Parmalat Finanziaria sues Deutsche Bank
Rome: Parmalat has said that it had filed suit against Deutsche Bank for $20 million. The now-insolvent Parmalat Finanziaria SpA, which is under government-appointed administration, added that it is also asking for interest on the sum from former adviser Deutsche Bank SpA.

Parmalat, which filed the case at a court in its hometown of Parma, seeks to recover the debt its previous management repaid Deutsche Bank in December 2003 - shortly before the dairy company was forced to declare insolvency. Parmalat's new administration argues that the transaction came at the expense of other creditors. Parmalat also said it reserves the right to seek damages in addition to the money it hopes to recover in the current suit. The global food and dairy conglomerate has to recover about $14 billion in debt held by its creditors.
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AMD's Enhanced Virus Protection
Sunnyvale, USA: Bringing a new level of security to desktop and mobile PC computing, AMD has announced that with the release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP) can now be enabled on all AMD Athlon 64 processors. This unique hardware and software combination is designed to keep computers protected against certain malicious viruses, computer worms and Trojan horses. AMD Athlon 64 processor customers can now feel more secure performing computing tasks such as e-mailing, sharing music files, and downloading photos, games, and other graphic-intensive computing applications. According to AMD, the sophistication of viruses has raised the need for security prevention at all platform levels. AMD has addressed this need with Enhanced Virus Protection making the AMD Athlon 64 family of processors the only high-performance PC processors available today that offer this enhanced level of security.

Enhanced Virus Protection is a hardware feature designed into AMD Athlon 64 desktop and mobile processors. When combined with the Data Execution Prevention technology found in Windows XP SP2, EVP not only identifies certain malicious code, specifically those that execute buffer overflow attacks, but also prevents them from replicating and spreading throughout the system. By incorporating security technology into the hardware, costs and damages associated with these virus attacks can be significantly reduced while increasing the integrity of the home and corporate network.

Every AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, AMD Athlon 64 mobile and desktop, and Mobile AMD Sempron processor customer can now use the built-in EVP capability when enabled by Windows XP SP2. For businesses and enterprises using the AMD Opteron processor, EVP will be enabled with the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit Extended Systems. AMD designs and produces innovative microprocessors, Flash memory devices and low-power processor solutions for the computer, communications and consumer electronics industries.
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Brain portions smaller in children born prematurely
Stanford, USA: Children who were born significantly preterm may be struggling with a hidden handicap that sets them apart from their peers: specific areas of the brain that are smaller than normal, even years later. A collaborative study between the Stanford, Yale and Brown medical schools compared the brain volumes of two types of 8 year olds: those born prematurely and those born full-term. The researchers found significant, lingering reductions in the areas of the cerebral cortex responsible for reading, language, emotion and behavior. Even more surprising, the researchers discovered that the brains of preterm boys were more severely affected than were girls.

Doctors have known that preterm newborn boys fare more poorly than girls, but it's not been clear why. The differences persist even after the early medical hurdles have been cleared: preterm boys struggle more than preterm girls with speech and language and have a harder time in academic and social situations as they grow older. Although it stands to reason that newborns making an unreasonably early appearance have smaller brain volumes than full-term babies, it wasn't known that boys' brains are more severely affected or that the disparity persists for so long.

According to researchers they also looked at which specific white matter areas are most compromised by preterm birth. They found that certain parts of the brain were more vulnerable to the effects of preterm birth than others. In males, the temporal lobe and the deep cerebral region of the brain are preferentially affected. It turns out that individuals who are born preterm often have particular problems in language-based areas, and the temporal lobe is one of the seats of language. These areas are also involved in many other important functions, including emotion, attention and reading — classic Achilles heels for many kids born preterm.
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World's first Amorphous Silicon 2.6-inch VGA LCD panel
Seoul, Korea: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world's largest provider of TFT-LCD display panels, has announced the world's first a-Si (Amorphous Silicon) 2.6-inch TFT-LCD with VGA (300ppi) image quality. Using a-Si technology, mobile phone displays are now capable of projecting the same VGA format found on notebook PCs and desktop monitors. With almost seven times the resolution of a 42-inch high-definition LCD TV at 300 pixels per inch (ppi), an a-Si enabled mobile phone can be used as a high quality mobile TV.

Amorphous silicon (a-Si) and polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon or p-Si) are the two main silicon technologies used in the thin film transistors for LCDs. Low-temperature polysilicon can achieve a high degree of integration, making it the method of choice when producing panels that require high resolution. Conventional wisdom has held that structural properties would limit a-Si technology to 150ppi resolution. However, Samsung Electronics engineers completed a 1.94-inch display with qVGA (207ppi) resolution in May of this year, and continued to improve upon its own a-Si technology to achieve VGA resolution for small- and mid-sized display panels.

Samsung's latest LCD is a transflective model (200:1 contrast ratio and 150cd/m(2) brightness), which provides sharp images even when exposed to bright summer sunshine. Mass production on existing lines is scheduled to begin in December of this year, giving the company a competitive edge in terms of production cost and supply capability. Samsung will eventually expand the a-Si technology to "smart phones" and mobile phones equipped for digital multimedia broadcasting. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2003 parent company sales of US$36.4 billion and net income of US$5.0 billion.
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