BRISTOL, England, July 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Austin Adams, former CIO for JPMorgan Chase, spent most of his 35-year career in banking overseeing technology and operations. In a period of dramatic consolidation, he was involved in more than 90 mergers and responsible for almost 28,000 employees and a multi-billion dollar budget.

On Wednesday 20 August, the man Business 2.0 magazine called "one of the 16 most influential technology people in the world" will be sharing his accumulated knowledge with a host of senior financial executives in a unique, online and interactive interview on MeettheBoss.com, the next generation business-networking tool dedicated to finance.

According to Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, "All free-living organisms host one or more parasites." This can be taken two ways, both of them generally true: a) that each individual multicellular organism hosts at least one individual parasite within its body, and b) that each free-living species plays host to at least one species of parasite that attacks it exclusively. Consider this second point for a moment. For each free living species there is one or more (usually several more) parasite species -- that is, as a category (polyphyletic, obviously), parasites may very well be the most diverse types of organisms on the planet.

Surcharges. those annoying fees like shipping and handling, have been around since the advent of catalogs and remain in the days of the Internet. Everyone hates them but how many of us base our purchasing decision on these bothersome fees?

Quite a lot, it seems. And not just on Ebay, where sellers make a habit of tacking on outrageous handling charges, but in all aspects of commerce. Basically, the less trustworthy the seller, the more inclined a buyer will balk at surcharges.

The new research published in The Journal of Consumer Research was conducted by Amar Cheema, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis, and he suggests that consumers pay more attention to surcharges overall than previously thought.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Crocodiles not Waterlilies Entertainment, LLC, a San Francisco based entertainment company with meaningful content, announced that its CrocPond (TM) brand is locally supporting the Kristi Yamaguchi's Friends and Family ice show slated for October 12 in Phoenix, AZ at the US Airways Center. The show will include very special guest performances by The Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, and Jordan Pruitt and will be nationally televised on NBC-TV at a date to be announced.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080724/AQTH057LOGO-a)

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080724/AQTH057LOGO-b)

NEW YORK, July 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- EU-5 mobile music retail revenues to exceed US$1.4 billion in 2012

Europe's mobile music scene is more advanced than that in the US. While the UK is the biggest individual mobile music market in the EU-5, the other countries -- France, Germany, Italy and Spain -- are reporting sharp growth as well. eMarketer predicts that mobile music retail revenues in the EU-5 will reach over US$1.4 billion by 2012, up from US$267 million in 2007. eMarketer expects ad-supported mobile music in the EU-5 to reach US$170 million in 2012, up from US$4.6 million in 2007.

To see chart, click here:

Mobile Music Spending in the EU-5, by Format, 2007-2012 (millions) http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/images/chart_gifs/095001-096000/095967.gif

Somewhere, people got the idea that girls were not as good at math as boys and that was a cultural issue - discrimination on one side or favoritism on the other - and it had to be fixed, usually with legislation and money for social activists.

Is there any truth to it?

After sifting through mountains of data, including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act, a team of scientists reporting in Science says the answer is 'no.' Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.

CD4+ T lymphocytes, or simply CD4 T cells, are the "brains" of the immune system, coordinating its activity when the body comes under attack. They are also the cells that are attacked by HIV, the devastating virus that causes AIDS and has infected roughly 40 million people worldwide. The virus slowly eats away at CD4 T cells, weakening the immune system.

But the immune systems of HIV/AIDS patients face another enemy as well — stress, which can accelerate CD4 T cell declines. Now, researchers at UCLA report that the practice of mindfulness meditation stopped the decline of CD4 T cells in HIV-positive patients suffering from stress, slowing the progression of the disease. The study was just published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

RESTON, Virginia, July 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- As families hit the road this summer, more will be turning to the mobile device for turn-by-turn directions.

- Mobile map usage growing much faster than online map usage

LONDON, July 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Nearly half of lazy UK fellas believe they come up with their greatest ideas whilst resting on their mattress, whilst 1 in 10 think they find their most useful inspiration on the loo.

The poll also found Britons picked the internet (36%) as the greatest invention or discovery in the world, followed by antibiotics (27%) and computers (20%).

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers were able to witness for the first time the appearance of a shell of dusty gas around a star that had just erupted and follow its evolution for more than 100 days. This provided the astronomers with a new way to estimate the distance of this object and obtain invaluable information on the operating mode of stellar vampires, dense stars that suck material from a companion.

Although novae were first thought to be new stars appearing in the sky, hence their Latin name, they are now understood as signaling the brightening of a small, dense star. Novae occur in double star systems comprising a white dwarf - the end product of a solar-like star - and, generally, a low-mass normal star - a red dwarf. The two stars are so close together that the red dwarf cannot hold itself together and loses mass to its companion. Occasionally, the shell of matter that has fallen onto the ingesting star becomes unstable, leading to a thermonuclear explosion which makes the system brighter.