LONDON, October 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- A Live EDGE Energy Efficiency Conference will be Hosted Online on 15 October 2008

Premier Farnell plc (LSE:PFL), the leading multi-channel, high service distributor and its companies (Farnell, Newark, Premier Electronics, Farnell-Newark CPC, and MCM), today announced that design entries are now being accepted at http://www.Live-EDGE.com for the international design competition, Live EDGE - Electronic Design for the Global Environment. The competition invites electronic design engineers, students and hobbyists to design products utilizing electronic components, which will positively impact the environment.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081001/323021 )

MAIDENHEAD, England, October 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Toys R Us has announced its top toy predictions for Christmas with High School Musical, Hannah Montana, Ben 10, In The Night Garden and Nintendo Wii expected to be topping Christmas wish lists this year.

Toys R Us will be offering outstanding value for budget-conscious families with many top toys cheaper than they were last year and virtually all electronic products both lower in price and with higher specifications than ever before.

LOS ANGELES, October 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- Malaysian Plantation is First to Receive International Certificate for Responsible Practices

The American Palm Oil Council (APOC) today announced that a Malaysian palm oil plantation has been certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the world's only international association formed to codify sustainable industry practices, as the first plantation to adopt the strictest standards of sustainability in its production of palm oil.

ESPOO, Finland, October 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortum contributes EUR 400,000 to the John Nurminen Foundation's Clean Baltic Sea project aiming at reducing phosphorous discharges from municipal sources in Poland. The project is carried out in co-operation with the Swedish Foundation Baltic Sea 2020 and Polish cities.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080930/323003 )

RICHMOND, California, October 1 /PRNewswire/ --

Lumiphore, Inc., a biotechnology leader in the development of new proprietary fluorescent metal-lanthanide technology for use in high-value applications, announced that it has signed an exclusive agreement with Biophor Diagnostics, Inc., Redwood City, California to apply Lumiphore products in diagnostic tests for drugs of abuse.

Under the agreement, Biophor Diagnostics holds the exclusive worldwide rights to Lumi4(TM) technology in current and future diagnostic tests of this type. Lumi4(TM) fluorescent metal-reporter compounds bring increased sensitivity, stability, and robustness to assays in the drugs of abuse testing market through their excellent fade-resistant photophysical properties.

MicroRNAs, the tiny molecules that fine-tune gene expression, were first discovered in 1993, but it turns out they've been around for a billion years. Evidence published in Nature by scientists in the lab of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Member and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David Bartel provides a window into the early evolution of these key regulators, placing their origin within the earliest of animal lineages.

The research also suggests that microRNAs present early on have undergone extensive changes, which likely have altered their functions across various lineages.

The effect of media violence on behavior is not as straightforward as you might think. Although many studies have been conducted examining the link between violence on TV and aggressive behavior, most of these studies have overlooked several other potentially significant factors, including the dramatic context of the violence and the type of violence depicted as well as the race and ethnicity of the viewers.

In a new study appearing in the September issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists Seymour Feshbach from the University of California, Los Angeles and June Tangney from George Mason University investigated the effect that exposure to violent TV programs has on negative behavior in children from different ethnic backgrounds.

When a cell's chromosomes lose their ends, the cell usually kills itself to stem the genetic damage - University of Utah biologists say their discovery about how those cells evade suicide and start down the path to cancer may lead to new treatments.

A new study of fruit flies is the first to show in animals that losing just one telomere, the end of a chromosome, can lead to many abnormalities in a cell's chromosomes, which are strands of DNA that carry genes.

"The essential point is that loss of a single telomere may be a primary event that puts a cell on the road to cancer," says Kent Golic, a professor of biology at the University of Utah and senior author of the study, published in the journal Genetics.

A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry says that women who smoke are at greater risk of developing major depressive disorder. Australian researchers from the University of Melbourne and Geelng's Barwon Health assessed a group of 1043 Australian women, whose health had been monitored for a decade as part of the Geelong Osteoporosis Study.

On their ten year follow up participants were given an additional test of a psychiatric assessment.

Results revealed that women with depression were more likely to have been smokers than those without depression. Compared with non-smokers, the likelihood for developing depression more than doubled for heavy smokers (those who smoked more than 20 cigarettes a day).

Clear air turbulence (CAT) is energy associated with gravity waves — phenomena in the atmosphere that look like ocean waves but which can occur in clear air. They can be created by air flow over mountains, frontal boundaries or other causes.

The type of gravity wave that John Knox, an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of Georgia, and his colleagues identified as a possible source of airplane flight bumpiness comes from a different source; these waves are spontaneously generated and associated with jet streams at high altitudes, near cruising levels for airplanes.

Their new method outlined in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences could help pilots chart new courses around these patches of rough but clear air that can turn an otherwise unremarkable flight into a nightmare.