WELWYN GARDEN CITY, England, July 21 /PRNewswire/ --

- Log on to our Summer Holidays Web TV Show to Find Out How to Avoid Spending Beyond Your Means Keeping the Kids Entertained

- Chat date: Thursday 24th July - Chat time: 12.30pm

As the school summer holidays kick off this week, the average British family of four can look forward to a massive dent in their pockets simply from keeping the kids entertained for 6 weeks.

Entertaining the kids with trips to swimming pools, theme parks and bowling alleys all add up, with numbers reaching worrying heights, according to new research by Bounty, the UK's favourite parenting club. These are the sorts of costs that many families struggle to afford, particularly at the moment.

Few things say as much about our culture as the food we eat. A new book, Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut by Paul R. Mullins, Ph.D., an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis anthropologist, explores the development of America's consumer culture through our relationship with the doughnut; beloved by all but a symbol of temptation and unhealthiness to some.

It's unknown when in in pre-history someone dropped flour into oil but it happened and the ancestor of the doughnut was born. Since then, every culture has fried flour and many add something sweet to the dough.

Mullins is certainly a fan of his subject. He enjoys his doughnuts at an Indianapolis mom and pop shop which has been serving up those fried delicacies for 55 years, though he is also an avid runner who logs approximately 45 miles per week, often past that doughnut shop.

In a major step in understanding how the nervous system and the immune system interact, scientists at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research have identified a new anatomical path through which the brain and the spleen communicate.

The spleen, once thought to be an unnecessary bit of tissue, is now regarded as an organ where important information from the nervous reaches the immune system. Understanding this process could ultimately lead to treatments that target the spleen to send the right message when fighting human disease.

Nutrients from the Amazon River spread well beyond the continental shelf and drive carbon capture in the deep ocean, according to the authors of a multi-year study. The finding does not change estimates of the oceans' total carbon uptake, but it reveals the surprisingly large role of tropical oceans and major rivers.

The tropical North Atlantic had been considered a net emitter of carbon from the respiration of ocean life. A 2007 study estimated that ocean's contribution to the atmosphere at 30 million tons of carbon annually.

Geoscientists at the California Institute of Technology have come up with a new explanation for the formation of monsoons, proposing an overhaul of a theory about the cause of the seasonal pattern of heavy winds and rainfall that essentially had held firm for more than 300 years.

The traditional idea of monsoon formation was developed in 1686 by English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley, namesake of Halley's Comet. In Halley's model, monsoons are viewed as giant sea-breeze circulations, driven by the differences in heat capacities between land and ocean surfaces that, upon heating by sunlight, lead to temperature differences between warmer land and cooler ocean surfaces--for example, between the Indian subcontinent and the oceans surrounding it.

LONDON, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- New research from PowWowNow finds that businesses waste GBP55m of the GBP210m spent each year on conferences-by-'phone, according to a new study.

There's no doubt that 'phone conferencing is an important aspect of mobile working. Workers at all levels need to be able to reliably stay in touch with co-workers and clients. And it's a powerful indication of how important it has become, particularly to people running small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs - typically up to 100 staff), that British business now spends a staggering GBP210m on conference call charges every year!

LONDON, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Professor Terje Pedersen (Ullevål University Hospital, Oslo, Norway), lead investigator for the Simvastatin and Ezetimibe in Aortic Stenosis (SEAS) Study, will provide an update on the study on Monday the 21st July.

Also present in London will be Sir Richard Peto (Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology and Co-director of the Clinical Trials Service Unit, University of Oxford) Professor Rory Collins (BHF Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and Co-director of the Clinical Trials Service Unit) and Professor Ingar Holme, PhD, (Professor of Biostatistics, University of Oslo and Ullevål University Hospital, Oslo, Norway), SEAS steering committee statistician.

PALO ALTO, California and SYDNEY, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Kx Systems, the leader in high-performance database and timeseries analysis, is delighted to announce that it has signed a partnership agreement with Hologram Business Intelligence, the Australian-based supplier of business performance management solutions.

The relationship between the two companies goes back a long way and means that they already have an in-depth understanding of each other's products and businesses. The deal will see Hologram taking on the sales, support and consultancy of Kx's Kdb+ database and its q language in Asia-Pacific. Kx products may also be incorporated into Hologram's offerings in the future.

BREDA, The Netherlands, July 21 /PRNewswire/ --

- Singapore Seminar About Cost Reduction in Benefits Freight Audit Payment

The fast growing Dutch company ControlPay is expanding its activities on the Asian market. The freight audit solutions provider intends to open two new offices in Asia within two years and is to host a seminar in Singapore on August 12 to discuss the benefits of automated freight invoice audit processes.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080721/313798 )

For generations, people have consumed cranberry juice, convinced of its power to ward off urinary tract infections, though the exact mechanism of its action has not been well understood. A new study by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) reveals that the juice changes the thermodynamic properties of bacteria in the urinary tract, creating an energy barrier that prevents the microorganisms from getting close enough to latch onto cells and initiate an infection.

The study, published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces: B, was conducted by Terri Camesano, associate professor of chemical engineering at WPI, and a team of graduate students, including PhD candidate Yatao Liu. They exposed two varieties of E. coli bacteria, one with hair-like projections known as fimbriae and one without, to different concentrations of cranberry juice. Fimbriae are present on a number of virulent bacteria, including those that cause urinary tract infections, and are believed to be used by bacteria to form strong bonds with cells.