Washington, August 15: Promoting a company as one running a family business enhances its performance by positively influencing customers’ purchasing decisions, suggests new research.

This finding emerges from a survey of people leading 399 family businesses, which provided information regarding relationships among the extent to their efforts to promote their company’s family-based brand identity, the extent to which they aligned their business with the needs of the customer, and company growth and profitability.

Washington  - There is no prospect the United States will use military force to resolve the ongoing conflict between Georgia and Russia, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

"The United States spent 45 years working very hard to avoid a military confrontation with Russia," Gates said, referring to the Cold War. "I see no reason to change that approach today."

Washington  - The United States will have a more racially and ethnically diverse population by 2042 as minority groups will outnumber the white population by that year, the US Census Bureau said Thursday in a revision of demographic projections.

The bureau had earlier projected that those identified as Hispanic, black, Asian or Native American would outnumber whites by 2050. But fast growing ethnic minorities with high birth rates and new immigrants led the bureau to update its projections.

Washington, August 14: A scientist has outlined a number of steps that could reverse the demise of the oceans.

According to Jeremy Jackson, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the following steps, if taken immediately, could reverse the destruction of the oceans.

They are: establish marine reserves, enforce fishing regulations, implement aquaculture, remove subsidies on fertilizer use, muster human ingenuity to limit fossil fuel consumption, buy time by establishing local conservation measures.

These steps are mentioned in Jackson’s article, titled “Ecological Extinciton and Evolution in the Brave New Ocean.”

Washington, August 14: Archaeologists in Rome have unearthed the colossal portrait head of the Roman empress Faustina, wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius, who ruled from A. D. 138 to 161.

The find comes almost exactly one year after archaeologists discovered the remains of a colossal 16 foot statue of the emperor Hadrian (A. D. 117-138) at a spot about 6 m (20 feet) away.

Both the Hadrian statute and Faustina head come from the largest room of the Roman Baths at Sagalassos, which have under excavation for the past 12 years.

This room—cross-shaped, with mosaic floors, and up to 1250 sq. meters—was most likely a cold room or frigidarium.

Washington, August 14: A scientist has warned that human activities are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.

According to Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in the US, human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world’s oceans down a rapid spiral.

He added that only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems the oceans are facing.