STOCKHOLM, June 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Vattenfall, the European energy company, announces a new downloadable footage service for broadcast journalists, launching 27 June, 2008.

To view the Multimedia News Release, please click: http://mnr2.world-television.com/vattenfall/421/

Within the Press and News section of its website, under Video Gallery journalists can now immediately view and download, free of charge, broadcast-quality (MPEG2) footage. This includes B-Roll footage covering Vattenfall's business and operations in its markets in Europe: Germany, Poland and the Nordic region.

Journalists can search quickly and easily for relevant footage, which can be viewed prior to download via the streaming preview function.

LONDON, June 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Micro Focus, the UK software company, today announced full-year results that saw revenues rise above the $200m mark for the first time including a 'pleasing' return from North America of 20 per cent. The company said it was proposing a 30 per cent rise in its final dividend to shareholders.

In a video interview, Micro Focus CEO Stephen Kelly said the results exceeded expectations.

"We are very ambitious for the company," he said. "But I think it's quite responsible for us to keep our feet on the ground, our focus on the strategy and the planning and executing well. And if we exceed our expectations, then that's all good."

LONDON, June 27 /PRNewswire/ -- On Wednesday 2 July 2008, members of the Road Haulage Association, the lobby group TransAction 2007 and the Transport Association will take the fuel issue to the heart of the Nation's capital to ensure that soaring fuel prices and the highest levels of fuel duty in Europe are top of the political agenda. And while convoy of Heavy Goods Vehicles makes its way from the M40 Westway south to Westminster, a large foot lobby will be taking the message to the Houses of Parliament.

LONDON, June 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- Over Half of British Employees Want to Work to The Sound Of Music

- Glastonbury Live Act Neil Diamond, Famed for Hits Like Sweet Caroline, Top Choice for Work Party

The Rocky Theme Tune has been voted the cheesiest motivational song in an Orange Business Services poll about the effect of music in the workplace. Conjuring up images of the Ricky Gervais' motivational talks in The Office, over a third (36 per cent) of people named it as the worst motivational song. But cheesy music isn't a total flop with Glastonbury headliner, Neil Diamond, being named the artist people would most like to perform at a work party beating other Glastonbury artists including Amy Winehouse, Jay Z and The Gossip.

TOKYO, June 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- NEC Strengthens Global Software Business Helping Communications Service Providers Accelerate Business Transformation

NEC Corporation (NEC) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire NetCracker Technology Corp. (NetCracker), a US based software and solutions company with an industry leading track record of delivering Operations Support Systems (OSS) transformation to communications service providers across the globe. This strategic acquisition underscores NEC's long standing commitment to offer innovative solutions to the communications industry, enabling them to transform their business, and rapidly deploy new infrastructure and services.

Due to concerns about greenhouse gases, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have become the rage - even to a point where common sense has taken a holiday, namely when environmental sites fall back on Big Tobacco language like 'unlikely to hurt you' and 'no conclusive evidence' instead of realistically telling you that you should call in a Haz-Mat team if one breaks.

Introduced in the United States in 1979, they reached nearly 300 million last year. Experts expect that figure to rise steeply by 2012, when a federal law requiring energy-efficient lighting goes into effect.

There's just one catch to this energy conservation story: Each CFL contains a small amount (3 to 5 milligrams) of mercury, a neurotoxin that can be released as vapor when a bulb is broken. The gas can pose a minor risk to certain groups, such as infants, small children and pregnant women. Mercury can escape from plastic bags containing discarded bulbs, which makes long-term storage, disposal or recycling tricky.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have determined that starvation blocks the effects of growth hormone via a mechanism that may have implications in treating diabetes and extending life span.

Using genetically altered mice, the researchers found that during fasting, the actions of growth hormone are blocked by a fat-burning hormone called FGF21.

Growth hormone has many functions in the growth and reproduction of cells, such as controlling the length of developing arm and leg bones in children.

A new publication answers centuries' old questions regarding the mechanism and function of humor, identifying the reason humor is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants.

Previous theories have only ever applied to a small proportion of all instances of humor, many of them stipulating necessary content or social conditions either in the humor itself or around the individual experiencing it. But this doesn't explain why an individual can laugh at something when no one else around them does, nor why two people can laugh at the same stimulus for different reasons.

Want to really store carbon? Get old ... and underwater. Researchers at the Missouri Tree Ring Laboratory in the Department of Forestry discovered that trees submerged in freshwater aquatic systems store carbon for thousands of years, a significantly longer period of time than in a forest, thus keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.

The team studied trees in northern Missouri, a geographically unique area with a high level of riparian forests (forests that have natural water flowing through them). They discovered submerged oak trees that were as old as 14,000 years, potentially some of the oldest discovered in the world. This carbon storage process is not just ancient; it continues even today as additional trees become submerged, according to Guyette.

"If a tree is submerged in water, its carbon will be stored for an average of 2,000 years," said Richard Guyette, director of the MU Tree Ring Lab and research associate professor of forestry in the School of Natural Resources in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. "If a tree falls in a forest, that number is reduced to an average of 20 years, and in firewood, the carbon is only stored for one year."

Engineers working in optical communications bear more than a passing resemblance to dreamers chasing rainbows.

They may not wish literally to capture all the colors of the spectrum, but they do seek to control the rate at which light from across the spectrum moves through optical circuits.

This pursuit is daunting when those circuits contain dimensions measured in nanometers.

At the nanoscale, says Qiaoqiang Gan, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., engineers hoping to integrate optical structures with electronic chips face a dilemma.