There are a number of interconnected factors that lead to the success or failure of any business so it is usually considered an impossible task to predict whether a company will sink or swim numerically but researchers in Taiwan using the principles of evolutionary biology say they have devised an approach to spotting when a company is likely to fail.

Ping-Chen Lin of the National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences in Kaohsiung and Jiah-Shing Chen of the National Central University, Jhongli, in Taiwan, also explain how their metric of the financial status of any company can be of interest not only to its owners and employees but to a range of creditors, stockholders, banks, and individual investors.

LONDON, March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- An ongoing strike involving maintenance craft workers at Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is set to build and spread.

24 Unite maintenance members are in dispute over the trust's failure to honour a national pay agreement and they are building up their action, striking again today (Friday 14th March) and twice again next week (Monday 17th and Thursday 19th March).

They may also be joined by Unison maintenance workers who are now balloting for strike action.

The Trust is refusing to implement a recruitment and retention premia which is part of a national pay agreement agreed under Agenda for Change. The premia amounts to around GBP3,000 per year.

LONDON, March 14 /PRNewswire/ --

- Photo Opportunity: Tuesday 18th March 2008 - 12 Noon Outside Downing Street

Unite members will next Tuesday (18th March 2008) be handing in a petition to Downing Street as part of the campaign to keep vital services open at Bridlington Hospital.

Activists will be handing a petition with over 37,000 signatures to Downing Street and meeting MPs, as part of the campaign opposing the closure of the Cardiac Monitoring Unit and two acute medical wards at the hospital. Unite has consistently said the trust's plans will put patient's lives at risk.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a medical team from the University of Leicester say they have established a predictor for pregnant women who may have miscarriages and those who won’t.

The researchers measured the levels of a naturally occurring ‘cannabis’ (an endocannabinoid) known as anandamide in women who presented with a threatened miscarriage (bleeding in early pregnancy with a viable baby) and found that those who at the time of the test had significantly higher levels of anandamide subsequently miscarried.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Diamyd Medical AB (http://www.omxgroup.com, ticker: DIAM B; http://www.otcqx.com, ticker DMYDY). The FDA has given Diamyd Medical permission to start a Phase III clinical study in type 1 diabetes patients in the US with the therapeutic diabetes vaccine Diamyd(R).

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080314/297194 )

"We are eager to start this study and to be able to offer this promising drug to our newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes patients", says Professor Jerry Palmer, University of Washington in Seattle, USA, who will be the Lead Investigator for the US study.

It's taken weeks to get here but we've covered 13.7 billion years of cosmic quirks. We've gone from The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture through Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture to The Big Burp And The Evolution of Elements.

We've seen the beginning of mass behavior among quarks, the proto-memory of atoms, and a strange preview of culture long before life arose.

LONDON, March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- NHS Choices (http://www.nhs.uk), the digital 'front door' to the NHS launches a new Live Well package on pregnancy, aimed at helping people find out more about keeping well during pregnancy.

Based on NHS accredited information, the pregnancy bundle (http://www.nhs.uk/LiveWell/Pregnancy/Pages/Pregnancyhub.aspx) provides users with information about staying healthy and fit during pregnancy, including eating well, exercise, choosing where to give birth and antenatal care. There is a page for dads-to-be, and videos about screening, antenatal classes, exercising after the birth and post-natal depression. This Live Well package is the latest addition to the NHS Choices' extensive Live well section.

A new mathematical object was revealed yesterday during a lecture at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM). Two researchers from the University of Bristol exhibited the first example of a third degree transcendental L-function. These L-functions encode deep underlying connections between many different areas of mathematics.

The news caused excitement at the AIM workshop attended by 25 of the world's leading analytic number theorists. The work is a joint project between Ce Bian and his adviser, Andrew Booker. Booker commented that, "This work was made possible by a combination of theoretical advances and the power of modern computers."

Fifty years have passed since the United States Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Army invented DEET to protect soldiers from disease-transmitting insects and in the process made civilian life outdoors nicer as well.

Despite its effectiveness, and decades of research, scientists never knew precisely how it worked.

By pinpointing DEET's molecular target in insects, researchers at Rockefeller University have shown that DEET acts like a 'chemical cloak', masking human odors that blood-feeding insects find attractive. This research makes it possible to improve the repellent properties of DEET and also make it a safer chemical.

New data has indicated that in rats, "male" hormones drive the decision to become a male during a window of time before male genitalia develop, and that blocking "male" hormones during this time caused male genitalia birth defects.

These defects were associated with a decreased ano-genital distance, leading to the suggestion that measuring human neonatal AGD could provide a noninvasive method to predict those at risk of developing male genitalia birth defects.

Cryptorchidism, the absence in the scrotum of one or both testes (usually because of the failure of the testis to descend), and hypospadias, the abnormal positioning of the opening of the urethra, are common birth defects of the male genitalia and are risk factors for the adult-onset disorders of low sperm count and testicular cancer.