NASA hopes to use the the new Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures film WALL-Eto promote interest among schoolchildren in science and technology. They have signed a Space Act Agreement for a series of educational and public outreach activities related to Disney-Pixar's new movie opening in theaters nationwide on June 27, 2008.

This collaboration highlights the similarities between the movie's storyline and NASA's real-life work in robot technology, propulsion systems and astrophysics. Disney-Pixar's WALL-E is set 700 years in the future. The film's main character is the only rover-robot left on Earth. He meets a new robot named Eve, and together they take a journey through the universe.

Disney has designed a 30-second public service announcement featuring WALL-E for NASA's television channels and Web site. The video is designed to draw students to NASA's Web site to explore the agency's missions. The WALL-E character also will be featured on NASA's Kids' Club page. In addition, Disney has designed a "movie surfer vignette" about WALL-E that touches on science and technology that drives NASA's programs, which began airing on the Disney Channel in June.

The newly sequenced genome of a dainty, quill-like sea creature called a lancelet provides the best evidence yet that vertebrates evolved over the past 550 million years through a four-fold duplication of the genes of more primitive ancestors.

The late geneticist Susumu Ohno argued in 1970 that gene duplication was the most important force in the evolution of higher organisms, and Ohno's theory was the basis for original estimates that the human genome must contain up to 100,000 distinct genes.

Instead, the Human Genome Project found that humans today have only 20,000 to 25,000 genes, which means that, if our ancestors' primitive genome doubled and redoubled, most of the duplicate copies of genes must have been lost. An analysis of the lancelet, or amphioxus, genome, published in the June 19 issue of Nature, shows this to be the case.

The Nazca booby, a Galápagos Island seabird, emerges from its shell ready to kill its brother or sister. Wake Forest University biologists and their colleagues have linked the murderous behavior to high levels of testosterone and other male hormones found in the hatchlings.

The research is part of a long-term study by Anderson that has included monitoring more than 16,000 Nazca booby nests at Punta Cevallos, Isla Espanola, in the Galápagos Islands since 1984.

The elevated levels of male hormones, called androgens, increase aggression in both male and female chicks and prepare the birds to fight to the death as soon as they hatch, said David J. Anderson, professor of biology at Wake Forest and project leader.

SOLLENTUNA, Sweden, June 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Gains Access to In Vitro Diagnostic Technologies in Development for Use in Point-of-Care Settings

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised the first computerized method that can analyze a single photograph and determine where in the world the image likely was taken. It's a feat made possible by searching through millions of GPS-tagged images in the Flickr online photo collection.

The IM2GPS algorithm developed by computer science graduate student James Hays and Alexei A. Efros, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, doesn't attempt to scan a photo for location clues, such as types of clothing, the language on street signs, or specific types of vegetation, as a person might do. Rather, it analyzes the composition of the photo, notes how textures and colors are distributed and records the number and orientation of lines in the photo.

Two stars, each with the same mass and in orbit around each other, are twins that one would expect to be identical. So astronomers were surprised when they discovered that twin stars in the Orion Nebula, a well-known stellar nursery 1,500 light years away, were not identical at all. In fact, these stars exhibited significant differences in brightness, surface temperature and possibly even size.

The study published in the June 19 Nature suggests that one of the stars formed significantly earlier than its twin. Because astrophysicists have assumed that binary stars form simultaneously, the discovery provides an important new challenge for today's star formation theories, forcing theorists to reexamine their models to see if the models can indeed produce binaries with stars that form at different times.

PARIS, June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Valeo today announced the signing of a contract with OSEO, the French state financing group dedicated to supporting innovation, for 61 million euros in funding for its research program LOwCO2MOTION(R), which aims to improve vehicle engine efficiency and contribute to reducing CO2 emissions.

This funding, granted by the French Industrial Innovation Agency (Agence de l'Innovation Industrielle, AII) which is now part of OSEO, was authorized by the European Commission on June 17.

SAN DIEGO, California, June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Germany is on the cutting edge in biotechnology R&D and is a top player in large- and clinical-scale production. Companies located in Germany are poised to profit from the latest developments in biomanufacturing. These were the results of an expert panel, at the BIO International Convention (BIO 2008) in San Diego, California on June 18th. Invest in Germany co-chaired the panel along with the CEO of a major transatlantic biotech consultancy.

SAN DIEGO, California and CALGARY, Canada, June 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Findings Demonstrate Clear Trends of Proof of Principle of Reverse Cholesterol Transport in Human Volunteers

SAN DIEGO, California and CALGARY, Canada, June 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Resverlogix Corp. ("Resverlogix" or the "Company") (TSX: RVX) announced today that it has completed the planned exploratory efficacy analysis of the data from the Phase I, 7 day RVX-208 treatment subjects. Analysis from two independent and external laboratories of blinded serum samples showed consistent improvements of key biomarkers for the RCT (reverse cholesterol transport) pathway.

The pageantry of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, the Coca-Cola empire, Michael Jackson’s turn from the King of Pop into an iconic global recluse: American pop culture – Hollywood cinema, television, pop music – dominates the rest of the world through its hegemonic presence. Does that make everyone a hybridized American, or do these elements find mediation within the other cultures that consume them?

Fabricating the Absolute Fake. America in Contemporary Pop Culture by Jaap Kooijman applies concepts of postmodern theory – Baudrillard’s hyperreality and Eco’s “absolute fake,” among others – to this globally mediated American pop culture in order to examine both the phenomenon itself and its appropriation in the Netherlands, as evidenced by such diverse cultural icons as the Elvis-inspired crooner Lee Towers, the Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, musical tributes to an assassinated politician, and the Dutch reality soap opera scene.