LONDON, February 5 /PRNewswire/ --

Fin-Scan, a leading provider of sanctions list and PEP compliance screening solutions for the financial services industry, today announced that it has appointed John Haley as Sales & Marketing Manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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LONDON, February 5 /PRNewswire/ --

-- Fully-managed service rolled out to 900 stores in three-year, 2.3 million pound sterling contract. -- Agreement enables faster customer transaction times, greater in-store efficiencies, cost savings.

Following the success of its initial implementation for 700 Superdrug stores, global IP solutions provider Global Crossing (Nasdaq: GLBC) today announced that it is to extend its fully managed Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN) into an additional 200 Superdrug retail outlets. The total value of Global Crossing's contract with the leading UK health and beauty chain is 2.3 million pounds sterling over three years.

BARCELONA, February 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Joikusoft Oy Ltd. today announces JoikuSpot, a free mobile software solution that turns a Symbian S60 Smartphone to a Wi-Fi HotSpot.

According to the Joikusoft Oy Founder and CEO Mr. Lasse Maki "Internet should be easily and cost-efficiently accessible everywhere, and Joikusoft aims to enable that with the JoikuSpot innovation."

JoikuSpot enables S60 Smartphone to share it's 3G internet connection wirelessly over WLAN with any compatible WLAN device such as laptop, other Smartphone or e.g. Apple iPod touch. Multiple devices can connect to JoikuSpot in parallel and seamlessly share the same 3G internet connection. JoikuSpot acts thus as an internet gateway to external WLAN devices.

PLANEGG-MARTINSRIED, Germany, February 5 /PRNewswire/ -- The Martinsried drug discovery and development company 4SC AG (Frankfurt, Prime Standard: VSC) and the Wuppertal-based AiCuris GmbH & Co KG today announced that they have entered into a research collaboration. The long-term goal of this collaboration is to jointly set-up a product pipeline with innovative, anti-infective drug candidates.

It has been agreed in a first step that 4SC AG will, within the context of its collaboration business segment, provide extensive resources from its medicinal chemistry to AiCuris, for research purposes. In return 4SC AG is to receive relevant research funds, of an undisclosed amount, which are to be used for further development of its own project pipeline.

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands and CAMBRIDGE, England, February 5 /PRNewswire/ --

- Agreement Includes ARM Cortex-M3 Processor for Microcontrollers

NXP Semiconductors, the independent semiconductor company founded by Philips, and ARM (LSE:ARM); (Nasdaq:ARMHY) today announced that they have expanded their strategic relationship with a new licensing agreement, including the high-performance, low-power ARM(R) Cortex(TM)-M3 processor, as well as other ARM technology. NXP will introduce a new family of microcontrollers based on the ARM Cortex-M3 processor starting in 2008, further expanding its broad portfolio of 56 ARM7(TM) and ARM9(TM) family-based MCUs.

A compound that naturally occurs in grapefruit and other citrus fruits may be able to block the secretion of hepatitis C virus (HCV) from infected cells, a process required to maintain chronic infection.

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine (MGH-CEM) report that HCV is bound to very low-density lipoprotein (vLDL, a so-called “bad” cholesterol) when it is secreted from liver cells and that the viral secretion required to pass infection to other cells may be blocked by the common flavonoid naringenin.

If the results of this study extend to human patients, a combination of naringenin and antiviral medication might allow patient to clear the virus from their livers.

For the first time, scientists have described the transition of the flat, disc-shaped heart field into the primary linear heart tube. The investigations on zebrafish embryos were made by Stefan Rohr and Cécile Otten, members of the research group of Dr. Salim Abdelilah-Seyfried of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany.

Currently, one of the most important areas to explore in developmental biology is how cellular transformation processes lead to the three-dimensional formation (morphogenesis) of organs. A better understanding of these processes is a basic requirement for elucidating congenital malformation of organs.

The heart, for instance, develops in the embryo from a flat disc, the so-called heart field. The tissue of this two-dimensional structure consists of a thin layer of epithelial cells. Similar cells line all inner organs, but also the skin and blood vessels.

A new plan to further reduce, refine and replace the use of animals in research and regulatory testing, commonly referred to as the 3Rs, was unveiled today by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM).

Traditionally, chemicals, consumer products, medical devices and new drugs are tested on animals to predict toxicity on humans, but scientists in ICCVAM are working to promote the development and validation of alternative test methods. Alternative test methods are those that accomplish one or more of the 3Rs; of reducing the number of animals used in testing, refining procedures so animals experience less pain and distress or replacing animals with non-animal systems.

ICCVAM has evaluated more than 185 test methods since its inception in 1997. ICCVAM itself does not conduct research but makes evaluates proposed solutions and makes recommendations about their usefulness to federal regulatory agencies.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed.

In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory; the culture of quarks, if you will.