KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany, December 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- German Market Leader Establishes a Fully Integrated Platform for Its On-Trade and Off- Trade Distribution Channels

CAS AG, the leading global provider of demand side management solutions for the consumer products industry, today announced that the Radeberger Group, Germany's leading brewer with a market share of 15%, has extended its long-standing partnership with CAS.

LONDON, December 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Charity Invests in Managed Hosting Platform for Secure and Reliable Online Fundraising Presence

Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity has selected NTT Europe Online to provide a managed hosting platform for its charity website. The site is the portal for all the hospital's fundraising events and new campaigns, as well as providing a gateway for online donations. The charity will work with NTT Europe Online's team to create a foundation for future developments.

LONDON, December 16 /PRNewswire/ -- CMPMedica, a global healthcare information provider that is a division of United Business Media Limited, has signed a worldwide agreement to supply iSOFT, one of the world's largest providers of healthcare IT solutions, with comprehensive evidence-based drug information. CMPMedica's information solution will power iSOFT's fully integrated suite of decision support tools. These tools enable healthcare professionals to make better informed decisions at the point of care and thus improve patient outcomes.

On its opening day, the London Millennium Bridge experienced unexpected swaying due to the large number of people crossing it. A new study finally explains the Millennium Bridge 'wobble' by concluding that humans did not walk the way engineers would have preferred.

It has generally been thought the Millennium Bridge 'wobble' was due to pedestrians synchronizing their footsteps with the bridge motion. However, this is not supported by measurements of the phenomenon on other bridges.

GENEVA, December 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Every product made by a luxury goods manufacturer - a watch, handbag, piece of jewellery, etc. - would be accompanied and sold with a smart device, such as a SmartCard, containing the encrypted full details of the product, ie registration number, bar code, date and place of manufacture, etc. Manufacturers, sales outlets and purchasers would then be able to use the SmartCard to verify instantly via the Internet the authenticity of the product using WISeKey-developed technology - namely, WISeAuthentic(c) (for which the patent is pending).

The findings of the world's largest study on the ability of children and young people to taste and what they like have now been published jointly by Danish Science Communication and food scientists from The Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) at University of Copenhagen. The subjects were 8,900 Danish schoolchildren.

The short version:

- Girls have a better sense of taste than boys

- Every third child of school age prefers soft drinks which are not sweet

- Children and young people love fish

- Kids do not think of themselves as being fussy eaters

- Boys have a sweeter tooth than girls

... and this all changes when they become teenagers.

Black holes?  Maybe we should think of them as donut holes. The shape of material around black holes has been seen for the first time: an analysis of over 200 active galactic nuclei—cores of galaxies powered by disks of hot material feeding a super-massive black hole—shows that all have a consistent, ordered physical structure that seems to be independent of the black hole's size.

Earth's magnetic field, which shields our planet from particles streaming outward from the Sun, often develops two holes that allow the largest leaks, according to researchers sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation. 

"The discovery overturns a long-standing belief about how and when most of the solar particles penetrate Earth's magnetic field, and could be used to predict when solar storms will be severe. Based on these results, we expect more severe storms during the upcoming solar cycle," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles, Principal Investigator for NASA's THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). THEMIS was used to discover the size of the leak. 

Schizophrenia and autism probably share a common origin, according to Dutch researcher Annemie Ploeger following an extensive literature study. The developmental psychologist says that both mental diseases have similar physical abnormalities which are formed during the first month of pregnancy.