WEYBRIDGE, Surrey, February 25 /PRNewswire/ --

- With Photo

- Findings Reveal Excessive Water Wastage in British Homes - Be Water Wise With Ariel

An overwhelming majority of the British public fail to recognise water saving as a pressing environmental issue, according to a new report released today by Ariel laundry detergent and Waterwise - the UK's leading authority on water efficiency. The report has prompted the launch of the nationwide 'Be Water Wise with Ariel' campaign, fronted by property designer Wayne Hemingway MBE and welcomed by Minister for the Environment, Phil Woolas(1), to rally the nation to help protect one of its most precious resources.

If you've ever had a severe asthma attack or gone into premature labor, there is a good chance you were given the drug terbutaline. Terbutaline can relax your involuntary smooth muscle when it's causing problems: in constricted airways during an asthma attack, or in the uterus during contractions. But if you've taken terbutaline, you've probably also noticed another effect: it can induce a pounding, racing heartbeat. How can one drug produce such opposite effects - relaxing smooth muscle in some parts of your body, while making your cardiac muscle work harder?

The answer is that terbutaline switches on a common information-processing module, called a signaling pathway, which gets used over and over in different cells to perform very different jobs. This information-processing module can be plugged into different cell types, where it will transmit signals from the environment outside the cell to the inside where the information is processed and acted upon. Because our cells use a common set of information-processing modules to carry out so many different jobs, it's easy for drugs that act on these modules to produce a wide range of side-effects.

If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a city – one, perhaps, on its way to becoming a megacity with a population that exceeds 10 million or more. If not, you and most of the world’s population soon will be, according to global population demographics projections.

“When we think of global change, images of melting ice caps and pasture replacing tropic rainforest come to mind,” Arizona State University ecologist Nancy Grimm says. “What drives these changes? In fact, much of the current environmental impact originates in cities, and with demographic transition to city life the urban footprint is likely to continue to grow.”

Applying organic fertilizers, such as those resulting from composting, to agricultural land could increase the amount of carbon stored in these soils and contribute significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research published in a special issue of Waste Management & Research.

Carbon sequestration in soil has been recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the European Commission as one of the possible measures through which greenhouse gas emissions can be mitigated.

As thousands flock to ‘Fairtrade Fortnight’ events all over Britain, Free Trade Nation, a new book by Professor Frank Trentmann, Director of the Economic and Social Research Council-funded Cultures of Consumption programme, shows that ethical consumerism was already flourishing over a century ago.

Then, it was Free Trade that brought millions of Britons onto the streets, promoting peace, justice and democracy.

‘Today, Free Trade is often viewed as the new slavery,’ says Professor Trentmann. ‘Look at the anti-globalisation demonstrations at the WTO and G8 summits. People see Fairtrade as the way to peace and justice. Fairtrade is cool, even sexy, and attracts widespread support from eco-warriors to rock stars. But what people don’t know is that Free Trade was once an equally popular movement, and similarly seen as the path to democracy.’

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, February 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Story Highlights - Captaris unveils new capture, imaging and routing technologies - Special training on Fax over IP solutions and on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server will be offered to all attendees - AIIM ECM Practitioner certification training hosted in parallel to the event

Microbiologist Carl Woese is well known as an iconoclast. Indeed, few biologists have so thoroughly shaken the tree of life as he did when he proposed that there are not two major branches -- prokaryotes, whose cells lack nuclei, and eukaryotes who possess nuclei, including all animals, plants, fungi, and protists -- but rather three. "Prokaryotes", Woese argued, do not represent a cohesive category, and should be split into two deeply divergent lineages: the Bacteria, with which everyone is reasonably familiar, and the Archaea, superficially similar organisms that are less commonly encountered as many of them reside in extreme environments. What's more, studies of genetic data suggested that the Archaea are actually more closely related to eukaryotes -- including humans -- than they are to bacteria.

Woese's three-domain tree of life. From Wikimedia Commons.

At 79 years of age, Woese is still shaking things up. Most recently, he stated in an interview with Wired that,

My feeling is that evolution shouldn't be taught at the lower grades. You don't teach quantum mechanics in the grade schools. One has to be quite educated to work with these concepts; what they pass on as evolution in high schools is nothing but repetitious tripe that teachers don't understand.

A healthy individual loses around a hundred hairs a day. Nothing to worry about as long as they are constantly replaced and the losses occur evenly around the whole scalp. But when hair loss goes well beyond this level it can become quite a problem for those affected – not only superficially in terms of looks but also psychologically.

A breakthrough on the hair front has now been made by an international research team headed by scientists at the University of Bonn. After six years of research they have succeeded in identifying a gene that is responsible for a rare hereditary form of hair loss known as Hypotrichosis simplex.

The scientists are the first to identify a receptor that plays a role in hair growth. They now hope that their research findings will lead to new therapies that will work with various forms of hair loss.

Each year, technologies initially intended for space exploration come into our everyday lives - if you still haven't tried Tang or pens that write upside down, you are living in a cave.

One innovation, which physicians for astronauts have shared with their terrestrial brethren, is a special suit called “Penguin.” After minor modifications, the “Penguin” suit has become the “Regent” suit and turns out to be an efficient therapeutic agent for rehabilitation of patients after a stroke.

Hypokinetic motor syndrome developed with cosmonauts who stayed for long periods in the weightlessness of orbit.

Bacteria get bad press, with those found in water often linked to illness and disease. But researchers at The University of Nottingham are using these tiny organisms alongside the very latest membrane filtration techniques to improve and refine water cleaning technology.

These one-celled organisms eat the contaminants present in water — whether it is being treated prior to industrial use or even for drinking — in a process called bioremediation.