LONDON, March 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Ion Thrusters Provide Cruise Control for ESA Gravity Mission to be Launched Today

QinetiQ's (LSE: QQL) electric engines are playing a crucial role on a revolutionary spacecraft to be launched today (Monday) from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Northern Russia. The electric engines(link: http://www.qinetiq.com/home/defence/defence_solutions/space/ep.html), known as T5 ion thrusters, are providing high-precision drag compensation for the dart-shaped GOCE spacecraft being launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to map the Earth's gravitational field.

To view the Multimedia News Release, please click:

http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/qinetiq/37449/

LONDON, March 16 /PRNewswire/ -- SYSTIME http://www.SYSTIME.net, a CMS Group Company and the largest Oracle JD Edwards practice globally, has recently announced commencement of their France operations. This investment is aligned to their strategic decision to expand their European business operations in the ERP space.

SYSTIME's advent in Paris, France along with its European headquarters in London, gives it an expanded network in Europe, allowing proximity to clients and faster response times. Delivering solutions from this near shore facility will also be more convenient and advantageous to clients and will provide customers with seamless service.

LONDON, March 16 /PRNewswire/ --

The need for storing energy along with the preference for cleaner storage techniques opens the door to enormous opportunities for alternative energy storage technologies in numerous end-user and almost all geographical markets worldwide.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081117/FSLOGO)

MARSEILLE, France, March 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- WT1 is a Valuable Biomarker in the Prognosis and Follow-up of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) Patients.

- The ProfileQuant(R) WT1 kit was Developed and Validated in the Context of an International Collaborative Study Coordinated by the European Leukemia Network (ELN) Consortium.

- With its WT1 kit, Ipsogen Continues its CE Marking Strategy and Confirms its Leadership Position in Molecular Diagnosis of Leukemia.

IPSOGEN SA (Alternext - FR0010626028 - ALIPS), a molecular diagnostic company specialized in the development, manufacturing and commercialization of diagnostic assays for breast cancer and leukemias, today announces the CE marking of its ProfileQuant(R) WT1 kit.

The climate change skeptic asks - 'Given that the climate changes over millenia due to powerful natural forces, how could humans possibly contribute any significant effect to climate change, given our brief existence in geological time?'

I shall try to answer that question with examples from engineering which show how short-term pulse events can significantly affect long-term cyclic events.

The Influence of Short-Term Events on Long-Term Events.

Synchronized, goal-directed actions are nothing new; that concept is the foundation of civilization.   But it goes much deeper than previously realized, according to research in BMC Neuroscience.    It isn't just voluntary cooperation that happens, sometimes it is at the unconscious brain level.

A new study shows that when musicians play along together it isn't just their instruments that are working together, it is happening at the brain wave level also.  The research details how EEG readouts from pairs of guitarists become more synchronized, a finding with wider potential implications for how our brains interact when we do.

Want to see a collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with a  millions of times the mass of the sun?

You're in luck.   NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope recently caught that very thing.   The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

Sixty-one teams from Southern California, Arizona, Brazil and Chile faced off in the Los Angeles regional FIRST Robotics Competition on March 13 and 14. JPL sponsored nine of the schools in this annual engineering and technology contest held at the Long Beach Convention Center. 

The teams from Centinela Valley Union High School District, Lawndale; Atascadero High School, Atascadero; and the NASA-sponsored Bishop Alemany High School, Mission Hills, won the regional competition and will compete in the FIRST championship competition in Atlanta, from April 16-19. Chaminade College Preparatory, in West Hills, won the competition's highest award, the Regional Chairman's Award, and will also go to Atlanta. 

A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated a site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia.  The sudden death of the herd in a mud trap provides a rare snapshot of social behavior. Composed entirely of juveniles of a single species of ornithomimid dinosaur (Sinornithomimus dongi), the herd suggests that immature individuals were left to fend for themselves when adults were preoccupied with nesting or brooding.

Sometimes different is good.  You may not want a strange cup of coffee when you go to Starbucks and you would like for your car to work the way cars should, but in science the peculiar can teach us a lot.
 
This was the idea behind Halton Arp’s catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies that appeared in the 1960s. One of the oddballs listed there is Arp 261, which has now been imaged in more detail than ever before using the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.