Information gleaned from a Greenland ice core by an international science team shows that two huge Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes prior to the close of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago were tied to fundamental shifts in atmospheric circulation.

The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years, then plunged back into icy conditions before abruptly warming again about 11,700 years ago. Startlingly, the Greenland ice core evidence showed that a massive "reorganization" of atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere coincided with each temperature spurt, with each reorganization taking just one or two years, said the study authors.

The new findings are expected to help scientists improve existing computer models for predicting future climate change as increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere drive up Earth's temperatures globally.

Firing someone? Do it on Friday because they would have the weekend off anyway and they are less likely to show up after two days with a rifle. Some things don't change.

But the 'Friday Effect' for publicly traded companies has diminished with the advent of instant news so they have little to gain from saving bad news until Fridays on the assumption that traders are distracted by the approaching weekend, says economist Leon Zolotoy in his research, for which he will be awarded a PhD at Tilburg University in the Netherlands on 25 June.

Zolotoy researched how international stock markets react to new information. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was introduced in July 2002, partly as a result of the corporate scandals involving Global Crossing, WorldCom, Enron and Tyco. The Act’s strict disclosure requirements were designed to restore investors’ and analysts’ confidence in the stock market.

LONDON, June 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Leading Provider of Web 2.0 Solutions for Financial Institutions and Gaming Organisations Enhance Technology Lead

Push Technology Ltd today announced the immediate commercial release of Diffusion 2.0, a real-time push engine, enhancing its product portfolio of Web 2.0 solutions.

The new market-leading release enables organisations such as financial institutions, on-line gaming companies, spread betting organisations, travel agents and news feed providers to greatly improve their customers user experience by providing real-time, compelling data in a format that requires no browser add-ins or specialist client implementation.

Specifically, the new release includes:-

BANGKOK, Thailand, June 19 /PRNewswire/ --

CMP Media (Thailand) Co Ltd, and the Thailand Board of Investment (BOI) jointly announced the success of the recently concluded INTERMACH 2008 and SUBCON THAILAND 2008 machinery exhibition which attracted over 35,000 local and foreign visitors and produced combined transaction values of over 4.2 billion baht.

In spite of doom and gloom predictions, the 2008 exhibition turned out to be one of the most successful ever as the combined forces of INTERMACH and SUBCON THAILAND joined to forge new business opportunities across the board. The show's outstanding success bodes well for Thai industry which should continue to thrive and stimulate the country's overall economy.

Since September 11, U.S. politicians have repeatedly reminded us that the journalists in the Arab world are biased against America and the West. A new study in the July 2008 issue of International Journal of Press/Politics says that is not the case.

To provide a snapshot of journalists' attitudes and to create a benchmark for future studies, the researchers surveyed 601 mainstream professional Arab journalists with the goal of understanding how they view both their profession and the events they cover. (1)

While still subject to censorship, Arab journalists have growing aspirations for independence fed by their access to more than 300 free-to-air Arab satellite channels and the rise of blogging on the internet.

LONDON, June 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Maximum Capacity of Plant Sufficient to Power up to 150 HGVs or 500 LGVs

- With Photo

Gasrec, the UK's first commercial producer of liquid biomethane fuel, BOC, a member of the global gases and engineering Linde Group and SITA UK, one of the country's leading recycling and waste management companies, are pleased to announce the successful production of liquid biomethane ('LBM') fuel from the Gasrec plant at SITA UK's Albury landfill site in Surrey, UK.

Gasrec has been working closely with BOC and SITA UK to develop an LBM production facility at Albury which can recover over 85% of the methane contained in the raw gas produced from the landfill site.

Several huge active submarine volcanoes, spreading ridges and rift zones have been discovered northeast of Fiji by a team of Australian and American scientists aboard the Marine National Facility Research Vessel, Southern Surveyor.

On the hunt for subsea volcanic and hot-spring activity, the team of geologists located the volcanoes while mapping previously uncharted areas. Using high-tech multi-beam sonar mapping equipment, digital images of the seafloor revealed the formerly unknown features.

The summits of two of the volcanoes, named 'Dugong', and 'Lobster', are dominated by large calderas at depths of 1100 and 1500 metres.

BANGALORE, India, June 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Establishes Itself as the Leader in F&A Outsourcing Category for the Second Consecutive Year

Infosys BPO, the business process outsourcing subsidiary of Infosys Technologies, has been awarded the Provider of the Year 2008 award in the Large Enterprise Category by FAO Today. This is the second consecutive win for the company in this category, thus establishing Infosys BPO's thought leadership in the F&A outsourcing space. The other contenders in this category included Genpact, HP, IBM, and Cap Gemini.

The nominees were selected based on the following criteria:

1) Scale of financial volume during the year, in context of entire industry total volume;

Are senior doctors who help drug companies sell their drugs independent experts or just drug representatives in disguise, asks Ray Moynihan from the University of Newcastle in Australia, in this week's BMJ.

Pharmaceutical companies regularly sponsor leading specialists with "generous fees to peddle influence" and promote drugs to the profession and the public, writes Moynihan.

Drug companies will pay influential doctors up to $400 an hour to act as key opinion leaders, and some doctors earn more than $25 000 a year in advisory fees.

KVISTGÅRD, Denmark, June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Bavarian Nordic's cancer research unit, BN ImmunoTherapeutics, has completed an interim analysis of its first two clinical studies with MVA-BN(R)-HER2, a cancer vaccine immunotherapy for breast cancer patients.