SAN DIEGO, California, December 20 /PRNewswire/ --

- First Molecular Test to Simultaneously Identify Staphylococcus aureus and Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus from Nasal and Wound Specimens

GENEVA, Switzerland, December 20 /PRNewswire/ --

- Flamel's Medusa(R) Technology Designed to Allow Less Frequent Administration of Therapeutic Proteins and Peptides

SUNNYVALE, California, December 20 /PRNewswire/ --

- Music-Centric Social Networking Community Expands Language Offerings in Polish, German, Portuguese and Korean

Melodis Corp., a leader in search and sound recognition technologies, today announced the availability of Midomi.com in German, Korean, Portuguese and Polish. This latest advancement allows people to find, share, and record versions of music in these languages just in time for the holidays.

Tufts University researchers have updated their Food Guide Pyramid for Older Adults to correspond with the USDA food pyramid, now known as MyPyramid. The Tufts version is specifically designed for older adults and has changed in appearance and content.

The Modified MyPyramid for Older Adults continues to emphasize nutrient-dense food choices and the importance of fluid balance, but has added additional guidance about forms of foods that could best meet the unique needs of older adults and about the importance of regular physical activity.

“Adults over the age of 70 have unique dietary needs,” says first author Alice H. Lichtenstein, D.Sc., director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts (USDA HNRCA).

Researchers at Stanford University report in Genome Biology a new approach to computationally predicting the locations and structures of protein-coding genes in a genome.

Gene finding remains an important problem in biology as scientists are still far from fully mapping the set of human genes. Furthermore, gene maps for other vertebrates, including important model organisms such as mouse, are much more incomplete than the human annotation. The new technique, known as CONTRAST (CONditionally TRAined Search for Transcripts), works by comparing a genome of interest to the genomes of several related species.

What could be a greater test of the limits of human physiology than the Olympics? To mark the 2008 games in Beijing, the Journal of Physiology present a special issue focusing on the science behind human athleticism and endurance.

This unique collection of original research and in-depth reviews examines the genes that make a champion, the physiology of elite athletes, limits to performance and how they might be overcome.

Excess body heat is a barrier to performance in many sports, and a novel study by Romain Meeusen et al.1 shows that both the neurotransmitter systems have an important impact on the control and perception of thermoregulation.

Using observations from ESO’s VLT, astronomers were able for the first time to reconstruct the site of a flare on a solar-like star located 150 light years away - about ten million times further away from us than the Sun is. The study of this young star, BO Microscopii, will help scientists better understand the youth of our own star.

BO Microscopii is a young star with a mass about 90% of the mass of our Sun. It is located 150 light years away towards the Microscope constellation. 'Speedy Mic', as it is called, got its name because of its very fast rotation. The object rotates 66 times as fast as our Sun, which results in much stronger magnetic fields than ours.

SAN MATEO, California, December 20 /PRNewswire/ --

NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N) announced today the initial public offering of 6,200,000 shares of its common stock at a price of US$26.00 per share. NetSuite and certain selling stockholders have also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 930,000 shares to cover over-allotments. NetSuite's common stock will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "N" on Thursday, December 20, 2007.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20021024/SFTH024LOGO)

Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC acted as sole book-running manager for the offering and W.R. Hambrecht + Co., LLC acted as co-manager.

Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have corrected key symptoms of mental retardation and autism in mice.

The report in Neuron also indicates that a certain class of drugs could have the same effect. These drugs are not yet approved by the FDA, but will soon be entering into human clinical trials.

Fragile X syndrome (FXS), affecting 100,000 Americans, is the most common inherited cause of mental retardation and autism. The MIT researchers corrected FXS in mice modeling the disease. “These findings have major therapeutic implications for fragile X syndrome and autism,” said study lead author Mark F. Bear, director of the Picower Institute and Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT.

The seemingly inefficient way our bodies replace worn-out cells is a defense against cancer, according to new research.

Having the neighboring cell just split into two identical daughter cells would seem to be the simplest way to keep bodies from falling apart.

However that would be a recipe for uncontrolled growth, said John W. Pepper of The University of Arizona in Tucson. We wrote of the paper by Pepper and his colleagues,, "Animal Cell Differentiation Patterns Suppress Somatic Evolution", last week.

"If there were only one cell type in the group, it would act like an evolving population of cells.