A blog may prove to be your best marketing tool; a well-written and actively promoted blog can attract more clients than many other forms of marketing combined while simultaneously establishing your brand and increasing your reputation as an expert in your field. It does, however, take time and patience to make your blog into a successful marketing tool. If you are fortunate enough to have an established blog in place already, with a large following, then - congratulations - you are already more than halfway there. If you don't have a blog as yet, or have only recently ...

NASA astronaut Don Pettit was awarded NASA Engineer of the Year by the National Society of Professional Engineers/Professional Engineers in Government (NSPE/PEG) Feb. 21, at the Federal Engineer of the Year Awards ceremony held at the National Press Club in Washington. As a flight engineer during Expedition 30/31 aboard the International Space Station, Pettit shared his love of science with students through weekly videos. Pettit, who has a doctorate in physics from the University of Arizona, created 14 videos, comprised of experiments and demonstrations in a microgravity ...

CPN, a nationwide credit card processing company, today announced that it has unveiled a new web presence at CPNUSA.com. The website provides information on CPN's suite of services and offers users a more transparent merchant services experience. "The new CPN online presence gives a better experience to existing and prospective customers," said Patrick Hare, Digital Marketing Manager for CPN. "We are looking to pull back the curtain on merchant services, and provide everyone with a better credit card processing experience." One of the value propositions ...

Dons of Desperado is a story and artwork-driven mobile Card Battle RPG that allows users to collect cards and use them to compete with other players in countless missions, battles, and special events. In the game's story, the gamer plays a character who has recently suffered from amnesia, fighting to discover his origins and the world around him. What the world of Desperado has to offer: - Strong, story-driven gameplay in its missions and events - An intuitive user interface, carefully designed for better user experience - Hundreds of collectible cards with incredible ...

For patients with bone and soft tissue tumours, the study data currently available allow no robust conclusions as to the advantages and disadvantages of using positron emission tomography (PET), alone or in combination with computed tomography (CT). This is because no studies have directly compared the benefit of these imaging techniques with conventional diagnostics. And the few available studies on diagnostic accuracy do not show any relevant differences. This is the conclusion of the final report of the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) ...

Athens, Ga. – University of Georgia researchers discovered important genetic clues about the history of microorganisms called archaea and the origins of life itself in the first ever study of its kind. Results of their study shed light on one of Earth's oldest life forms. "Archaea are an ancient form of microorganisms, so everything we can learn about them could help us to answer questions about the origin of life," said William Whitman, a microbiology professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and co-author on the paper. Felipe Sarmiento, lead author ...

Just as a global posi­tion­ing sys­tem (GPS) helps find your loca­tion, the brain has an inter­nal sys­tem for help­ing deter­mine the body's loca­tion as it moves through its surroundings. A new study from researchers at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity pro­vides evi­dence for how the brain per­forms this feat. The study, pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature, indi­cates that cer­tain position-tracking neu­rons — called grid cells — ramp their activ­ity up and down by work­ing together in a col­lec­tive way to deter­mine loca­tion, rather than each cell act­ing on its own as was ...

The ancient Egyptians did not live in such good conditions and were not surrounded by such opulence as was thought up to now, but, rather, suffered from hunger and malnutrition, a whole range of infectious diseases and an extremely high infant mortality rate. Furthermore, the governors of Aswan, on the border with Sudan, as well as their families, interbred with the black peoples of the neighbouring country. These are some of the conclusions drawn from the Qubbet el-Hawa research project, carried out by the University of Jaen, in which anthropologists from the University ...

A University of Central Florida chemist has come up with a unique way to kill certain cancer cells – give them acid reflux. Chemistry professor Kevin Belfield used a special salt to make cancer cells more acidic – similar to the way greasy foods cause acid reflux in some people. He used a light-activated, acid-generating molecule to make the cells more acidic when exposed to specific wavelengths of light, which in turn kills the bad cells. The surrounding healthy cells stay intact. The technique is a simple way around a problem that has frustrated researchers for years. ...

Philadelphia, PA—For many of us, maple syrup is an essential part of breakfast—a staple accompaniment to pancakes and waffles—but rarely do we think about the complicated and little-understood physiological aspects of syrup production. Each spring, maple growers in temperate regions around the world collect sap from sugar maple trees, which is one of the first steps in producing this delicious condiment. However, the mechanisms behind sap exudation—processes that trigger pressure differences causing sap to flow— in maple trees are a topic of much debate. In a paper ...

VIDEO: Karen Tashima, MD, director of the HIV Clinical Trials Program at The Miriam Hospital, led a study to look at new treatment regimens for patients with drug-resistant HIV. ... Click here for more information. PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A new multi-site study reveals patients with drug-resistant HIV can safely achieve viral suppression – the primary goal of HIV therapy – without incorporating the traditional class of HIV medications into their treatment regimen. Karen Tashima, M.D., ...

(Edmonton) An overwhelming majority of Albertans believe dying adults should have the right to request to end their life, according to new research from the University of Alberta. U of A researcher Donna Wilson led the team that studied the views of 1,203 Albertans on assisted suicide, currently illegal in Canada. A majority—77.4 per cent—felt dying adults should have the right to end their life early. "Increasingly, there are countries or states where they are allowing assisted suicide or euthanasia. Like many of those countries, Canada will have to grapple with this ...

HOUSTON – (March 6, 2013) – Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) have discovered phthalates, industrial chemicals, in common foods purchased in the United States. Phthalates can be found in a variety of products and food packaging material, child-care articles and medical devices. "Although it's not completely understood how phthalates get into our food, packaging may be a contributor to the levels of the toxin in food," said lead investigator Arnold Schecter, M.D., M.P.H., professor of environmental health at The University ...

The species from the genus Copa are very common spiders found in the leaf litter of various habitats. Being predominantly ground-living, they occur widely in savanna woodlands but also occasionally in forests, where they are well camouflaged. They usually share the litter microhabitats with several other species of the family Corinnidae. The spiders from this cryptic, ground-dwelling genus in the continental Afrotropical Region are revised in a study published in the open access journal Zookeys. The number of continental species in the Afrotropical Region has been reduced ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers at MIT and the Santa Fe Institute have found that some widely used formulas for predicting how rapidly technology will advance — notably, Moore's Law and Wright's Law — offer superior approximations of the pace of technological progress. The new research is the first to directly compare the different approaches in a quantitative way, using an extensive database of past performance from many different industries. Some of the results were surprising, says Jessika Trancik, an assistant professor of engineering systems at MIT. The findings could ...

AMES, Iowa – Bong Wie has heard the snickers. You want to protect the Earth from asteroids? Where were you when the dinosaurs needed you? You want to be like Bruce Willis in that asteroid movie? Wie has a serious reply: After five years of science and engineering work, Wie and his small team have a publication list of 40-plus technical papers, $600,000 of NASA research support and a proposal for a $500 million test launch of an asteroid intercept system. Plus, Wie has just been invited to show off his research as part of NASA's Technology Day on the Hill in Washington, ...

This press release is available in French. Dr. Roberto Morandotti and his team at the INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre have developed a device that is critical to the use of terahertz (THz) sources for a variety of applications. Their electromagnetic non-reciprocal isolator is the subject of a recent article in Nature Communications, showing just how important this new development is. Until now, no isolator existed that was effective in the THz region of the spectrum, a situation that held back the development of certain technologies. The new ...

The transistors and wires that power our electronic devices need to be mounted on a base material known as a "motherboard." Our human brain is not so different — neurons, the cells that transmit electrical and chemical signals, are connected to one another through synapses, similar to transistors and wires, and they need a base material too. But the cells serving that function in the brain may have other functions as well. PhD student Maurizio De Pittà of Tel Aviv University's Schools of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering says that astrocytes, the star-shaped ...

This press release is available in German. The unusual behavior of complex fluids is part of our daily life: cake dough climbs up the stirring bar, ketchup becomes liquid when you shake it. Also technology uses such phenomena: if we add a small amount of long-chained polymer molecules, a pipeline can transport more oil. The polymers reduce the flow resistance. But up to now the origin of these effects was unclear. The engineers had to rely on estimates and lengthy trials. A team of physicists led by Professor Andreas Bausch, Chair of Cellular Biophysics at TUM now ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A pair of studies tells the tale of how a neuroscientist at Mayo Clinic in Florida helped to discover the first African-American family to have inherited the rare movement disorder dystonia, which causes repetitive muscle contractions and twisting, resulting in abnormal posture. The research may improve diagnosis of this neurological condition in a population not known to suffer from it. In the first study, published in 2011 in the journal Parkinsonism and Related Disorders, Mayo Clinic's Zbigniew Wszolek, M.D., and a team of neuroscientists from ...

A new report from Michigan State University and the Michigan Department of Community Health raises significant concerns about the federal government's system for tracking work-related injuries. Published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the study found the number of amputations following jobsite accidents in Michigan was nearly two-and-a-half times higher than the official estimate from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Such inaccuracy is evidence that the bureau should change its system that relies solely on a sample of employers to report ...

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered that a particular protein prevents normal cells from being reprogrammed into cells that resemble stem cells, providing new insight into how they may lose their plasticity during normal development. This finding has broad-reaching implications for how cells change during both normal and disease development. The data are published this week in Nature Communications. In a previous study, Emily Bernstein, PhD, and her team at Mount Sinai studied the natural progression of melanoma using mouse and ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- The normal development of an animal or plant can be compared in at least two ways with the successful performance of a great symphony. The whole is the product of a great number of events involving contributions by many different "players"; and these contributions must occur in a precise and almost perfectly coordinated temporal and spatial sequence. In simple animals like the fruit fly and more recently in plants and mammals, scientists have been able to identify some of the principal players in the developmental symphony. Today, a team ...

HOUSTON—(March 6, 2013)—Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) have found that up to 30 percent of minority youths reported sending or receiving "sexts," which are sexually explicit messages sent through technology including photos, videos and text-only messages. "Although sexting is relatively common among youth and there has been a lot of attention about sexting in the media, there hasn't been much about sexting among ethnic minority youth," said lead investigator Melissa Fleschler Peskin, Ph.D., assistant professor of behavioral ...

This press release is available in German. "We estimate that three percent of all premature deaths can be attributed to the high consumption of processed meat," summarizes Sabine Rohrmann from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Zurich. Teaming up with research colleagues from ten countries, she has been studying the link between the consumption of processed meat and the risk of mortality as part of a Europe-wide study with around 450,000 participants. People who eat a lot of processed meat such as sausage products, salami or ham ...