LONDON, October 2 /PRNewswire/ --

- Free Guide From Level Four Aims to Assist Banks to Successfully Outsource ATM Testing

For several decades, scientists have thought that the Solar System formed as a result of a shock wave from an exploding star — a supernova — that triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud that contracted to form the Sun and the planets.

Models of this formation process have only worked under the simplifying assumption that the temperatures during the violent events remained constant but astrophysicists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) say their new model says that a supernova could indeed have triggered the Solar System’s formation under the more likely conditions of rapid heating and cooling.

As the world looks for more energy, the oil industry will need more refined tools for discoveries in places where searches have never before taken place, geologists say. One such tool is a new sediment curve (which shows where sediment-on-the-move is deposited), derived from sediments of the Paleozoic Era 542 to 251 million years ago, scientists report in this week's Science. The sediment curve covers the entire Paleozoic Era.

"The sediment curve is of interest to industry, and also to scientists in academia," said Bilal Haq, lead author of the paper and a marine geologist at the National Science Foundation (NSF), "as the rise and fall of sea-level form the basis for intepretations of Earth history based on stratigraphy."

LONDON, October 2 /PRNewswire/ --

- London Business School Responds Directly to Student and Recruiter Needs

London Business School has today announced the launch of a ground-breaking new addition to its existing degree programme portfolio. The new Masters in Management degree will welcome students from around the world for its first intake in August 2009.

The Masters in Management has been designed with an intense focus on what students and recruiters need in today's business environment. As one of the world's leading business schools, London Business School identified the need to equip students with both the intellectual rigour and the practical skills needed in today's competitive marketplace.

PARIS, October 2 /PRNewswire/ --

- European Search Technology Centre will be focused on developing a world-class search offering.

Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer continued his five-city European trip today with additional announcements of plans to step up investment and recruitment in the region. Following an earlier announcement in Norway, creating jobs focused on innovation in enterprise search, Microsoft today announced further details on the plan to open a new European Search Technology Centre (STC).

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO )

LONDON, October 2 /PRNewswire/ --

Splunk (http://www.splunk.com), the IT Search company, today announces the appointment of Brian Haynes as Vice President Sales in the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region. The appointment of Haynes follows Splunk's continued and exceptional growth -- in Q2 alone Splunk added 94 new customers and upgraded 45 existing customers to higher data indexing levels. The company ended Q2 with more than 750 enterprise, service provider and government agency customers worldwide, including more than 60 in EMEA.

WATFORD, England, October 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Doing business online has been the mission of Novae Group Plc ('Novae') since deploying Salmon's Application Framework for Insurance (SAFI(TM)) for its underwriting business in 2004. Novae have now launched its Motor Fleet line-of-business on SAFI, extending the web-based platform to get a range of new products to market quickly and efficiently.

Steve Fookes, IT Director Novae said, "The introduction of Novae's Motor Fleet Underwriting Service is an opportunity to strengthen our market position. We needed a completely integrated IT infrastructure that could be aligned across the business which was cost effective and would support ongoing growth."

Belief in God encourages people to be helpful, honest and generous, but only under certain psychological conditions, according to University of British Columbia researchers who analyzed the past three decades of social science research.

Religious people are more likely than the non-religious to engage in prosocial behavior – acts that benefit others at a personal cost – when it enhances the individual's reputation or when religious thoughts are freshly activated in the person's mind, say UBC social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff

A record two-hour observation of Jupiter using a new technique to remove atmospheric blur has produced the sharpest whole-planet picture ever taken from the ground. The series of 265 snapshots reveal changes in Jupiter's smog-like haze, probably in response to a planet-wide upheaval more than a year ago.

Being able to correct wide field images for atmospheric distortions has been a goal for decades. The new images of Jupiter prove the value of the advanced technology used by the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) prototype instrument mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), which uses two or more guide stars instead of one as references to remove the blur caused by atmospheric turbulence over a field of view thirty times larger than existing techniques.

Telescopes on the ground suffer from a blurring effect introduced by atmospheric turbulence. This turbulence causes the stars to twinkle in a way that delights the poets but frustrates the astronomers, since it smears out the fine details of the images. However, with Adaptive Optics (AO) techniques, this major drawback can be overcome so that the telescope produces images that are as sharp as theoretically possible, i.e., approaching conditions in space.

Eating too many calories throws critical portions of the brain out of whack, reveals a study in the journal Cell. That response in the brain's hypothalamus — the "headquarters" for maintaining energy balance — can happen even in the absence of any weight gain, according to new studies done in mice.

The brain response involves a molecular player, called IKKß/NF-?B, which is known to drive metabolic inflammation in other body tissues. The discovery suggests that treatments designed to block this pathway in the brain might fight the ever-increasing spread of obesity and related diseases, including diabetes and heart disease.

"This pathway is usually present but inactive in the brain," said Dongsheng Cai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cai said he isn't sure exactly why IKKß/NF-?B is there and ready to spring into action in the brain. He speculates it may have been an important element for innate immunity, the body's first line of defense against pathogenic invaders, at some time in the distant past.