LONDON and DUBLIN, April 9 /PRNewswire/ --
- Businesses encourage telecommuting; practice is driving down real estate costs
As recession-battered companies look to save money on real estate costs, a growing number of businesses are equipping their employees with BlackBerrys and laptops and moving them out of the main office as a way of reducing expenses. The Regus Group (LSE: RGU), the leading global provider of workplace solutions, is reporting an increase in virtual office contracts in part to this growing corporate trend.
Last week I described how a boulder-sized meteorite exploded in the skies over Murchison, Australia, forty years ago. The remarkable mix of organic compounds discovered in samples of the meteorite, which included amino acids, confirmed that some of the compounds required for the origin of life could have an extraterrestrial origin, as John Oro had proposed ten years earlier. But where did the organic compounds come from, and how were they synthesized?
PARIS, April 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Oxatis, the leading e-commerce solution in Europe, is continuing its European development and today announced the opening of the UK version of its e-commerce website creation platform. Thanks to this entirely English version, Oxatis is now available to all future e-merchants in the UK and around the globe!
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090409/343090 )
The e-commerce market potential in the UK is huge, representing 27 million online shoppers in 2008. Out of a population of 61 million people, the UK has more than 35 million Internet users, 76% of whom shop online... great potential for boosting the sales of British and European SoHos and SMBs!
BERLIN, April 9 /PRNewswire/ --
The Game Developers Conference(R) Europe has appointed an advisory board comprised of industry executives from leading developer studios, technology and consultancy firms to help guide the conference program and ensure the event meets the needs of the European audience. Combining keen insights from the advisors with the GDC's proven reputation for delivering the most relevant and inspiring industry content, GDC Europe looks to take center stage as the must-attend developer event for the European community this year.
The central African belt is a fascinating look back in time for humanity because the largest group of hunter–gatherers of Africa, the Pygmies, still inhabit the region and they coexist with neighboring farmers.
All African Pygmies, inhabiting a large territory extending west-to-east along Central Africa, descend from a unique population who lived around 20,000 years ago, according to an international study led by researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The research concludes that the ancestors of present-day African Pygmies and neighboring farmers separated ~60,000 years ago.
A natural, biological pacemaker; that's what a heart is, right? Sure, but our hearts can wear out and while artificial heart pacemakers have saved and extended the lives of thousands of people, but they have their shortcomings – such as a fixed pulse rate and a limited life.
Could a permanent replacement biological solution be in our future? Richard Robinson and colleagues at New York's Columbia and Stony Brook Universities certainly think so, and their work published in the latest issue of The Journal of Physiology outlines how we can bring it a step closer to reality.
Because global warming - whoops, climate change - became a political football rather than a scientific one, there are a lot of people attacking methodology and motive. 1990 does seem like a pretty arbitrary date for CO2 emissions until you realize that's right after the merger of Germany and all they, a key advocate of proponent, had to do to meet their target was close some World War 2 era Soviet factors in East Germany to meet their target. And France just had to open up some more nuclear power plants (no CO2, but do American environmentalists think that is better?).
Where does space begin? Scientists at the University of Calgary have created a new instrument that is able to track the transition between the relatively gentle winds of Earth's atmosphere and the more violent flows of charged particles in space – flows that can reach speeds well over 1000 km/hr. And they have accomplished this in unprecedented detail.
Data received from the U of C-designed instrument sent to space on a NASA launch from Alaska about two years ago was able to help pinpoint the so-called edge of space: the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.
With that data, U of C scientists confirmed that space begins 118 km above Earth.
Researchers from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Calgary have uncovered the first evidence that neurons talk to ‘glial’ cells in the digestive tract: a discovery that could help find a way to regulate and restore balance in the gut for the one in 10 Canadians suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and the more than 200,000 Canadians suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Scorpions possess resistance to high temperatures and the ability to conserve water for long periods of time, and as a result thrive in hot and arid parts of the world. But is this global distribution also seen at a more local level? Doctoral student Shmuel Raz and colleagues at the University of Haifa, Israel show that this is indeed the case, even when European-like and African-like habitats were separated by no more than 100 meters.
Shmuel Raz and colleagues studied the communities of scorpions in a valley near Mount Carmel in Israel which has been dubbed "Evolution Canyon." Evolution Canyon" has steep slopes and runs approximately east-west, which means that the south-facing slope receive up to eight times as much solar radiation as the north-facing slope .
