LEEDS, England, February 6 /PRNewswire/ --

- With Photo

Masternaut Three X has been rated as one of Britain's best companies to work for. The Leeds-based vehicle tracking firm has received a Best Companies 2008 star status accreditation for its outstanding workplaces and investment in people. Masternaut Three X was just one of five companies in the business services sector to receive the accolade.

Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago in order to find out how they were able to become as large as they did. Such gigantic animals should not have existed.

Their recipe; take 200 milligrams of dried and ground equisetum, ten milliliters of digestive juice from sheep's rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly.

In this way they obtained an artificial 'dinosaur rumen'. With this apparatus (also used as a ‘Menke gas production technique’ in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these 'sauropod dinosaurs' with their 70 to 100 tons had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average people.

Quantitative modeling of a biological pathway normally involves intense computer simulations to crunch all available data on the dozens of relevant reactions in the pathway, producing a detailed interaction map.

Now an MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by measuring what goes into and out of the system. Such an approach can give researchers an alternative way to look at the inner workings of a complicated biological system-such as a pathway in a cell-and allow them to study systems in their natural state.

The researchers focused on a pathway in yeast that controls cells' response to a specific change in the environment. The resulting model is “the simplest model you can ever reduce these systems to,” said Alexander van Oudenaarden, W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Associate Professor of Physics and senior author of the paper in Science.

When something is moving close to the speed of light, the fastest anything can move, sending ahead information in time to make mid-path flight corrections sounds impossible.

Not quite, say physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

They have developed a way to measure subtle fluctuations in RHIC's particle beams as they speed around their 2.4-mile-circumference high-tech racetrack - and send that information ahead to specialized devices that smooth the fluctuations when the beam arrives.

Older women are more prone to depression and are more likely to remain depressed than older men, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the February Archives of General Psychiatry.

The Yale team also found that women were less likely to die while depressed than older men, indicating that women live longer with depression than men. This factor, along with the higher likelihood of women becoming depressed and remaining depressed, collectively contribute to the higher burden of depression among older women.

Citizen Science – Past, Present & Future, to be held at Vaughan College, the University’s Institute of Lifelong Learning, will showcase longstanding research from the University’s Departments of Biology and Lifelong Learning, as well as from the Rutland Water Nature Reserve, the British Trust for Ornithology, Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and the Earthwatch Institute, all linked with the University.

Its emphasis will be on how ordinary citizens have helped scientific research over the years of the University’s existence. In making this connection, the conference goes back to the very beginnings of Adult Education in Leicester, when Canon Vaughan made academic knowledge – including knowledge of the natural world – available to ordinary working class men and women of Leicester in the 19th Century. The university is proud to continue these traditions throughout the world.

WESTWOOD, Massachusetts, February 6 /PRNewswire/ --

- Stories Reflect How Recovery System Helps Police Combat Vehicle Theft and Benefit Society

BEND, Oregon, February 6 /PRNewswire/ --

Vulcan Power Company today announced the G3 Power Plan, a preliminary plan for green grid transmission upgrades to deliver a "green gigawatt" (1,000 megawatts) of clean geothermal power to Los Angeles and Las Vegas from massive natural steam zones located in northwest Nevada. Maps and full article text can be found at http://www.G3Plan.com.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080206/AQW096) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050314/SFM071LOGO)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, February 6 /PRNewswire/ --

- Microsoft and BT host workshop to help students from six countries turn their software applications into marketable products.

SAN JOSE, California, February 6 /PRNewswire/ --

- Acquisition Expands and Strengthens Atmel's Proprietary Microcontroller Product Portfolio

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Quantum Research Group Ltd. ("Quantum"), the leading independent developer of capacitive sensing IP and solutions for user interfaces. The acquisition of Quantum provides Atmel with an immediate presence in touch sensing, one of the fastest growing markets for microcontrollers. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to Atmel's net income per share in the fourth quarter of 2008 and thereafter.