ANDOVER, England, January 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Ever had your conscience nagging at you? "Go to the dentist?", "Get your blood pressure checked?" Well, "Hey, jus' say!"

Introducing "the Sleeve", the voice of your health conscience and the new face of HSA - the UK's favourite Healthplan provider. This reassuring and recognisable character will appear across all of HSA's marketing material and advertising from 20 January 2008, including national television advertising.

A new study by the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research says that women should avoid caffeine during the first trimester of pregnancy - caffeine equivalent to two cups of coffee per day was linked to a doubled risk of miscarriage compared to women who had no caffeine.

The study controlled, for the first time, pregnancy-related symptoms of nausea, vomiting and caffeine aversion that tended to interfere with the determination of caffeine’s true effect on miscarriage risk. The research appears in the current online issue of American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

EDINBURGH, January 21 /PRNewswire/ --

- Edinburgh-Based Aircraft Medical Ready to Fight GBP37m Court Action

Aircraft Medical ("Aircraft"), the UK medical devices company announces that it will rigorously defend a patent infringement case commenced in the Court of Session, Edinburgh by a competitor, Verathon (based in Seattle, USA). Verathon is claiming GBP37m in damages.

Verathon has claimed that the McGrath(R) Series 5 Video Laryngoscope, manufactured by Aircraft Medical in Scotland, infringes its European Patent 1307131, and by some undisclosed means has calculated damages in lost sales of GBP37m.

NIEUWEGEIN, The Netherlands, January 21 /PRNewswire/ --

- Profit Forecast for 2007: Similar Operating Result (2006: EUR 42 million)

- Order Book for 2007: Sharp Rise to Approx. EUR 1.4 billion

- Final Annual Figures for 2007: 14 March 2008

Profit Forecast for 2007 Confirmed

PARIS, January 21 /PRNewswire/ --

- Consumers Can Run Stores without the Hassle of Inventory or Logistics and Discover Products within Any Category of Interest

Zlio.com, http://www.zlio.com, the world's largest emporium of specialty stores powered by users, today unveiled its UK website, offering a way for consumers to easily open their own online store for free. Consumers can populate their stores by choosing from more than one million products offered by 62 well-known UK merchants including Play and Dell, among others.

Plasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to its environment, is at the heart of learning. After being awake, your brain needs sleep to refresh, research says.

A new theory from University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dr. Chiara Cirelli, associate professor of psychiatry, and Dr. Giulio Tononi, professor of psychiatry, called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, runs against the grain of what many scientists currently think about how sleep affects learning. The most popular notion these days, says Cirelli, is that during sleep synapses are hard at work replaying the information acquired during the previous waking hours, consolidating that information by becoming even stronger.

Dark-field images provide more detail than ordinary x-ray radiographs and could be used to identify explosives in hand luggage, diagnose the onset of breast cancer or Alzheimer’s disease and pinpoint hairline cracks or corrosion in functional structures.

The issue has been that the wavelengths needed for dark-field images required sophisticated optics that could only be produced at facilities like the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI)’s 300m-diameter, $200 million synchrotron. Now researchers at PSI and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have developed a novel method allowing dark-field images to be produced using ordinary x-ray equipment already in place in hospitals and airports around the world.

The first evidence of a volcanic eruption from beneath Antarctica’s most rapidly changing ice sheet is reported this week in the journal Nature Geosciences. The volcano on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet erupted 2000 years ago (325BC) and remains active.

Using airborne ice-sounding radar, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) discovered a layer of ash produced by a ‘subglacial’ volcano. It extends across an area larger than Wales.

The volcano is located beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet in the Hudson Mountains at latitude 74.6°South, longitude 97°West. Volcanoes are an important component of the Antarctic region. They formed in diverse tectonic settings, mainly as a result of mantle plumes acting on the stationary Antarctic plate.

Using embryonic stem cells from mice, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have prompted the growth of healthy – and more importantly, functioning – muscle cells in mice afflicted with a human model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

The study represents the first time transplanted embryonic stem cells have been shown to restore function to defective muscles in a model of muscular dystrophy.

The researchers’ newly developed technique, which involves stringent sorting to preserve all stem cells destined to become muscle, avoids the risk of tumor formation while improving the overall muscle strength and coordination of the mice, the researchers found.

Scientific studies on climate change, energy and alternative fuels are among the 30 projects awarded more than 145 million processing hours on supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory through the Department of Energy's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

Through INCITE, researchers from industry, academia and government research facilities receive access to computing power at the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL for research on climate change, fusion energy, nanoscience, materials, chemistry, astrophysics, and other areas.