New research from Diamond has revealed women in the UK spent around GBP3.35billion* on shoes in 2012 but still leave two thirds of their collection of high heels, boots and sandals in the wardrobe. Diamond revealed the average woman owns 19 pairs of shoes but regularly wears just seven pairs of them. The study of 2,000 women across the UK also revealed one in twenty women are true shoe devotees and own more than 50 pairs while 7% buy 10 or more pairs each year. Natalie Grimshare, spokesperson for Diamond said: "According to our study, the average woman owns ...

University of Adelaide researchers have provided new evidence on the long-debated authorship of two famous texts – the US Federalist Papers and the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. The results of a 10-year project led by Professor Derek Abbott, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, was published today in the prestigious journal PLOS ONE. The team has developed an automatic authorship detection system, using advanced software techniques to analyse author style based on commonly used words. "We applied our new authorship detection technique to ...

New Rochelle, NY, February 21, 2013—By targeting the specific mutation that causes the hereditary neuromuscular disease myotonic dystrophy, it is possible to neutralize the mutant RNA toxicity and minimize or even eliminate the disabling symptoms of the disease. New classes of drugs called antisense oligonucleotides are being designed to achieve this. Innovative work to develop a modified antisense drug that can be administered intravenously and achieve the desired therapeutic effect is described in an article in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary ...

DENVER – The median age of patients diagnosed with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has steadily increased over the recent years and is presently 70 years. Despite this, the elderly are significantly underrepresented in clinical trials. A recent study published in the March 2013 issue of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's (IASLC) Journal of Thoracic Oncology, investigated the degree to which exclusion or underrepresentation of elderly occurs in practice-changing clinical trials in advanced NSCLC. Researchers conclude that greater representation ...

DENVER – Local therapy is not commonly utilized in metastatic lung cancer. Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center investigated the efficacy of local therapy with continued EGFR TKI therapy specifically in patients with acquired resistance to EGFR TKIs. A recent study published in the March 2013 issue of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's (IASLC) Journal of Thoracic Oncology, found that EGFR- mutant lung cancers with acquired resistance to EGFR TKI therapy are amenable to local therapy to treat oligometastatic disease when used in ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– For over a century, the rubber tappers of Acre, Brazil collected the valuable sap of the rubber trees from the forests of the western Amazon. As the demand for natural rubber declined, however, the Brazilian government sought to stimulate the economy in the 1970's by encouraging southern ranchers to bring their cattle to the isolated state and convert the forests to pastureland. During the dramatic land conflicts that ensued, rubber tappers captured international media attention by arguing that their harvesting of rubber and other products from ...

The first scientific examinations of data recorded during a record-setting expedition have yielded new insights about the diversity of creatures that live and thrive in the cold, dark, and highly pressurized habitats of the world's deepest points and their vastly unexplored ecosystems. Natalya Gallo of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego will present preliminary findings from the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition, a project led by James Cameron in collaboration with Scripps, and supported by National Geographic and Rolex, on Feb. 22 (GS09: Community Ecology ...

Weighing the costs and benefits of plastic vegetable greenhouses The economic benefits of intensive vegetable cultivation inside plastic greenhouses, particularly for small-holders, have driven a rapid mushrooming of long plastic tents in farmlands worldwide – but particularly in China, where they cover 3.3 million hectares and produce approximately US $60 million in produce (2008 figures). The method conserves water, binds up carbon, shrinks land use, protects against soil erosion and exhaustion, and mitigates problematic dust storms. But this change from conventional ...

The new drug has been proven to be effective in preventing the spread of different strains of influenza in laboratory models – including resistant strains of the virus. The breakthrough is the result of a global collaboration between scientists from CSIRO, the University of British Columbia and the University of Bath. In order to infect cells, flu viruses bind onto sugars on the cell surface. To be able to spread they need to remove these sugars. The new drug works by preventing the virus from removing sugars and blocking the virus from infecting more cells. It is hoped ...

Pulmonary fibrosis is a scarring or thickening of the lungs that causes shortness of breath, a dry cough, fatigue, chest discomfort, weight loss, a decrease in the ability of the lungs to transmit oxygen to the blood stream, and, eventually, heart failure. Cells known as myofibroblasts normally secrete materials that are required for wound healing; once the wound has closed, the cells disappear. In pulmonary fibrosis, the myofibroblasts stick around, continuing to secrete wound healing factors that cause fibrosis in the lungs. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, ...

How to mend a broken heart: advances in parthenogenic stem cells Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction during which unfertilized eggs begin to develop as if they had been fertilized. It occurs naturally in many plants and a few invertebrate (some bees, scorpions, parasitic wasps) and vertebrate animals (some fish, reptiles, and amphibians), but does not occur naturally in mammals. In 2007, researchers were able to chemically induce human egg cells to undergo parthenogenesis. The resulting parthenogenote has properties similar to an embryo, but cannot develop ...

Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction during which unfertilized eggs begin to develop as if they had been fertilized. It occurs naturally in many plants and a few invertebrate (some bees, scorpions, parasitic wasps) and vertebrate animals (some fish, reptiles, and amphibians), but does not occur naturally in mammals. In 2007, researchers were able to chemically induce human egg cells to undergo parthenogenesis. The resulting parthenogenote has properties similar to an embryo, but cannot develop further. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, ...

Washington, DC (February 19, 2013) – Parents know that one day they will have to talk to their children about drug use. The hardest part is to decide whether or not talking about ones own drug use will be useful in communicating an antidrug message. Recent research, published in the journal Human Communication Research, found that children whose parents did not disclose drug use, but delivered a strong antidrug message, were more likely to exhibit antidrug attitudes. Jennifer A. Kam, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ashley V. Middleton, MSO Health Information ...

Los Angeles, CA (February 22, 2013) Studies report that since 2004, suicides rates in the U.S. Army have been on the rise. While researchers debate the cause, a new study finds that among suicide cases from 2007 – 2010, young white males were more at risk than any other demographic. This study, out today, will be published in Armed Forces & Society, a SAGE journal published on behalf of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. Army Research Psychologists James Griffith and Mark Vaitkus analyzed data from the Army National Guard's (ARNG) personnel data ...

National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded researchers at Amherst College in Massachusetts and the University of Texas at Austin have described a new technique based in particle physics that might one day reveal, in more detail than ever before, the composition and characteristics of the deep Earth. There's just one catch: the technique relies on a fifth force of nature that has not yet been detected, but some particle physicists think it might exist. The fifth force would be in addition to gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Physicists ...

The study combines the cycles of sulphur, nitrogen and carbon in the ecosystem, as it shows that the molecular clusters need sulphuric acid, amines and oxygenated organics for growth. When the clusters reach a size of 1.5-2 nm, their growth increases considerably. The measurements were conducted at the University of Helsinki SMEAR II (Station for Measuring Forest Ecosystem-Atmosphere Relations) measurement station in Hyytiälä, southern Finland, which is among the most comprehensive stations in the world for atmosphere and biosphere research. During the last five years, ...

When fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their environment, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, essentially forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps. The discovery by biologists at Emory University is being published in the journal Science on Friday, February 22. "The adult flies actually anticipate an infection risk to their children, and then they medicate them by depositing them in alcohol," says Todd Schlenke, the Emory evolutionary geneticist whose lab led the research. "We found that this medicating behavior ...

This press release is available in German. Silicon nanocrystals have a size of a few nanometers and possess a high luminous potential. Scientists of KIT and the University of Toronto/Canada have now succeeded in manufacturing silicon-based light-emitting diodes (SiLEDs). They are free of heavy metals and can emit light in various colors. The team of chemists, materials researchers, nanoscientists, and opto-electronic experts presents its development in the "Nano Letters" journal (DOI: 10.1021/nl3038689). Silicon dominates in microelectronics and photovoltaics ...

Our ancestors evolutionarily split from those of rhesus monkeys about 25 million years ago. Since then, brain areas have been added, have disappeared or have changed in function. This raises the question, 'Has evolution given humans unique brain structures?'. Scientists have entertained the idea before but conclusive evidence was lacking. By combining different research methods, we now have a first piece of evidence that could prove that humans have unique cortical brain networks. Professor Vanduffel explains: "We did functional brain scans in humans and rhesus monkeys ...

Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden conclude that public opposition to dam removal is not based on knowledge deficiency, as is sometimes argued in dam removal science. It is instead a case of different understandings and valuation of the environment and the functions it provides. The findings are now published in the journal Ecology and Society. Dam removal is an increasingly common practice as old splash dams and small hydropower dams have become obsolete. Although the removal of these dams has ecological benefits by restoring rivers to their former courses, local ...

PITTSBURGH—At a time when the U.S. government is contemplating changes to federal guidelines governing research with humans, serious questions are being raised about the role of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in overseeing such research. Particularly, vocal critics have cited lost time, money and even lives under a system that they claim consumes scarce resources and stifles academic freedom. In response, defenders of the IRB system point to the need to protect research participants from abuse. Carnegie Mellon University's Alex John London, an internationally renowned ...

Despite years of research, the genetic factors behind many human diseases and characteristics remain unknown. The inability to find the complete genetic causes of family traits such as height or the risk of type 2 diabetes has been called the "missing heritability" problem. A new study by Princeton University researchers, however, suggests that missing heritability may not be missing after all — at least not in yeast cells, which the researchers used as a model for studying the problem. Published in the journal Nature, the results suggest that heritability in humans ...

State supreme court justices who don't face voters are generally more effective than their elected counterparts, according to research led by Princeton University political scientists. The research combines data about almost 6,000 state supreme court rulings nationwide between 1995 and 1998 with a new theoretical model to reach the conclusions that appointed justices generally bring a higher quality of information to the decision-making process, are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and are less likely to make errors than elected justices. "Judges ...

WASHINGTON, DC – With only one week left before sequestration is to take effect, America's research community sustained its call for an end to the across-the-board cuts to discretionary spending that will severely restrict the nation's ability to invest in the basic scientific research that drives innovation and produces economic growth. Sequestration will reduce federal funding for scientific research by nearly $95 billion over the next nine years, which will result in a reduction of U.S. GDP by at least $203 billion. The net impact will be 200,000 fewer jobs per year ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, February 21, 2013 -- Rocket attacks in Sderot, Israel significantly increase the likelihood of miscarriages, according to a new study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers. The study, published in the January issue of Psychosomatic Medicine Journal of Bio-behavioral Medicine, compared 1,341 pregnancies of women (exposed group) who resided in Sderot, an area exposed to frequent rocket fire, with 2,143 pregnancies of women who lived in Kiryat Gat (unexposed group), which is out of range of missiles. Among women residing in the exposed ...