The organisers of the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival, which will take place next month in Scotland, are aggressively campaigning for the reinstatement of `dram' as an official measurement whiskey.

Since 1995, whisky has been sold in two metric measurements - 25ml and 35ml. the campaigners are demanding the London-based National Measurement Office to declare the larger of the two measurements as a dram.

Buying a house in Scotland is now cheaper than renting a property, according to a fresh report by economists at the Bank of Scotland (BoS).

The report says that falling prices of residential property in Scotland has made buying a home more affordable than renting. As per the economists' estimate, a person who buys a three-bedroom house in Scotland would be more than £400 per year better off than those who rent a similar property.

The importance of exercise in bringing down the risk of breast cancer has been highlighted by women footballers who have teamed up with a charity.

The message will be promoted by social networking which will be used by the Scottish Women's Football Association and Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

The aim is also to let women know about the symptoms and the signs of breast cancer and the partnership has been named One Goal.

Every year in Scotland alone about 4,500 women are diagnosed with the disease.

Among women it is the most common cancer and it claims about 1000 lives every year.

There is a rising number of people who have type 2 diabetes in Scotland and this is happening in the United Kingdom too. And the people who have been diagnosed with it have almost become double in the past 10 years.

The number of people suffering from type 1 diabetes is highest in Scotland, reports state.

The diabetes, whether type 1 or 2 can be managed well with certain precautions taken and right support, this can make these sufferers have a healthy and long life but there can be some serious consequences too from care and diagnosis.

The Scottish population has not been using the internet broadband services completely, as only 61% of the Scots use broadband, compared with 74% of people in the entire UK, the communications regulator Ofcom notified.

According to the reports of Ofcom, in Greater Glasgow, the usage of broadband was very low, as only 50% people have been using it. However, between the age group of 35 and 54, the usage of broadband was highest at 85% in Scotland while it was just 83% in the entire UK. Also, 9% increase has been seen recently due to the popularity of laptop or PC with a broadband dongle.

There is some good news from the side of private sector in Scotland. This sector has shown some growth in the previous month. But despite these encouraging figures, the sector has not touched the output figures that it had during the later part of last year.

Figures showed that the north side of the Border was lagging when it comes to growth as compared to rest of UK. This happened due to the fact that the firms continued to shed workers during the month of January.

A travel agent in Scotland has been the first one in his country to have sold rights to travel in space. He is based in Edinburgh and has sold tickets for the onboard Virgin Galactic.

Name of the travel agency is Dream Escape and it is into the business of luxury business.

It has joined the list of four other agencies in UK. Cost of each seat is £125,000 at present and with more and more time, it is said that the price will continue to go up.

As of now, there are just 140 travel agents in the whole world, who are actually the seats and making money out of it.

Project Merlin has been in the news for all the bad reasons as the Scottish engineering industry has hit out at it. They have complained that while the government is trying to restore business as usual, the method followed by it is to increase business lending but also curb bonuses. They are saying that the government is not doing enough to increase money supply.

Liz Lochhead, Scotland's new Makar (national poet) has officially opened a new museum dedicated to Robert Burns.

Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond was also present at the ceremony at the Alloway, Ayrshire-based facility that has been created at a cost of £21 million.

Speaking on the opening of museum, Ms Lochhead said, "It is a huge pleasure to officially open the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, which is such an asset to the further popular enjoyment of our so well-loved national poet.

Fisheries Minister Richard Lochhead has praised the EU Fisheries Commissioner's promise to do away with the "scandalous waste" of discards.

The fisheries minister said that throwing fish back, dead, into sea is a scandal and they had been making sincere efforts to convince the EU Fisheries commission to amend the rules that force fishermen to throw dead, good quality fish back into the sea.

Recently, EU Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki said that throwing fish back into the sea was not sustainable and they would make reform the Common Fisheries Policy.

Scottish scientists have created an ultra-fast 1000-core processor that has the potential to run 20 times faster than those found in the existing PCs.

Currently available processors feature 2, 4, and sometimes sixteen cores, but Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede and his team members at the University of Glasgow have now created a processor that effectively contains over a thousand cores on a single chip.

Each week more than 2,000 Scots are signing for the organ donor register. The number of the donor has increased up to 7% in 2010 with 113,517 people joining in 2009 in the Scottish organization of NHS, reported by the Scottish Government yesterday.

The increased number indicates more than one third of the total population. However 600 people were shortlisted on the waiting list for the transplantation in Scotland, along with 3 people dying in the UK looking toward for a donor organ.

Renewable energy accounted for 8.6 per cent of total electricity produced in the UK in the three months to September, according to the latest data released from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

The contribution is the highest made by renewable energy sector and are close to government’s target for 10 per cent from the sector by 2010. The wind energy grew 36.9 per cent in the third quarter. The proportion of wind, hydro power and other sources grew 23.1 per cent compared to the same period last year.

Heavy snow falling in Scotland forced authorities to close Edinburgh Zoo, but internet users could watch penguins playing in the snow without actually visiting the zoo, thanks to the penguin cam on Twitter.

Claire Richardson, marketing assistant at the zoo, noticed that the Gengtoo penguins were more active than ever, and posted a tweet to allow people to see the penguins in action.

It took merely two hours for the Edinburgh Zoo to become in the UK's top Twitter searches. At one point, Claire's link to the penguin cam was receiving up to ten re-tweets per minute.

Father of five Matthew Anderson has been sent behind the bars for 18 months after he spied on computer users using their own webcams.

Thirty-three-year-old Anderson is believed to have sent out as many as 50 million `spam' e-mails containing a virus that left the recipient computers effectively enslaved.

Anderson then used to spy into the living rooms of the strangers by controlling their webcams remotely. The victims remained completely unaware that someone was watching them.