TOKYO, April 27 /PRNewswire/ --

NTT Communications (NTT Com) announced on April 27 that following the establishment of NTT Communications Russia LLC in Moscow, Russia this past January, the wholly owned subsidiary will now set up a branch office in St. Petersburg, and, in addition, two other NTT Com subsidiaries will respectively set up branches in Brussels, Belgium and Neemrana, India, all within the current business quarter.

The Brussels branch will be set up by NTT Europe Limited, an NTT Com subsidiary that already manages branch offices in other European cities.

NTT Com also operates a representative office in Moscow, which it set up in April 2008.

MUMBAI, India, April 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Patni Computer Systems (http://www.patni.com/) (BSE: PATNI COMPUT, NSE: PATNI, NYSE:PTI), a leading global IT and BPO services provider, today announced that it has been ranked as the No. 1 'Green Innovative Information Technology Vendor' by the prestigious 2009 Black Book Top Green Outsourcing Vendors Survey, an annual industry survey of outsourcing service providers' pro-environmental initiatives from the perspective of their client experience. Patni was credited as a highly recommended vendor who exceeded client satisfaction, with over 315 client nominations. The Green Outsourcing Vendors survey is conducted by the Brown-Wilson Group, a Tampa, Florida-based research organization.

LONDON, April 27 /PRNewswire/ -- BIS Ltd, a leading provider of datacentres and global networks today announced that it had completed a new strategic partnership with Telstra International EMEA.

The partnership cements the strong relationship between the companies and demonstrates Telstra's commitment to BIS and its customers.

Filligent, a Hong Kong-based biotech company, is mobilizing stocks of its anti-infective BioMask to help combat the global spread of the deadly new Mexican strain of Influenza A.   The BioMask is the first medical face mask to kill the Influenza A virus within seconds of contact while retaining the breathability required by front-line workers and children, who are often the first to fall in a contagious episode.

If pizza isn't already on the list of 7 greatest inventions of the post-modern world (because nothing goes with wanting to strangle someone who invokes Foucault like a nice slice of pepperoni) a new discovery may put it there; the physics of the perfect pizza toss have inspired Monash University to design the next generation of micro motors  ... thinner that a human hair.

The idea that far distant particles can somehow 'talk' to each other led Einstein to call it 'spooky action at a distance'.

Having confirmed its existence, scientists today are learning how to use this 'spooky action' as a helpful tool. Now a team of physicists at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London have harnessed this phenomenon to shed light on another unusual and previously difficult aspect of quantum physics - that of distinguishing between two similar quantum devices.

In the everyday world any process can be considered as a black box device with an input and an output; if you wish to identify the device you simply apply inputs, measure the outputs and determine what must have happened in between.

Autism is a complex brain disorder that impairs social, communications and behavioral development.  It is often characterized by extreme behavior.   A new study by University of Utah School of Medicine researchers and conducted with Utah children says kids  who are firstborn or breech or whose mothers are 35 or older when giving birth are at significantly greater risk for developing an autism spectrum disorder.

Firstborn?   Those are  50% of all kids in America.   

In the April 27, 2009,issue of  Pediatrics, the researchers say that:

Women who give birth at 35 or older are 1.7 times more likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), compared with women between the ages of 20-34;

Scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München, led by Professor Martin Hrabé de Angelis, director of the Institute of Experimental Genetics, have developed a new mouse model with a genetic mutant in which a single base of a specific microRNA seed region has been altered. Mice carrying this miR-96 mutation suffer progressive hearing loss as they get older.    Moreover, if they carry two of these mutants, their sensory hair cells are impaired from birth on.

Most people are expert readers, but it is something of an enigma how our brain achieved expertise in such a recent cultural invention which requires a cognitive interface between vision and language.

The first alphabetic scripts are thought to have been invented only around four to five thousand years ago so it is unlikely that enough time has elapsed to allow the evolution of specialized parts of the brain for reading. 

While neuroimaging techniques have made some progress in understanding the neural underpinning of this essentially cultural skill, the exact unfolding of brain activity has remained elusive. 

The theory that the Chicxulub crater holds the clue to the demise of the dinosaurs and 40 percent of all species 65 million years ago is challenged in a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society.  The Chicxulub crater, discovered in 1978 in northern Yucutan and measuring about 112 miles in diameter, lies under a km of debris and records a massive extra-terrestrial impact by an object 10-20 km in size.