Children who under-achieve at school may just have poor working memory rather than low intelligence according to researchers who have produced the world's first tool to assess memory capacity in the classroom.

The researchers from Durham University, who surveyed over three thousand children, found that ten per cent of school children across all age ranges suffer from poor working memory seriously affecting their learning. Nationally, this equates to almost half a million children in primary education alone being affected.

However, the researchers identified that poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence.

Boulders the size of footballs could help scientists predict the West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s (WAIS) contribution to sea-level rise according to new research published this week in Geology.

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Durham University and Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) collected boulders deposited by three glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment – a region currently the focus of intense international scientific attention because it is changing faster than anywhere else on the WAIS and it has the potential to raise sea-level by around 1.5 meters.

Analysis of the boulders has enabled the scientists to start constructing a long-term picture of glacier behavior in the region.

Taking the supplement ginkgo biloba had no clear-cut benefit on the risk of developing memory problems, according to a study published in Neurology®.

The three-year study involved 118 people age 85 and older with no memory problems. Half of the participants took ginkgo biloba extract three times a day and half took a placebo. During the study, 21 people developed mild memory problems, or questionable dementia: 14 of those took the placebo and seven took the ginkgo extract. Although there was a trend favoring ginkgo, the difference between those who took gingko versus the placebo was not statistically significant.

RALEIGH, North Carolina, February 27 /PRNewswire/ --

DARA BioSciences(TM) (Nasdaq: DARA) announced today the appointment of Haywood D. Cochrane, Jr. to the Board of Directors. Mr. Cochrane was appointed to fill a Board vacancy and will serve on the Company's Audit and Compensation Committees. The appointment was effective February 21, 2008.

In making the announcement DARA's Board Chairman, Richard Franco, Sr., commented, "We are pleased that Haywood has joined us as a Director. His vast knowledge and successful experience in the healthcare industry will further strengthen DARA's already skilled Board."

LOS ANGELES, February 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- Managed Hosting Customers to Benefit from Reliability, Performance of Next-Generation Technology

Verizon Business managed hosting customers will be among the first to benefit from the powerful new functionality of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, the next-generation server operating system launched worldwide by Microsoft Wednesday (Feb. 27).

As a member of Microsoft's early adopter initiative, known as the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP), Verizon Business has gained critical expertise that will enable it to offer Windows Server 2008 as a high-end managed hosting solution to U.S. customers this spring, with rollout to European and Asia-Pacific customers by late summer.

PARIS, February 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Optical Transmission With Capacity x Distance Product Record at 41.8 Petabit/s.km, and Three New Photonic Integrated Circuits

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext and NYSE: ALU) today announced, in four post deadline papers accepted at the OFC/NFOEC conference in San Diego, California, new optical networking milestones, including a new optical transmission record and three novel new photonic integrated circuits.

SAN DIEGO, California, February 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that Bob Tkach, director of Transmission Systems research at Bell Labs, received the 22nd John Tyndall Award, the highest recognition in the optical telecommunications community, during a ceremony at the OFC/NFOEC conference in San Diego, California. Tkach was recognized for his long and prolific body of optical networking research that includes inventing many of the fundamental technologies that are now the basis of high-capacity wave division multiplexing (WDM) systems. These include:

FREDERICK, Maryland, February 27 /PRNewswire/ --

Vaccinogen, Inc. announced that its new vaccine to block colon cancer from recurring will be commercially available in Europe starting June 2008.

"This makes OncoVAX(R) the world's first commercially viable vaccine for colon cancer," said Dr. Michael G. Hanna, Jr., Ph.D., Chairman & CEO of Vaccinogen. "It is the beginning of our worldwide strategy of profitable distribution. Questions of the feasibility of patient specific anti-cancer therapies have been raised and this new European initiative will obviate these issues."

The number of scientists is increasing along with the number of scientific journals and published papers, the latter two thanks in large part to the rise of electronic publishing. Scientists and other researchers are finding it more difficult than ever to zero in on the published literature that is most valuable to them.

A team of researchers from Northwestern University say they have developed a mathematical method to rank scientific journals according to quality.

The team analyzed the citation data of nearly 23 million papers that appeared in 2,267 journals representing 200 academic fields and that spanned the years from 1955 to 2006; their analysis produced 200 separate tables of journal rankings by field.

Biologists have elucidated the mechanism of a plant gene that controls the amount of atmospheric ozone entering a plant’s leaves and their finding helps explain why rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may not necessarily lead to greater photosynthetic activity and carbon sequestration by plants as atmospheric ozone pollutants increase.

It also provides a new tool for geneticists to design plants with an ability to resist droughts by regulating the opening and closing of their stomata—the tiny breathing pores in leaves through which gases and water vapor flow during photosynthesis and respiration.