SAO PAULO, Brazil, July 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Favorable decision also includes the investment agreement between Braskem and Petrobras

Braskem (BOVESPA: BRKM3, BRKM5, BRKM6; NYSE: BAK; LATIBEX: XBRK), the leading company in the thermoplastic resins industry in Latin America and third-largest resin producer in the Americas, announces that Brazil's antitrust authority, CADE (Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica), today gave the final approval to the acquisition of the petrochemical assets of the Ipiranga Group by Braskem and Petrobras. The only recommendation made by CADE was to adjust the clause regarding non-competition by the sellers, which is limited to the markets where they operated.

PLEASANTON, California, July 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Innovative distance learning solution for on-demand, hands-on training launched by Citrix to train its worldwide channel partners and customers.

Toolwire, a leading innovator of experiential distance learning solutions announces that Citrix Systems, Inc. has chosen Toolwire to deliver an on-demand and scheduled lab environment to train Citrix worldwide channel partners and customers on its application networking products, including Citrix(R) NetScaler(R), Citrix WANScaler(TM), Citrix Access Gateway(TM), and NetScaler Application Firewall products.

GENEVA, Switzerland and HOUSTON, Texas, July 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. and WISeKey today announced that they were selected by the Regional Government of Biscay for the delivery of a comprehensive e-Government Citizen Services Platform. This EUR17.4 million project includes a leading-edge identity federation that enables the establishment of customized citizen portals adapted to the needs and the interests of each citizen in a real Web 2.0 environment.

PARIS, July 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Valeo announces that it has received the Global Innovation Award from Nissan Motor Co. for its contribution to their Lane Departure Prevention system. The award was presented on July 10 at the Nissan Global Supplier Award ceremony in Tokyo.

Valeo's advanced camera and intelligent software technology, which supplies precise vehicle position information, is a key element of this system. The new models equipped are the Infiniti EX, FX and M.

A newly developed nano-sized electronic device is an important step toward helping astronomers see invisible light dating from the creation of the universe. This invisible light makes up 98% of the light emitted since the "big bang," and may provide insights into the earliest stages of star and galaxy formation almost 14 billion years ago.

The tiny, new circuit, developed by physicsts at Rutgers University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the State University of New York at Buffalo, is 100 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. It is sensitive to faint traces of light in the far-infrared spectrum (longest of the infrared wavelengths), well beyond the colors humans see.

"In the expanding universe, the earliest stars move away from us at a speed approaching the speed of light," said Michael Gershenson, professor of physics at Rutgers and one of the lead investigators. "As a result, their light is strongly red-shifted when it reaches us, appearing infrared."

ARNHEM, The Netherlands, July 10 /PRNewswire/ -- ARCADIS (EURONEXT: ARCAD), the international consultancy, design, engineering and management services company, announced today that the Company has been selected by the Cleantech Group(TM), LLC to join its prestigious Cleantech Index(TM) (AMEX: CTIUS) of public cleantech companies, effective June 30, 2008.

DENVER, July 10 /PRNewswire/ --

Following HP's launch of the industry's first fault-tolerant blade server running HP NonStop, Integrated Research (ASX: IRI) today announced that its PROGNOSIS performance monitoring software is ready to support the needs of customers adopting this new server technology.

The new HP Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem supports high transaction volumes with all the advantages of the NonStop platform. These new systems now offer twice the performance of existing NonStop server offerings at half the footprint, delivering the lowest total cost of ownership of any server in its class.

Therapies, rehabilitation and specialty medical care are just a few of the extra costs that parents face when raising children with special needs. In a new study that will be published in current issue of Pediatrics, Paul T. Shattuck, Ph.D., professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, found that families with similar demographics and nature of their children's special needs have different out-of-pocket health expenditures depending on the state in which they live.

"This is one of the few studies that focuses on families' costs when caring for children with special needs, rather than the overall cost for society as a whole," he says.

The study's authors ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia, using survey data from 2000 and 2001, in terms of the average percentage of special needs families that shoulder an additional financial burden, the yearly average extra costs of those families and the size of these costs relative to family income.

In one of those odd uses of statistics, higher gasoline prices have been associated with fewer deaths from car accidents, says a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

An analysis of yearly vehicle deaths compared to gas prices found death rates drop significantly as people slow down and drive less. If gas remains at $4 a gallon or higher for a year or more, traffic deaths could drop by more than 1,000 per month nationwide, said Michael Morrisey, Ph.D., director of UAB's Lister Hill Center for Health Policy and a co-author on the new findings.

This means if we raise the price to $10 a gallon people might never die, right? Likewise if we drop the speed limit to 5 MPH or eliminate cars, there would be fewer deaths.