SOUTHAMPTON, England, September 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Global leader in personal satellite navigation (PND) Garmin is proud to be the headline sponsor of the 2008 Garmin T3 Gadget Awards.

The awards, which celebrate the hottest gadgets and coolest technologies, have been open for public voting via the T3 website. With many winners chosen through a reader vote, these awards separate the year's highlights from the hype.

The winners of the technology 'Oscars' will be crowned on the 9th October at London's Intercontinental, Park Lane amidst the backdrop of gadgets, celebrities, T3 cover girls and the Great British media.

READING, England, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- Network Provides Foundation for Advanced IP Services

Melexis, a Belgium-based semiconductor supplier for the automotive industry, has chosen a fully managed IP network from Verizon Business to enhance its global communications capabilities.

Verizon Private IP will connect more than 800 Melexis employees at 12 locations in Asia, Europe and the U.S. The highly scalable, fully managed network also offers a firm foundation on which the company can deploy future advanced IP communications, including voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) applications.

CARDIFF, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- FemtoLab(TM) Will Provide Customer Experience Testing of Voice, Video and Data Quality

Epitiro, the global broadband communications authority, announced today that its FemtoLab(TM) solution has been selected by ip.access Ltd. to provide voice, data and video quality testing of its Oyster 3G(TM) femtocell solution.

FemtoLab(TM), part of Epitiro's Femtocell Test Suite, provides automated, time-synchronised triple-play testing and reporting. Actual customer experience measurements such as voice quality mean opinion score (PESQ-MOS) and data quality metrics (throughput, jitter, latency and packet loss) are provided in real-time within test environments that include GSM, CDMA, CDMA2000, HSPA, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE.

DUBLIN, Ireland, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- Extreme Fever Imminent

DUBLIN, Ireland, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

PopCap Games, the leading developer and publisher of casual games, today announced the immediate availability of Peggle Nights at http://www.popcap.com. The game is the much-anticipated follow-up to the original Peggle game - named one of the top twenty videogames of 2007 according to the Guinness World Records 2008 Gamers Edition.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have transformed cells from human skin into cells that produce insulin, the hormone used to treat diabetes.

The breakthrough may one day lead to new treatments or even a cure for the millions of people affected by the disease, researchers say.

The approach involves reprogramming skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, or cells that can give rise to any other fetal or adult cell type, and then inducing them to differentiate, or transform, into cells that perform a particular function – in this case, secreting insulin.

The skeleton of a man discovered by archaeologists in a shallow grave on a construction site at the University of York could be one of one of Britain’s earliest victims of tuberculosis. He was interred in a shallow scoop in a flexed position, on his right side. Radiocarbon dating suggests that he died in the fourth century.

He was aged 26-35 years, suffered from iron deficiency anemia during childhood and was shorter than the average Roman male at 5 feet 4 inches.

Detailed analysis of the skeleton by Malin Holst, of York Osteoarchaeology Ltd, revealed that a likely cause of death was tuberculosis which affected the man’s spine and pelvis. She says that it is possible that he contracted the disease in childhood from infected meat or milk or the infection could have been inhaled into the lungs. The disease then lay dormant until adulthood when the secondary phase took its toll.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers: As the dominoes of the financial sector continue to fall at an alarming rate and the Federal Reserve attempts to forestall a systemic meltdown of the domestic financial network, University of Arkansas economists find that a network approach to the study of financial “contagion” – the transmission and impact of financial crises – may be applied to understand the current turmoil in the U.S. banking sector and the need for a systemwide response by the Fed.

A new study by Raja Kali and Javier Reyes, economics professors in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, reveals that integration in the global financial network is a double-edged sword. On one hand, being well connected to the network can make a country more vulnerable to systemic shocks. However, this same connectedness also is associated with an increased ability to dissipate economic shocks to the system. Kali and Reyes reached these conclusions by studying how international financial crises travel though the network of global trading relationships.

VIENNA, Austria, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- Decillion and Microsoft collaboration delivers enterprise value with a SWIFT-based messaging platform covering payments, cash management, corporate actions and securities trades for White Outsourcing.

Today at Sibos 2008, Microsoft Corp. announced that White Outsourcing Pty. Ltd., a provider of outsourced financial and accounting services to Australian fund managers, has chosen a hosted solution based on the Microsoft Application Platform. The new solution will provide White Outsourcing with straight-through processing of financial transactions to and from the SWIFT Alliance Gateway, enabling it to achieve operational excellence and drive cost effectiveness in its processing of SWIFT-related messages.

CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

Three Rivers Pharmaceuticals, LLC announced today that it has signed a definitive license agreement with Amgen Inc. to expand its commercial rights to the hepatitis C drug Infergen. Three Rivers Pharmaceuticals will obtain commercial rights to Infergen in all markets except Japan. In addition, Three Rivers Pharmaceuticals will obtain commercial rights to China effective March 31, 2009. Three Rivers Pharmaceuticals currently has commercial rights to Infergen in the United States and Canada.

VIENNA, Austria, September 17 /PRNewswire/ --

- Microsoft to enable transport, management and exchange of over 4 million SWIFT transactions per year.

Microsoft Corp. today announced at Sibos 2008 that the Polish National Depository for Securities (KDPW) is implementing Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT for the transport, management and exchange of more than 4 million SWIFT transactions per year. As the central institution responsible for the management and supervision of clearing and settlement in Poland, KDPW will use Microsoft's leading solution for financial messaging integration, leveraging BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT to help about 10 domestic and global customers efficiently and effectively connect to SWIFT.