CHICAGO, December 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Web site helps businesses make good choices for the environment

InterCall, a global leader in conferencing and collaboration services, has announced the launch of GreenConferencing.com. This Web site gives employees the knowledge and resources they need to help their business reduce their carbon footprint, whether through conferencing or other strategies.

The Web site's features include access to tools like a green calculator to calculate a business trip's carbon dioxide emissions and a how-to guide to reduce business travel. Also, the latest articles and information on going, and staying green are available through the site.

University of California, San Diego researchers have proven in animal studies that fibrosis in the liver can be not only stopped, but reversed. Their discovery, published in PLoS Online, opens the door to treating and curing conditions that lead to excessive tissue scarring such as viral hepatitis, fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, pulmonary fibrosis, scleroderma and burns.

Six years ago, the UC San Diego School of Medicine research team discovered the cause of the excess fibrous tissue growth that leads to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, and developed a way to block excess scar tissue in mice.

People with high triglycerides and another type of cholesterol tested but not usually evaluated as part of a person’s risk assessment have an increased risk of a certain type of stroke, according to research published in the December 26 issue of Neurology®.

“LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol has been the primary target for reducing the risk of stroke, but these results show that other types of cholesterol may be more strongly linked with stroke risk,” said study author Bruce Ovbiagele, MD, of UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA, and member of the American Academy of Neurology.

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators.

HOUSTON, December 26 /PRNewswire/ --

Endeavour International Corporation ("Endeavour") (Amex: END) (LSE: ENDV) today announced that it has signed an agreement with the Smedvig Family Office of Norway for a current investment of $40 million (USD) and with the intent to increase that investment to a total of $100 million (USD) in the future to support the strategic activities of Endeavour. This investment will take the form of a convertible note and is expected to close in mid-January upon completion of required consents and approvals.

In mammals, male or female development depends on the presence of the Y chromosome, which is only found in males because it includes masculinizing genes. But other animal groups have evolved different systems.

James Erickson and Jerome Quintero at Texas A&M University studied the mechanism of sex determination in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Previous studies in the fly suggested that it was the ratio of X chromosomes (the “female” chromosome, of which there are two copies in a female fly, and just one in a male) to the non-sex chromosomes (the autosomes) that determined the sex of a fly embryo.

However, this new paper indicates that rather than being dependent on the ratio, it is the number of X chromosomes that is important.

Protests couldn't happen without college students, who have plenty of time on their hands, but research carried out at the University of Granada reveals that busy housewives raising future college students are still more willing to separate glass from other garbage than the students themselves.

Awareness of the environment does not translate into ecologically responsible behavior, according to the research carried out in the Department of Social Psychology and Methodology of Behaviour Sciences of the University of Granada.

This research was carried out by doctor María del Carmen Aguilar Luzón under the direction of professor J. Miguel Ángel García Martínez. The environmental behaviour chosen for the study was the separating of glass from other garbage.

An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Svetlana Berdyugina of ETH Zurich’s Institute of Astronomy, has for the first time ever been able to detect and monitor the visible light that is scattered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

Employing techniques similar to how Polaroid sunglasses filter away reflected sunlight to reduce glare, the team of scientists were able to extract polarized light to enhance the faint reflected starlight ‘glare’ from an exoplanet. As a result, the scientists could infer the size of its swollen atmosphere. They also directly traced the orbit of the planet, a feat of visualization not possible using indirect methods.

Someone named Scylla waterboarded himself and provided a detailed account of what happened. “Old” self-experimentation, you could say, was doctors doing dangerous things to themselves for a short time to prove some idea that they already believed (e.g., a dentist using laughing gas as an anesthetic); “new” self-experimentation is me doing something perfectly safe for a long time to solve a problem that I have no clue how to solve. What Scylla did is between the two. Short duration, not completely safe, done to find out if waterboarding is torture or not. Scylla had no strong opinion about this when he started.

SAN MATEO, California, December 26 /PRNewswire/ --

NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N) announced today that it has closed on its initial public offering of 6,200,000 shares of common stock at a price of US$26.00 per share. NetSuite also announced that the underwriters of the offering exercised in full their option to purchase an additional 930,000 shares of the company's common stock (565,000 shares from the company and 365,000 shares from the selling stockholders), bringing the total initial public offering size to US$185.4 million prior to the deduction of underwriting discounts and estimated expenses paid by NetSuite.

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