Applied Physics

FREMONT, California, May 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Corsair(R) http://www.corsair.com, a worldwide leader in high performance computer and flash memory products, announced today lab findings that show significant increases in performance and efficiency when increasing system memory capacity from 2GB to 4GB. Testing procedures and results can be found in the application note AN804: Gaming Performance Analysis -- 4GB vs. 2GB, which is now available online at: http://www.corsair.com/_appnotes/AN804_Gaming_Performance_Analysis.pdf Corsair Gaming Performance Analysis AN804: Gaming Performance Analysis --…

Current biochemical detectors are slow and produce an unacceptable number of false readings because they are easily fooled by subtle differences between deadly pathogens and harmless substances. They simply cannot fully monitor or interpret the different ways these substances interact with biological systems. To solve this problem, three faculty researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineeringare are learning how to incorporate real cells into tiny micro-systems to detect chemical and biological pathogens. They are collaborating across engineering disciplines…

ST. PETER PORT, Guernsey, May 6 /PRNewswire/ -- ECAS S.a.r.l, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of European Capital Limited (LSE: ECAS) ("European Capital"), announced today that it has invested euro 28 million in International Electronics and Engineering S.A. ("IEE"), a leading and innovative developer of safety-critical sensing solutions for the automotive industry. The investment supports Apax Partners' recapitalization of IEE. ECAS S.a.r.l invested mezzanine debt in IEE, which was arranged and underwritten by Allied Irish Banks. "We are excited to once again work with Apax Partners, a…

BRADFORD, England, May 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Yorkshire Water has won many awards for customer service and holds the British government's Charter Mark for Service Excellence. In 2006 they were voted utility company of the year for an unprecedented third consecutive year, finishing ahead of all other water, gas, electricity, and telecoms companies. Pursuing further efficiencies, Yorkshire Water looked for a way to retain their proven voice switches and reduce leased line costs. The first steps in 2003 involved the elimination of a number of costly 2 Mbps lines by carrying voice traffic over their…

LONDON, May 6 /PRNewswire/ -- In their first year of entering, SRG were winners in two categories of the 2008 Recruiter Awards for Excellence. These awards are the biggest, most comprehensive and most prestigious covering the whole of the UK recruitment industry. The winning entries were for Best Candidate Care and Best Health Care/Medical Recruitment Firm The judges' summary for Best Candidate Care Award stated that SRG had demonstrated that caring for its candidates is an important - if not the most important - business model that makes a recruiter stand out above its competitors. The…

Over the past decades competition for fossil fuels and the concern that they are generating large quantities of contaminating gases have given rise to a growing scientific interest in the development of alternative energies. Most current research is focused on hydrogen cells, the biggest advantages being that they do not generate contaminant gases and have water vapor as the only waste product. However, hydrogen is very expensive, both in production and distribution. It has to be kept and stored under conditions of very high pressure (more than 800 bars). This is why hydrogen is dangerous…

HOUSTON and ABERDEEN, Scotland, May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- - Leader in swellable elastomer expands into important new markets of North, South and Central America Swellfix B.V., a leader in swellable elastomers for zonal isolation, announced today it has expanded its product and service offerings into the important new markets of North, South and Central America. With its global base in Aberdeen, Scotland and its Americas headquarters in Houston, Swellfix provides a range of zonal isolation products and services, including cement assurance and other cost-effective swellable elastomer applications…

  The biggest ever science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, should be operational this summer.  Three years behind schedule and 30% over budget, the $8.7 billion LHC will collide protons together and lead ions next year, at colossal energies never before attempted.  Don't hold your breath.  Rudiger Schmidt at CERN, near Geneva, says,"The LHC is a frightening complex accelerator."  A lot could still go wrong even before startup.  On the engineering side, most of the equipment custom designed and built, problems also are complex.  One particular sore…

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Germany believe they can achieve a significant increase in the accuracy of one of the fundamental constants of nature by boosting an electron to an orbit as far as possible from the atomic nucleus that binds it. The experiment could put the modern theory of the atom to the most stringent tests yet. It could also mean more accurate identifications of elements in everything from stars to environmental pollutants. The physicists’ quarry is the Rydberg constant, the quantity that…

New findings suggest that the ancient human “cousin” known as the “Nutcracker Man” wasn’t regularly eating anything like nuts after all. A University of Arkansas professor and his colleagues used a combination of microscopy and fractal analysis to examine marks on the teeth of members of an ancient human ancestor species and found that what it actually ate does not correspond with the size and shape of its teeth. This finding suggests that structure alone is not enough to predict dietary preferences and that evolutionary adaptation for eating may have been based on scarcity rather than on an…