BASINGSTOKE, England and PHILADELPHIA, July 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Shire Limited (LSE:SHP, NASDAQ: SHPGY), the global specialty biopharmaceutical company, will announce second quarter 2008 earnings on Thursday 31 July 2008

Results press release will be issued at: 12:00 BST / 07:00 EDT Investor meeting and conference call time: 14:30 BST / 09:30 EDT

Investor & Analyst meeting and conference call:

Angus Russell, Chief Executive Officer, Graham Hetherington, Chief Financial Officer, Mike Cola, President, Specialty Pharmaceuticals and Sylvie Grégoire, President, Human Genetic Therapies will host the investor and analyst meeting and conference call at 14:30 BST/9:30 EDT.

The meeting will take place at Holborn Bars, 138-142 Holborn, London EC1 2NQ.

NASA's sun-focused STEREO spacecraft unexpectedly detected particles from the edge of the solar system last year, allowing University of California, Berkeley, scientists to map for the first time the energized particles in the region where the hot solar wind slams into the cold interstellar medium.

Mapping the region by means of neutral, or uncharged, atoms instead of light "heralds a new kind of astronomy using neutral atoms," said Robert Lin, UC Berkeley professor of physics and lead for the suprathermal electron sensor aboard STEREO. "You can't get a global picture of this region, one of the last unexplored regions of the heliosphere, any other way because it is too tenuous to be seen by normal optical telescopes."

The heliosphere is a volume over which the effects of the solar wind extend, stretching from the sun to more than twice the distance of Pluto. Beyond its edge, called the heliopause, lies the relative quiet of interstellar space, at about 100 astronomical units (AU) - 100 times the Earth-sun distance.

The world of geology changes rapidly - sometimes the Grand Canyon is one age and then it is found to be much older. But even in geology it's not often a date gets revised by 500 million years.

University of Florida geologists say they have evidence that a half-dozen major basins in India were formed a billion or more years ago, making them at least 500 million years older than commonly thought. If so, it might remove one of the major obstacles to the 'Snowball Earth' theory that says a frozen Earth was once entirely covered in snow and ice. It might even lend some weight to a controversial claim that complex life originated hundreds of million years earlier than most scientists currently believe.

The Purana basins – which include the subject of the study, the Vindhyan basin – are located south of New Delhi in the northern and central regions of India. They are slight, mostly flat depressions in the Earth's crust that span thousands of square miles. For decades, Meert said, most geologists have believed the basins formed 500 million to 700 million years ago when the Earth's crust stretched, thinned and then subsided.

LONDON, July 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- TrustedPlaces and BView Partner to Offer Online Marketing Solutions for Local Businesses

Commercial flower and plant growers know all too well that invasive, ubiquitous weeds cause trouble by lowering the value and deterring healthy growth of potted ornamental plants. To control weeds, many commercial nursery owners resort to the expensive practice of paying workers to hand-weed containers. Some growers use herbicides, but efficacy of herbicides is questionable on the wide range of plant species produced in nurseries, and many herbicides are not registered for use in greenhouses.

Enter "dried distillers grains with solubles", or DDGS. DDGS, a byproduct of converting corn to fuel ethanol, is typically used as livestock feed. Rick A. Boydston, Harold P. Collins, and Steve Vaughn, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, undertook a research study on the use of DDGS as a weed deterrent on potted ornamentals. The study results, published in the February 2008 issue of HortScience, evaluated the use of DDGS as a soil amendment to suppress weeds in container-grown ornamentals.

'Hello, climate? We're from the government and we're here to help you.'

A group of former senior federal officials have called for the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA) that would be created by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) into something even larger.

Charles Kennel, former Associate Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Director of Mission to Planet Earth, says, "Earth system science focuses on understanding current processes and predicting changes that will take place over the next hundred years. It merges earth, atmospheric, and ocean science into a panorama of the earth system as it is today and as it will be tomorrow. We need it to predict climate change and its impacts, and to help us mitigate and adapt to other changes that have the potential to affect our quality of life and economic well-being."

LSU associate professor of sociology Troy C. Blanchard recently found that a community's religious environment – the type of religious congregations within a locale – affects mortality rates, often in a positive manner. These results were published in the June issue of Social Forces.

This result, he says, is particularly timely in the context of presidential candidate Barack Obama's recent call for expanding the roles of such religious groups.

Along with co-author John Bartkowski from the University of Texas at San Antonio and other researchers from the University of West Georgia and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Blanchard found that people live longer in areas with a large number of Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches. He offers two key reasons for these findings.

FALLS CHURCH, Virginia, July 3 /PRNewswire/ --

- Agreement Adds Support for New U.S. Commercial Nuclear Facility

CSC (NYSE: CSC) announced today that it has signed a new information technology (IT) outsourcing contract with Urenco, a leading supplier of enriched uranium to nuclear power utilities worldwide. The new six-year agreement, which is valued at US$22 million (10.9 million pounds sterling), follows a seven-year, 23 million pounds sterling IT outsourcing contract Urenco awarded to CSC in March 2007.

BIOCITECH, France, July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Cellectis SA today announced the signature of an agreement with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. over the use of Cellectis' patents covering certain uses of homologous recombination for the generation of innovative human therapies, including the development of fully human monoclonal antibodies. As part of the agreement, Cellectis will receive an upfront of 12,450,000$ from Regeneron. In addition, Regeneron will invest in Cellectis' equity.