Mumbai, Oct 22 (ANI/Business Wire India): PlaySpan,Inc., the game industry's first publisher sponsored in-game commerce network, today announced that former Sony PlayStation Europe CEO, Chris Deering, has joined the PlaySpan advisory board. Deering brings a decade of experience as CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, guiding publishers in dealing with complex issues across multiple cultures, currencies and jurisdictions.

"The PlaySpan microtransaction platform delivers the next big revenue stream to game publishers based on in-game commerce and complements subscription and advertising revenue streams," said Deering. "I am impressed with the all- star team at PlaySpan/ PayByCash and their industry leading technology which has gained rapid adoption by reputable game developers and publishers worldwide. I look forward to helping PlaySpan realize its objective to become global market leader."

Deering was founder and CEO of the London-based Sony PlayStation Division for EMEA and Australasia from 1995 through 2005, when he retired from Sony. PlayStation Europe enjoys the highest cumulative installed base of PlayStation consoles in the world and created the renowned "EyeToy" and "SingStar" global game franchises.

A Harvard Business School graduate, Deering has also served as VP of International Marketing at Atari, and 10 years as Senior VP at Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures) where he was COO of International Video. Currently, he sits on the boards of several tech firms, as well as serving as Chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival.

"It is a great privilege to have such a leading and reputable executive of the gaming industry as Chris Deering on our advisory board," said Karl Mehta, Founder and CEO of PlaySpan Inc. "Chris knowledge of the European gaming industry and the game industry as a whole will be invaluable to PlaySpan as we expand on a global scale."

PlaySpanT is the game industry's first publisher-sponsoredT in-game commerceT network. PlaySpan's patent-pending in-game search, commerce and micropayment technologies enable game publishers and developers to generate new revenues, acquire new users and extend the loyalty of existing users. Leading game providers and virtual world publishers have selected PlaySpan as their official marketplace for virtual goods commerce.

PlaySpan payment solutions are offered by its subsidiary under the PayByCash(r) brand, which supports more than 70 payment methods across 200 countries for the past 10 years. PayByCash's widely distributed ULTIMATE GAME CARD(r) is the leading pre-paid card supported by more than 200 online games and available in over 20,000 retail locations across North America and soon worldwide. (ANI)

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Washington, Oct 22 (ANI): Astronomers from the University of Florida (UF) and University of California-Santa Cruz have discovered the onset of a huge flow of gas from a quasar, or the super-bright core of an extremely remote young galaxy still being formed.

The gas was expelled from the quasar and its enormous black hole sometime in the space of four years around 10 billion years ago - an extremely brief and ancient blip noticed by the unlikely convergence of two separate observational efforts.

"It was completely serendipitous," said Fred Hamann, a UF astronomy professor. "In fact, the only way it could have happened is through serendipity," he added.

Quasars are enormously bright cores of very distant galaxies thought to contain "super-massive" black holes a billion times larger than our sun.

They are seen only in the centers of very distant galaxies that formed long ago - galaxies whose light is just now reaching Earth after billions of years in transit.

The quasar in question occurred about 10.3 billion years ago.

The black holes within quasars are invisible, but the cosmic material cascading toward them builds up and forms hot "accretion" disks, the source of quasars' intense light.

Some of the incoming material also can be expelled from quasars to form enormous gas clouds that zoom out at extremely high speeds.

"With the quasar in question, the gas is flowing at an astonishing rate of 58 million mph," Hamann said.

But while astronomers had observed the presence of such gas clouds with other quasars, they had never witnessed one actually coming into being - until now.

Hamann said the discovery was initiated when Kyle Kaplan, an undergraduate at UC-Santa Cruz, earlier this spring noticed peculiarities in the spectra, or wavelengths of light, that had been observed and recorded from the quasar.

The spectra were gathered in 2006 as part of an effort to study the galaxies between the quasar and Earth.

When Hamann and other astronomers checked the spectra against the spectra of the same region recorded in a separate sky survey in 2002, they were surprised to discover that there were zero indications of the gas cloud.

"So that's how we know this appeared between 2002 and 2006," he said.

Daniel Progra, a physics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an expert on gas outflows from astronomical objects, indicated the discovery is a lucky one.

"I am most excited about this work," he said. "We humans cannot directly monitor changes in quasars as they take very many years. Therefore, a discovery of a change over a few years is very interesting. It is not unexpected, but chances are very small," he added. (ANI)

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Washington, Oct 22 (ANI): A new research by scientists has determined that hurricanes and typhoons, which are normally seen as looming threats from global warming, are actually helping to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

According to a report in Discovery News, the research was done by Robert Hilton of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and a team of researchers.

Each year humans emit approximately 7.2 billion tons of the greenhouse gas, trapping vast amounts of heat in the air and oceans.

Tropical cyclones derive their energy from warm seas, and some scientists believe global warming will spawn more frequent and more intense storms unless drastic effort is undertaken to cut emissions.

But, Robert Hilton a team of researchers found that when two powerful storms lashed Taiwan in 2004, rains eroded thousands of tons of carbon-rich plant matter and soil.

The material was sent coursing out of the island's steep mountain range down the LiWu River and into the deep sea, where it was buried in sediment.

"Over the last 30 years large storms, which only last a few days, dominated the erosion there," Hilton said. "Between 77 and 92 percent of carbon was eroded by these storms," he added.

Hilton and colleagues calculated that Typhoon Mindulle, the stronger of the 2004 storms, washed about 5,500 tons of carbon down the LiWu River.

When a steep river like the LiWu comes roaring out of the mountains at flood stage, its waters are dense with sediment and they quickly descend to the sea floor, where up to 90 percent of the carbon can be buried and removed from Earth's carbon cycle.

So-called "steepland" rivers are prevalent in the tropics throughout the western Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, making the region ripe for erosion by tropical cyclones.

In the Pacific alone, some 50-90 million tons of carbon are sequestered in this way annually.

According to Basil Gomez of Indiana State University, "This is a cool study that suggests erosion may not be as big a worry for carbon in some areas as we once thought it was." (ANI)

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Rome, Oct 22 (ANI): Archaeologists have discovered nine ancient Roman columns believed to have originally lined the most important Roman road into the Balkans, on a riverbed in northern Italy.

According to news agency ANSA, the stone columns are believed to date back to the fourth century AD and some carry inscriptions relating to the emperors of that late stage in the Roman Empire.

"'This is an extraordinary find because of the number of columns and the inscriptions they bear," local archaeological authorities said.

The columns are originally believed to have served as milestones along the road that led from Aquileia to ancient Aemona, today the Slovenian capital Ljubljana.

It was the main southwest route into the vast province of Pannonia which comprised most of today's Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Serbia.

At some stage in history, probably after the Empire fell, the pillars were moved to a bend in the river in which they were found, near Gorizia, according to archaeologists. (ANI)

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