BIRMINGHAM, England, March 19 /PRNewswire/ --

ATTN: England Editors

Community groups across England are all set to spring clean their neighbourhoods with the launch of a GBP50 million lottery-funded grants programme today, Wednesday 19 March.

The Community Spaces programme will provide grants and support to community groups wanting to make their neighbourhoods cleaner and greener. Community Spaces will help local people improve and create play areas, community gardens, parks, wildlife areas, ponds, courts and village greens.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have set the stage for building the “evolutionary link” between the microelectronics of today built from semiconductor compounds and future generations of devices made largely from complex organic molecules. In an upcoming paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a NIST team demonstrates that a single layer of organic molecules can be assembled on the same sort of substrate used in conventional microchips.

The ability to use a silicon crystal substrate that is compatible with the industry-standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) manufacturing technology paves the way for hybrid CMOS-molecular device circuitry—the necessary precursor to a “beyond CMOS” totally molecular technology—to be fabricated in the near future.

Researchers at NIST and the Joint Quantum Institute (NIST/University of Maryland) have developed a new method for creating pairs of entangled photons, particles of light whose properties are interlinked in a very unusual way dictated by the rules of quantum physics. The researchers used the photons to test one of the fundamental concepts in quantum theory.

In the experiment, the researchers sent a pulse of light into both ends of a twisted loop of optical fiber. Pairs of photons of the same color traveling in either direction will, every so often, interact in a process known as “four-wave mixing,” converting into two new, entangled photons, one that is redder and the other that is bluer than the originals.

If you had one hundred unlabeled DNA samples, taken from people all around the world, could you use that DNA to determine where the original donors came from?

With major improvements in genotyping technology, geneticists are now getting better and better at this game, and a recent paper in Science reports the largest study to date of human genetic diversity: 650,000 genetic differences scrutinized in nearly 1000 different individuals from 51 different populations.

Studies like this one lay important groundwork to help us understand how human genomes differ around the world, how differences in our genes and environments together make us healthy or sick, and how very ancient migrations led to the structure of today's human populations around the globe.

DES MOINES, Iowa, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- Bunge, DuPont Alliance on Track to Deliver First Biotech Product with Direct Consumer Benefits

New oil testing results confirm a new, improved soybean oil trait from DuPont will deliver increased nutritional benefits with broader applications than other soybean oil products currently on the market. The high oleic soybean oil trait is the next generation of improved oil products developed by DuPont business Pioneer Hi-Bred as part of the Bunge DuPont Biotech Alliance.

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- CMD Paper on New Re-Passivation Technology to be Presented as Part of WLCSP Forum Program Track

California Micro Devices announced it would deliver a technical paper on a new CSP repassivation technology designed to minimize parasitic elements in ASIP(TM) (Application Specific Integrated Passive(TM)) products at the IMAPS 4th Annual International Conference and Exhibition on Device Packaging, March 17th through March 20th, 2008, at the Radisson Fort McDowell Resort and Casino in Scottsdale, Arizona. The presentation will be part of a technical track of papers sponsored by the Wafer Level Chip Scale (WLCSP) Forum on wafer level chip scale package board reliability.

Twice in two days Botulinum toxin (Botox) has graced our front page, and it's not just because it makes Joan Rivers look like The Joker.

Yesterday we reported that Botox has helped infants with CHARGE Syndrome and today we discovered an article in Medical Hypotheses talking about its many beneficial effects.

Not bad press for an often fatal poison produced by a rare type of food poisoning bacteria.

RESTON, Virginia, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

- U.S. Currently Accounts for 21 Percent of Worldwide Internet Users, Down from 66 Percent in 1996

comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released several key findings from its "Digital World: State of the Internet" report. The study highlights the changing dynamics of worldwide Internet usage, as it has grown from a U.S.-centric medium to its currently global landscape.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080115/COMSCORELOGO )

Only two per cent of paediatric drug trials reported that they had established independent safety monitoring committees that can help lead to the early detection of adverse drug reactions, according to a major review in the April issue of Acta Paediatrica.

Child health researchers from the University of Nottingham, UK, carried out a detailed analysis of 739 international drug trials published between 1996 and 2002 to see what safety measures were in place and to monitor the levels of adverse drug reactions.

Just under three-quarters of the trials (74 per cent) described how safety monitoring was performed during the study, but only 13 studies (two per cent) had independent safety monitoring committees.

While significant gaps remain in our total knowledge of the extent of carbon dioxide’s sources, such as fires, volcanic activity and the respiration of living organisms, and its natural sinks, such as the land and ocean, it is known that more than 30 billion tons of extra carbon dioxide (CO2) is released into the atmosphere annually by human activities, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels.

According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this increase is predicted to result in a warmer climate with rising sea levels and an increase of extreme weather conditions. Predicting future atmospheric CO2 levels requires an increase in our understanding of carbon fluxes.

Using data from the SCIAMACHY instrument aboard ESA's Envisat environmental satellite, scientists have for the first time detected regionally elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide – the most important greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming – originating from manmade emissions.