Spencer Kelly looks at whether the mobiles of the future will be hampered by tiny touch-screens - and could they bring down some of technology's biggest names?
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Nick Reilly said the UK lost many of its small component-making firms decades ago The future of car making in the UK could be in danger if the industry fails to develop a British-based supply chain, the boss of Vauxhall has said.Nick Reilly, chief executive of General Motors in Europe, said a lack of home-based parts manufacturers was the most critical issue facing the industry.
Mr Reilly told the BBC that car makers in the UK such as Nissan and Toyota were finding it difficult to compete.
This was because they had to import so many vehicle components, he said.
Mr Reilly said the situation added to shipping costs and created currency risks as well as a longer supply chain.
'Lack of suppliers'The current government understood the problem but decisions taken decades ago meant the UK had lost many of its small component-making firms, Mr Reilly added.
"Our biggest issue is lack of suppliers in the UK," he said.
"In the 70s to 90s we gave up a lot of business. What it means is that at Luton [Vauxhall factory] we import a lot of components.
"If we don't have a decent amount of local suppliers it makes this place more difficult to be competitive."
He continued: "Frankly, I think it's the most critical issue facing the automotive industry in the UK.
"It's not enough to have Nissan, Toyota, Vauxhall manufacturing the products because we'll never be able to compete with another country where the suppliers are surrounding the car plants."
General Motors was forced into bankruptcy two years ago during the recession and is now majority controlled by the US and Canadian governments.
Car manufacturing at GM Europe's plants in Luton and Cheshire have since been secured for the medium term.
It was confirmed in March that the Luton plant would build the new Vivaro van, produced jointly with Renault.
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By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News, Vienna 
Volcanoes such as Stromboli indicate powerful geological forces at work in the Mediterranean Europe may be starting to burrow its way under Africa, geologists suggest.The continents are converging; and for many millions of years, the northern edge of the African tectonic plate has descended under Europe.
But this process has stalled; and at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting last week, scientists said we may be seeing Europe taking a turn.
If they are correct, this would signal the start of a new subduction zone - a rare event, scientifically fascinating.
Beneath the Mediterranean Sea, the cold, dense rock at the extreme north of the African plate has virtually all sunk under the Eurasian plate on which Europe sits.
But the African landmass is too light to follow suit and descend.
"Africa won't sink, but Africa and Europe continue to move together; so where is this taken up?" asked Rinus Wortel from the University of Utrecht.
"It looks possible that on the appropriate timescale, we are witnessing the beginning of subduction of Europe under Africa," he told BBC News.
The Mediterranean Sea's geological structure and history are quite complex.
The Utrecht group's analysis goes like this:
The slow convergence - just a few centimetres per year - was obstructed partially by collision of the two plates further East, in Turkey, and then by the fact that the lightness of the African continent prevented further subduction.
As a result, bits of the African plate that did subduct have broken off and are descending to the Earth's mantle.To fill this gap, bits of the Eurasian plate have been pulled southwards across the Mediterranean, such as the Balearic Islands, Corsica and Sardinia. The same thing is happening with Crete.
And computer modelling suggests the end product of all this could be the initiation of subduction in the opposite direction from the past.
Additional evidence comes from observations of earthquakes.
"We see what motion occurs in the earthquakes, and we see that the fault planes dip towards the South," said Professor Wortel.
Glacial paceAlthough the power of subduction zones to generate enormous events has been thrown into stark light once more by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami off the Japanese coast, the geology of the Mediterranean is very different.
Nevertheless, there is some concern among scientists that European countries are putting only small amounts of money into building a tsunami warning system for the region.
Tsunami warning systems: does the Mediterranean Sea need one? At the EGU, Stefano Tinti from the University of Bologna, Italy, said the EU collectively had put only about 8m euros into tsunami research over the last five years.
Over the same period, Germany alone funded the Indonesian early warning system to the tune of about 55m euros, he said.
"There was interest just after [the Asian tsunami of] 2004, and then interest rapidly decreased again," Professor Tinti, who until recently chaired an intergovernmental co-ordination group on tsunami in Europe, told reporters.
"It's very political; and putting together all these member states in order to co-operate and put money in - even though the sums are very small, was a very difficult task."
Although tsunamigenic earthquakes in the Mediterranean are smaller than the biggest ones around the Pacific rim, Magnitude 8 events have been recorded, such as the 1303 Crete quake whose tsunami devastated Heraklion and Alexandria.
Confirmation that European subduction had started could allow scientists to model the region better, and so make better assessments of earthquake and tsunami risk.
But the long timescales involved in geological processes make this a challenge.
"We'll keep track of the seismic activity to see whether it continues to indicate this underthrusting of the Mediterranean subsurface underneath North Africa," said Rinus Wortel.
"But it's not going to mature in the lifetime of a scientist."
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