Designed by Italy's Renzo Piano and Britain's Richard Rogers, The Shard has fast become one of London's most iconic buildings, signifying new development after a ravaging recession and paving the way towards the capital's prosperous future. The tallest building in Europe, The Shard is visible from all points in London and boosts three floors of restaurants (including 5* Shangri-La Hotel) as well as top end residential homes. Officially opening for business on 5 July 2012, The Shard now offers Londoners and visitors a brand new panoramic experience. Opening on 1 February ...

NAVORI QL Player is now available on Android. This newest player core has the same playback quality and functionality as the windows version, offering a stunning seamless 1080p TV look and feel with multi-layer function on all Android appliances (Smart TV, Tablets and even on a mini HD player device that will become available at a retail price of less than 100 USD ! THE NAVORI QL HYBRID SIGNAGE SERVER version 1.0.0.24 allows for a transparent content management of both Windows and Android players. NAVORI QL SERVER offers full load balancing to ensure absolute scalability ...

Global IP Telecommunications shows for the first time the software telephone "Juggler" that gives rise to substantial advances in the ergonomics of electronic office communication. "We simply need space on our desktops! Therefore our development makes the telephone, in part or with the entire set of functions, available through a simple gesture. The telephone consumes no space at all on the virtual computer desktop!" says Michael Best, CEO of Global IP Telecommunications. Mr. Best adds: "Meanwhile almost all telephones are controlled by software. ...

360 Celsius has recently announced that it now offers the complete production of Viral Videos and TV Commercials as, adding to the integrated media hub's long list of products and services. The move was in line with the company's vision of establishing itself as the prime ASEAN media hub. Prior to this move to expand, 360 Celsius already had already been actively producing numerous videos for events, corporate, lifestyle channels, and commercials. According to the Founder and CEO of 360 Celsius, Mr. Farbod Sadeghian, 2012 was a proving ground for a lot of his products, ...

A new year invariably brings a host of new fashion trends, meaning every fashion journalist, blogger and aficionado is now scrapping to try and tell the world what their predictions are. The wonderful diversity and wealth of opinion in the fashion community makes for an interesting discussion but with so much information to sift through, it can often be difficult to pick out the fashion fact from fiction to truly tell which styles will win out in 2013. Though contradiction is rife among the diverse opinions of the fashion community, there is no grey area over the fact ...

Rising Sum, the investment specialist, has launched a platform (risingsum.com) that identifies investment opportunities using the acquisition criteria favoured by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet's highly successful investment vehicle. At risingsum.com investors can identify true value investments by either using the platform's standard screening template, or by adjusting the settings to find companies that meet individual investment styles and preferences. Investors can also enter their stocks into the system and find out if any of their existing holdings would ...

What an inspired idea -- let students teach and share with others the interesting research astronauts do on the International Space Station, or ISS. After all, today's students are the future explorers and innovators of scientific discovery, space exploration, and technological innovation. There is often nothing more gratifying to a kid or young adult than sharing what they know with others -- particularly their parents, teachers or friends. While the orbiting lab is breaking ground on scientific and technological exploration fronts, time is made for educational endeavors, ...

Hall of Fame coach Mike Ditka will be hosting a charity fundraising event to benefit Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund and The Kevin Turner Foundation on February 1, 2013 from 7pm to 10pm at The Foundry (333 Saint Joseph Street) in New Orleans, LA, as part of the Super Bowl week festivities. The event entitled, An Exclusive Evening With Ditka and Friends, will allow attendees to spend time with Coach Ditka and some of his NFL friends, hear their stories, and contribute to a worthy cause. The evening will also feature a special live music performance from The Kyle Turley Band, ...

The amount of rainfall and number of tropical storms during the summer monsoon season greatly impact the agriculture, economy, and people in Asia. Though meteorologists and climate scientists have worked for years to develop helpful prediction systems, seasonal predictions of these two types of weather phenomena are still poor. Scientists working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, have now made a promising breakthrough for predicting in spring both the summer monsoon rainfall over East Asia and the number of tropical storms affecting ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Residents living near an e-waste recycling site in China face elevated risks of lung cancer, according to a recent study co-authored by Oregon State University researchers. Electronic trash, such as cell phones, computers and TVs, is often collected in dumps in developing countries and crudely incinerated to recover precious metals, including silver, gold, palladium and copper. The process is often primitive, releasing fumes with a range of toxic substances, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, a group of more than 100 chemicals. PAHs, ...

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, and their partners have determined that water demand by many plant communities can fluctuate in response to water availability, indicating a capacity for resilience even when changing climate patterns produce periodic droughts or floods. But their research also suggests that a limit to this resilience ultimately could threaten the survival of these plant communities. Sensitive environments such as the arid grasslands in the Southwestern U.S. already are approaching this limit. Results from this study were published ...

Melbourne researchers have discovered that the death of immune system cells is an important safeguard against the development of diseases such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, which occur when the immune system attacks the body's own tissues. The finding suggests that these so-called autoimmune diseases could be treated with existing medications that force long-lived immune system cells to die. In the development of the immune system, some cells are produced that have the potential to attack the body's own tissues, causing autoimmune disease. The death ...

Astronomers using a CSIRO radio telescope have taken the Universe's temperature, and have found that it has cooled down just the way the Big Bang theory predicts. Using the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, NSW, an international team from Sweden, France, Germany and Australia has measured how warm the Universe was when it was half its current age. "This is the most precise measurement ever made of how the Universe has cooled down during its 13.77 billion year history," said Dr Robert Braun, Chief Scientist at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science. Because ...

The most consistent finding of autism research lies in the revelation that the disorders are incredibly complex. Two new studies in the January 23 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron that add to the growing appreciation of this complexity focus on identifying inherited genetic mutations linked with autism spectrum disorders. The mutations—which are distinct from the spontaneous mutations that have been the focus of previous studies—may provide valuable insights into the causes of autism. "It's long been known that autism is a heritable condition and that some cases ...

DURHAM, N.C. – All parents know the infant milestones: turning over, learning to crawl, standing, and taking that first unassisted step. Achieving each accomplishment presumably requires the formation of new connections among subsets of the billions of nerve cells in the infant's brain. But how, when and where those connections form has been a mystery. Now researchers at Duke Medicine have begun to find answers. In a study reported Jan. 23, 2013, in the scientific journal Neuron, the research team describes the entire network of brain cells that are connected to specific ...

Boston, Mass. - While autism clearly runs in some families, few inherited genetic causes have been found. A major reason is that these causes are so varied that it's hard to find enough people with a given mutation to establish a clear pattern. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have pinpointed several inherited mutations—among the first to be identified—through an unusual approach: using whole-exome sequencing to study large Middle Eastern families with autism. The study, published in the January 23 issue of the journal Neuron, also found evidence for some of ...

In space, dense clouds of cosmic gas and dust are the birthplaces of new stars. In visible light, this dust is dark and obscuring, hiding the stars behind it. So much so that, when astronomer William Herschel observed one such cloud in the constellation of Scorpius in 1774, he thought it was a region empty of stars and is said to have exclaimed, "Truly there is a hole in the sky here!" [1] In order to better understand star formation, astronomers need telescopes that can observe at longer wavelengths, such as the submillimetre range, in which the dark dust grains shine ...

Researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, have designed a new computing system that determines the age and sex of a corpse with a reliability of 95%. This system is based on free software called Image and a free DICOM displayer called K-Pacs. This state-of-the-art system is very different from the traditional macroscopy systems used to evaluate the osteoarticular features of a corpse, and it is much faster and user-friendly. The author of this study is Manuel López Alcaraz, a researcher at the Forensic Anthropology Laboratory of the University of Granada, in collaboration ...

BOSTON (January 23, 2013) — Neuroscience researchers from Tufts University have found that our star-shaped brain cells, called astrocytes, may be responsible for the rapid improvement in mood in depressed patients after acute sleep deprivation. This in vivo study, published in the current issue of Translational Psychiatry, identified how astrocytes regulate a neurotransmitter involved in sleep. The researchers report that the findings may help lead to the development of effective and fast-acting drugs to treat depression, particularly in psychiatric emergencies. Drugs ...

Over the past two decades, the incidence of type 1 diabetes in very young children under age 5 has increased by 70 percent in the city of Philadelphia, according to research from a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing researcher who currently maintains the only US registry of diabetes in children that has collected data continuously since 1985. In a far-reaching study in the current issue of Diabetes Care, researchers led by nursing professor Terri H. Lipman, PhD, RN found that the overall incidence of Type 1 diabetes in children in Philadelphia has increased ...

Constraining choice isn't necessarily a good thing when it comes to managers' problem-solving, according to a new Canadian study. Managers tend to pick higher-risk options when forced to choose between competing alternatives to complex situations, according to researchers from the University of Guelph and University of Waterloo whose study was published recently in the Journal of Business Ethics. But when they're not forced to choose, managers tend to reflect more and solve problems with fewer negative consequences, says the study. "One of the most powerful tools ...

A candidate dengue vaccine developed by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been found to be safe and to stimulate a strong immune response in most vaccine recipients, according to results from an early-stage clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH. The trial results were published online on January 17 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Dengue fever, prevalent in many tropical and subtropical regions of the world, is caused by any of four related viruses—DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3 ...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2013—Silica microwires are the tiny and as-yet underutilized cousins of optical fibers. If precisely manufactured, however, these hair-like slivers of silica could enable applications and technology not currently possible with comparatively bulky optical fiber. By carefully controlling the shape of water droplets with an ultraviolet laser, a team of researchers from Australia and France has found a way to coax silica nanoparticles to self-assemble into much more highly uniform silica wires. The international team describes their novel manufacturing ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Despite data on rising rates of abuse and overdoses of narcotic pain medicines across all age groups, in a new poll from the University of Michigan, most parents said they are not very concerned about misuse of these medicines by children and teens. . In addition, parent support was lukewarm for policies that would discourage abuse of drugs like Vicodin or Oxycontin, according to the most recent University of Michigan Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health. Overall, 35% of parents said they are very concerned about misuse of ...

Experts believe that plain packaging of tobacco products would cut smoking, a new study has found. Tobacco control experts from around the world estimate that two years after the introduction of generic packaging the number of adult smokers would be reduced by one percentage point (in the UK - from 21 to 20%*), and the percentage of children trying smoking would be reduced by three percentage points (in the UK - from 27 to 24%*). The Cambridge research was published today in the journal BMC Public Health. Because Australia, the first country to implement plain packaging, ...