LONDON, September 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Retail Decisions (ReD), a card issuer and a world leader in card fraud prevention and payment processing is pleased to announce a new research and development project in conjunction with City University London, the UK's leading research centre in neural computing. The project will focus on enhancing and advancing ReD's neural technology PRISM(R).

PRISM(R) is ReD's proprietary neural technology developed by Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr. Leon Cooper. The PRISM product line utilises both predictive neural and rules-based technologies and is designed to keep pace with the ever-changing patterns of behaviour in the area of financial fraud.

VIENNA, BRUSSELS and LONDON, September 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Dexia Belgium has joined the VocaLink Euro CSM (Clearing & Settlement Mechanism). Today, Dexia Belgium signed a contract with VocaLink for transaction processing. Dexia Belgium will use the VocaLink Euro CSM to support the processing needs of its customers.

Erwin Ruymaekers, payments director at Dexia Belgium said: "VocaLink has been able to convince us of its capabilities and quality of service, enabling us to sign this contract today. VocaLink offers a range of value-added services that we believe will be attractive to our customers, going beyond clearing and settlement and the basic requirements of SEPA compliance."

For the first time in waters surrounding New York City, the beckoning calls of endangered fin, humpback and North Atlantic right whales have been recorded, according to experts from the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

The recorders were placed about 13 miles from the New York Harbor entrance and off the shores of Fire Island. Information about the seasonal presence of whales will help New York state policymakers develop management plans to protect them. Knowing the whales' travel paths will help ship traffic managers avoid whale collisions in New York waters. Further, the study will characterize New York waters' acoustic environment and examine whether underwater noises, including shipping, affect the whales.

JOENSUU, Finland, September 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Blancco Data Centre Edition Keeps Data Centres Productive With Fast, Simple and Secure Data Destruction for 200 Plus Disks at Once

Blancco, the global leader in data erasure and end-of-lifecycle solutions, today announced the availability of Blancco Data Centre Edition, secure data destruction that also enable safe reuse of the hard drives in mass storage environments. The software can simultaneously erase over two hundred hard drives, offering a safe and cost-effective way to manage IT assets while meeting all major erasure standards for high-end server and storage area network (SAN) environments.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080912/320621 )

An international team of scientists predict that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a disk of ‘dark matter’, in a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Astronomers Dr. Justin Read, Professor George Lake and Oscar Agertz of the University of Zurich, and Dr. Victor Debattista of the University of Central Lancashire used the results of a supercomputer simulation to deduce the presence of this disk. They explain how it could allow physicists to directly detect and identify the nature of dark matter for the first time.

Unlike the familiar ‘normal’ matter that makes up stars, gas and dust, ‘dark’ matter is invisible but its presence can be inferred through its gravitational influence on its surroundings. Physicists believe that it makes up 22% of the mass of the Universe (compared with the 4% of normal matter and 74% comprising the mysterious ‘dark energy’). But, despite its pervasive influence, no one is sure what dark matter consists of.

Genetic studies involving the long term storage and study of human samples hold great promise for medical research—but they also pose new threats to individuals such as uninsurability, unemployability, and discrimination, say Matthias Wjst (Institute of Genetic Medicine, Bozen, Italy) and colleagues.

They argue that the traditional informed consent process—in which the researcher counsels potential study participants about the risks and benefits of taking part in a study—may no longer be appropriate when dealing with long-term studies using biological materials.

Johns Hopkins scientists report success in significantly suppressing levels of the "hunger hormone" ghrelin in pigs using a minimally invasive means of chemically vaporizing the main vessel carrying blood to the top section, or fundus, of the stomach. An estimated 90 percent of the body's ghrelin originates in the fundus, which can't make the hormone without a good blood supply.

"With gastric artery chemical embolization, called GACE, there's no major surgery," says Aravind Arepally, M.D., clinical director of the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design and associate professor of radiology and surgery at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. "In our study in pigs, this procedure produced an effect similar to bariatric surgery by suppressing ghrelin levels and subsequently lowering appetite."

When it comes to aggression, boys are physical and girls are social, it is said, but a new analysis of almost 150 studies of aggression in children and adolescents has found that there's more overlap than stereotypes lead us to believe.

Physical aggression - hitting - is something boys are more likely to do while girls are more likely to spread rumors, gossip, and intentionally exclude others, called indirect, relational, or social aggression.

The analysis of 148 studies, which comprised almost 74,000 children and adolescents and were carried out largely in schools, looked at both direct aggression and indirect aggression and was conducted by Noel A. Card, assistant professor of family studies and human development at the University of Arizona, and researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Kansas.

Young girls from poor neighborhoods with conduct issues are more likely to initiate sex at a young age, according to a new study by researchers from the Université de Montréal, the University of New Brunswick and Tufts University, published in the journal Child Development. The study found that troubled girls living in poor neighborhoods were more likely to engage in sexual intercourse in early adolescence and also to be doing so with older boys.

These teen girls from poor neighborhoods with a history of conduct problems were more likely to associate with deviant peers and to be initiated into sex by males that were three years older or more. "Girls with a history of conduct problems were found to be more likely to have deviant and older male friends when they lived in a disadvantaged context," said lead author Véronique Dupéré, who completed the research at the Université de Montréal. "Deviant peers are thought to provide a pool of willing partners and cultivate a sense that early sexual activity is desirable."

Houses made of hemp, timber or straw could help combat climate change by reducing the carbon footprint of building construction, according to researchers at the University of Bath. The construction industry is a major contributor of environmental pollutants, with buildings and other build infrastructure contributing to around 19% of the UK’s eco-footprint, they say.

Researchers at the BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials are researching low carbon alternatives to building materials currently used by the construction industry. Although timber is used as a building material in many parts of the world, historically it is used less in the UK than in other countries.