The type of robot chosen as a personal companion by participants at the University of Hertfordshire Science and Technology Research Institute’s (STRI) Showcase next week will very much depend on their personality type.

This is a recent finding from Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn’s team at the university’s School of Computer Science, who took the robot out of the laboratory last year and had it living in a house nearby so that they could observe how it interacted with humans.

People with extroverted personalities will choose more human-looking robots with facial features and a human-like voice, results say, while introverted people tend to prefer mechanical-looking robots, more like a box on wheels with a metal head.

University of Utah scientists developed a new crime-fighting tool by showing that human hair reveals the general location where a person drank water, helping police track past movements of criminal suspects or unidentified murder victims.

“You are what you eat and drink – and that is recorded in your hair,” says geochemist Thure Cerling, who led the research effort with ecologist Jim Ehleringer. The new hair analysis method also may prove useful to anthropologists, archaeologists and medical doctors in addition to police.

“We have found significant variations in hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in hair and water that relate to where a person lives in the United States,” Ehleringer says.

There are currently no objective clinical laboratory blood tests for mood disorders. The current reliance on patient self-report of symptom severity and on the clinicians’ impression is a rate limiting step in effective treatment and new drug development.

Investigators from Indiana propose, and provide proof of principle for, an approach to help identify blood biomarkers for mood state. They measured whole-genome gene expression differences in blood samples from subjects with bipolar disorder that had low mood vs. those that had high mood at the time of the blood draw, and separately, changes in gene expression in brain and blood of a mouse pharmacogenomic model.

The rise of oxygen and the oxidation of deep oceans between 635 and 551 million years ago had an impact on the increase and spread of the earliest complex life, including animals, according to a study in PNAS.

The atmosphere had almost no oxygen until 2.5 billion years ago and it was not until about 600 million years ago that the atmospheric oxygen level rose to a fraction of modern levels. Geologists and evolutionary biologists have speculated that the rise of the breathing gas and subsequent oxygenation of the deep oceans are intimately tied to the evolution of modern biological systems.

PARSIPPANY, New Jersey, February 25 /PRNewswire/ --

Tanager AudioWorks, Inc. today announced the availability of their Chirp(TM) Virtual MIDI Keyboard Controller software. Chirp turns a user's computer keyboard into a MIDI keyboard controller, allowing a user to write or compose music without the need for a physical keyboard controller. Chirp takes advantage of the new Adobe AIR(TM) rich internet application (RIA) development environment.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080225/NYM127LOGO )

PARSIPPANY, New Jersey, February 25 /PRNewswire/ --

ORLANDO, Florida, February 25 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Mouse aimed at reducing cross contaminations including Influenza and MRSA.

Seal Shield LLC today introduced the new SILVER SEAL(TM) Washable, Antimicrobial Mouse at the HiMSS Healthcare Symposium in Orlando, FL. According to the company, the SILVER SEAL(TM) Mouse is the world's first computer mouse to be fully submersible, dishwasher safe, and manufactured from SILVER SEAL(TM) Antimicrobial plastic. The new SILVER SEAL(TM) mouse has been created to help reduce the risk of cross contaminations, including Influenza and the "superbug," MRSA. The new SILVER SEAL(TM) Mouse is a companion product to the company's SILVER SEAL(TM) Washable, Antimicrobial Keyboard, which began shipping earlier this month.

SAN FRANCISCO, February 25 /PRNewswire/ --

- Partnership with Acceso, a company part-owned by Havas Media, will further extend Zinio in Europe and Latin America

Zinio (http://www.zinio.com), the world's biggest provider of magazines online, is announcing two pivotal initiatives today: the launch of an online 'global newsstand', a website where consumers can buy hundreds of different leading magazines from around the world and view the actual pages instantly on-screen; and, secondly, a partnership spanning Europe and Latin America with Acceso Group, a company part-owned by both Havas Media -- the media division of Havas, one of the largest communication and advertising groups worldwide -- and ISP.

A new tool called "Carbon Hero" was regional prize winner in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme. It uses satellite navigation technology to track journeys and tells people their carbon footprint.

“With Carbon Hero calculating your carbon footprint is easy,” explains Andreas Zachariah, a graduate student from the Royal College of Art in London and inventor of Carbon Hero. “This easy-to-use mobile system uses satellite navigation data to calculate the environmental impact of travel. With its specialist database and algorithm, it can determine the mode of transport and its environmental impact with almost no user input.”

The United States is the world's top corn grower, producing 44 percent of the global crop. In 2007, U.S. farmers produced a record 13.1 billion bushels of corn, an increase of nearly 25 percent over the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The 2007 production value of corn was estimated at more than $3 billion. Favorable prices, a growing demand for ethanol and strong export sales have fueled an increase in farmland acreage devoted to corn production.

A team of scientists have completed a working draft of the corn genome, an accomplishment that should accelerate efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet society's growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel.

Corn, also known as maize, underlies myriads of products, from breakfast cereal, meat and milk to toothpaste, shoe polish and ethanol.