This decision was necessary due to the increasing demand for collateralized loans and is aimed at helping more people to get cash fast for the holidays. "We're very excited to watch how online pawning is becoming a modern and trusted trend, leaving behind many other ways to get cash fast. We are very proud to be able to offer our best loan-to-value for our customers. And, during this busy holiday season, we are now able to serve even more customers, because we know how important it is for people to have that extra cash during this time of the year," said Jay ...

Adults who had parents who struggled with addiction, unemployment and divorce are 10 times more likely to have been victims of childhood physical abuse, according to a new study prepared by the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. The study, which was published online this week in the journal Child: Care, Health & Development, found that more than one-third of adults who grew up in homes where all three risk factors were present reported they had been physically abused by someone close to them while under the age of 18 and still living at home. ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – GEOLOGY ends 2012 with 23 new articles spanning a variety of geoscience phenomena and locations, including Mercury; Naica Cave, Mexico; Diamantina, Brazil; the Galápagos hotspot; China; the Aleutian island arc; Disko Bay and Uummannaq Fjord, central West Greenland; the California arc; the Pacific Ring of Fire; Po Plain, Italy; Torfajökull, Iceland; the U.S. Sierra Nevada; Spain; New Zealand; Turkey; Connecticut, USA; and Texas, USA. Papers cover 1. High-resolution images obtained by the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging ...

NEW YORK (Dec. 20, 2012) -- Diagnosed with severe coronary artery disease, a group of patients too ill for or not responding to other treatment options decided to take part in a clinical trial testing angiogenic gene therapy to help rebuild their damaged blood vessels. More than 10 years later, in a follow-up review of these patients, doctors at Baylor College of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College (where the clinical trial and review took place) and Stony Brook University Medical Center report the outcomes are promising and open the door for larger trials to begin. The ...

Scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) have found evidence that liver mitochondria in mice adapt to become better metabolizers of alcohol and increase in number after chronic exposure, which may raise the potential for free radical damage associated with aging and cancer over time. The liver is a vital organ, playing a major role in metabolism and detoxification in the body. Overconsumption of alcohol has long been tied to liver diseases such as fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis and cirrhosis, but how the substance damages ...

The genes of long-living and virus resistant bats may provide clues to the future treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and cancer in people, researchers have found. Published in the journal Science, the research provides an insight into the evolution of bat's flight, resistance to viruses and relatively long life. Researchers at CSIRO and the Beijing Genome Institute led a team sequencing the genomes of two bat species - an Australian mega bat, the black flying fox, and a Chinese micro bat, David's Myotis. They then compared the bat genomes to the genomes of ...

December 21, 2012, Shenzhen, China – A study published online in Cell reports the latest investigation of de novo germline mutation by whole genome sequencing in autism patients. This study provides a global view of the landscape of mutability and its influence on genetic diversity and susceptibility in autism, and its implications on other human diseases. The work was a collaborative effort led by international teams comprised of the University of California, San Diego, BGI, and other institutes. The results are expected to shed new light on a deeper understanding of the ...

Starting January 1, 2013 the Archives journals will have new titles and a new distribution schedule. Please provide proper attribution to the new journal names. On first reference, one time only, we would prefer that you provide this attribution: "a study published online today in JAMA Neurology (formerly Archives of Neurology) ..." The names are JAMA (specialty), not the Journal of the American Medical Association (specialty). Here are the new titles and new embargo schedule: Mondays 3pm central time/4pm eastern time JAMA Pediatrics JAMA Neurology JAMA Internal ...

Despite more than 25 years of research on antiobesity drugs, few medications have shown long-term success. Now researchers reporting online on December 21 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism say that targeting taste sensors in the gut may be a promising new strategy. The gut "tastes" what we eat—bitter, sweet, fat, and savory—in much the same way as the tongue and through the use of similar signaling mechanisms. The result is the release of hormones to control satiety and blood sugar levels when food reaches the gut. The sensors, or receptors, ...

The X-factor in liver metabolism After you eat, your liver switches from producing glucose to storing it. At the same time, a cellular signaling pathway known as the unfolded protein response (UPR) is transiently activated, but it is not clear how this pathway contributes to the liver's metabolic switch. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Phillip Scherer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center report that activation of the UPR triggers the expression of Xbp1s, a protein that regulates genes needed for the metabolic ...

After you eat, your liver switches from producing glucose to storing it. At the same time, a cellular signaling pathway known as the unfolded protein response (UPR) is transiently activated, but it is not clear how this pathway contributes to the liver's metabolic switch. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Phillip Scherer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center report that activation of the UPR triggers the expression of Xbp1s, a protein that regulates genes needed for the metabolic switch. Scherer and colleagues found ...

H. pylori frequently causes gastric ulcers and is also one of the greatest risk factors for gastric cancer. H. pylori infection is also associated with another gastric cancer risk factor, iron deficiency. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Richard Peek at Vanderbilt University investigated the influence of iron on H. pylori-induced gastric cancer. Peek and colleagues found that low iron accelerated the development of H. pylori-associated cancerous lesions in gerbils. Further, H. pylori strains isolated from a human population at high ...

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, in collaboration with colleagues in Germany and the Netherlands, have identified a previously unknown group of nerve cells in the brain. The nerve cells regulate cardiovascular functions such as heart rhythm and blood pressure. It is hoped that the discovery, which is published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, will be significant in the long term in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases in humans. The scientists have managed to identify in mice a previously totally unknown group of nerve cells in the brain. These ...

PHILADELPHIA—Elevated levels of Cyclin D1b could function as a novel biomarker of lethal metastatic disease in prostate cancer patients, according to a pre-clinical study published ahead of print on December 21 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson. The group, headed by Karen E. Knudsen, Ph.D., Professor and Hilary Koprowski Chair, Departments of Cancer Biology, Urology, and Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University and Deputy Director for Basic Science at the KCC, found that Cyclin D1b, a variant of the ...

Someday, Oahu's Koolau and Waianae mountains will be reduced to nothing more than a flat, low-lying island like Midway. But erosion isn't the biggest culprit. Instead, scientists say, the mountains of Oahu are actually dissolving from within. "We tried to figure out how fast the island is going away and what the influence of climate is on that rate," said Brigham Young University geologist Steve Nelson. "More material is dissolving from those islands than what is being carried off through erosion." The research pitted groundwater against stream water to see which ...

Over the past couple of years research into miRNAs has become increasingly diversified and attracted a great number of research articles across genetics and medicine. This should hardly come as a surprise to any scientist in the field, especially since it has become clear that miRNAs, a recently discovered class of non-coding RNAS, are represented in nearly all cellular functions and molecular pathways. A growing list of reports demonstrates that microRNAs play a critical role in cancer initiation and progression, and that miRNA alterations are ubiquitous in human cancers. ...

Theoretical physicist Elad Eizner from Ben Gurion University, Israel, and colleagues created models to study the attractive forces affecting atoms located at a wide range of distances from a surface, in the hundreds of nanometers range. Their results, about to be published in EPJ D, show that these forces depend on electron diffusion, regardless of whether the surface is conducting or not. Ultimately, these findings could contribute to designing minimally invasive surface probes. Bombarding a surface with atoms helps us understand the distribution of its electrons and ...

The putative remains of Carin Göring, wife of Nazi leader Herman Göring, were found in 1991 at a site close to where she had been buried. In a recently published article, Maria Allen, professor of forensic genetics at Uppsala University, Sweden, and her associates present evidence supporting that it is Carin Göring's remains that have been identified. The Swedish Carin Göring was married to the well-known Nazi leader Herman Göring. When she died in 1931 she was buried in Stockholm, but three years later Herman Göring had her remains moved to his residence Karinhall outside ...

This press release is available in German. Using the world's most powerful X-ray free-electron laser, an international team of researchers, including scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, has obtained new insight into the structure of a medicinally important protein that may serve as a blueprint for the development of drugs to fight sleeping sickness. Science magazine have chosen the experimental study as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year. Sleeping sickness is caused by the unicellular organism Trypanosoma ...

In a recent publication, researchers achieved new accuracy in the ability to measure energy differences between states of molecules, thus predicting which states will be observed. It has been known since the seventies that excessive salt causes DNA to reverse its twist, from a right-handed spiral to a left-handed one. DNA in the Z form is treated by our natural repair enzymes as damaged, and is therefore usually deleted from the cell. Deletion of genetic material can lead to cancer or to other problems, so the B-Z transition is no mere curiosity. However such is the ...

The climate after the largest mass extinction so far 252 million years ago was cool, later very warm and then cool again. Thanks to the cooler temperatures, the diversity of marine fauna ballooned, as paleontologists from the University of Zurich have reconstructed. The warmer climate, coupled with a high CO2 level in the atmosphere, initially gave rise to new, short-lived species. In the longer term, however, this climate change had an adverse effect on biodiversi-ty and caused species to become extinct. Until now, it was always assumed that it took flora and fauna ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Six weeks of weight training can significantly improve blood markers of cardiovascular health in young African-American men, researchers report in the Journal of Human Hypertension. The researchers measured blood markers associated with inflammation, immune response or the remodeling of arteries that normally occur after tissue damage, infection or other types of stress. They found that levels of two of these markers dropped significantly in African-American men but not in Caucasian men after six weeks of resistance training. "This suggests that resistance ...

AUSTIN, Texas—Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have designed a simulation that for the first time emulates key properties of electronic topological insulators. Their simulation, which was described this week in Nature Materials, is part of a rapidly moving scientific race to understand and exploit the potential of topological insulators, which are a state of matter that was only discovered in the past decade. These insulators may enable dramatic advances in quantum computing and spintronics. "The discovery of these materials, which are insulators in ...

New Rochelle, NY, December 20, 2012—Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are a potent new drug class that can silence a disease-causing gene, but delivering them to a target cell can be challenging. An innovative delivery approach that dramatically increases the efficacy of an siRNA drug targeted to the liver and has made it possible to test the drug in non-human primates is described in an article in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publishers (http://www.liebertpub.com). The article is available on the Nucleic Acid Therapeutics ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University today announced the discovery of an underlying genetic cause of atopic dermatitis, a type of eczema most common in infancy that also affects millions of adults around the world with dry, itchy and inflamed skin lesions. The findings were just published in PLoS ONE, a professional journal, and may set the stage for new therapeutic approaches to this frustrating syndrome, which is difficult to treat and has no known cure. Eczema is also related to, and can sometimes cause asthma, a potentially deadly immune dysfunction. Pharmaceutical ...