa of Seattle, Washington, granted Japan Tobacco a licence to develop vaccines based on patented genes that are uniquely active in lung cancer cells.

Brainwave recordings really can betray what a person is thinking. Patrick Suppes of Stanford University in California recorded the brainwaves of five volunteers as they read 100 sentences. The recordings for each volunteer were taken over 24 sessions and then averaged to give a typical pattern for each sentence.

Suppes then showed each volunteer the 100 sentences in a random order, and compared their brainwaves to the patterns recorded before. For one volunteer he correctly identified 93 per cent of the sentences. His worst result, identifying 9 per cent of the sentences, was still significantly better than guessing.

Want to be warned when a virus has evaded your virus checker and is infecting your PC? Robert Morris of Lancashire has the answer. Most viruses propagate by covertly e-mailing copies of themselves to addresses in a computer's address book. So Morris suggests adding a trap address to the address book; as soon as a virus strikes and sends out e-mails, at least one will go to the trap. The office server, or your Internet service provider, checks mail arriving at the trap address and e-mails you a warning if it finds a virus there. The network can then delay transmission of all other e-mails, so you can tackle the virus before it spreads further.

Battlefields contaminated with depleted uranium could pose a long term threat to the health of local children, warns a report by the Royal Society in London. Since 1991 shells containing about 270 tons of depleted uranium have been fired in the Gulf War and the Balkans, mostly by the US. Though the contamination may not be high enough to harm the health of most people, the report highlights the risk to children who play where shells have landed, and whose water and food might become polluted. Soldiers in tanks struck by depleted uranium shells could also suffer kidney damage, it warns. At worst, their kidneys could fail "within a few days".