PALM DESERT, California, January 28 /PRNewswire/ --

ikordo, the free online meeting planner that organizes and schedules meetings, has an onsite meeting pod open for business at the DEMO 08 conference, being held from January 28th - 30th 2008 in Palm Desert, CA at the JW Marriott Resort and Spa. DEMO is the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies. As a gold sponsor of DEMO, ikordo invites delegates to schedule their onsite and follow up meetings at the meeting pod located in the Sponsor Network Lounge. Delegates will have the opportunity to receive tips on best practices from an ikordo expert.

GAITHERSBURG, Maryland, January 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Providing any-to-any multi-path switching, security, survivability, and presence/reachability, SmartNode(TM) Unified Communication Agent integrates IP-based communications with existing TDM/PSTN telephony and SIP/H.323 VoIP systems

Patton Electronics -- the leader in business and carrier-class network access, connectivity, and voice-over-IP equipment -- has announced the new Unified Communication Agent (UCA) for SmartNode(TM) VoIP Gateway-Routers.

COLUMBIA, Maryland, January 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- Scaleable Gateway MSC, HLR, Prepaid, USSD Callback, Multi-IMSI Support and TDM and IP Routing Built On Carrier-Grade Architecture

- Visit Tecore Networks at Mobile World Congress, Stand 8C78

NEW YORK, January 28 /PRNewswire/ --

Nanotech Briefs has announced a Call for Nominations for its fourth annual Nano 50 awards competition, which launched on January 7. The Nano 50 recognizes the top 50 technologies, innovators, and products with the greatest potential to advance the commercialization of nanotechnology.

Nominations are accepted at no cost via an online submission form at the official awards Web site: www.nanotechbriefs.com/nano50. The awards categories are:

RALEIGH, North Carolina, January 28 /PRNewswire/ --

Campbell Alliance, the leading management consulting firm specializing in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, today announced that Nader Naeymi-Rad, Senior Vice President of the firm's Brand Management practice, will speak at the EyeForPharma Oncology Summit Europe. The event will be held on January 30-31, 2008, at the Regent's Park Marriott Hotel in London, England.

Mr. Naeymi-Rad's presentation, titled "Key Success Factors for Launching Oncology Products in Europe," is slated for 2:00 pm GMT on January 30 and will cover:

LONDON, January 28 /PRNewswire/ --

- The Winner of the $100,000 USD Live EDGE Prize Package Will be Announced Live by Premier Farnell's CEO Harriet Green

- Winning Design in the Opinion of the Judges Will Have Creative and Intuitive Design Using Electronic Components That Will Have a Positive Impact on the Environment.

Premier Farnell plc (LSE: PFL), the leading multi-channel, high service distributor supporting millions of engineers and purchasing professionals globally, has announced open registration to the technical conference and awards ceremony for Live EDGE - Electronic Design for the Global Environment. The awards ceremony will announce the $100,000 USD prize package winner and the five highly commended designs receiving $5,000 USD each.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed and discussed why space travel is not only becoming important for ecological reasons, it's part of a universal mandate.

Now we're going to talk about some aspects of galactic order. Infinite monkeys in a random universe? No, more like a railroad train with a lot of ways to get from point A to point B - but it has rails and the universe can never leave them.

In the aftermath of the Big Bang, particles collided and shifted with terrific force - yet protons came out of these crashes intact. This identity retention was a primitive form of memory and it was the foundation of culture.

It used to be that El Nino was a predictable phenomenon that explained odd weather changes but recent global warming studies minimized its impact - everything was global warming instead. Now, it seems, El Nino is back in atmospheric fashion.

Scientists have known about El Niño weather fluctuations over a large portion of the world since the early 1950s. They occur in cycles every three to seven years, changing rain patterns that can trigger flooding as well as drought.

Siegfried Schubert of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues studied the impact that El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have on the most intense U.S.

Communist dictatorships don't get credit for much but one thing about them made anti-smoking advocates happy; a lack of cigarettes meant fewer people puffed. Yes, according to a new study in an anti-smoking journal, capitalism is to blame.

Contrary to health wisdom in the west, the number of Russian women who smoke has more than doubled since the collapse of the Soviet Union, say authors of a study published in the journal Tobacco Control.

In 1992, seven per cent of women smoked, compared to almost 15 per cent by 2003. In the same period, the number of men who smoke has risen from 57 per cent to 63 per cent.

Since the term "black hole" was coined by John Wheeler in 1967, they have been used to resolve a lot of science-fiction plot inconsistencies.

Sometimes they resolve real-life ones too, especially if there is no other explanation.

HE 0437-5439, is an early-type star and one of ten so-called hypervelocity stars that are speeding away from the Milky Way galaxy - because of its young age, astronomers stated it could not have come from our galaxy. Carnegie astronomers Alceste Bonanos and Mercedes López-Morales, and collaborators Ian Hunter and Robert Ryans from Queen’s University Belfast examined its velocity, light intensity and, for the first time, its elemental composition and have proposed an answer - another black hole.