Applied Physics

PALO ALTO, California, February 19 /PRNewswire/ -- - DreamSpark offers millions of students access to professional-grade software developer and designer tools. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates today will unveil a software giveaway that will ultimately provide millions of college and high school students around the world with access to the latest Microsoft developer and designer tools at no charge to unlock their creative potential and set them on the path to academic and career success. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO) The Microsoft DreamSpark student program…

The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT. Berwick will describe his ideas about language in a session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sunday, Feb. 17. The session is called “Mind of a Toolmaker,” and explores the use of evolutionary research in understanding human abilities. Some researchers in recent years have speculated that mutations in a gene called Foxp2 might have played a fundamental role…

The strange world of quantum mechanics can provide a way to surpass limits in speed, efficiency and accuracy of computing, communications and measurement, according to research by MIT scientist Seth Lloyd. Quantum mechanics is the set of physical theories that explain the behavior of matter and energy at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It includes a number of strange properties that differ significantly from the way things work at sizes that people can observe directly, which are governed by classical physics. “There are limits, if you think classically,” said Lloyd, a professor…

For more than a decade, Peter Zandstra has been working at the University of Toronto to rev up the production of stem cells and their descendants. The raw materials are adult blood stem cells and embryonic stem cells. The end products are blood and heart cells – lots of them. Enough mouse heart cells that they form beating tissue. Starting with computer models of stem cell growth and differentiation (the process by which a stem cell matures into its final form), Zandstra has moved on to develop more sophisticated culture methods that fine-tune the microenvironments to guide the generation of…

A butcher from Mindelheim and Fraunhofer scientists have succeeded in manufacturing tasty sausage varieties containing only two to three percent of fat. The almost fat-free sausage is now making its way onto the refrigerated shelves of German shops. Master butcher Josef Pointner from Mindelheim hit on the idea of making low-fat sausage. “Low-fat products for varieties such as ham sausage, Leberkäse (a German meat loaf specialty) or salami or Weisswurst (Bavarian veal sausage) have never been available until now. But I was only partially successful in producing these sausage varieties,”…

PRINCETON, New Jersey, February 14 /PRNewswire/ -- - Augments Senior Management Team with more than 30 Years Experience in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing, Engineering, Technical Services and Validation Laureate Pharma, Inc., a full-service biopharmaceutical development and protein production company, today announced the appointment of Gary Swan as Vice President of Operations. In this newly created position, Mr. Swan will be responsible for leading Laureate's manufacturing operations, which include upstream processing, downstream processing, formulation and filling, facilities maintenance,…

LONDON, February 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Saipem S.A and investment partnerships affiliated with Hellman & Friedman LLC ("H&F"), executed a definitive agreement under which H&F will acquire Saipem's 30% ownership stake in Gaztransport & Technigaz S.A.S. ("GTT") for EUR310 million. GTT is the leading marine engineering company operating in the liquefied natural gas ("LNG") sector and is based near Paris in Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse and has over 200 employees. Saipem is the leading international turnkey contractor operating in the oil and gas industries. H&F is a leading global…

A comprehensive new study documents in detail the dynamics of parts of Greenland’s ice sheet, important data that have long been missing from the ice sheet models on which projections about sea level rise and global warming are based. The research is published this month in the Journal of Glaciology, also demonstrates how remote sensing and digital imaging techniques can produce rich datasets without field data in some cases. Traditionally, ice sheet models are very simplified, according to Beata Csatho, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology and lead author of the paper. The implications of…

Johns Hopkins researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine have devised a micro-scale tool - a lab on a chip - designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain. The system should help scientists better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together to form the nervous system. A report on the work appears as the cover story in the February 2008 issue of the British journal Lab on a Chip. ”The chip we’ve developed will make experiments on nerve cells more simple to conduct and to control,” says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., associate professor of…

LONDON, February 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Ideaworks3D, a leading developer of native mobile technology and applications, today announced that its Airplay native execution environment has been certified as a conformant implementation of the OpenKODE(TM) 1.0 API standard from the Khronos(TM) Group. OpenKODE is a royalty-free, open standard that combines a set of native APIs to increase source portability for rich media and graphics applications. OpenKODE reduces mobile platform fragmentation by providing the OpenKODE Core cross-platform API for accessing operating system resources, and a media…