The AmeriQuest Symposium, now celebrating its 10th year of bringing together industry experts, thought leaders, and decision-makers to share insights and ideas, has named Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Bob Woodward as one of its keynote speakers. The Symposium takes place at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando Grande Lakes, April 17-19. "The AmeriQuest Symposium is the premier platform where industry leaders explore the issues impacting their businesses and then define the solutions and tools needed to create success," said Doug Clark, President ...

AQB, an Austin-based small business consulting firm, today announces new corporate blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts to increase customer engagement on the latest Intuit Quickbooks offerings and SMB news. Well-known for offering comprehensive QuickBooks training videos, AQB will now offer the blog, Facebook and Twitter weekly to feature upcoming training videos, as well as company and client news, press releases, system updates and Intuit news. "Our QuickBooks training videos are not scripted and edited down - we've taken a live training class broken into sub ...

Employers in today's challenging market are indicating that while a post-secondary diploma or degree helps validate technical skills, equally important for employment is workplace readiness or "soft" skills, such as networking, enthusiasm and communication. With nearly 50 career-focused educational institutions, Kaplan Higher Education Campuses is launching a Kaplan Certified Professional program to help its students illustrate they are ready to work and have made an additional effort to gain the well-rounded skills potential employers seek. It begins today for ...

Michael Walters Advertising (MWA), based in Chicago, has been selected by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana (BCBSMT) to launch a new brand identity to promote the benefits of its services. The largest and oldest health insurance company in Montana, BCBS has chosen Michael Walters Advertising as its new Agency of Record (AOR) for 2013. MWA will use their expertise in healthcare and insurance marketing to create a compelling message that will encourage new customers to choose BCBS over competitors or the affordable healthcare vouchers while maintaining current market ...

Pool Cover Specialists National, Inc., the largest independently-owned automatic-swimming-pool-cover manufacturer in the world, announced today that company Gross Sales for 2012 surpassed 2011 by 22% and set a new record for the highest annual gross sales in the company's 29 year history. "The year started out a little rough when we caught our CFO with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar, so I really wasn't sure how the rest of the year was going to go," stated Wes Mathis, Co-Chair Board Of Directors for Pool Cover Specialists. Mr. Mathis went on to say: ...

LinkedIn has now become a lot more than a social networking site for business professionals. It is now the primary site for job recruiters/seekers, a platform to build your brand, a networking tool, and much more! And it is this power of networking that helps business people the most. Tina Brinkley Potts, business strategist in conjunction with Tony Treacy of Local Market Labs, now offers a series of video training webinars to educate people in using LinkedIn to connect and network with fellow business professionals. "We're slowly but surely moving to a society ...

Alaska is home to large deposits of many metals, including copper, gold, silver, zinc, numerous rare earth metals and a new push for rare gems. Many of these deposits have never been mined, and if current proposals go through, they could dramatically expand the mining industry in the state. In addition to operating mines, there are a number of active prospect mining operations in Alaska. Small upstart mining companies such as Dorado Equities Inc. are among the companies that have contributed to almost $425 million on exploration costs in 2012, a significant part of ...

It's no secret that China is faced with some of the world's worst pollution. Until now, however, information on the magnitude, scope and impacts of a major contributor to that pollution – human-caused nitrogen emissions – was lacking. A new study co-authored by Stanford biology professor and Stanford Woods Institute senior fellow Peter Vitousek reveals that amounts of nitrogen (from industry, cars and fertilizer) deposited on land and water in China by way of rain, dust and other carriers increased by 60 percent annually from the 1980s to the 2000s, with profound consequences ...

HONOLULU, HI - Researchers at the University of Hawai'i Cancer Center have uncovered a novel mechanism that may lead to more selective ways to stop cancer cells from spreading. Associate Professor Joe W. Ramos PhD, a cancer biologist at the UH Cancer Center and his team have identified the role of the protein RSK2 in cancer cell migration, part of the process of cancer metastasis. Cancer becomes metastatic when cells break away from the primary tumor and spread to other parts of the body. Metastatic cancer is much more difficult to treat and patients with metastatic ...

Lower-income patients want to communicate electronically with their doctors, but the revolution in health care technology often is not accessible to them, due to inadequate health information services within the health care clinics they frequent, according to a survey by UC San Francisco researchers. Increasing numbers of health care systems are offering online services to patients in order to manage care outside of office visits, and this often includes the ability for patients to communicate electronically with health care providers. The UCSF research team found that ...

Health care workers who consistently wear special fitted face masks while on duty are much less likely to get clinical respiratory and bacterial infections, according to new research led by University of New South Wales (UNSW) academics. The results, published in The American Journal of Critical Care Medicine, are particularly significant with the threat of possible pandemics and severe flu seasons, such as the current outbreak in the United States. "When there are no drugs and vaccines available, sometimes for months at a time, then all you have is masks," says the ...

Washington, DC (26 February 2013)—Across-the-board cuts to US R&D programs could have a devastating impact on efforts to develop new drugs for tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS, the world's first malaria vaccine, and other vital global health products in development, according to a new report from a coalition of nonprofit groups focused on advancing innovation to save lives. "We know that policymakers are currently facing difficult budget decisions. But any reductions in funds could eliminate essential support for the development of global health tools and slow or halt the ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Women who reported eating a diet rich in iron were 30 to 40 percent less likely to develop pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) than women who consumed lower amounts, in a study reported this week by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences and Harvard. It is one of the first to evaluate whether dietary mineral intake is associated with PMS development. Senior author Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson and others at UMass Amherst, with lead author Patricia Chocano-Bedoya and colleagues at Harvard, assessed mineral ...

HOUSTON – (Feb. 26, 2013) – Bone marrow cells that produce brain-derived eurotrophic factor (BDNF), known to affect regulation of food intake, travel to part of the hypothalamus in the brain where they "fine-tune" appetite, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Shiga University of Medical Science in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, in a report that appears online in the journal Nature Communications. "We knew that blood cells produced BDNF," said Dr. Lawrence Chan, professor of molecular and cellular biology and professor and chief of the division of diabetes, endocrinology ...

Ottawa (February 26th, 2013) – Canadian agriculture is faced with great opportunities, but also challenged by water-related risks and uncertainties. An expert panel convened by the Council of Canadian Academies has found that water and land resources in Canada can be more sustainably managed by developing forward-thinking policies and effective land and water management strategies, adopting effective governance mechanisms, and harnessing technological advancements. The agricultural sector is an important contributor to Canada's prosperity and well-being. In 2011, primary ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a group of progenitor cells in the inner ear that can become the sensory hair cells and adjacent supporting cells that enable hearing. Studying these progenitor cells could someday lead to discoveries that help millions of Americans suffering from hearing loss due to damaged or impaired sensory hair cells. "It's well known that, in mammals, these specialized sensory cells don't regenerate after damage," said Alan Cheng, MD, assistant professor of otolaryngology. (In contrast, ...

Huntington's disease, also known as Huntington's chorea, is a hereditary brain disease causing movement disorders and dementia. In Germany, there are about 8,000 patients affected by Huntington's disease, with several hundred new cases arising every year. The disease usually manifests between the ages of 35 and 50. To date, it is incurable and inevitably leads to death. It is caused by a specific genetic defect: In the patient's DNA, which is the carrier of genetic information, there are multiple copies of a certain motif. "Repeats like this are also found in healthy people. ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Fat worms confirm that researchers from Michigan State University have successfully engineered a plant with oily leaves -- a feat that could enhance biofuel production as well as lead to improved animal feeds. The results, published in the current issue of The Plant Cell, the journal of the American Society of Plant Biologists, show that researchers could use an algae gene involved in oil production to engineer a plant that stores lipids or vegetable oil in its leaves – an uncommon occurrence for most plants. Traditional biofuel research has focused ...

Northwestern University's Yonggang Huang and the University of Illinois' John A. Rogers are the first to demonstrate a stretchable lithium-ion battery -- a flexible device capable of powering their innovative stretchable electronics. No longer needing to be connected by a cord to an electrical outlet, the stretchable electronic devices now could be used anywhere, including inside the human body. The implantable electronics could monitor anything from brain waves to heart activity, succeeding where flat, rigid batteries would fail. Huang and Rogers have demonstrated ...

In a substudy of the STAMPEDE trial (Surgical Therapy And Medications Potentially Eradicate Diabetes Efficiently), Cleveland Clinic researchers have found that gastric bypass surgery reverses diabetes by uniquely restoring pancreatic function in moderately obese patients with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes. The two-year substudy evaluated the effects of bariatric surgery and intensive medical therapy on blood sugar levels, body composition, and pancreatic beta-cell function. Striking metabolic changes were observed in patients who underwent bariatric surgery compared with ...

The researchers conducted a mirror experiment to show that by changing the position of the mirror in a vacuum, virtual particles can be transformed into real photons that can be experimentally observed. In a vacuum, there is energy and noise, the existence of which follows the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. If we act fast enough, we can prevent the particles from recombining – they will then be transformed into real particles that can be detected', says Dr. Sorin Paraoanu from Aalto University. For the experiment, the researchers used an array of superconducting ...

For scientists to improve cancer treatments with targeted therapeutic drugs, they need to be able to see proteins prevalent in the cancer cells. This has been impossible, until now. Thanks to a new microscopy technique, University of Akron researcher Dr. Adam Smith, assistant professor of chemistry, has observed how clusters of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) — a protein abundant in lung and colon cancers, glioblastoma and others — malfunctions in cancer cells. "We can directly observe protein clusters, in a living cell membrane, that are invisible to traditional ...

The overuse of antibiotics has created strains of bacteria resistant to medication, making the diseases they cause difficult to treat, or even deadly. But now a research team at the University of Rochester has identified a weakness in at least one superbug that scientists may be able to medically exploit. Biologists Gloria Culver at Rochester and Keith Connolly, now at Harvard University, thought one key to stopping the bacteria may lie with proteins, so they studied the mechanism behind the development of bacterial ribosomes—the cell's protein-manufacturing machine. ...

(24 February 2013) An estimated 50 per cent of patients consulting a gastroenterologist suffer from functional bowel disorders (FBD), such as dyspepsia or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It is characteristic for these conditions that underlying physiological mechanisms are hard to be found. "However, recent research shows that the gut microbiota is a likely candidate for filling some of the gaps in the causal chain leading to FBD," says Professor Fernando Azpiroz, Chairman of the Gut Microbiota & Health Section of the European Society of Neurogastroenterology & Motility ...

(26 February 2013) Clostridium difficile infections have developed into a virtual pandemic over the past two decades. The outcome of standard antibiotic treatment is unsatisfactory: the recurrence rates are high with every relapse increasing the risk of further follow-ups. Faecal microbiota transplantation offers a rapidly acting and highly effective alternative in treating recurrent Clostridium difficile infections (RCDI), as Professor Lawrence J. Brandt (Montefiore Medical Center, New York, USA) points out. According to him, more than 90 per cent of the patients are being ...