CALGARY, Canada, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Brad Thompson, President and CEO of Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (TSX: ONC, NASDAQ: ONCY), will present a corporate overview of the Company at the BioSquare 2008 Conference on Thursday, March 13, 2008. The event is being held at the Congress Center in Basel, Switzerland from March 12-14, 2008.

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Astronomers at the University of Rochester have announced that low-mass stars and possibly even super-Jupiter-sized planets may be responsible for creating some of the most breathtaking objects in the sky.

The news is ironic because the name “planetary” nebula has always been a misnomer. When these objects were discovered 300 years ago, astronomers couldn’t tell what they were and named them for their resemblance to the planet Uranus. But as early as the mid-19th century, astronomers realized these objects are really great clouds of dust emitted by dying stars.

Rochester researchers now say they have found that planets or low-mass stars orbiting these aged stars may indeed be pivotal to the creation of the nebulae’s fantastic appearance.


Model of the spiral shock waves caused by a planet orbiting a dying star. Credit: University of Rochester

High-energy physicists devoted to recreating the conditions at the beginning of the universe have for the first time observed a new way to produce those basic particles of atoms, protons and neutrons.

Confirming a decades-old prediction, the physicists with the CLEO collaboration say they observed a rare and extremely short-lived subatomic particle with the unusual name of “charmed-strange meson” decay into a proton and anti-neutron.

Detection of the event was attributed to John Yelton, a physicist at the University of Florida, one of many institutions that are part of the CLEO collaboration.

When exotic species invade new territory, they often present a major threat to the other plants and animals living there, that much is clear, but in addition to their destructive tendencies, invasive species can also have a surprisingly “creative” side.

Researchers writing in Current Biology say they have discovered that an invasive population of the freshwater snail Melanoides tuberculata, found on the island of Martinique, harbors a tremendous amount of genetic variation for key life-history traits, such as fecundity, juvenile size, and age at first reproduction. And that means they have a remarkably large potential for evolutionary change.

LONDON, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Tanzania, 2007. A male patient is admitted to a hospital with pneumonia and possibly HIV. Due to staffing problems and improper handling, the patient is not seen for a week. Upon finally being seen, he is found to be HIV negative. Because he does not have HIV he has to pay for all expenses, totaling more than his monthly earnings. If he were HIV positive, the entire stay, all medication, and all tests would be free.

LONDON, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Heren Energy is pleased to announce the launch of a pioneering new spot Liquefied Natural Gas assessment to add to its extensive portfolio of energy pricing benchmarks.

The company's weekly global LNG publication, Heren LNG Markets, will carry a spot LNG price for cargoes delivered to the Far East as of 7th March.

The price reflects the traded value delivered ex-ship (d.e.s.) into Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China.

Using a virtual pendulum and its real-world counterpart, scientists at the University of Illinois have created the first mixed reality state in a physical system. Through bi-directional instantaneous coupling, each pendulum “sensed” the other, their motions became correlated, and the two began swinging as one.

“In a mixed reality state there is no clear boundary between the real system and the virtual system,” said U. of I. physicist Alfred Hubler. “The line blurs between what’s real and what isn’t.”

In the experiment, Hubler and graduate student Vadas Gintautas connected a mechanical pendulum to a virtual one that moved under time-tested equations of motion. The researchers sent data about the real pendulum to the virtual one, and sent information about the virtual pendulum to a motor that influenced motion of the real pendulum.

Video games such as Second Life give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before but while they can have your hair or your hazel eyes, it's still just a pretty face.

A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working to change that.

They are engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they interact in the real world, according to the team.

New research suggests that humans are not as fooled as they seem when viewing visual illusions.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Psychologist Tzvi Ganel, writing in the March issue of Psychological Science, says we process images in two very distinct ways. He and his colleagues presented research participants with the “Ponzo” illusion, an image common in psychological research that makes two objects that are similar in length appear drastically different. They then hooked participants’ index finger and thumb to computerized position tracking equipment and asked them to grasp the objects with their fingers.

NEW YORK, March 10 /PRNewswire/ --

Chairman and CEO of QTRAX Allan Klepfisz announced today that Beggars Group has signed a digital distribution licensing agreement with QTRAX, the free and legal ad-supported peer-to-peer music network.