LONDON, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

Planalytics Inc., the global leader in Business Weather Intelligence(R), released its February WeatherCall(SM) report today pointing to differences in consumer demand during the month as a result of below normal precipitation. Starting around the 6th of February, many parts of southern England and also the Midlands went between 16 and 18 days without measurable rainfall, which boosted overall high street footfall but hurt sales of specific categories such as rainwear.

LONDON, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

Chiltern, a leading global research organization, is proud to announce that it won 4 'Pharmas' at the PharmaTimes Clinical Researcher of the Year ceremony, including the coveted Clinical Department of the Year.

Chiltern received the following awards: Gold: Clinical Department of the Year - Chiltern International Gold: Anne Tebbatt in the Project Manager category Gold: Kara Tanabe in Clinical Research Associate category Silver: Donna Sexton in Clinical Research Associate category

A combination of negative mother-daughter relationships and low blood levels of serotonin, an important brain chemical for mood stability, may be lethal for adolescent girls, leaving them vulnerable to engage in self-harming behaviors such as cutting themselves.

New University of Washington research indicates that these two factors in combination account for 64 percent of the difference among adolescents, primarily girls, who engage in self-harming behaviors and those who do not.

“Girls who engage in self harm are at high risk for attempting suicide, and some of them are dying,” said Theodore Beauchaine, a UW associate professor of psychology and co-author of a new study. “There is no better predictor of suicide than previous suicide attempts.”

Solving a long-standing biological mystery, UCLA stem cell researchers have discovered that blood stem cells, the cells that later differentiate into all the cells in the blood supply, originate and are nurtured in the placenta.

The discovery may allow researchers to mimic the specific embryonic microenvironment necessary for development of blood stem cells in cell culture and grow them for use in treating diseases like leukemia and aplastic anemia, said Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a researcher in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and senior author of the study.

NEW YORK, March 5 /PRNewswire/ -- What: GoldenSource Corporation, a leading provider of Enterprise Data Management (EDM) solutions, is participating at FIMA 2008 and sponsoring a roundtable as part of the Data Quality & Metrics Day. GoldenSource will host roundtable discussions on the challenges of developing and refining a comprehensive set of data metrics at an enterprise level. Experts will be available at the GoldenSource booth throughout the two day conference to discuss EDM solutions as well as recently announced GoldenSource connections and partnerships.

Where: FIMA 2008, Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York, NY.

When: Data Quality & Metrics Day roundtable: March 11 from 10:40 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

People who handle explosives usually have heavy-duty tasks to perform – dislodging rocks, demolishing old buildings, or triggering an avalanche. Now explosives can be used for delicate tasks, too, like making it possible to place holograms in steel.

Nearly everybody carries holograms around on light things, like money or tickets for a concert, because they protect against forgery. They take a great deal of effort to produce, and are almost impossible to copy, because the image is created not only by the interaction of different colors and contrasts, but also by the surface structure. Different pictures can be seen, depending on the direction from which the light is shining.

What do oil exploration and steroid testing have in common? Quite a bit, say researchers at The University of Nottingham.

Their new process — which uses high pressure environments to investigate the chemical structure and make-up of a sample — has been refined and developed at the University to develop highly accurate tests for detecting levels of illicit steroids in urine. The test procedure is already in the process of being commercialised and is expected to be ready for use in the 2012 Olympics.

LONDON, March 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Unite, Britain's biggest trade union, is using World Book Day tomorrow (Thursday 6th March) to build on the successful work initiated by Union Learning Reps in hundreds of workplaces.

Unite wants it's 2600 Union Learning Reps (ULRs) to set up libraries, book shelves, reading groups and book swaps, to get the union's two million members hooked on books.

Unite the union has secured an extra GBP2.7 million from the Government's learning fund to continue to build a learning culture that supports, encourages and aids it's members in their lifelong learning journey and help them reach goals, both personally and professionally, that many individuals never thought would be possible.

EDMONTON, Alberta, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

SplitFish AG (SplitFish), a leader in video game hardware innovation, today announced its video game console adapters are now being offered for sale in Canada, Germany, United States, Spain, England, and Russia via direct international distributors. SplitFish has expanded its direct distribution network to include these individual international suppliers to better serve the growing overseas demand with faster fulfillment capability and reduce the FragFX shortages in retail stores globally.

SplitFish is proud to have German distribution via Azoo3D, Jakob, Gross Electronics, Amazon.de or direct from www.Splitfish.de .

A new modeling approach using sea ice motion data to follow parcels of ice backward in time at monthly intervals for up to 3 years while accumulating a history of the solar radiation and air temperature to which the ice was exposed offers new hope for increased accuracy in climate change models, say scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. This is the only model based entirely on historical observations.

Using this new technique, the thickness of Arctic sea ice was estimated from 1982 to 2003. Results showed that average ice thickness and total ice volume fluctuated together during the early study period, peaking in the late 1980s and then declining until the mid-1990s. Thereafter, ice thickness slightly increased but the total volume of sea ice did not increase.