ARMONK, New York, June 8 /PRNewswire/ --

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has completed the deployment of an infrastructure that will modernize the delivery of government services for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The multi-year eGovernment Service Bus (GSB) project delivers the core communication and security infrastructure for the Yesser eGovernment Program, the Kingdom's long-term modernization of all government services. This program will eventually provide everyone in the Kingdom with access to government services from anyplace and at anytime, replacing the current system of time-consuming, manual processes.

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HAIFA, Israel, June 7 /PRNewswire/ --

Oil Refineries Ltd. (TASE: ORL.TA) (ORL or the Company), Israel's largest oil refiner, announced today that the Israel Corporation (Israel Corp.) and Israel Petrochemical Enterprises Ltd. (IPE) have completed the signing of a joint control agreement in ORL between the Israel Corp., IPE and Petroleum Capital Holdings (fully owned by IPE) (Petroleum), as well as signed an addendum to the Control Agreement in the Company.

SINGAPORE, June 7 /PRNewswire/ --

- Designed for Technophobes, the Jabra BT2080 is Effortless to use - the Epitome of Simplicity

Jabra, a world leader in innovative headset solutions, has today launched its latest no nonsense handsfree device, the all new Jabra BT2080. Perfect for the day-to-day headset user, the headset solves all the small, fiddly problems that can put users off using a headset, and combines the two outstanding qualities that Jabra is best known for; style and ease of use. Not only will you look good when using it, but you will be sure to master the headset in next to no time.

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It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything!

A trivial demonstration of the above fact is the following. Consider you are measuring the mass of the top quark (why, I know you do it at least once a week, just to keep mentally fit). You could say you have no idea whatsoever of what the top mass is, but you are capable of guessing, and your best guess is that the top mass is  twice the mass of the W boson: after all, you have read somewhere that the top quark decays into a W boson plus other stuff, so a good first-order estimate is 2x80.4= 160.8 GeV.

BERLIN, June 7 /PRNewswire/ --

Amgen Inc. (Nasdaq: AMGN) today released the results of a new study comparing Nplate(R) (romiplostim) to the medical standard of care (SOC) in non-splenectomised adult patients with chronic immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP). Chronic ITP is a serious autoimmune disorder characterised by low platelet counts in the blood (thrombocytopenia), which can lead to serious bleeding events. The study results show Nplate significantly reduced the incidences of splenectomy and treatment failures in non-splenectomised adult patients with chronic ITP when compared to medical SOC. The results were presented today as an oral presentation at the 14th congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA abstract #1672).

According to research presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, in the presence of free access to food, sleep restricted subjects reported decrease in appetite, food cravings and food consumption; however, they gained weight over the course of the study. Thus, the finding suggests that energy intake exceeded energy expenditure during the sleep restriction

Results indicate that people whose sleep was restricted experienced an average weight gain of 1.31 kilograms over the 11 days of the study. Of the subjects with restricted sleep who reported a change in their appetite and food consumption, more than 70 percent said that it decreased by day 5 of the study. A group of well rested control subjects did not experience the weight gain.
Trains, planes, buses and automobiles are more than just exhaust, when it comes to the full scope of environmental damage. There is a full life-cycle of processes associated with getting from Point A to Point B that we have difficult quantifying but in an article published today in Environmental Research Letters, researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, say they have created a framework to help us calculate the true environmental cost of travel.
Both boys and girls have issues but boys are  getting a raw deal, according to Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the US.

It's commonplace to hear about gender-specific issues involving girls but when there are concerns about issues primarily affecting boys, responses tend to veer toward sexism.  Issues impacting boys have been neglected by policy makers, she says. Her review of issues characterizing American boyhood, how they compare to those affecting girls, and the lack of initiatives in place to address them was published in the June issue of Springer's journal Gender Issues.
Activists tend to point to someone else's job and say it's for the good of the planet that it disappear.   But everyone need to cut back, including climate scientists, says a researcher who, ironically, regularly flies north to study the health of caribou.

Scientists studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic need to consider ways to reduce their own carbon footprints,  according to postdoctoral fellow Ryan Brook  in the June issue of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America.  Brook calls on scientists to show leadership by examining and sharing ways to reduce the impact of working in polar regions.