LONDON, July 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Following the challenging 'launch mission' set by New York Times best-selling author GP Taylor, the next in Renaissance Learning's 'Quest for Knowledge' has been devised by Young Samurai author Chris Bradford, and launches 1st July 2009.

This month's mission is set in Japan and draws on UK primary and secondary school pupils' creative skills and powers of deduction. The winner will receive an exclusive Young Samurai pack, which features some fantastic goodies - including a rare signed proof copy of Young Samurai: The Way of the Warrior.

LONDON, July 1 /PRNewswire/ --

The list of locations around the world having experienced terrorist attacks on luxury hotels is growing fast: Netanya in Israel, Jakarta in Indonesia, Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh in Egypt, Sana'a in Yemen, Amman in Jordan, Islamabad in Pakistan, Mumbai in India in November 2008 and last month, Peshawar in Pakistan. Each of these events points to the same major vulnerability that exists in the high-end hotel sector, not just in global terrorism hot spots, but also closer to home, where possible copycat attacks have been predicted, and highlights the urgent need for major security improvements.

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ARNHEM and GRONINGEN, The Netherlands, July 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- Establish International 'Center of Excellence' for Gas

ARNHEM and GRONINGEN, The Netherlands, July 1 /PRNewswire/ --

NEW YORK, July 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- New York-based Computer Generated Solutions, Inc. has been recognized for its leadership, strategic expansion, and growth in Romania over the past two years. CGS services include inbound customer support, outbound sales and marketing, and outsourced back-office processes.

On television, police technicians zoom in on a security camera video to read a license plate or capture the face of a hold-up artist but, in real life, enhancing this low-quality video to focus in on important clues hasn't been an easy task.

It just got a little easier.   Prof. Leonid Yaroslavsky of Tel Aviv University and colleagues have developed a new video "perfection tool" to help investigators enhance raw video images. Commissioned by a defense-related company to improve what the naked eye cannot see, the tool can be used with live video or with recordings, in color or black-and-white. 

The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years,  according to research published in Nature Geoscience. 

If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it has been moving north, then some Pacific islands near the equator – even those that currently enjoy abundant rainfall – may be drier within decades and starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner.

Global warming?  Maybe.  But if it is, the arid event could happen even sooner than current projections.  

Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory have discovered a black hole they labeled HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), which lies towards the outskirts of the galaxy ESO 243-49, approximately 290 million light-years from Earth and weighs more than 500 solar masses, making it a 'missing link' between lighter stellar-mass and heavier supermassive black holes. This discovery is the best detection to date of a new class that has long been searched for: intermediate mass black holes.
 
The discovery has been made by an international team of researchers working with XMM-Newton data, led by Sean Farrell from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, now based at the University of Leicester. 

LONDON, July 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- KT, SK Telecom and LG Telecom join forces to provide new enhanced services for customers incorporating GSMA's Rich Communication Suite key features

The GSMA today announced that the world's first interoperable enhanced communication service incorporating key elements of the GSMA's Rich Communication Suite (RCS) specifications is now a live commercial service in South Korea. The GSMA's RCS initiative is supported by some of the world's leading handset vendors, core network vendors and mobile operators including KT, and SK Telecom, who joined the initiative to provide an interoperable service solution in South Korea.

The biomedical community has become too risk-averse, according to a recent NY Times piece. I agree, although I don't agree with the dramatic presentation (it's not some dirty scientific secret - it's not hard to find scientists, and the leaders of the funding agencies themselves talking about it). Here are the basic issue:

Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.

LONDON, June 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- Frost Sullivan to Host Analyst Briefing on IFE Hardware and Content Markets on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 at 15.00 BST

IFE Markets have seen a list of new product introductions over the last 5 years, ranging from high capacity portable media players, to mobile telephony enabling technologies and fiber optic-based embedded systems. Nonetheless we are now at the bottom of a global recession that has affected all airlines and has pushed the implementation of far-reaching cost cutting measures, effectively restraining any growth potential for IFE suppliers.

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