LONDON, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Martin Oxley, Managing Director Europe of BuzzBack Market Research, will participate in an Ideas Rush panel at Research 2009: The Annual Conference, March 24 and 25 at the Riverbank Park Plaza in London.

Oxley will be joining a panel of research experts for an Ideas Rush, a session focused on Big Ideas in a short-time format. The Ideas Rush is a series of high-energy sessions where each speaker presents one original idea, in five minutes, with the aid of only one slide. Oxley will speak on the subject Do You Think in Black and White? He will expand on why so much current research does not engage with people in an emotive and relevant way.

Half-biological and half-synthetic, an army of thousands of wrecking balls are contained within Dr. Metin Sitti's Carnegie Mellon laboratory.  Once incited, they keep moving to the death.  They run on sugar.  And they can all be taken down by penicillin. 

Sitti’s army is a cadre of Serratia marcensens bacteria-coated polystyrene microbeads, propelled by the bacteria’s innate restlessness.  To Sitti, recruiting bacteria to form the propulsion side of a microprojectile is more than a fun day in the lab.  These tiny living robots are the foundation for the future of biointegrated micromachines.

Professor Lynn Margulis is the biologist who had the incredible insight that the cells of modern organisms were originally formed by the symbiotic combination of prokaryotic cells and colonies of bacteria, and then had to battle for years to have this recognised by the science community.

The idea is so outlandish, but so significant, that it puts her right up there as one of the greats of biology.

LONDON, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Uncertainty around today's economy has left some workers feeling uneasy about their jobs. Career experts from CareerBuilder are offering tips to help workers make themselves indispensable at the office and to help them find a job if they have experienced a layoff.

The important thing is to be prepared and stay productive within your organization, said Tony Roy, Managing Director of CareerBuilder.co.uk. If you've experienced a layoff, don't get discouraged. It may take longer to find a job, but there are still organizations out there hiring.

To look at Matthew Houdek, you could never tell he was born with virtually no left ear.

A surgery at Loyola University Health System made it possible for Houdek to be fitted with a prosthetic ear that looks just like the real thing.

Ear-nose-throat surgeon Dr. Sam Marzo implanted three small metal screws in the side of Houdek's head. Each screw is fitted with a magnet, and magnetic attraction holds the prosthetic ear in place.

It takes only a few seconds for Houdek to put his prosthetic ear on in the morning and take it off when he showers or goes to bed. It doesn't fall off, and it's much more convenient than prosthetic ears that are attached with adhesive. 

Humans excel at recognizing faces, but how we do this has been an abiding mystery in neuroscience and psychology. In an effort to explain our success in this area, researchers are taking a closer look at how and why we fail. 

A new study from MIT looks at a particularly striking instance of failure: our impaired ability to recognize faces in photographic negatives. The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, suggests that a large part of the answer might lie in the brain's reliance on a certain kind of image feature.

FINDINGS: Scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the National University of Singapore have discovered the first microRNA (miRNA) capable of directly tamping down the activity of the well known tumor-suppressor gene, p53, While p53 functions to prevent tumor formation, the p53 gene is thought to malfunction in more than 50% of cancerous tumors.

RELEVANCE: The study reports the first time a miRNA has been shown to directly affect the p53 protein level, although researchers have previously identified other genes and miRNAs that indirectly affect p53's activity.

A group of international researchers has found the first reliable evidence that early detection of subsequent breast tumours in women who have already had the disease can halve the women's chances of death from breast cancer.

According to the research published online today (Wednesday 18 March) in the cancer journal, Annals of Oncology [1], if the second breast cancer was picked up at its early, asymptomatic stage, then the women's chances of survival were improved by between 27-47% compared to women whose second breast cancer was detected at a later stage when symptoms had started to appear.

In the past few years, a number of anti-cancer drugs have been developed which are directed selectively against specific key molecules of tumor cells. Among these is an antibody called cetuximab, which attaches to a protein molecule that is found in large amounts on the surface of many types of cancer cells. When this surface molecule, called epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGF-R for short, is blocked by cetuximab, the cancer cell receives less signals stimulating cell division.

UPPSALA, Sweden, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

Hansoft, the leading vendor of tools for project management and QA in the game development industry, will officially launch Hansoft 5.3 during GDC in San Francisco next week.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090317/NY84963 )

Hansoft 5.3 contains a number of improvements. One of the most significant is the asset pipeline tool, a feature many developers have been waiting for.