Unless a researcher owns stock in a company whose drug is being tested, telling potential research volunteers about an investigator’s financial interests is unlikely to affect their willingness to volunteer, a new study shows. But many research volunteers put less trust in clinical trial leaders with financial conflicts.

For the study, Jeremy Sugarman, M.D., M.P.H., M.A., professor at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his colleagues at Duke University School of Medicine and Wake Forest Schools of Medicine and Law recruited 3,623 adults with asthma or diabetes from a national database of individuals who are willing to participate in internet-based research. Overall, the recruits, almost all white, were well educated and had middle to high income levels. They were located in all regions of the United States.

Most of the respondents indicated that the financial disclosure was less important to their decision about participating than such factors as potential risks and benefits, and the purpose of the research.

VANCOUVER, Canada, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

- Small-cap Conference Provides Trans-Orient the Opportunity to Bring Greater Awareness to the Company's Waipawa-Whangai Fractured Oil-Shale Play

VANCOUVER, Canada, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

Canadian-based oil and gas exploration company Trans-Orient Petroleum Ltd. (OTCBB/TOPLF) is pleased to announce today that it will deliver a presentation at the Annual Small-Cap Conference Series in Calgary, Alberta. Drew Cadenhead, Chief Operating Officer, Trans-Orient Petroleum Ltd. is scheduled to present to investment representatives on Saturday, April 5th at 10:50 a.m. MDT at the Artists of the World Conference Centre in Calgary.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

The 2008 World Summit of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (WSIE) -- the most inspiring gathering of its kind in Dubai -- concluded this afternoon, calling for improving the role of innovation as a catalyst for peace and development to improve the quality of lives for billions of people worldwide.

The three-day summit, organized under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, brought together over 800 delegates from all walks of life.

Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals can tell when time passes.

Newly published research from The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada may bring us closer to answering that very question.

William Roberts and his colleagues in Western’s Psychology Department found that rats are able to keep track of how much time has passed since they discovered a piece of cheese, be it a little or a lot, but they don’t actually form memories of when the discovery occurred. That is, the rats can’t place the memories in time.

CHICAGO, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

The Certification Authority/Browser Forum (CAB Forum), the author of the guidelines for issuing Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, is pleased to announce that approximately 5,000 EV SSL certificates have been deployed by businesses and organizations worldwide(1) since the introduction of the guidelines last June.

Extended Validation SSL certificates were introduced last year to help businesses and organizations conducting e-commerce, e-banking or e-government to reliably assert their identities to end-users and consumers. EV SSL certificates are issued to entities that complete a rigorous validation process that includes the following criteria:

A team of researchers led by Danish professor Eske Willerslev shows that the ancestors of the North American Indians who came from Asia were the first people in America, and that they were of neither European nor African descent. It also shows that immigration to North America took place approximately 1,000 years earlier than assumed. These findings call for a revision of our understanding of the early immigration route to the American continent.

Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues recently conducted DNA tests on samples of fossilized human feces found in deep caves in the Oregon desert and came to a conclusion sure to cause debate - the oldest of the droppings have been carbon-dated to be approximately 14,340 years old. Willerslev’s feces samples clearly contain two main genetic types of Asian origin that are unique to present-day North American Indians.

There are many interactions between the Sun and the Earth but one of the most dynamic events is a ‘substorm’ - an explosive reshaping of the Earth’s outer magnetic field.

To better understand substorms, scientists in Europe and North America are studying them from space using the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) satellites launched by NASA in 2007 and from the ground using a network of all-sky cameras.

University of Lancaster solar-terrestrial scientist Dr Emma Woodfield gave a talk at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast and presented the first few months of results from the Rainbow cameras newly installed in southern Iceland that complement this network.

DALLAS and REYKJAVIK, Iceland, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

U.S. Preventive Medicine(R), (http://www.USPreventiveMedicine.com) the leader in prevention, and deCODE Genetics, the global leader in gene discovery, today announced they have signed a letter of intent to add genetic testing to expand both companies' personalized medicine services in the U.S. and internationally.

LONDON, April 3 /PRNewswire/ --

Teliris(1) has added three executives to head up day-to-day sales and marketing initiatives to further scale the company as it continues to lead paying deployments of telepresence(2) systems worldwide.(3)

At the company's European headquarters in London, Tony Smith(4) joins Teliris from Polycom as Vice President of European Sales, with the directive to establish and lead a European sales organisation designed to promote the Teliris solution to a wider range of prospects in their local language.

Reshaping of the DNA scaffolding that supports and controls the expression of genes in the brain may play a major role in the alcohol withdrawal symptoms, particularly anxiety, that make it so difficult for alcoholics to stop using alcohol.

DNA can undergo changes in function without any changes in inheritance or coded sequence. These "epigenetic" changes are minor chemical modifications of chromatin -- dense bundles of DNA and proteins called histones.

"This is the first time anyone has looked for epigenetic changes related to chromatin remodeling in the brain during alcohol addiction," said Dr. Subhash C. Pandey, professor and director of neuroscience alcoholism research at the UIC College of Medicine and the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, the lead author of the study.