AMSTERDAM, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- Ensures Continued Access to eBooks on ScienceDirect

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, today announced an agreement with Portico, a not-for-profit digital preservation service, to aid ScienceDirect, Elsevier's online STM platform, in addressing the challenges of eBook preservation. This agreement will ensure that eBooks on ScienceDirect content is protected for the future.

The burgeoning growth of digital content of all types has created questions and concerns about the lifespan of archived materials, and the realization that information that is available today, may at some point deteriorate or otherwise become inaccessible.

FREMONT, California, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- Alienware Area-51 ALX Overclocked to 1600MHz for High-Performance Gaming

Corsair(R) http://www.corsair.com, a worldwide leader in high performance computer and flash memory products, announced today that the recently relaunched Alienware Area-51(R) ALX high performance gaming platform now includes 4GB of Corsair's award winning overclockable DOMINATOR DDR3 memory. Using Corsair's DOMINATOR memory modules, the Alienware Area-51 ALX runs with rock-solid stability at the overclocked memory frequency of 1600 MHz.

REDMOND, Washington, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- Company's expertise in mobile personal data protection and management to come to Microsoft.

Microsoft Corp today announced it intends to acquire MobiComp, a company that helped pioneer technologies allowing the backup and restoration of mobile data and mobile posting of social content to websites such as Facebook. The acquisition would combine MobiComp's expertise building innovative mobile data protection and sharing services with Microsoft's vision to provide compelling experiences that span work and play across mobile phones, the web and PCs. Terms of the planned acquisition are not being disclosed.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO)

California and New York regulators have been in the news lately (such as here and here), with their attempts to crack down on the nascent direct-to-consumer genetic testing industry. These states argue that companies like 23andMe, Navigenics, and several others, are offering unproven and unlicensed clinical tests directly to consumers. Are the services offered by these companies clinical tests, subject to the normal regulations of other clinical tests? Should the government be able to stop you from getting your DNA sequenced?

The answer to the second question is a flat-out no. The government has no legitimate reason to prevent you from getting genotyped. The technology used by these personal genetics companies is very good - in the future, this technology will be cheaper and cover more variants in your genome, but what is available right now is very good. And there are reasonable non-clinical reasons to get yourself sequenced, out of sheer curiosity, or for genealogy purposes, for example. More importantly, this sequence data is a permanent resource for you. Although we may not have very good clinical tests for complex genetic diseases right now, we'll have them in the future, and any DNA sequencing you get done now will be suitable for these future analyses. Once you have your raw DNA data in hand, it's there if you need it in the future.

So, as things stand now, the genotyping serviced offered by 23andMe, DecodeMe, and Navigenics have enough non-clinical use to justify themselves, and these services should not be blocked by state regulators. But simply offering people DNA sequencing is one thing - making disease risk predictions is another.

LONDON, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Headache frustrations are set to ease, thanks to a new range of patient leaflets. Produced by Lifting The Burden, the World Health Organization's Global Campaign to Reduce the Burden of Headache Worldwide, they will help sufferers understand and manage their headache more effectively.

Almost all of us will have had a headache, but for many people it is more than just an irritant. For those with recurring headache, it can have a serious impact on their daily lives. A third (34.3%)(1) of migraine sufferers face difficulties or discrimination at work because of their condition.

To help all people with headache, including those with migraine, Lifting The Burden has produced five new leaflets:

- What is migraine?

LONDON, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- Piper Alpha: 20 Years On

On 6 July 1988 a massive explosion on the North Sea Piper Alpha oil platform took the lives of 167 people in what remains the world's worst offshore industry disaster.

The tragedy was a wake-up call to the offshore sector, and the lessons learnt in the aftermath have ensured a safer industry in which to work. Or have they?

Not many people think about what it's like to be a bat, but for those who do, it's enlightening and potentially groundbreaking for understanding aspects of the human brain and nervous system.

Cynthia Moss, a member of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., is one of few researchers who spend time trying to get into the heads of bats.

Her new research suggests there is more to studying bats than figuring out how they process sound to distinguish environments.
"For decades it's been recognized that a bat's voice produces sounds that give the bat information about the location of objects," says Moss. "We're now recognizing that every time a bat produces a sound there are changes in brain activity that may be important for scene analysis, sensorimotor control and spatial memory and navigation."

Every year thousands of doctors and scientists fly to meetings all over the world, but with climate change accelerating, can this type of travel be justified, two doctors debate the issue in this week's BMJ.

Flying across continents in great numbers to exchange information will soon become as outdated and unsuitable to the modern world as the fax machine and the horse-drawn carriage, writes Professor Malcolm Green, from Imperial College, London.

Driving less and low energy light bulbs can contribute a little to reducing our carbon footprint, but if doctors stop going to international conferences they could make a real difference and be seen to be taking the lead, he argues.

If you remember the early days of computers, you saw some marketing claims that seemed to make sense but quickly evaporated when reality hit - you could store all your recipes, for example, until you realized computers were as loud as a turbo jet and used almost as much energy so it was not wise to keep them on - so keep a box with some index cards in it was much better.

You may feel the same way about adding an invisible layer of nanomaterials to the bottom of a metal put just so you can boil water using a lot less energy. While this increase in efficiency could some day have a big impact on cooling computer chips, and reducing costs for industrial boiling applications, like those early computers, it's best to wait a while before getting rid of the tea kettle.

Bringing water to a boil, and the related phase change that transforms the liquid into vapor, requires an interface between the water and air. In the example of a pot of water, two such interfaces exist: at the top where the water meets air, and at the bottom where the water meets tiny pockets of air trapped in the microscale texture and imperfections on the surface of the pot. Even though most of the water inside of the pot has reached 100 degrees Celsius and is at boiling temperature, it cannot boil because it is surrounded by other water molecules and there is no interface — i.e., no air — present to facilitate a phase change.

AMSTERDAM, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- 43 Elsevier Journals Receive Top Category Rank; Journal Citations Grow 10 Percent; Lancet and Cell Each Increase and Retain Leadership Positions

Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced highlights of its Journal Impact Factor performance in 2007. The 2007 Journal Citation Reports(c) published by ThomsonReuters, reports that 43 Elsevier journals ranked number one in their respective categories. In addition, total Elsevier journal citations grew by 10 percent (compared to an industry average of 8.9 percent).