There's no McAlgae drive-through, but coral have their own addiction to 'junk food' and, say researchers, we may be in the position of needing to halt global warming in order to keep that fast food coming. 200 million humans depend on it for their subsistence.

The symbiosis between coral, a primitive animal, and zooxanthellae, tiny one-celled plants, is not only powerful enough to build the largest living organism on the planet, the Great Barrier Reef, but also underpins the economies and living standards of many tropical nations and societies who harvest their food from the reefs or have developing tourism industries.

Enzymes are biological catalysts that are made from a string of amino acids, which fold into specific three-dimensional protein structures. Without them, life would not exist. They are a valuable model for understanding the intricate works of nature. These molecular machines are responsible for initiating chemical reactions within the body. Millions of years of natural selection have fine-tuned the activity of such enzymes, allowing chemical reactions to take place millions of times faster.

In order to create artificial enzymes, a comprehensive understanding of the structure of natural enzymes, their mode of action, as well as advanced protein engineering techniques is needed. A team of scientists from the University of Washington, Seattle, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, made a crucial breakthrough toward this endeavor.

They have succeeded in creating a new type of enzyme for a reaction for which no naturally occurring enzyme has evolved.

Using classical coding, a single photon will convey only one of two messages - one bit of information. In dense coding, a single photon can convey one of four messages - two bits of information.

University of Illinois researchers say they have broken the record for the most amount of information sent by a single photon using the direction of “wiggling” and “twisting” of a pair of hyper-entangled photons. Doing so, they have beaten a fundamental limit on the channel capacity for dense coding with linear optics.

“Dense coding is arguably the protocol that launched the field of quantum communication,” said Paul Kwiat, a John Bardeen Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Today, however, more than a decade after its initial experimental realization, channel capacity has remained fundamentally limited as conceived for photons using conventional linear elements.”

TOKYO, March 24 /PRNewswire/ --

NTT Communications (NTT Com) announced today that it will establish a physical presence in the Russian market by opening a representative office in Moscow on April 1.

The office, which will start with a staff of five, will engage primarily in researching the Russian telecommunications market and promoting NTT Com's wide variety of services for enterprise customers.

According to Kazuyoshi Terada, Vice President of Business Strategy, Global Business Division, "The NTT Communications Moscow Representative Office will strengthen NTT Com's ability to develop and serve multinational enterprise customers who require high-quality one-stop ICT solutions and network resources in the Russian market."

SANTA CLARA, California, March 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Finesse Solutions, LLC, a manufacturer of measurement and control solutions for life sciences process applications, announces the release of TruFluor(TM), a single use optical dissolved oxygen measurement system, at Interphex in Philadelphia on March 26, 2008.

The TruFluor(TM) dissolved oxygen and temperature sensor is a single-use solution consisting of a disposable sheath, an optical reader, and a transmitter. The single-use sheath can be pre-inserted in a disposable bioreactor bag port, and irradiated with the bag, in order to both preserve and guarantee the sterile barrier. All wetted materials of the sheath are USP class VI compliant.

AUSTIN, Texas, March 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Database-Brothers, Inc. (DBI) today announced a program that allows customers to name the terms, conditions and price they are willing to pay for database performance and auditing software. For the first time ever a software company is allowing customers to proactively participate in the pricing and terms of licensing software with the introduction of DBI Bid.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060505/NYF037LOGO)

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that a chemical reaction in the atmosphere above major cities long assumed to be unimportant in urban air pollution is in fact a significant contributor to urban ozone—the main component of smog.

Their finding should help air quality experts devise better strategies to reduce ozone for US areas that exceed new standards announced last week by the Environmental Protection Agency and also benefit cities like Mexico City and Beijing that are grappling with major air quality and urban smog problems. More than 100 million people worldwide currently live in cities that fail to meet international standards for air quality.

BOSTON, March 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- Campaign Captures Athletes' Love/Hate Relationship With Running and Brand's Promise to Increase the Love

Global athletic leader New Balance debuts a new brand campaign on March 27, 2008 that highlights running as fundamental to all sport and spotlights the runner's complex love/hate relationship with running. The campaign brings these struggles and personal breakthroughs to life by personifying running in a light-hearted and engaging manner and showcases the brand's ability to increase the love of running through product innovation.

WASHINGTON, March 23 /PRNewswire/ --

In a Baltimore Sun opinion piece today (1), AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) called for the suspension of costly HIV vaccine research funding and the re-allocation of resources into effective, proven HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and treatment strategies.

Co-authored by Dr. Homayoon Khanlou, AHF's Chief of Medicine/U.S. and Michael Weinstein, AHF's President, the op ed, "Enough is Enough," has been published on the eve of the HIV Vaccine Summit assembled by the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci and scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday, March 25th in Bethesda, Maryland. This meeting of top leaders in the field is being convened at the urging of members of the scientific community concerned by the overall HIV vaccine funding strategy in the wake of a string of recent, highly publicized trial failures. The text of AHF's opinion editorial is below:

Graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite, is a new material which combines aspects of semiconductors and metals.

University of Maryland physicists have shown that in graphene the intrinsic limit to the mobility, a measure of how well a material conducts electricity, is higher than any other known material at room temperature - and 100 times faster than in silicon.

A team of researchers led by physics professor Michael S. Fuhrer of the university's Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials, and the Maryland NanoCenter said the findings are the first measurement of the effect of thermal vibrations on the conduction of electrons in graphene, and show that thermal vibrations have an extraordinarily small effect on the electrons in graphene.