Polaris Software, a leading Financial Technology company, today announced that Central Bank of Seychelles, the central authority responsible for all monetary issues in the country, has gone live with Polaris' IntellectTM Core Banking System (CBS) for Central Banks. Powered by our innovative Xtreme Account Posting Gateway (XAP) Technology, the solution has been designed to enable the Central Bank to exercise Transaction Per Day Per Account (TPDPA) linked processing for associated commercial, private and co-operative banks across Seychelles. To overcome the bottlenecks ...

The Taste Hawaii Food Adventure! seminar is a little gourmet feast seasoned for non-local couples to taste the flavors of Hawaii's island fusion cuisine while enjoying a Valentine's Day vacation. This 3-day culinary and cultural event includes 4-nights at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort on Maui, all meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner), wine and food tastings, lectures, cooking demonstrations and farm tours; along with drawings and a few surprises for attendees. Registration for this event closes on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. Information and reservations - Pleasant ...

Austrian researchers have uncovered mutations throughout the mitochondrial genome that are associated with prostate cancer. An exciting aspect of the study, published by Cell Press on December 2 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is the association of tRNA mutations with elevated levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in Austrian men diagnosed with various stages of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is among the most prevalent cancers diagnosed in the United States and Europe. The most common and noninvasive way to detect prostate cancer is to check PSA levels. ...

LA JOLLA, CA – November 30, 2010 – Scripps Research Institute scientists have made a significant leap forward in the drive to find a way to safely reprogram mature human cells and turn them into stem cells, which can then change into other cell types, such as nerve, heart, and liver cells. The ability to transform fully mature adult cells such as skin cells into stem cells has potentially profound implications for treating many diseases. In research published in the December 3, 2010 issue of Cell Stem Cell, Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, PhD, reports ...

Coral reef ecosystems are one of the most diverse habitats on the planet, providing habitat for a wide variety of marine animals. Unfortunately, coral reefs and their associated fish, algae, and invertebrate species are in worldwide decline. In 2009, 83 rare corals were petitioned to be listed under the United States Endangered Species Act. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service is currently reviewing the status of the coral on the petition. If the listing is granted, it will afford higher protection and designate critical ...

The increased availability and access of broadband around the world has meant a rise in global demand for online media services and this could have implications for a society that is living within environmental limits. New research has analysed the potential future demand for downloaded data worldwide, such as social networking sites and on-demand TV programs, and the resulting energy requirements. Academics at Bristol University's Department of Computer Science have looked at the provision of media services to consumers, focusing on energy use in the infrastructure. ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – A team from UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center has uncovered a clue as to how certain common genetic variants may influence an individual's risk of developing cardiovascular diseases such as stroke or heart attack. The team had been studying three related genes encoded by the INK4/ARF (or CDKN2a/b) locus which is closely associated with human aging. Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) from several large consortia have shown that common genetic variants located very near, but not actually in, these genes are associated with diseases ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A novel type of biomedical imaging, made possible by new advances in microscopy from scientists at Harvard University, is so fast and sensitive it can capture "video" of blood cells squeezing through capillaries. Researchers led by Harvard's Brian G. Saar, Christian W. Freudiger, and X. Sunney Xie describe the work this week in the journal Science. The new technique, based on stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), makes a complementary partner to MRI, widely used to capture static images of organs, tumors, and other large structures. For the first time, ...

December 2, 2010, New York, New York—Premiums for employer-sponsored family health insurance increased an average of 41 percent across states from 2003 to 2009, more than three times faster than median incomes, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. Yet, insurance is buying less. The report found that deductibles per person rose 77 percent, on average. Higher premiums plus higher out-of-pocket costs are putting working families' budgets under stress across the country. The report, State Trends in Premiums and Deductibles, 2003�: How Building on the Affordable ...

A dysfunction in the lining of blood vessels that is linked to cardiovascular illness also appears to play a role in the development of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study published in Circulation Research: Journal of the American Heart Association. Alzheimer's disease is a progressive brain condition that typically affects people age 60 and older, depriving them of memory, reasoning and other cognitive skills. As many as 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's, according to the National Institutes of Health. Two distinct anomalies in the brain are hallmarks of Alzheimer's: ...

Healthy lifestyle choices and emergency room interventions can help prevent first-time strokes, according to revised American Heart Association/American Stroke Association guidelines. The guidelines, last updated in 2006, will be published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. "Between 1999 and 2006, there's been over a 30 percent reduction in stroke death rates in the United States and we think the majority of the reduction is coming from better prevention," said Larry B. Goldstein, M.D., chairman of the statement writing committee and director of the ...

AMHERST, Mass. – University of Massachusetts Amherst microbiologists Derek Lovley, Zarath Summers and colleagues report in the Dec. 2 issue of Science that they have discovered a new cooperative behavior in anaerobic bacteria, known as interspecies electron transfer, that could have important implications for the global carbon cycle and bioenergy. The scientists found that microorganisms of different species, in this case two Geobacter species, can form direct electrical connections and pass an electric current from one microbe to the other. By cooperating in this way ...

The Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries. In collaboration with the National Geographic Society and published today in the online journal PLoS ONE, the study is the first to measure the spatial expansion of global fisheries. It reveals that fisheries expanded at a rate of one million sq. kilometres per year from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. The rate of expansion more than tripled in the 1980s and early 1990s – to roughly ...

A protein that is crucial for regulating the self-renewal of normal prostate stem cells, needed to repair injured cells or restore normal cells killed by hormone withdrawal therapy for cancer, also aids the transformation of healthy cells into prostate cancer cells, researchers at UCLA have found. The findings, by researchers with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, may have important implications for controlling cancer growth and progression. Done in primary cells and in animal models, the findings from the three-year ...

Santa Cruz, CA, USA and Oxford, UK, 2 December 2010: Research published this week in JACS shows continuous and controlled translocation of a single stranded DNA (ssDNA) polymer through a protein nanopore by a DNA polymerase enzyme. The paper by researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) provides the foundation for a molecular motor, an essential component of Strand Sequencing using nanopores. Researchers at UCSC are collaborating with the UK-based company Oxford Nanopore Technologies, developers of a nanopore DNA sequencing technology. The new research ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Financially rewarding farmers for using the best fertilizer management practices can simultaneously benefit water quality and help combat climate change, finds a new study by the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER). The researchers conclude that setting up a "trading market," where farmers earn financial incentives for investing in eco-friendly techniques, would result in a double environmental benefit – reducing fertilizer run-off destined for the Chesapeake Bay, while at the same time capturing carbon dioxide ...

Physicists at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Department of Physics at Northeastern University have made a comparison of a number of competing dark energy models. They have tested and compared nine popular dark energy models using the latest observational data. The study is reported in Issue 9 (Volume 53) of SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy because of its significant research value. Over the past decade, cosmologists around the world have accumulated conclusive evidence for the fact that the cosmic expansion is accelerating. ...

The School of Nuclear Engineering and Technology at the East China Institute of Technology cooperated with the China Institute of Atomic Energy to investigate the high spin states of 84Sr. The study is reported in Issue 53 (October, 2010) of the Chinese Science Bulletin because of its significant research value. Nuclei with Z ≈ 40 and N ≈ 45 lie in a transitional region between deformed nuclei and spherical nuclei. There are collective bands in some isotopes of nuclei of such elements as Sr, Zr and Mo, where the structures have single-particle features. 84Sr, ...

An evanescent wave arises at the interface of two media when light propagates from a more to a less-dense medium under total internal reflection. The wave is distributed over a superficial area because its amplitude decays exponentially with distance from the interface. The evanescent wave intensity at the interface can be larger than that of the incident beam. Evanescent waves have widespread current use in the imaging of chemical, bio-chemical and biological phenomenon. For example, an evanescent wave is responsible for fluorophore excitation in total internal reflection ...

Researchers from the College of Physical Sciences, GUCAS, have proposed to establish a new branch, unsteady aerothermodynamics, within the discipline of aerothermodynamics. The principal objectives of this new branch, to treat by theoretical means the study of physical phenomena relating to attached boundary layer flows, have been outlined in a preliminary investigation. A report based on a feasibility study has appeared in Vol. 54 No. 8 of Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy. Aerothermodynamics, a cross-discipline based mainly on aerodynamics and thermodynamics, ...

Researchers from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO) and the Universidad de Sevilla (US) have found patterns of behaviour that occur before an earthquake on the Iberian peninsula. The team used clustering techniques to forecast medium-large seismic movements when certain circumstances coincide. "Using mathematical techniques, we have found patterns when medium-large earthquakes happen, that is, earthquakes greater than 4.4 on the Richter scale," Francisco Martínez Álvarez, co-author of the study and a senior lecturer at the UPO revealed to SINC. The research, which ...

Memory difficulties such as those seen in dementia may arise because the brain forms incomplete memories that are more easily confused, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. The findings are published today in the journal Science. Currently, memory problems are typically perceived to be the result of forgetting previously encountered items or events. The new research (using an animal model of amnesia), however, found that the ability of the brain to maintain complete, detailed memories is disrupted. The remaining, less detailed memories are relatively ...

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) play an important role as cosmological distance indicators and have been used successfully to determine cosmological parameters, which resulted in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. However, the exact nature of SN Ia progenitors is still not well understood. There is a popular theory that SNe Ia originate from runaway thermonuclear events in carbon–oxygen white dwarves (CO WD) in binary systems. The CO WD accretes material from its companion. When the CO WD increases its mass above the maximum stable mass, it will explode. Based ...

Impairments to health and physical performance are not primarily a result of aging but of unfavorable lifestyle habits and lack of exercise. This is the position taken by Dieter Leyk and his coauthors in the new issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[46]: 809󈝼). Sporty elderly people have a life expectancy that is almost 4 years higher and are often faster than younger athletes. In their study, the sports scientists analyzed the stamina of more than 600 000 marathon and half marathon runners and asked participants about their ...

Scientists from The University of Manchester say a naturally occurring chemical found in soy could prove to be an effective new treatment for a fatal genetic disease that affects children. Dr Brian Bigger, from the University's MPS Stem Cell Research Laboratory, found that genistein – derived from soya beans and licensed in the US as an osteoporosis drug – had a dramatic effect on mice suffering from the human childhood disease Sanfilippo. "Sanfilippo is an untreatable mucopolysaccharide (MPS) disease affecting one in 89,000 children in the United Kingdom," said Dr ...