AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, February 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Payment software provider Welcome Real-time today announced the appointment of Francois Dutray as CEO. The Supervisory Board chose François Dutray for his in-depth knowledge of the bank industry and his leadership experience which will be key assets to continue the growth of the company.

BASEL, Switzerland, February 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Synosia Therapeutics today announced the appointment of Philippe Lutz MA Finance, as the company's first chief financial officer, effective immediately. He will be based at Synosia's new headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.

Lutz joins Synosia from Credit Suisse Investment Banking where he most recently served as a vice president of the global markets solutions group. In a nine-year career at Credit Suisse, he contributed to a broad range of capital market transactions and successfully completed the chartered financial analyst exams (CFA). Lutz is a Swiss national and earned his masters in business administration from the University of St. Gallen.

TOKYO, February 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- Exhibits to Feature Solutions for Open Internet/Open Platform

- Next Generation Networks and Converged Devices

ACCESS CO., LTD., a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets, will be an exhibitor again this year at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2008 (formerly 3GSM World Congress), the mobile industry's biggest event, which is taking place February 11-14 in Barcelona, Spain. This year's event marks the seventh time that ACCESS will be present at the Mobile World Congress.

LONDON and TOKYO, February 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- LiMo Platform and APIs Open Market Access for Technology Vendors and Application Developers

LiMo Foundation(TM), a global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole industry, today announced the on-schedule availability in March 2008 of the first release of the LiMo Platform-the first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile handsets-together with the immediate public availability of the application programming interface (API) specifications.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080204/CLM031LOGO )

LiMo's technology will be showcased in Booth 8b135, Hall 8 at Mobile World Congress (www.mobileworldcongress.com), February 11-14 in Barcelona.

CALGARY, Canada, February 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (TSX: ONC, NASDAQ: ONCY) ('Oncolytics') reported today that Dr. Kevin Harrington and his research group at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, U.K. published the results of their work testing combination treatment schedules of reovirus and radiation in human and murine tumour cells in vitro and in vivo. The paper, entitled "Enhanced In vitro and In vivo Cytotoxicity of Combined Reovirus and Radiotherapy" appears online in the February 1, 2008 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

Patients with diabetes or high blood pressure could benefit from the development of new "smart" holograms which can detect changes in, among other things, glucose levels and make self-diagnosis much simpler, cheaper and more reliable, write Chris Lowe and Cynthia Larbey in February’s Physics World.

A hologram is a recording of an optical interference pattern created when laser light shone on an object is made to overlap with a separate beam of light that does not pass through the object. When light is shone onto the interference pattern, a 3D image of the original object is recreated.

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that languages change and evolve in rapid bursts rather than in a steady pattern.

The research in Science investigates thousands of years of language evolution, and looks at the way in which languages split and evolve. It has long been accepted that the desire for a distinct social identity may cause languages to change quickly, but it has not previously been known whether such rapid bursts of change are a regular feature of the evolution of human language. The findings show that initially, the basic vocabulary of newly formed languages develops and changes quite quickly, and this is then followed by longer periods of slower and gradual change.

Drugs derived from cinchona bark, known as cinchona alkaloids, have been used in healing from ancient times. The most prominent representative of this group is quinine, a bitter substance contained in beverages such as tonic water and used in modern medicine to combat malaria.

As early as 1945, Robert Burns Woodward and William von Eggers Doering (Harvard University) described how to synthesize quinine in the laboratory. The last step of this “formal” total synthesis, a three-step reaction procedure previously described by Paul Rabe and Karl Kindler in 1918, has continued to be the subject of much controversy to this day.

Had they done it or not? That has been the question for decades. Woodward and Doering published the synthesis of d-quinotoxine in 1944. Based on the conversion of d-quinotoxine into quinine described by Rabe and Kindler in 1918, they claimed to have derived the total synthesis of quinine, though they had not actually completed this last step themselves before publishing. Their “formal” total synthesis was strongly challenged and was even dismissed as a “myth” by Gilbert Stork (Columbia University) in 2001.

REDMOND, Washington, February 3 /PRNewswire/ --

The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.

Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

A new approach to cleaning up digital photos has been developed by researchers in the UK and Jordan - they use a computer algorithm known as PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) to intelligently boost contrast and detail in images without distorting the underlying features.

Malik Braik and Alaa Sheta Al-Balqa Applied University, in Salt, Jordan, working with Aladdin Ayesh at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, explain that the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm represents an entirely new approach to solving all kinds of optimization problems. PSO has recently been used in computer science and electrical engineering.