California Attorney General pleads for reconsideration of human trafficking law California wants to reinstate a human trafficking law, which a federal judge has enjoined for imposing unconstitutional restrictions on convicted sex offenders. Opponents of the law note that the initiative creates a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of convicted sex offenders. Provisions of voter-approved Proposition 35 increase prison terms for human traffickers and require convicted sex traffickers to register as sex offenders. The law, also known as the Californians Against ...

West Virginia changing drugged driving laws? Many people involved in motor vehicle accidents never see it coming until it is too late. They are unable to make the moves necessary to avoid the crash, and are left to deal with the aftermath of the collision. When the factors leading to the accident are examined, occasionally it is learned that one of the drivers involved is under the influence of alcohol or drugs. In West Virginia, there are various initiatives in place to further crackdown on those drivers who are drugged driving. While the state has established a ...

Ohio legislature passes law increasing protections to Ohio franchisees The state of Ohio recently amended the Ohio Business Opportunity Law and the changes to the law affect those in the franchise industry. The new version aims to increase the protections for Ohio franchisees from abusive franchising practices, including those relating to franchise disclosures by franchisors. The Ohio Business Opportunity Law The Ohio Business Opportunity Law was passed in an effort to "protect prospective purchasers of business opportunity plans by requiring that sellers ...

Marijuana remains concern for Ohio law enforcement Many people associate drug crimes with the common street drugs, such as cocaine, heroin or meth. Those who manufacture or sell these drugs are thought to be connected to various other criminal activities, including money laundering or gang-related turf wars. Officials publicize their efforts to control the flow of the illegal drugs, in the hopes that the public will feel that their streets are being made safer. While these drugs may receive most of the attention, marijuana offenses remain a priority for law enforcement ...

Divorce rates growing among older Americans A few decades ago, divorce used to be an issue that affected primarily young and middle-aged couples. In 1990, approximately 90 percent of all divorcees were under age 50. Recently, though, divorce rates among the baby boomer generation have skyrocketed -- to the point that 25 percent of divorcees were age 50 or older in 2009. That year alone, more than 600,000 Americans age 50 and older got a divorce. This change has led researchers and academics to question why there has been such a surge in "grey divorce" over ...

Working with a soon to be ex-spouse to create a custody agreement can be a difficult process. Making a physical custody plan, however, is necessary and it is important to do what is best for the children and to make sure they have fulfilling relationships with both sides of their family. Florida law governs child custody, and the purpose of the law is to make sure that the best interests of the children are honored. If parents are unable to come up with a physical child custody arrangement, then a family court judge will step in and make the decision for them. Shared ...

Los Angeles, CA (March 01, 2013). In a 2012 report, the Obama administration announced that it was "jumpstarting" the nuclear industry. Because of the industry's long history of permitting problems, cost overruns, and construction delays, financial markets have been wary of backing new nuclear construction for decades. The supposed "nuclear renaissance" ballyhooed in the first decade of this century never materialized. And then came Fukushima, a disaster that pushed countries around the world to ask: Should nuclear power be part of the energy future? In the third and final ...

Quality is a central component of any discussion around health care and one of the key dimensions and measurements of quality care is the patient experience. However, many healthcare organizations struggle to become 'patient focused' and fail to score well on patient satisfaction surveys. New research from Brigham and Women's Hospital, published in the March edition of British Medical Journal Quality and Safety, offers a potential explanation -- insufficient support from hospital management to improve the patient experience by engaging physicians and nurses in the process. "Twelve ...

A continental-scale chemical survey in the waters of the eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico is helping researchers determine how distinct bodies of water will resist changes in acidity. The study, which measures varying levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other forms of carbon in the ocean, was conducted by scientists from 11 institutions across the U.S. and was published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography. "Before now, we haven't had a very clear picture of acidification status on the east coast of the U.S.," says Zhaohui 'Aleck' Wang, the study's lead author and ...

Alexandria, VA – The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) and American Geophysical Union (AGU) have released a recording of the latest AGU/AGI Heads and Chairs webinar. This month's session focuses on legal issues related to field trips and field courses. The webinar, led by panelists David Mogk from Montana State University and Steven Whitmeyer from James Madison University, serves as a guide for reducing risk and liability for geoscience departments, and reviews tips for properly planning a safe and enjoyable field trip. Although field work is acknowledged as an integral ...

Research now reveals that fish can migrate to avoid the threat of being eaten. A new study from Lund University in Sweden shows that roach fish leave lakes and move into surrounding streams or wetlands, where they are safer from predators. Every year, millions of animals migrate worldwide. In most cases, this is due to a shortage of food or other environmental factors. However, few research studies have focused on migration as a strategy to avoid predators. It is not easy to measure and quantify the risk of an animal being eaten. "Our findings are therefore quite unique", ...

Scientists at the Universities of Liverpool have found evidence of an ancient micro-continent buried beneath the Indian Ocean. The ancient continent extends more than 1500 km in length from the Seychelles to the island of Mauritius and contains rocks as old as 2,000 million years, much older than the Indian Ocean which has formed only in the last 165 million years. The research team believe that this micro-continent, which they have named Mauritia, was split off from Madagascar and India between 61 and 83 million years ago as one single land mass rifted apart to ...

Researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich identify a novel signal transduction pathway, which activates the parkin gene and prevents stress-induced neuronal cell death. Parkinson's disease is the most common movement disorder and the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's disease. It is characterized by the loss of dopamin-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, a region in the midbrain, which is implicated in motor control. The typical clinical signs include resting tremor, muscle rigidity, slowness of movements, and ...

March 1, 2013 - Even in the face of a disaster, we remain optimistic about our chances of injury compared to others, according to a new study. Residents of a town struck by a tornado thought their risk of injury from a future tornado was lower than that of peers, both a month and a year after the destructive twister. Such optimism could undermine efforts toward emergency preparedness. After an F-2 tornado struck his town in Iowa, Jerry Suls, a psychologist at the University of Iowa who studies social comparison, turned his attention to risk perception. "I had dinner as ...

This press release is available in German. The computer is increasingly used to help in complex situations. The latest innovations in this area will be presented by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology at the CeBIT in early March (hall 9, stand G33). User-friendly systems display all facts to surgeons during operation and simultaneously translate university lectures for foreign students. In addition, smart living environments that support comfort, safety, and care services and software for the relocation of ...

The term "big data" is defined as a huge amount of digital information, so big and so complex that normal database technology cannot process it. It is not only scientific institutes like the nuclear research center CERN that often store huge amounts of data ("Big Data"). Companies like Google and Facebook do this as well, and analyze it to make better strategic decisions for their business. How successful such an attempt can be was shown in a New York Times article published last year. It reported on the US-based company "Target" which, by analyzing the buying patterns ...

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are hiding in plain sight -- dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide. The study results essentially exonerate Asia, including India and China, two countries that are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning, said lead study author Ryan Neely, who led the research as part of his CU-Boulder doctoral thesis. Small ...

Changes made by humans to the natural landscapes can often compromise ecosystems, which paradoxically are vital for human survival. Pollination of crops by wild insects is one such vulnerable ecosystem service, as wild insects are declining in many agricultural landscapes. The study, recently published in Science, focused on understanding whether the ongoing loss of wild insects impacts crop harvest. For this purpose, the researchers compared fields with abundant and diverse wild insects to those with degraded assemblages of wild insects across 600 fields at 41 crop systems ...

A new University of Iowa study confirms what many women have long suspected – that pregnancy permanently changes the size and shape of a woman's feet. Flat feet are a common problem for pregnant women. The arch of the foot flattens out, possibly due to the extra weight and increased looseness (laxity) of the joints associated with pregnancy. The new study, published in the March issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, suggests that this loss of arch height is permanent. "I had heard women reporting changes in their shoe size with pregnancy, ...

The interplay between an infection during pregnancy and stress in puberty plays a key role in the development of schizophrenia, as behaviourists from ETH Zurich demonstrate in a mouse model. However, there is no need to panic. Around one per cent of the population suffers from schizophrenia, a serious mental disorder that usually does not develop until adulthood and is incurable. Psychiatrists and neuroscientsist have long suspected that adverse enviromental factors may play an important role in the development of schizophrenia. Prenatal infections such as toxoplasmosis ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 1, 2013—Most adults and children with type 1 diabetes are not in optimal glycemic control, despite advances in insulin formulations and delivery systems and glucose monitoring approaches. Critical barriers to optimal glycemic control remain. A panel of experts in diabetes management and research met to explore these challenges, and their conclusions and recommendations for how to improve care and optimize clinical decision-making are presented in a white paper in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT), a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, ...

(Boston) – A study led by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has identified epigenetic mechanisms that connect a variety of diseases associated with inflammation. Utilizing molecular analyses of gene expression in macrophages, which are cells largely responsible for inflammation, researchers have shown that inhibiting a defined group of proteins could help decrease the inflammatory response associated with diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer and sepsis. The study, which is published online in the Journal of Immunology, was led by ...

SEATTLE – A study of older patients with advanced head and neck cancers has found that where they were treated significantly influenced their survival. The study, led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and published in the March 1 online edition of Cancer, found that patients who were treated at hospitals that saw a high number of head and neck cancers were 15 percent less likely to die of their disease as compared to patients who were treated at hospitals that saw a relatively low number of such cancers. The study also found that such patients ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A study published in the journal Science reveals a decline in bee species since the late 1800s in West Central Illinois. The study could not have been conducted without the work of a 19th-century naturalist, says a co-author of the new research. Charles Robertson, a self-taught entomologist who studied zoology and botany at Harvard University and the University of Illinois, was one of the first scientists to make detailed records of the interactions of wild bees and the plants they pollinate, says John Marlin, a co-author of the new analysis in Science. ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – In an article published as the cover story of the March 2013 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, Lindsey James, PhD, research assistant professor in the lab of Stephen Frye, Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor in the UNC School of Pharmacy and member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, announced the discovery of a chemical probe that can be used to investigate the L3MBTL3 methyl-lysine reader domain. The probe, named UNC1215, will provide researchers with a powerful tool to investigate the function of malignant brain tumor (MBT) domain ...