NEW YORK, January 9 /PRNewswire/ --

Investment firm W. P. Carey & Co. LLC (NYSE: WPC) announced today that CPA(R):14, its publicly held non-traded REIT affiliate, acquired an industrial/office research facility in Turku, Finland for approximately EUR 10 million.

The facility is being leased to Wallac Oy, a subsidiary of PerkinElmer, Inc., under a long-term lease. The acquisition is a follow-on transaction to an approximately EUR 28 million sale-leaseback of an adjacent research and production facility that CPA(R):14 completed with PerkinElmer in 2001. Both properties are located in Turku's "Bio Valley" - a section of the city named for its comprehensive infrastructure of science, business and biotech-related services.

LONDON, January 9 /PRNewswire/ --

- Innovative Scanner Offers Schools Versatile, Cost-Effective, High- Quality Data Capture and Imaging Technology

Today at BETT 2008, Pearson previewed the first desktop model scanner combining high-speed, full-color document imaging technology with the proven data capture capabilities of grayscale mark recognition. The new iNSIGHT 30(TM) is designed to support education scanning applications such as testing, attendance, grading, surveys, student portfolios, personnel records and back office file conversions. To develop this innovative scanner, Pearson applied its more than 50 years of unique engineering, forms design, applications development and customer support experience.

NASA will debut a new book for blind readers at a media event and reception Jan. 15. The agency will unveil "Touch the Invisible Sky," which gives blind readers the ability to experience cosmic images from the agency's space-based observatories and other telescopes on the ground.

The event begins at 10 a.m. EST at the National Federation of the Blind, 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore. Media will have the opportunity to ask the authors questions and view science experiments related to NASA's Great Observatories.

"Touch the Invisible Sky" is accessible to both blind and sighted readers. The book presents celestial objects as they appear through visible-light telescopes and in different spectral regions that are invisible to the naked eye.

SETH: You wrote that New York Times piece, and from my take on it, you had a bunch of evidence, and then you got a book contract. Is it fair to say that you found out that what you wrote in the piece was mostly right?

Stress, to put it bluntly, is bad for you. It can kill you, in fact. A study reveals that stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you more susceptible to everything from the common cold to cancer. Thanks to new research crossing the disciplines of psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and genetics, the mechanisms underlying the connection are rapidly becoming understood.

The first clues to the link between stress and health were provided in the 1930s by Hans Selye, the first scientist to apply the word “stress”— then simply an engineering term— to the strains experienced by living organisms in their struggles to adapt and cope with changing environments.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have developed a new “nanobiotechnology” that enables magnetic control of events at the cellular level. They describe the technology, which could lead to finely-tuned but noninvasive treatments for disease, in the January issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Don Ingber, MD, PhD, and Robert Mannix, PhD, of Children’s program in Vascular Biology, in collaboration with Mara Prentiss, PhD, a physicist at Harvard University, devised a way to get tiny beads – 30 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter – to bind to receptor molecules on the cell surface.

When exposed to a magnetic field, the beads themselves become magnets, and pull together through magnetic attraction.

The molecular machinery behind gene transcription -- the intricate transfer of information from a segment of DNA to a corresponding strand of messenger RNA -- isn't stationed in special "transcription factories" within a cell nucleus, according to Cornell researchers. Instead, the enzyme RNA polymerase II (Pol II) and other key molecules can assemble at the site of an activated gene, regardless of the gene's position.

The findings, published in the Dec. 28, 2007, issue of the journal Molecular Cell, are the result of an ongoing collaboration between the laboratories of John T. Lis, the Barbara McClintock Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and Watt W. Webb, professor of applied physics and the S.B. Eckert Professor in Engineering.

MCKINNEY, Texas, January 8 /PRNewswire/ --

Torchmark Corporation (NYSE: TMK) will release Fourth Quarter 2007 earnings after the market closes on Wednesday, February 6, 2008. In conjunction with Torchmark's Fourth Quarter 2007 Earnings Release, you are invited to listen to a conference call that will be broadcast live over the Internet on Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. At that time a copy of the Company's Q4-2007 earnings press release and other financial and statistical information about the quarter will be available on the Company's website at http://www.torchmarkcorp.com on the Investor Relations page.

Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.

"This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder," says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.