Going through a divorce is one of the most stressful events. Difficult decisions involve where a child will live and when each child will spend time with each parent. For a parent with a mental or physical disability there may be questions or fears surrounding negotiation of child custody. While many would assume that disabilities would not come up during divorce proceedings this is not always the case. As each parent seeks the strongest argument to obtain custody of a child, an impairment never questioned while the couple was together may crop up in a custody request. Unfortunately, ...

Making the decision to divorce is rarely easy. Many people are afraid of how they will make it on their own as a single person after having been part of a couple. Often people worry about what their financial circumstances will be after divorce. People considering divorce can take some steps to help prepare financially for divorce and increase their chances of financial stability after divorce. Gather documents A critical first step to making financial preparations for divorce is to gather copies of important documents, such as: - Income tax returns - Mortgages - ...

On Wednesday, January 16, 2013, after a 2 day trial, a Hennepin County (Minnesota) jury returned an excess verdict in favor of a 22-year old passenger who was injured in a collision in late March 2010. The 22-year old was a passenger in a vehicle driven by Champale Carter on March 28, 2010. The young women were traveling to Willmar to visit friends. On the way there, after dark, the driver went through a t-intersection and into a holding pond. The car hit the water, the front windshield broke and water began rushing in. The young women escaped the vehicle. When they ...

The Government of Nicaragua, private sector representatives and labor unions recently signed a labor agreement that establishes salary increases in the free zones sector through the year 2017 with the purpose of granting further stability to employees and predictability to investors. The agreement, called the Free Zones Minimum Wage Tripartite Agreement, sets annual salary increases of eight percent for the 2014-2017 period for employees working within the country's free zones sector. Furthermore, the agreement calls for the development of mechanisms aimed at increasing ...

The Boomers Guide to Recovering Your Lost Retirement: The Bill Fisher Story by Michael Burns Receives the NABE Pinnacle Award for Best Self Help Book. The book tells the story of Bill Fisher, who at the age of 72, started from scratch investing in high-dividend stocks, municipal bonds and residential real estate and over the next 18 years was able to build a net worth of one million dollars. Bill didn't win the lottery or inherit a large sum of money. What Bill did do was continue to work at his entry level job and invest his pension money, Social Security checks and ...

The new guidance is in response to a super-complaint made to the OFT by The Citizens Advice Bureau last March as a result of it's report Cashing In, which revealed how tens of thousands of consumers have been targeted by unscrupulous brokers and debt management companies and tricked out of large sums of money. It details rising instances of dubious practices from brokers and debt management companies, including cold calling or texting consumers offering to help them get an unsecured loan, and taking up front fees for credit brokering but not providing a service, often resulting ...

Cape Cod, Massachusetts has a problem. The iconic salt marshes of the famous summer retreat are melting away at the edges, dying back from the most popular recreational areas. The erosion is a consequence of an unexpected synergy between recreational over-fishing and Great Depression-era ditches constructed by Works Progress Administration (WPA) in an effort to control mosquitoes. The cascade of ecological cause and effect is described by Tyler Coverdale and colleagues at Brown University in a paper published online this month in ESA's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the ...

(Philadelphia, PA) – Scientists at the Center for Translational Medicine at the Temple University School of Medicine are inching closer to solving a long-standing mystery in sepsis, a complex and often life-threatening condition that affects more than 400,000 people in the U.S. every year. By blocking the activity of a protein, STIM1, in cells that line the insides of blood vessels in mice, they have halted a cascade of cellular events that culminates in the out-of-control inflammation that marks sepsis, and protected lungs from severe damage. The findings, reported ...

In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Karen Avraham and colleagues at Tel Aviv University identified a genetic mutation in two families with hereditary high frequency hearing loss. The mutated gene, which has not previously been linked to hearing loss, encodes NESP4, a protein that is expressed in the outer nuclear membrane (ONM) of the hair cells of the ear. Avraham and colleagues found that mutated NESP4 was mislocalized, disrupting a cellular complex known as the "linker of nucleoskeleton and cytoskeleton" or LINC, which maintains the position of the ...

Prostate cancer patients have increased levels of stress and anxiety; however, several recent studies have found that men who take drugs that interfere with the stress hormone adrenaline have a lower incidence of prostate cancer. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation George Kulik and colleagues at Wake Forest University examined the relationship between stress and cancer progression in a mouse model of prostate cancer. Kulik and colleagues found that mice that had been subjected to stress (exposed to the scent of a predator) exhibited a significantly reduced ...

Prostate cancer cells thrive on stress Prostate cancer patients have increased levels of stress and anxiety; however, several recent studies have found that men who take drugs that interfere with the stress hormone adrenaline have a lower incidence of prostate cancer. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation George Kulik and colleagues at Wake Forest University examined the relationship between stress and cancer progression in a mouse model of prostate cancer. Kulik and colleagues found that mice that had been subjected to stress (exposed to the scent of ...

The bread and butter of investing for Silicon Valley tech companies is stale. Instead, a new method of predicting the evolution of technology could save tech giants millions in research and development or developments of new products—and help analysts and venture capitalists determine which companies are on the right track. The high-tech industry has long used Moore's Law as a method to predict the growth of PC memory. Moore's Law states that the number of chips on a transistor doubles every 18 months (initially every year). A paper by Gareth James and Gerard Tellis, ...

Researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery have identified a potential new target for drugs to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a protein known as IRHOM2. The finding could provide an effective and potentially less toxic alternative therapy to tumor necrosis factor-alpha blockers (TNF-blockers), the mainstay of treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, and could help patients who do not respond to this treatment. Efforts to develop drugs that hone in on this new target are underway. "This study is an elegant example of the capacity of basic science cell biologists ...

A study conducted at the University of Granada has demonstrated that men like female thinness more than women and they find female overweight more unpleasant than women. In addition, the study revealed that women who are not comfortable with their body perceive women with a "normal" body –i.e. women with a healthy weight– as a threat. Specifically, when these women see a "normal" body they experience feelings of displeasure and lack of control, since they feel they have not any control on their own body and cannot make it be as they want. This research study was conducted ...

BOSTON – In recent years, it has been thought that select sets of genes might reveal cancer patients' prognoses. However, a study published last year examining breast cancer cases found that most of these "prognostic signatures" were no more accurate than random gene sets in determining cancer prognoses. While many saw this as a disappointment, investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) saw this as an opportunity to design a new method to identify gene sets ...

The research group led by Associate Professor Kenji Osafune and his colleague Shin-ichi Mae, both from Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University in Japan, has succeeded in developing a highly efficient method of inducing human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to differentiate into intermediate mesoderm, the precursor of kidney, gonad, and other cell lineages. This represents a major step toward realizing renal regeneration. As nearly all kidney cells are derived through differentiation from intermediate mesoderm, to realize kidney regeneration ...

Population explosions of pine beetles, which have been decimating North American forests in recent decades, may be prevented by boosting competitor and predator beetle populations, a Dartmouth study suggests. Bark beetles are the most destructive forest pests worldwide. Management and climate change have resulted in younger, denser forests that are even more susceptible to attack. Though intensively studied for decades, until now an understanding of bark beetle population dynamics—extreme ups and downs—has remained elusive. The Dartmouth-led study, published in the ...

About ten percent of all cases of malignant melanoma are familial cases. The genome of affected families tells scientists a lot about how the disease develops. Prof. Dr. Rajiv Kumar of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) together with Prof. Dr. Dirk Schadendorf from Essen University Hospital studied a family where 14 family members were affected by malignant melanoma. The scientists analyzed the genomes of family members and found an identical mutation in the gene for telomerase, an enzyme often called 'immortality enzyme', in all ...

The highest rates of infection were in children, with 47 per cent of those aged five to 19 showing signs of having caught the virus. Older people were affected less, with only 11 per cent of people aged 65 or older becoming infected. The findings come from an international collaboration led by the World Health Organization and Imperial College London, which analysed data from 19 countries, including the UK, US, China and India, to assess the global impact of the 2009 influenza pandemic. The results, published in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, showed ...

Internationally renowned climate researcher Caroline Leck of Stockholm University has evaluated the Norwegian project and is enthusiastic. "These results are truly sensational," says Dr Leck. "If confirmed by other studies, this could have far-reaching impacts on efforts to achieve the political targets for climate." Temperature rise is levelling off After Earth's mean surface temperature climbed sharply through the 1990s, the increase has levelled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilised somewhat, despite the fact that ...

PITTSBURGH—The language and reading comprehension skills of low-income upper elementary-school students—especially English-language learners—can improve markedly if trained literacy coaches engage teachers in conducting interactive text discussions with students, according to a three-year University of Pittsburgh study. The Pitt researchers report in the journal Learning and Instruction that language and reading comprehension showed measurable improvement for young students when their teachers had worked "at-elbow" with content-specific literacy coaches to foster a more ...

This press release is available in Spanish. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists in Fort Pierce, Fla. are helping citrus growers and juice processors address the threat posed by Huanglongbing (HLB), a disease that is costing the citrus industry millions of dollars each year. Citrus trees infected with HLB, also called citrus greening, usually die within five to 10 years. Fruit on infected trees often falls to the ground before harvest, and fruit that remains on trees may become misshapen and sometimes only partially ripen. Supervisory horticulturalist ...

Supplementing children's diets with fish oil, enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child's intelligence, according to a new report published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness ...

This press release is available in German. Scientists at Aalto University, Finland, have demonstrated results that show a huge improvement in the light absorption and the surface passivation on highly absorbing silicon nanostructures. This has been achieved by applying atomic layer coating. The results advance the development of devices that require high sensitivity light response such as high efficiency solar cells. This method provides extremely good surface passivation. Simultaneously, it reduces the reflectance further at all wavelengths. These results are ...

A team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown that by bringing gold nanoparticles close to the dots and using a DNA template to control the distances, the intensity of a quantum dot's fluorescence can be predictably increased or decreased.* This breakthrough opens a potential path to using quantum dots as a component in better photodetectors, chemical sensors and nanoscale lasers. Anyone who has tried to tune a radio knows that moving their hands toward or away from the antenna can improve or ruin the reception. Although ...