ANDHRA PRADESH, India, February 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- Nominated in the 'best roaming product or service' category, Pyro Network's InRoam technology helps 400 million subscribers across Africa stay connected while roaming

Pyro Networks, a mobile solutions provider, is proud to announce that its InRoam solution has been selected as a finalist in the 2008 Global Mobile Awards. Pyro Networks has been nominated in the "best roaming product or service" category -- proving that they have the innovative ideas and technical expertise to provide a successful answer to the issues associated with billing and charging for roaming with a pre-paid wireless plan.

BASEL, Switzerland, February 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Synosia Therapeutics today announced the appointment of Philippe Lutz MA Finance, as the company's first chief financial officer, effective immediately. He will be based at Synosia's new headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.

Lutz joins Synosia from Credit Suisse Investment Banking where he most recently served as a vice president of the global markets solutions group. In a nine-year career at Credit Suisse, he contributed to a broad range of capital market transactions and successfully completed the chartered financial analyst exams (CFA). Lutz is a Swiss national and earned his masters in business administration from the University of St. Gallen.

LONDON and TOKYO, February 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- LiMo Platform and APIs Open Market Access for Technology Vendors and Application Developers

LiMo Foundation(TM), a global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole industry, today announced the on-schedule availability in March 2008 of the first release of the LiMo Platform-the first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile handsets-together with the immediate public availability of the application programming interface (API) specifications.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080204/CLM031LOGO )

LiMo's technology will be showcased in Booth 8b135, Hall 8 at Mobile World Congress (www.mobileworldcongress.com), February 11-14 in Barcelona.

Patients with diabetes or high blood pressure could benefit from the development of new "smart" holograms which can detect changes in, among other things, glucose levels and make self-diagnosis much simpler, cheaper and more reliable, write Chris Lowe and Cynthia Larbey in February’s Physics World.

A hologram is a recording of an optical interference pattern created when laser light shone on an object is made to overlap with a separate beam of light that does not pass through the object. When light is shone onto the interference pattern, a 3D image of the original object is recreated.

Drugs derived from cinchona bark, known as cinchona alkaloids, have been used in healing from ancient times. The most prominent representative of this group is quinine, a bitter substance contained in beverages such as tonic water and used in modern medicine to combat malaria.

As early as 1945, Robert Burns Woodward and William von Eggers Doering (Harvard University) described how to synthesize quinine in the laboratory. The last step of this “formal” total synthesis, a three-step reaction procedure previously described by Paul Rabe and Karl Kindler in 1918, has continued to be the subject of much controversy to this day.

Had they done it or not? That has been the question for decades. Woodward and Doering published the synthesis of d-quinotoxine in 1944. Based on the conversion of d-quinotoxine into quinine described by Rabe and Kindler in 1918, they claimed to have derived the total synthesis of quinine, though they had not actually completed this last step themselves before publishing. Their “formal” total synthesis was strongly challenged and was even dismissed as a “myth” by Gilbert Stork (Columbia University) in 2001.

A new approach to cleaning up digital photos has been developed by researchers in the UK and Jordan - they use a computer algorithm known as PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) to intelligently boost contrast and detail in images without distorting the underlying features.

Malik Braik and Alaa Sheta Al-Balqa Applied University, in Salt, Jordan, working with Aladdin Ayesh at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, explain that the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm represents an entirely new approach to solving all kinds of optimization problems. PSO has recently been used in computer science and electrical engineering.

Honestly, did you even known there was a Department of Pedagogy anywhere? Well, there is. They teach about the science of teaching. And apparently cartoons.

Pilar Casares García is a teacher in the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Granada but instead of teaching about teaching, she researches male chauvinism. In cartoons.

This was apparently once a real problem once but she says it's better now; women are as intelligent, agile, attractive, strong, and heroic as their male counterparts ... or more.

Researchers have uncovered the mechanism that contributes to the buildup of fibrous lung tissue in patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), finding that a SARS viral protein important for replication can enhance pulmonary fibrosis by inhibiting the activity of the enzyme that breaks down connective tissue. The results offer up a new pathway to treat the pulmonary damage of SARS.

Infection with the SARS virus can lead to severe inflammation in the lungs, which can lead to respiratory distress, fibrosis, and eventually lung failure.