LONDON, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- First Treatment Licensed for Chorea Associated With Huntington's Disease

Cambridge Laboratories Group Limited ("Cambridge"), the privately owned specialty pharmaceutical company, announces today that XENAZINE(R) (tetrabenazine), the first and only product for the treatment of chorea associated with Huntington's disease, has received approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US. XENAZINE(R) will be distributed in the US by Cambridge's partner Prestwick Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Prestwick").

HAIFA, Israel, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Substantial Sequential Improvement Over the First Quarter 2008

Oil Refineries Ltd. (TASE: ORL.TA) ("Oil Refineries" or the "Company") announced today its financial results for three and six month periods ending June 30, 2008.

Second Quarter Highlights (Compared to first quarter 2008) - Substantial increase in consolidated operating profit to $95 million and in consolidated EBITDA to $114 million - Refining margin USD/bbl 9.2, compared to USD/bbl 3.7 in first quarter 2008 - Average Reuter's quoted Mediterranean Ural Cracking Margin for the quarter totaled USD/bbl 6.3 - On August 13, 2008 General Meeting approved acquisition of 50% balance of Carmel Olefins

Second Quarter 2008

GOTEBORG, Sweden, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Saves Both Time and Administration

Ascom Wireless Solutions continues the technical development of its new Centralized Management for wireless handsets. The concept is already implemented for Ascom's VoWiFi handsets, and will be released in Q4 also in Ascom nextGen IP-DECT handsets.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080325/297903 )

Cocoa flavanols may increase blood flow to the brain, according to new research published in the Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment journal. The researchers suggest that long-term improvements in brain blood flow could impact cognitive behavior, offering future potential for debilitating brain conditions including dementia and stroke.

In a Mars, Inc. study of healthy, older adults ages 59 to 83, Harvard medical scientists found that study participants who regularly drank a cocoa flavanol-rich beverage made using the Mars Cocoapro process had an eight percent increase in brain blood flow after one week, and 10 percent increase after two weeks.

The summer games in Beijing are not the only place where the United States can claim gold medal bragging rights. The sixth International Linguistics Olympiad ended Friday in Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria, and U.S. high school students captured 11 out of 33 awards, including gold medals in individual and team events. This was only the second time the U.S. has ever competed in the event. Their achievement brings a new focus on computational linguistics.

This year's Olympiad featured 16 teams from around the world, including Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden, South Korea and Slovenia. Each problem presented clues about the sounds, words or grammar of a language the students had never studied, such as Micmac, a Native American language spoken in Canada, the New Caledonia languages of Drehu and Cemuhi, as well as several historical Chinese dialects. They were then judged by how accurately and quickly they could untangle the clues to figure out the rules and structures of the languages to solve the problem.

Tetra-Amido Macrocyclic Ligands (TAMLs) are environmentally friendly catalysts with a host of applications for reducing and cleaning up pollutants, and a prime example of "green chemistry."

Carnegie Mellon University's Terry Collins, the catalyst's inventor, believes that the small-molecule catalysts have the potential to be even more effective than previously proven. Collins will discuss how iron-TAMLs (Fe-TAMLs) work and areas for further research, citing evidence from mechanistic and kinetic studies of the catalyst on Monday, Aug. 18 at the 236th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia.

An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen – touted as the clean, green fuel of the future – cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale.

Professor Leone Spiccia, Mr Robin Brimblecombe and Dr Annette Koo from Monash University teamed with Dr Gerhard Swiegers at the CSIRO and Professor Charles Dismukes at Princeton University to develop a system comprising a coating that can be impregnated with a form of manganese, a chemical essential to sustaining photosynthesis in plant life.

SAN FRANCISCO, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Manufacturers of Portable Digital Audio Devices Now Have Access to the Lowest Power, Smallest Form Factor Wireless Design

INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM -- Ozmo Devices, the leading provider of low-power Wi-Fi Personal Area Network (Wi-Fi PAN) solutions, announced today that the company and Wolfson Microelectronics are collaborating to deliver an audio reference design to manufacturers of audio peripherals leveraging Ozmo's Wi-Fi PAN technology. Ozmo Devices' Wi-Fi PAN solution enables connectivity between peripherals such as mice and headsets and Wi-Fi-enabled platforms. The OZMO1000 Audio Reference Design utilizes the Ozmo Devices' OZMO1000 IC and Wolfson Microelectronics' WM8987L low-power CODEC.

Part 2 on The Plausibility of Life

How does evolution shape living things? The fact that evolutionary forces, such as natural selection, can shape living creatures is well-established, but how malleable those creatures are, and what the increments of change are is less well established. We have a fairly good idea of how genes can change, but how does that genetic change translate into physical changes in the shape and functioning of the organism itself - that is, how does genetic change translate into changes in the organism's phenotype?

The authors of The Plausibility of Life, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, argue that this issue has been ignored in evolutionary theory (although they go on to say that it was justifiably ignored for a long time - before modern molecular and cell biology, there was no way to effectively address this question):

What if evolutionary biologists were wrong to think of phenotypic variation as random and unconstrained? How much would it matter if we really understood how genetic variation leads to phenotypic variation, and in particular, how facile or difficult is it to achieve a specific phenotype?

These questions get to the heart of the evolution of complexity.

OXFORD, England, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

This summer, Wytham Woods near Oxford in the UK will become the European hub of an ambitious global research programme into the impacts of climate change on forests.

Earthwatch, the international environmental charity, is pleased to announce the opening of its Europe Regional Climate Centre* as part of the HSBC Climate Partnership. Formed in 2007, the partnership brings together HSBC, the Climate Group, Earthwatch, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and WWF to tackle the urgent threat of climate change on people, water, forests and cities.