Expert orthodontist Dr. Don Jorgensen of Jorgensen Orthodontics announced his practice's new website at www.doctorj.com. Located in Fort Collins, Colorado, Jorgensen Orthodontics offers the latest in orthodontic care including Invisalign: the "Clear" alternative to braces. Jorgensen Orthodontics also offers Invisalign Teen, clear braces, and metal braces. The new website intended for orthodontic patients in Fort Collins and Windsor, Colorado as well as Cheyenne, Wyoming is designed to improve the orthodontic patient experience. Visitors to the site will ...

California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) today announced that the second class of its Environmental Leadership Academy will graduate on Dec. 7, 2012. Each academy session features guest speakers covering current topics like climate change, air pollution, land use change, endangered species and water quality. The class encompasses four weekday sessions, each two days in length. The program was created by the university to educate leaders about the many environmental issues impacting our Southern California region. It is designed to help community, state and business ...

Time to Sign Sports continues its incredible success stories with the announcement that three pitchers will continue their baseball careers at the college level. Sam Ackerman, a right hand pitcher from Montclair, New Jersey will continue his baseball career at the school he always set as his goal. According to Gary Cohn, Time to Sign Sports co-founder, "From day one, Sam had a fascination of playing ball and attending GW. Now, he not only gets to live out that dream, but we believe he will make an impact as a Freshman." Ackerman had several other opportunities ...

On November 9, a Federal judge gave preliminary approval to a credit card class-action settlement agreement between several million merchants, and credit card giants Visa and MasterCard. The lawsuit alleged the credit card companies and certain banks were fixing the rates of swipe fees - the fee a credit card company charges a merchant when a customer uses a card. The settlement received preliminary approval from US District Judge John Gleeson earlier this month in Brooklyn, NY. This approval allows the plaintiffs in the lawsuit to begin registering the merchants who ...

TheDayGroup.net, an internet and technology advisory firm in Greenwich, CT, releases its official commentary on the general lack of marketing funds available for the smart phone platform. As most companies begin to undergo a shift in marketing focus from traditional media and online media to smart phone platforms, many more companies are struggling. "We' ve done our research," commented a spokesperson for TheDayGroup.net, "and we've found that the mobile marketing departments at many corporations are quite starved. You would think that these companies ...

The causes underlying the development of certain types of common cancers have not yet been elucidated. In order to better determine the origin and the sequence of events responsible for the onset of colon cancer, the teams led by Thanos Halazonetis and Stylianos Antonarakis, professors at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have sequenced the DNA of biopsied tissue from colon polyps. The results show that these precancerous lesions have a specific profile called 'mutator', which is associated with an increased frequency of acquisition of certain mutations. The ...

Everyone knows that men and women tend to hold different views on certain things. However, new research by scientists from the University of Bristol and published in PLoS ONE indicates that this may literally be the case. Researchers examined where men and women looked while viewing still images from films and pieces of art. They found that while women made fewer eye movements than men, those they did make were longer and to more varied locations. These differences were largest when viewing images of people. With photos of heterosexual couples, both men and women ...

Tropical storms that make their way into the North Atlantic, and possibly strike the East Coast of the United States, likely will become more intense during the rest of this century. That's the prediction of one University of Iowa researcher and his colleague as published in an early online release in the prestigious Journal of Climate, the official publication of the American Meteorological Society. The study is a compilation of results from some of the best available computer models of climate, according to lead author Gabriele Villarini, assistant professor of civil ...

BETHESDA, MD – November 30, 2012 -- Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations—including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans—descend from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans. This discovery helps fill gaps in scientific understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while providing an explanation for some genetic similarities among what would otherwise seem to be very divergent groups. This research was published ...

West Nile virus, Lyme disease, dengue fever, and plague are examples of "vector-borne zoonotic diseases," caused by pathogens that naturally infect wildlife and are transmitted to humans by vectors such as mosquitoes or ticks. According to Marm Kilpatrick, who studies the ecology of infectious diseases at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a broad range of human activities can affect the spread of zoonotic diseases. In an article in the December 1 issue of the British medical journal Lancet, Kilpatrick and coauthor Sarah Randolph of the University of Oxford describe ...

Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) describe in a new publication a viable community of bacteria that ekes out a living in a dark, salty and subfreezing environment beneath nearly 20 meters of ice in one of Antarctica's most isolated lakes. The finding could have implications for the discovery of life in other extreme environments, including elsewhere in the solar system. If, as the researchers postulate, the bacteria survive purely from chemical reactions, as opposed to drawing energy from the sun or other sources, "this gives us an entirely ...

Two new studies appearing in the Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences show that vitamin D may be a vital component for the cognitive health of women as they age. Higher vitamin D dietary intake is associated with a lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to research conducted by a team led by Cedric Annweiler, MD, PhD, at the Angers University Hospital in France. Similarly, investigators led by Yelena Slinin, MD, MS, at the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis found that low vitamin D levels among older women are associated ...

Developers of renewable energy and shale gas must overcome fundamental geological and environmental challenges if these promising energy sources are to reach their full potential, according to a trio of leading geoscientists. Their findings will be presented on Dec. 4, at 5:15 p.m. (PT), at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco in Room 102 of Moscone Center West . "There is a critical need for scientists to address basic questions that have hindered the development of emerging energy resources, including geothermal, wind, solar and ...

Bopha intensified into a typhoon today, Nov. 30, as it continues to affect the islands in Micronesia in the western North Pacific Ocean. NASA's TRMM satellite captured rainfall data of Bopha and noticed "Hot Tower" thunderstorms as it was intensifying from a tropical storm into a typhoon. When NASA and the Japanese Space Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over Bopha twice on Nov. 29, and the later data showed that the area of heaviest rainfall had expanded and was still south of the center of circulation. The heaviest rainfall was occurring ...

Human activities are advancing the spread of vector-borne, zoonotic diseases such as West Nile virus, Lyme disease and dengue fever, report scientists publishing a series of papers today in the journal The Lancet. Vector-borne zoonotic diseases result from disease-causing agents or pathogens that naturally infect wildlife, and are transmitted to humans by carriers such as mosquitoes and ticks. In short, they're diseases transmitted between animals and humans. Widespread land-use change, globalization of trade and travel, and social upheaval are driving the emergence ...

Turning lignin, a plant's structural "glue" and a byproduct of the paper and pulp industry, into something considerably more valuable is driving a research effort headed by Amit Naskar of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In a cover article published in Green Chemistry, the research team describes a process that ultimately transforms the lignin byproduct into a thermoplastic – a polymer that becomes pliable above a specific temperature. Researchers accomplished this by reconstructing larger lignin molecules either through a chemical reaction with formaldehyde or by washing ...

Cyber attacks that have long caused major work disruption and theft of private information are becoming more sophisticated with prolonged attacks perpetrated by organized groups. In September 2012, Bank of America, Citibank, the New York Stock Exchange, and other financial institutions were targets of attacks for more than five weeks. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned that the United States was facing the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could disrupt the government, utility, transportation, and ...

The 2012 Atlantic Hurricane season was a busy one as there were 19 tropical cyclones. A new NASA animation using data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM shows rainfall from tropical cyclones in the western Atlantic, as measured from space. The TRMM satellite has now been making highly accurate measurements of rainfall from space for fifteen years since it launched in Nov. 1997. TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency, JAXA. TRMM can be used to calibrate rainfall estimates from other satellites. Those rainfall ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the VA San Diego Healthcare System have found that deficiencies in the neural processing of simple auditory tones can evolve into a cascade of dysfunctional information processing across wide swaths of the brain in patients with schizophrenia. The findings are published in the current online edition of the journal Neuroimage. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by disturbed thought processes and difficulty in discerning real from unreal perceptions. Common symptoms include auditory ...

DETROIT – Postmenopausal women suffered significant bone density loss in their hip after they were treated with an epidural steroid injection for back pain relief, according to a Henry Ford Hospital study Bone density loss after six months was six times greater when compared to the typical bone density loss seen in a year in a postmenopausal woman who doesn't receive steroid injection, researchers say. Shlomo Mandel, M.D., a Henry Ford orthopedic physician and the study's lead author, says physicians should exercise caution prescribing an epidural steroid for select ...

The central skill of cancer is its ability to mutate – that's how it became cancerous in the first place. Once it's started down that path, it's not so difficult for a cancer cell to mutate again and again. This means that different tumors within a single patient or even different areas within the same cancerous deposit may develop different genetic characteristics. This heterogeneity helps cancer escape control by new, targeted cancer therapy drugs. Two of these targeted drugs are crizotinib and erlotinib – they do wonders for the patients whose cancers depend on the ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that extending nightly sleep in mildly sleepy, healthy adults increases daytime alertness and reduces pain sensitivity. "Our results suggest the importance of adequate sleep in various chronic pain conditions or in preparation for elective surgical procedures," said Timothy Roehrs, PhD, the study's principal investigator and lead author. "We were surprised by the magnitude of the reduction in pain sensitivity, when compared to the reduction produced by taking codeine." The study, appearing in the December issue of the journal SLEEP, ...

NORTH WOODSTOCK, N.H., December 1, 2012—Around the world, the effects of global climate change are increasingly evident and difficult to ignore. However, evaluations of the local effects of climate change are often confounded by natural and human induced factors that overshadow the effects of changes in climate on ecosystems. In the December issue of the journal BioScience, a group of scientists writing on long-term studies of watershed and natural elevation gradients at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire and in the surrounding region report a number ...

This press release is available in German. With the X-ray vision of DESY's light source DORIS, a research team from Hamburg and Iceland has uncovered the molecular structure of a master regulator central to the most deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma. The results, published in the scientific journal "Genes & Development", throw new light on the workings of the so-called Microphthalmia-associated Transcription Factor MITF, that is not only connected to skin cancer, but also to a variety of hereditary diseases where the production of the skin pigment melanin is disturbed, ...

How to discuss estate planning with aging loved ones Dealing with the discussion of inheritance while a loved one is in their old age can sometimes be a challenging and uncomfortable experience. However, there are many reasons why discussing a person's will can be beneficial for all family members in the long run, and conversations about estate plans should not be avoided simply because they might feel awkward. Elderly family members will have differing responses to the subject of their own estate planning, but there are a number of approaches that you can take to ...