Remember that old expression about your fence, "the grass is always greener on the other side?" Although this may not be entirely true, a recent study shows that a daily dose of the green stuff may actually prove beneficial to both your mental and physical health. 

Students attending college in San Marcos, Texas are taking advantage of their luscious green surroundings and are feeling quite good about it.

A.L. McFarland, a graduate student at Texas State University's Department of Agriculture, is head of a new "green" study which created data on the effects of outdoor interaction on a student's overall quality of life.

An analysis of news media coverage of medical studies indicates that news articles often fail to report pharmaceutical company funding and frequently refer to medications by their brand names, both potential sources of bias, according to a study in the October 1 issue of JAMA.

New articles represent an important source of medical information for many patients, and even some physicians. "An increasingly recognized source of commercial bias in medical research is the funding of studies by companies with a financial interest in the results," the authors write. Little is known about how frequently news articles report the funding sources of the medical research they report on, or how frequently news articles use brand medication names instead of generic names, which could create commercial bias.

A link between reduced levels of the 'stress hormone' cortisol and antisocial behaviour in male adolescents has been discovered by a research team at the University of Cambridge.

Levels of cortisol in the body usually increase when people undergo a stressful experience, such as public speaking, sitting an exam, or having surgery. It enhances memory formation and is thought to make people behave more cautiously and to help them regulate their emotions, particularly their temper and violent impulses.

The new research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, shows that adolescents with severe antisocial behaviour do not exhibit the same increase in cortisol levels when under stress as those without antisocial behaviour.

Sunnybrook researcher Dr. Donald Redelmeier and Stanford University statistician Robert Tibshirani have found an increased risk of fatal motor vehicle crashes on United States (US) presidential election days.

US presidential elections have large effects on public health by influencing policy, the economy, and military action. "Whether the US presidential electoral process has a direct effect on public health had never been tested despite the endless media commentary and the 1 billion dollars spent on this year's election alone," says Dr. Donald Redelmeier.

It's not what you take but the way that you take it that can produce different results in women who take hormone replacement therapy (HRT), according to new research on the association between HRT and heart attacks, published the European Heart Journal [1] today.

The study is the largest to look at the effects of HRT since the Women's Health Initiative trial was stopped early after finding that HRT increased the risk of women developing a range of conditions including breast cancer and thromboembolism.

The research is an observational study of 698,098 healthy Danish women, aged 51-69, who were followed between 1995-2001. It has found that overall there was no increased risk of heart attacks in current users of HRT compared to women who had never taken it.

ESPOO, Finland, September 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortum will gain approximately 1.5 million tonnes of emission reduction units (ERU) from Joint Implementation projects conducted at the Russian Territorial Generating Company No. 10 (TGC-10). The projects TGC-10 will implement include construction of new power generation facilities in the Tyumen and Chelyabinsk areas, and they will be conducted during the Kyoto Period (2008-2012) of the European Emissions Trading Scheme.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080930/323003 )

DALLAS, September 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- Entrust demonstrates perfect PKI certificate exchange for EAC interoperability test across multiple countries and vendors

At a key interoperability test for second-generation ePassports in Prague earlier this month, Entrust, Inc. (Nasdaq: ENTU) demonstrated a successful public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate exchange using United Kingdom and Slovenia systems in a multi-country test environment. Showcasing a "point- and-click" PKI system, Entrust confirmed that the security infrastructure for second-generation ePassports, based on Extended Access Control (EAC), is truly ready for global deployment.

READING, England, September 30 /PRNewswire/ -- DediPower, one of the UK's fastest growing managed hosting providers, this month celebrates its 10th anniversary. From small beginnings, today DediPower has '000's of customers ranging in size from rapidly growing "internet" innovators to large, well-established organisations and multinationals.

With origins in web development, founders Craig Martin, Spencer Tarring and Russell Champion, identified the growing need for reliable and effective web hosting solutions for their clients in the late 90's. This exciting market opportunity changed the direction of the company that today is focused on delivering dedicated hosting solutions in its two UK enterprise class data centres.

LONDON, September 30 /PRNewswire/ -- mvision, a UK Managed Network Service provider of video conferencing and telepresence solutions, was awarded TANDBERG's 2008 EMEA Managed Video Services Provider of the Year award. The award ceremony held during TANDBERG's Partner Summit in Barcelona recognised mvision for the way they have successfully developed, packaged and marketed their range of Managed Services.

The detailed study, called the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program, explored a region called the Local Volume, where galaxy distances range from 6.5 million light-years to 13 million light-years from Earth.

A typical galaxy contains billions of stars but looks smooth when viewed through a conventional telescope because the stars appear blurred together. In contrast, the galaxies observed in this new survey are close enough to Earth that the sharp view provided by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 can resolve the brightness and colour of some individual stars. This allows scientists to determine the history of star formation within a galaxy and tease out subtle features in a galaxy's shape.