AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Quadrem today announced it has signed a global business process outsourcing (BPO) agreement with SAP AG in order to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of implementing and operating integrated electronic sourcing, procurement, invoicing and contract management processes. In addition, Quadrem's BPO services have qualified as "Powered by SAP".

ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands, August 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Most PC case feet are made of solid plastic and therefore transmit unwanted vibrations from inside a PC via the chassis onto the desk, floor or shelf on which the system is placed. In this situation the PC can generate annoying noises at the case or elsewhere (secondary noise).

For this problem Nexus Technology has come up with a simple yet effective solution to prevent this vibration. The Dutch company has launched their new product: DAMPERS. These are versatile rubber feet which you put underneath your PC to create a rubber barrier between the case and the surface. This barrier of rubber will absorb the vibrations and act as a isolator for the resonance.

AMSTERDAM, August 18 /PRNewswire/ -- SANE (Sustainable Aviation Network Europe) organises on 1 September the conference "Sustainable Aviation: Sound and Climate in Perspective' in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. International guests speak about climate measures, like the proposal for the inclusion of aviation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme, about biofuels and also about sound annoyance. High level representatives from both EU and US airlines and European policymakers will share their views and facts will be made available that can help establish a better policy which is the starting point of sustainable aviation.

New research, reported this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, contaminated the Arctic and potentially affected human health and ecosystems in and around Earth's polar regions.

The study, titled "Coal Burning Leaves Toxic Heavy Metal Legacy in the Arctic," was conducted by the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Reno, Nev. and partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

Detailed measurements from a Greenland ice core showed pollutants from burning coal--the toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead--were much higher than expected. The catch, however, was the pollutants weren't higher at the times when researchers expected peaks.

Fast memory chips such as DRAMs and SRAMs (Dynamic and Static Random Access Memory) commonly used today have one decisive disadvantage: in case of power interruption, they lose their stored information. This problem could be solved by magnetic memory chips called MRAMs (Magnetic Random Access Memory). In MRAM the digital information is not stored by means of electric charge but by means of the orientation of the magnetization of a magnetic cell.

An experiment carried out at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) has realized spin torque switching of a nanomagnet as fast as the fundamental speed limit allows. Using this so-called ballistic switching future non-volatile magnetic memories could operate as fast as the fastest non-volatile memories. The experiments are described in the next issue of Physical Review Letters (22 August, 2008).

Self-recognition, it has been argued, is a hallmark of advanced cognitive abilities in animals. It was previously thought that only the usual suspects of higher cognition—some great apes, dolphins, and elephants—were able to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. In a PLoS Biology article, psychologist Helmut Prior and colleagues show evidence of self-recognition in magpies — a species with a brain structure very different from mammals.

The researchers subjected the magpies to a mark test, wherein a mark is placed on the subject's body in such a way that it can only be seen in a mirror. When the magpies engaged in activity that was directed towards the mark (e.g. scratching at it), the researchers were able to conclude that these birds recognized the image in the mirror as themselves, and not another animal.

DALLAS, August 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Parks Associates announced today CONNECTIONS(TM) Europe Summit will feature an exclusive tour of the Fraunhofer HHI Institute's exhibits at IFA 2008 in Berlin.

CONNECTIONS(TM) Europe Summit, August 29, at the Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin, is an event featuring panels and discussions on advanced television services, new media and digital content, and value-added services. The summit will conclude with a tour of the Fraunhofer HHI Institute's exhibits at IFA.

LONDON, August 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Rosetta Translation Limited announced today the formal launch of its website localisation services.

Global internet usage has tripled year on year since 2000. Of the 1.5 billion people that use the World Wide Web on a daily basis, forty per cent do so in a language that is not their mother tongue, making culture and geography-related specificities crucial factors for international companies to consider.

Cells obtained from menstrual blood, termed 'endometrial regenerative cells' (ERCs), are capable of restoring blood flow in an animal model of advanced peripheral artery disease, according to a study published today in Journal of Translational Medicine. When circulation-blocked mice were treated with ERC injections, circulation and functionality were restored.

Critical limb ischemia, an advanced form of peripheral artery disease, causes approximately 150,000 amputations per year in the US. Currently there are no medical or surgical interventions that are effective in the advanced stages of the disease. ERCs are cells taken from menstrual blood that are capable of forming into at least 9 different tissue types, including heart, liver and lung. Their discovery won the 'Medicine Research Award of the Year' award for BioMed Central's Research Awards in 2007.

Knowing the words for numbers is not necessary to be able to count, according to a new study of aboriginal children by UCL (University College London) and the University of Melbourne. The study of the aboriginal children from two communities which do not have words or gestures for numbers found that they were able to copy and perform number-related tasks.

The findings suggest that we possess an innate mechanism for counting, which may develop differently in children with dyscalculia, a lessor-known learning disability that affects mathatical calculations.