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Barcelona is hosting the third edition of the Wine & Culinary International Forum today, a biennial international conference dedicated to food and wine pairing promoted by Bodegas Torres. Over 250 professionals, including sommeliers, restaurant owners, distributors and journalists from almost 20 different countries, participated in the event. Celebrated in the Palau de Congressos de Catalunya, it provided a forum in which to reflect and discuss the complementary relationship between wine and food under the heading “Wine and World Cuisines.” The president of Bodegas Torres, Miguel A. Torres, opened the event, which featured talks, tastings and culinary demonstrations by a total of 20 national and international experts who are highly regarded in their fields. Among them, Josep Roca, sommelier at El Celler de Can Roca; the award winning wine-writer and journalist Sarah Jane Evans MW, an expert in Spanish wines as well as the former Chairman of the Institute of Masters of Wine; the prestigious French enologist Pascal Chatonnet, one of the leading researchers into the microbiological factors involved in the interaction between wine and oak; Canadian researcher François Chartier, a pioneer in the aromatic science of molecular food matching since 2004 and author of Taste Buds and Molecules, world’s best innovative food 2010; the renowned French wine critic Michel Bettane; and the endocrinologist Dr. Francisco Tinahones, a researcher at the University of Malaga. To view the multimedia release go to: http://www.multivu.com/players/uk/7948051-torres-wine-culinary-international-forum/

After only 16 weeks of existence, foetuses hear and respond to music as long as it is emitted from their mother’s vagina. Foetuses respond to this stimulus by opening their mouths and pulling their tongues out as far as possible, making vocalisation movements – prior to the acquisition of language. This is the main conclusion of the study conducted by the team of Institut Marquès, which boasts the collaboration of Alberto Prats, Professor of Anatomy and Human Embryology of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona. The study, entitled “Foetal facial expression in response to intravaginal music emission”, is published this week in the journal Ultrasound of the British Medical Ultrasound Society (BMUS). According to Dr. Marisa López-Teijón, the Head of Assisted Reproduction at Institut Marquès and the principal researcher and author of the clinical study: “We have discovered that the formula for foetuses to hear like us is to emit music from the mother’s vagina. They barely hear the sound that reaches them through their mother’s abdomen: the soft tissues of the abdomen and the inside of the mother’s body absorb the soundwaves”. To view the multimedia release go to: http://www.multivu.com/players/English/7647351-how-foetuses-hear-musical-stimuli/