The snowball Earth hypothesis posits that the Earth was covered from pole to pole in a thick sheet of ice for millions of years at a time. 635 million years ago, an abrupt release of methane from ice sheets that extended to Earth's low latitudes spiked global warming and ended the last "snowball" ice age, say researchers. The researchers believe that the methane was released gradually at first and then very quickly from clathrates - methane ice that forms and stabilizes beneath ice sheets.

Also called marsh gas, methane is a colorless, odorless gas. As a greenhouse gas, it is about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. When the ice sheets became unstable, they collapsed, releasing pressure on the clathrates. The clathrates then began to de-gas.

This transition "from 'snowball Earth' into a warmer period shows the compelling need for research on abrupt climate change in Earth's history," said H. Richard Lane, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

LONDON, May 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Contractor Extends Technology Partnership Established in 2001

New build, refurbishment and fit-out contractor Interior Services Group plc (ISG) has signed a new three-year corporate deal with BIW Technologies (BIW) to use its Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration platform.

ISG operates in the UK, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and first used the BIW system on a multi-million pound project for a City of London law firm in 2001, signing its first corporate deal with BIW in November that year.

BOSTON, May 28 /PRNewswire/ --

RISI, the leading information provider for the global forest products industry, today announced the launch of a free daily email update with top lumber and panel industry news headlines. This free email is part of Crow's Lumber & Panel News Service -- a comprehensive news service dedicated to the North American wood products industry. The service is produced by the editors of Crow's Weekly Market Report -- the longest running softwood lumber and panel price reporting service in the industry. Crow's Lumber & Panel Update will provide subscribers headlines on the latest lumber news and wood products industry developments -- market shifts, mergers and acquisitions, price changes, project news and more.

LONDON, May 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Joint Venture invests USD $6 million in Batam Island Concession Project

Cascal N.V. (NYSE: HOO) ("the Company"), a leading provider of water and wastewater services in seven countries, today announced that its 50% joint venture PT Adhya Tirta Batam is making an additional investment to construct a new water treatment plant in Duriangkang, located on Batam Island in Indonesia. The new construction is the third stage in the development of an integrated Duriangkang potable water system and follows the completion of earlier modules built in 2001 and 2004. The new treatment plant will have a capacity of 11.5 million gallons per day, equivalent to a population of almost 200,000, and is expected to commence operations in April 2009.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, May 28 /PRNewswire/ --

Today, Playlogic Entertainment, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: PLGC) an independent worldwide publisher of entertainment software, held its annual Meeting of Shareholders in Amsterdam. 63% of the shareholders were represented. Topics of the meeting included; re-election of the board of directors, a report of past year performance, current developments and general outlook for the year 2008.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20071119/PLAYLOGICLOGO )

A full-year 2008 financial outlook was given during this meeting. In 2007 Playlogic released 7 games, for 2008 the company expects to release 15 games (29 SKU's) on several platforms.

"The universe is a big place, and weird things can happen. I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before, "said Stephanie Wachter of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology about a mysterious infrared ring a dead star that displays a magnetic field trillions of times more intense than Earth's.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope detected the ring around magnetar SGR 1900+14 at two narrow infrared frequencies in 2005 and 2007. The ringed magnetar is of a type called a soft gamma repeater (SGR) because it repeatedly emits bursts of gamma rays.

TIRAT CARMEL, Israel, May 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Study Will Compare Birth Rates of Women who Underwent Non-Invasive MRgFUS to Those who had Invasive Fibroid Surgery

InSightec Ltd. announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the company to conduct a clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the ExAblate(R) 2000 system utilizing MR-guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery (MRgFUS) for the enhancement of fertility in women with non-hysteroscopically resectable uterine fibroids who are diagnosed with unexplained infertility.

We started off discussing the value of consumerism to even the most devout naturalists with In Praise Of Consumerism - It Appeals To The Thoreau In You and then discussed the materialistic greed of nature herself in In Praise Of Consumerism - Bees, Bacteria And The Value Of Wasted Time. Now now we're going to wrap things up by suggesting that consumerism is not the root of all evil. In fact, we’re going to propose the opposite.

Consumerism is responsible for some of the most important events in Western civilization. Consumerism has produced empowerments that have radically upgraded the lives of even the poorest people on the planet. And consumerism has even advanced the grand ambition of biomassto kidnap, seduce, and dragoon as many iinanimate atoms as possible into the 3.85-billion-year-old enterprise of life.

We left off last time with a not-so-simple question; what does consumerism do for human beings? To answer that, let me show you how spirit spun into material goods lifts other spirits down the line.

The traders of Venice in 1270 AD were motivated by sheer consumerist lust. They were driven by the hunger of Europe’s rich to do what bower birds and stags do - show off luxuries rarer than those of their neighbors.

The son of a wealthy trading family, a family powered by consumer lust, would change history and our vision of nearly everything we see. He was financed and set into motion by the luxury consumer goods industry. But he left behind a seed of spirit that, like Jack’s magic bean turned to a giant stalk, would put the Western World on a heady climb.

What he planted in the Western mind would uplift the spiritual ruminations of Thoreau and his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, plus your spiritual aspirations and mine.

Throughout the overlooked depths of Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes, a small but important animal is rapidly disappearing.

Until recently, the animal - a shrimplike, energy-dense creature called Diporeia - was a major food source for commercially important species like lake whitefish and many prey fish upon which salmon, trout and walleye rely.

Scientists are employing new research methods in a quest to explain their population freefall, which threatens to negatively affect the Lakes' ecosystems and $4 billion sport fishing industry, said Purdue University researcher Marisol Sepúlveda.

ZAPORIZHIA, Ukraine, May 28 /PRNewswire/ -- ZaporozhTransformator OJSC (ZTR), (Berlin: ZRTFq.BE; Frankfurt: ZRTFq.F; PFTS: ZATR), one of the largest Ukrainian manufacturers of electrical transformer equipment, announced today that as of May 20, its 2008 sales portfolio had reached US$610 million, 80% more than for the comparable period of 2007 (US$340 million).

ZTR's sales target for 2008 is US$700 million. According to the company's commercial plans ZTR's order portfolio for 2008 has already reached 85% of the target. The company's sales department expects to reach the full-year sales target by late July. This has become possible because of wide-ranging improvements to the company's sales activities and a comprehensive marketing strategy.