MILPITAS, California, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

- Appro to Support Renault's Drive for Performance in Formula 1 Racing

Appro (http://www.appro.com), a leading provider of high-performance enterprise computing systems, today announced that it has been awarded a contract for a 38TF Appro Xtreme-X(TM) Supercomputer for the ING Renault F1 Team Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Centre, a brand new modern technology-driven research facility designed to place Renault "in the pole position" in Formula 1 competition. This award marks another milestone for Appro's supercomputers in international HPC markets. The Appro Xtreme-X2 Supercomputer will be shipped and installed by Appro at the Renault F1 CFD Centre in the UK by the end of June, 2008.

PARIS and PRINCETON, New Jersey, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

- A New Step Forward May Help Increase Appropriate Early Use of Plavix(R) by Simplifying Administration in Acute Coronary Syndrome Patients

Sanofi-aventis (EURONEXT: SAN and NYSE: SNY) and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (NYSE: BMY) announced today that the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Evaluation Agency (EMEA) has issued a positive opinion recommending approval of the 300mg tablet of the antiplatelet Plavix(R) (clopidogrel bisulfate). This positive opinion from the CHMP needs to be ratified by the European Commission in the coming months before final approval.

SINGAPORE, March 5 /PRNewswire/ -- ICIS pricing, http://www.icispricing.com/, the world's leading price reporting service for the global chemical industry, has launched a new daily Xylenes (Asia Pacific) report.

The daily Xylenes (Asia Pacific) report will offer daily spot assessments of isomer grade xylene and paraxylene (PX) written by an experienced aromatics team from ICIS pricing.

The section on isomer grade xylene includes spot CFR NE Asia and FOB Korea price assessments, while the portion dedicated to PX has spot CFR China, CFR Taiwan and FOB Korea price assessments.

A national database containing images of ballistic markings from all new and imported guns sold in the U.S. should not be created at this time, says a new report from the National Research Council. Such a database has been proposed to help investigators link ballistics evidence -- cartridge cases or bullets found at crime scenes -- to a firearm and the location where it was originally sold.

But given the practical limitations of current technology for generating and comparing images of ballistic markings, searches of such an extensive database would likely produce too many candidate "matches" to be helpful, the report says.

Hardware piracy - making knock-off microchips based on stolen blueprints - has long been a chronic problem in the electronics industry. Computer engineers at the University of Michigan and Rice University have devised a comprehensive way to head off this costly infringement: Each chip would have its own unique lock and key. The patent holder would hold the keys. The chip would securely communicate with the patent-holder to unlock itself, and it could operate only after being unlocked.

The technique is called EPIC, short for Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits. It relies on established cryptography methods and introduces subtle changes into the chip design process. But it does not affect the chips' performance or power consumption.

According to quantum mechanics, small magnetic objects called nanomagnets can exist in two distinct states (i.e. north pole up and north pole down). They can switch their state through a phenomenon called quantum tunneling.

When the nanomagnet switches its poles, the abrupt change in its magnetization can be observed with low-temperature magnetometry techniques used in del Barco’s lab. The switch is called quantum tunneling because it looks like a funnel cloud tunneling from one pole to another.

A new paper in Nature shows that two almost independent halves of a new magnetic molecule can tunnel, or switch poles, at once under certain conditions. In the process, they appear to cancel out quantum tunneling.

SAN DIEGO, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

- The CDMA Certification Forum to announce its 2008 objectives including a new certification process.

The CCF (CDMA Certification Forum) a global non-profit organization dedicated to improving test efficiency in order to improve time to market and cost associated with CDMA device certification has announced its participation to the 2008 3G CDMA Middle East and Africa Regional Conference.

Research from ancient sediment cores indicates that a warming climate could make the world’s arctic tundra far more susceptible to fires than previously thought. The findings are important given the potential for tundra fires to release organic carbon – which could add significantly to the amount of greenhouse gases already blamed for global warming.

Montana State University post-doctoral researcher Philip Higuera is the lead author on the paper, which summarizes a portion of a four-year study funded by the National Science Foundation.

Butterflies and moths are well known for their striking metamorphosis from crawling caterpillars to winged adults. In light of this radical change, not just in body form, but also in lifestyle, diet and dependence on particular sensory cues, it would seem unlikely that learned associations or memories formed at the larval or caterpillar stage could be accessible to the adult moth or butterfly.

Now, scientists at Georgetown University have discovered that a moth can indeed remember what it learned as a caterpillar.

Just picture the scene: you’re at a cocktail party, talking to someone you would like to get to know better but the background noise is making it hard to concentrate. Luckily, humans are very gifted at listening to someone speaking while many other people are talking loudly at the same time. This so-called cocktail-party-phenomenon is based on the ability of the human auditory system to decompose the acoustic world into discrete objects of perception.

It was originally believed that the major acoustic cue used by the auditory system to solve this task was directional information of the sound source, but even though localisation of different sound sources with two ears improves the performance, it can be achieved monaurally, for example in telephone conversations, where no directional information is available.