Science Education & Policy

LONDON, June 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Micro Focus, the UK software company, today announced full-year results that saw revenues rise above the $200m mark for the first time including a 'pleasing' return from North America of 20 per cent. The company said it was proposing a 30 per cent rise in its final dividend to shareholders. In a video interview, Micro Focus CEO Stephen Kelly said the results exceeded expectations. "We are very ambitious for the company," he said. "But I think it's quite responsible for us to keep our feet on the ground, our focus on the strategy and the planning and executing…

Due to concerns about greenhouse gases, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have become the rage - even to a point where common sense has taken a holiday, namely when environmental sites fall back on Big Tobacco language like 'unlikely to hurt you' and 'no conclusive evidence' instead of realistically telling you that you should call in a Haz-Mat team if one breaks. Introduced in the United States in 1979, they reached nearly 300 million last year. Experts expect that figure to rise steeply by 2012, when a federal law requiring energy-efficient lighting goes into effect. There's just one catch…

EDMONTON, Canada, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Edmonton will be home to the world's first industrial scale facility to produce biofuels from municipal solid waste. The City has signed a 25-year agreement with GreenField Ethanol, Canada's largest ethanol producer and Enerkem, a leading biofuels technology company. The CDN$70 million biofuels facility will initially produce 36 million litres of biofuels per year and reduce Alberta's carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint by more than 6 million tonnes over the next 25 years - the equivalent of removing 12,000 cars off the road every year. "This facility is…

LONDON, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- YouGovStone, an opinion research agency, reports new findings which state that 83% of top Britons believe the Government should change its plans concerning the two pence fuel duty rise scheduled for October. These findings increase pressure on Gordon Brown. Only 13% of Britain's 'influentials' - people at the top of their field, drawn from business, politics, media, the arts, charities, health and education - think the fuel duty increase should go ahead as proposed. 10% say the amount should be reduced, 22% feel it should be postponed for 6-12 months, while 18…

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- - Test Declared One of the Most Pioneering Healthcare Innovations in 21st Century Agendia BV, a world leader in gene expression analysis-based diagnostics, is pleased to announce that the company recently received a prestigious award for its groundbreaking MammaPrint(R) test from the Dutch Innovation Platform. MammaPrint, a 70-gene signature diagnostic test that predicts high or low risk of breast cancer tumor recurrence, was chosen out of more than 150 entries as the most pioneering healthcare initiative and will have the distinguished honor…

AMSTERDAM, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- - Ensures Continued Access to eBooks on ScienceDirect Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, today announced an agreement with Portico, a not-for-profit digital preservation service, to aid ScienceDirect, Elsevier's online STM platform, in addressing the challenges of eBook preservation. This agreement will ensure that eBooks on ScienceDirect content is protected for the future. The burgeoning growth of digital content of all types has created questions and concerns about the lifespan of archived materials, and…

SAN FRANCISCO, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Network operators and ISPs from around the world have cooperated on two new best practice papers addressing technical issues that will help block botnet-induced spam and improve the deliverability of consumers' personal emails. The recommendations for sharing IP address space and for email forwarding were approved at a Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) meeting in Heidelberg, Germany last week and are available today. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070124/CLW180LOGO ) "MAAWG Methods for Sharing Dynamic IP Address Space Information…

We read (and write here) a lot about gender issues in the scientific arena but usually topics are related to science education and promoting greater equality of numbers at the higher levels. There are a number of studies detailing the issues women face in a predominantly male science world but a University of Missouri religion professor has found that if the researcher is a male fieldworker studying women, the situation can be just as challenging. His conclusions about male researchers studying female subjects are based on his extensive observations of the Diola (pronounced joe-la) people.…

JERUSALEM and NEEDHAM, Massachusetts, June 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Oridion Systems Ltd. - (SWX: ORIDN) Oridion Medical, the leading developer and manufacturer of innovative capnography monitoring solutions, announced that it won the 2008 Manufacturers Partnership Award from IMDA, the association of medical specialty sales and marketing companies. With this award, IMDA acknowledges the Company's achievements in market development and support of its Specialty distributors (part of the Oridion Distribution Network) to increase their sales of Oridion capnography products. The IMDA Manufacturers…

It has been commonly regarded as a good sign that the nation's homocide rate has remained flat but the big picture obscures a disturbing fact, say researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Namely that between 1999 and 2005, homicide involving firearms increased 31 percent among black men ages 25 to 44 and 12 percent among white men of the same age. For the study, Susan Baker, MPH, co-author of the study and a professor with the Bloomberg School's Center for Injury Research and Policy, and her colleagues Daniel Webster and Gouqing Hu, the study's lead author,…