miEdge, business intelligence system for Insurance Professionals, announced significant subscriber acquisition and market growth in 2012. Launched in January 2012, miEdge utilizes patent pending search engine technology to create a unique user interface to search, save and manage the expansive Health/Welfare Employee Benefits public 5500 data from the Department of Labor. Mark J. Smith, ACII, CIC, CEO & Founder of miEdge said, "Our growth in 2012 has been phenomenal and has exceeded my expectations. miEdge has performed magnificently and the one comment I keep ...

DLP Media, LLC. is happy to announce that preproduction has begun on its first feature film, entitled, Cigarette Soup. Written and directed by Damian Voerg, Cigarette Soup is a gritty verite-style drama set during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan. The film follows an aspiring journalist embedded inside a small band of American soldiers. After a surprise attack, the men become separated from their unit and find themselves trapped in an insurgent bunker -- surrounded on all sides by the enemy. The filmmakers ...

The aftermath of recent horrific events such as the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut and most recently, the bombing at the Boston Marathon has many of us concerned about security and most importantly, school security. While there is nationwide debate on what is the most important factor and it will differ based on whether you are a gun control activist, civil rights group, the NRA (National Rifle Association) or politicians, the fact remains the same that many parents are concerned about the growing violence happening in our nation's schools. According to the CDC, Center ...

"The Bigfoot Hoaxes just keep on coming" says Bigfoot Hunter Tom Biscardi, President of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. of Redwood City, California, and if you want to find out the truth behind two of the biggest Bigfoot Hoaxes of all time, you can see the detailed stories about them in two films that Biscardi produced. The most recent film is "Hoax of the Century." Hoax of the Century is about the faking of the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage of Bigfoot. The other film is "Anatomy of a Bigfoot Hoax," a film about the true 2008 story of ...

My Barber's Lounge celebrates a grand first year of operations in Greenbelt, MD. The Greenbelt community calls the upscale barbershop for men, women and children the "best kept secret in Prince George's County!" The shop's friendly atmosphere and robust conversations makes it more than just a place for personal grooming. Since April 2012, the shop owner, E. Davon Kelly's vision for the barbershop has been realized: "It is a wonderful place where you will feel welcome when you arrive, be pleased that you came, and will be remembered whenever you return. ...

Bobi Bee Manuka Honey Sweet Treat, the World's First 100% Healthy Happy-Stomach No-Caffeine Energy-Treat, is now available in a convenient Club-Pack Family-Size, coming to a Club-Store near you. According to Sherry Williams, VP, she believes Bobi Bee Sweet Treat is quickly becoming the number one healthy energy Treat choice among consumers who have been buying the product from the 350-store Michigan chain at a rapid pace. Williams said it's no surprise to see such continued increase in sales, but the frequency of the re-orders is convincing evidence that consumers have ...

Sound Physicians, a leading hospitalist organization focused on driving improvements in quality, satisfaction and financial performance of inpatient healthcare delivery, announced today an agreement to provide hospitalist services at Kona Community Hospital in Kealakekua, Hawaii. Sound Physicians will provide comprehensive hospitalist services to the 94-bed hospital, which includes an on-site skilled nursing facility. Sound Physicians will recruit to employ a team of six physicians, including a chief hospitalist leader plus a dedicated hospitalist RN whose role is to ...

PHILADELPHIA – Cytokines are molecules produced by immune cells that induce the migration of other cells to sites of infection or injury, promote the production of anti-microbial agents, and signal the production of inflammatory mediators. These events are important for fighting infections. However, sometimes this process goes unchecked, resulting in unwanted inflammation that can damage tissues and organs. Interleukin 17, or IL17, is a well-studied cytokine that regulates immune function at mucosal surfaces in the body but is dysregulated in many diseases, such as multiple ...

A team of 70 scientists from the U.S., China, Australia and Japan today reports having sequenced and annotated the genome of the "sacred lotus," which is believed to have a powerful genetic system that repairs genetic defects, and may hold secrets about aging successfully. The scientists sequenced more than 86 percent of the nearly 27,000 genes of the plant, Nelumbo nucifera, which is revered in China and elsewhere as a symbol of spiritual purity and longevity. "The lotus genome is an ancient one, and we now know its ABCs," said Jane Shen-Miller, one of three corresponding ...

A world-first completed clinical study by an Australian team has found Kava, a medicinal South Pacific plant, significantly reduced the symptoms of people suffering anxiety. The study, led by the University of Melbourne and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, revealed Kava could be an alternative treatment to pharmaceutical products for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who suffer from Generalised Anxiety Disorders (GAD). Lead researcher, Dr Jerome Sarris from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, said GAD is a complex ...

Enantioselectivity has been recognized in the fields of life science, pharmacology, modern medicine, and chemistry. The increasing release of chiral persistent organic pollutants (POPs) into the environment in recent decades has led to an increase in scientific research into their environmental behavior and safety. Scientist Weiping Liu and his colleagues at Zhejiang University have been studying enantiomer-specific effects of chiral pollutants for a long time, and have recently reviewed the enantiomer-specific environmental transportation, transformation, bioaccumulation, ...

People with job stress and an unhealthy lifestyle are at higher risk of coronary artery disease than people who have job stress but lead healthy lifestyles, found a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). To determine whether a healthy lifestyle can help reduce the effects of job stress on coronary artery disease, researchers looked at 7 cohort studies from a large European initiative that included 102 128 people who were disease-free during the 15-year study period (1985-2000). Participants, ranging in age from 17-70 (mean 44.3) years were from ...

For adults with no apparent symptoms of depression, routine screening is not recommended in primary care settings because of the lack of high-quality evidence on the benefits and harms of screening for depression, according to new evidence-based guidelines from the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). These guidelines mark a change in approach from the task force's 2005 guidelines, which recommended screening adults in primary care settings where there were integrated staff-assisted systems to ...

Once famously described as "orphan diseases, too small to be noticed, too small to be funded" in the Hollywood drama Lorenzo's Oil, rare diseases are getting unprecedented attention today among drug manufacturers, who are ramping up research efforts and marketing new medicines that promise fuller lives for children and other patients with these heartbreaking conditions. That's the finding of a major examination, published today in the weekly newsmagazine of the world's largest scientific society, of the status of new drugs for the 7,000 conditions that affect 200,000 ...

Cancún, Mexico -- It's very hard to convict a murderer if the victim's body can't be found. And the best way to hide a body is to bury it. Developing new tools to find those clandestine graves is the goal of a small community of researchers spread across several countries, some of whom are presenting their work on Tuesday, May 14, at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancún, Mexico, a scientific conference organized and co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. "Nowadays, there are thousands of missing people around the world that could have been tortured and killed ...

A recent study indicated that the urbanization in eastern China has significant impact on the observed surface warming and the temporal-spatial variations of urbanization effect have been comprehensively detected. This work was led by YANG XiuQun, professor of meteorology in the Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University. The article entitled "Urbanization and heterogeneous surface warming in eastern China" was published in Chinese Science Bulletin, 2013, No. 12. Urbanization, as one of the most significant processes ...

Researchers at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle (USA) and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg have jointly developed a revolutionary method to analyse the genomes of yeast families. The team of Dr. Aimée Dudley from the ISB and Dr. Patrick May from LCSB published their paper in the renowned scientific journal Nature Methods on May 12th. It describes a new method called BEST: Barcode Enabled Sequencing of Tetrads (DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.2479). Baker's yeast is one of the most powerful and widely used organisms in ...

How active a living cell is can be seen by its oxygen consumption. The method for determining this consumption has now been significantly improved by chemists in Bochum. The problem up to now was that the measuring electrode altered the oxygen consumption in the cell's environment much more than the cell itself. "We already found that out twelve years ago," says Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schuhmann from the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the Ruhr-Universität. "Now we have finally managed to make the measuring electrode an spectator." Together with his team, he reports in ...

This news release is available in German. Quantum computers work by manipulating quantum objects as, for example, individual photons, electrons or atoms and by harnessing the unique quantum features. Not only do quantum computers promise a dramatic increase in speed over classical computers in a variety of computational tasks; they are designed to complete tasks that even a supercomputer would not be able to handle. Although, in recent years, there has been a rapid development in quantum technology the realization of a full-sized quantum computer is still very challenging. ...

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a smart phone app that helps users lose weight by carefully recording their food consumption. The app was developed in response to research from the University's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, which showed that paying attention to what you eat while you eat it helps reduce food intake and prevents consuming excess calories at future meals. Researchers conducted a feasibility study using the app with 12 overweight and obese participants They found that over a four week period the average weight ...

This news release is available in Spanish. These conclusions were the most notable of those drawn by ISVA's evaluation of the vehicle inspections carried out in 2011. A total of 14,858,585 vehicles were inspected, 2,864,070 of which were rejected, which constitutes a 19.27% rejection rate The study also highlights the impact caused by the fact that one fifth of Spain's vehicle fleet does not undergo the obligatory inspection. If 20% of those vehicles that did not have a technical inspection had done so, at least 7,100 accidents, 7,000 injuries and 110 deaths more ...

It is not just our sense of taste that determines what a foodstuff "tastes" like. In fact, the tongue can recognize basic tastes like sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory). But to get that "rounded" taste experience, we also use our sense of smell – and strawberries provide a good example of this. The characteristic aroma of a fresh strawberry is the result of around a dozen different aroma compounds. One of these plays a particularly important role: HDMF (4-hydroxy-2,5-dimethyl-3(2H)-furanone), which is also known under the brand name Furaneol. Prof. Wilfried ...

On 31 March 2013, the Chinese National Health and Family Planning Commission announced human cases of novel H7N9 influenza virus infections. A group of scientists, led by Professor Chen Hualan of the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has investigated the origins of this novel H7N9 influenza virus and published their results in Springer's open access journal Chinese Science Bulletin (SpringerOpen). Following analysis of H7N9 influenza viruses collected from live poultry markets, it was found that these viruses circulating ...

Scientists have known for some time that exercise induces neurogenesis in a specific brain region, the hippocampus. However, until this study, the underlying mechanism was not fully understood. The hippocampus plays an important role in learning and in memory and is one of the brain regions where new neurons are generated throughout life. Serotonin facilitates precursor cell maturation The researchers demonstrated that mice with the ability to produce serotonin are likely to release more of this hormone during exercise, which in turn increases cell proliferation of ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Most Americans want the U.S. to place more emphasis on developing solar power, recent polls suggest. A major impediment, however, is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their rooftops. Fortunately, that is changing because researchers such as Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering, are helping develop a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what's available today. One ...