A NEW survey reveals that a majority of Britons would support a ban on smoking while driving.

According to research from Privilige, a UK-based insurer, more than twothirds of people there would support such a ban when children under the age of 16 are also in the car.

The research comes as a smoking ban in public places is due to come into effect in England and Wales, and the fear that this will have a knock-on effect of increasing smoking in cars by as much as 14%. An estimated one-in-20 youngsters under the age of 16 are believed to be already subject to passive smoking from their parents' habit.

In addition, the research, which was carried out by Brunel University, claims that drivers who smoke drive faster and are more likely to be involved in crashes.

The university's Dr Mark Young also said that smoking motorists drive "more inconsistently" than non-smokers and his research confirms a theory that smokers have a "more risk-taking attitude to life".

The new regulations in England and Wales will ban smoking in company cars, as is the case in Ireland, and follows the practice already established in countries such as New Zealand, Germany, Scotland, Brazil, Australia and India.

Eight states in the US already have laws prohibiting smoking in cars where there are children under the age of 16 present.

On the button for biofuels With a greater emphasis on biofuels when it comes to cars, research has turned to an alternative source for ethanol to fuel the environmentallyfriendly car.

The US Department of Energy, in association with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have begun working with button mushrooms to produce ethanol more cheaply than the corn kernels currently used as the main biofuel feedstock in the US.

Fungi have great plantdegrading power and scientists are planning to sequence the DNA of the button mushrooms to harness this capability in ethanol production.

Produced from corn, ethanol is expensive and requires high energy input in its making. A valuable food crop is also being used to make fuel.

There are other potential sources which have a higher ethanol output per acre, such as grasses, agricultural waste, cornstalks and even trees. But extracting ethanol from the cellulose base is more complex than from corn kernels or sugarcane and requires extensive preprocessing with expensive synthetic enzymes.

Button mushrooms naturally feed off decaying plants by degrading the cell walls and using the resulting sugar for energy.

Scientists hope that by using DNA sequencing they might identify superior enzymes that do the job more efficiently.

As this work is proceeding, parallel efforts are being made to use similar DNA sequencing to develop more efficient replacement biomass crops, such as eucalyptus trees.