HOUSTON and ABERDEEN, Scotland, May 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- Leader in swellable elastomer expands into important new markets of North, South and Central America

Swellfix B.V., a leader in swellable elastomers for zonal isolation, announced today it has expanded its product and service offerings into the important new markets of North, South and Central America.

With its global base in Aberdeen, Scotland and its Americas headquarters in Houston, Swellfix provides a range of zonal isolation products and services, including cement assurance and other cost-effective swellable elastomer applications for the oil and gas industry. The overall global zonal isolation market is estimated at nearly US$4 billion.

In a series of mate choice experiments with Phintella vittata (the Chinese jumping spider), a group researchers has found that female spiders would rather mate with males that reflect ultraviolet B (UVB) rays than those that do not. This is the first evidence of an animal using UVB rays to communicate with other members of its species.

“It has long been recognized that solar UVB has direct deleterious effects on a wide range of living organisms; for example, it can cause skin cancer and damage the retinal tissues of the eyes of mammals,” said Daiqin Li of National University of Singapore, who is also an Adjunct Professor in Hubei University, China.

SAN DIEGO, May 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- Molecular Technology Aids Hospitals in the Prevention of Vancomycin- Resistant Enterococci (VRE) Transmission and Infection

BD Diagnostics, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), announced today the CE marking of the BD GeneOhm(TM) VanR assay for the rapid detection of vanA and vanB genes, which are associated with vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE). BD will immediately begin commercializing this important new assay throughout Europe.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- In March 08 LightAir was exhibiting at the International Home + Housewares Show held in Chicago. Twenty-five innovative products were named as 2008 Design Defined Honorees; LightAir IonFlow 50 air purifier was one of the selected.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080312/297040 )

Teams of young designers, experienced practitioners and educators called Design Finders researched hundreds of exhibitors. A Design Defined Honoree 2008 is an innovative product that has exemplified a commitment to design while achieving an environmentally friendly solution to common household cleaning, storage and home décor issues.

HONG KONG, May 1 /PRNewswire/ --

The clinical impact of the first-ever pro-healing stent, OrbusNeich's Genous Bio-engineered R stent, is the subject of a symposium at next month's 16th Annual Scientific Congress of the Hong Kong College of Cardiology.

Scheduled for May 3 at the Sheraton Hong Kong Hotel, the one-hour session will include:

LONDON, May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Cattle at Bixley Farms in Norfolk were today (1 May) the first animals in the country to be vaccinated against Bluetongue serotype 8 as over one million doses are delivered for animals in the Protection Zone on the first day of the vaccine roll-out.

Intervet, the animal health company behind this new vaccine, isolated the Bluetongue serotype 8 virus in September 2006, soon after the first European outbreak, and started an emergency programme to develop a suitable vaccine. The vaccine has gone from research & development to full-scale production in a record-breaking 20 months rather than the usual five to ten years and its delivery is ahead of schedule.

WILEN, Germany, May 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- Technology Leader in Lab Diagnostics Software Achieves Europe-Wide Market Penetration With Acquired Division

WILEN, Germany, May 1 /PRNewswire/ --

As marine pollution continues to rise, various interesting solutions have been proposed to remove toxic contaminants.

Various species of seaweed are able to extract toxic compounds from seawater, says Shinichi Nagata of the Environmental Biochemistry Group, at Kobe University, Japan, and colleagues at Shimane University and Nankai University, China.

They point to the brown seaweed, Undaria pinnatifida, known as wakame in Japan, and note that it has been the focus of research in this area for almost a decade.

Biomedical research in developing countries is the kind of ethical condundrum we all think about.

On one hand, infectious diseases may cause up to half of all deaths in undeveloped nations(1), so no one needs advanced treatments more. On the other hand, these are human clinical trials of experimental drugs and socio-economic status does not make you a lab monkey in any sort of culture we want to call civilized.

So what is the solution? Americans are primarily distrustful of government, the bigger the worse, so a global body dictating clinical trials would be treated with a lot of skepticism but the perfect solution can't be moving ethical targets determined by various nations, funding sources or institutions as is done now.

Scientists probing volcanic rocks from deep under the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean have discovered a special geochemical signature until now found only in the southern hemisphere. The rocks were dredged from the remote Gakkel Ridge, which lies under 3,000 to 5,000 meters of water; it is Earth’s most northerly undersea spreading ridge.

The Gakkel extends some 1,800 kilometers beneath the Arctic ice between Greenland and Siberia. Heavy ice cover prevented scientists from getting at it until the 2001 Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge Expedition, in which U.S and German ice breakers cooperated.

This produced data showing that the ridge is divided into robust eastern and western volcanic zones, separated by an anomalously deep segment. That abrupt boundary contains exposed unmelted rock from earth’s mantle, the layer that underlies the planet’s hardened outer shell, or lithosphere.