For those who want to go off the beaten track when celebrating Christmas this year, London's smaller museums and historic houses could offer the perfect answer. One of London's most memorable Christmas experience comes at Dennis Severs' House, where you can wander round a Georgian house in Spitalfields that has been evocatively decorated with the sights and smells of an 18th-century Christmas. Another of London's quirkier Christmas specials is the Christmas Past exhibition at the Geffrye Museum. This museum, located in an east London almshouse, traces changes in interior ...

PaydayLoansOnline, the leading online aggregator for payday advance cash loans, announces the release of its new secure filter and updated application form. The site has been recently verified as officially secure according to the world's premier Internet security specialist, McAfee. To coincide with this stamp of approval, the site has also improved its base of search possibilities. This upgrade has been implemented with the help of customer feedback. The site reached out to its regular users and asked them to provide input as to how the platform could be enhanced. ...

HIS TIME CAME, 30 YEARS TOO EARLY! Dustin and his wife are planning to honeymoon in the furthest reaches of space; at the island paradise, Bellicose. Kate, the emotionally distant space-pirate is eying his ship for some plundering. In a bizarre turn of events, Dustin awakens prematurely while in suspended animation to find his ship headed for disaster. Will Kate abandon ship and dive to safety? Or will she answer to a nobler cause? Part sci-fi, part comedy, Jalopy is the brainchild of student filmmaker Daniel Kautz. He is an advocate of shooting in 35 mm and using an ...

If you live in Brazil, your gift options are usually limited to traditional products. Shoes, accessories and clothing are among the most favored gifts. ValeGift, a startup based in Belo Horizonte, introduces a new option: gift certificates of experiences. For example, you can buy a scuba diving course for USD 250. Or a sophisticated dinner for two people. Or even a set of dance lessons (imagine your friend's reaction when she finds out that you think she lacks dancing skills). "Our customers appreciate the ability to purchase and gift an experience unique to ...

Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay area have long had a reputation for being both the center of high tech innovation and a hub of viticultural refinement. Now, these two seemingly disparate worlds are beginning to intertwine. The innovative spirit of Silicon Valley is turning its attention on the age-old traditions surrounding wine, creating big changes in the ways wine is made, marketed, and sold. Wine Service Innovation Wine preservation and sales are undergoing a transformation thanks in part to technology emanating from the heart of Silicon Valley. ...

Just as this top VA-approved lender announces its year-over-year surge, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs issued a press release stating it has just backed its 20 millionth veterans' loan. iFreedom Direct primarily serves Veterans and is a top-ranked contributor to this military mortgage milestone. Jacob Case, business intelligence analyst for iFreedom Direct, says, "I understand the lending market is tough out there. But, I've watched our volume soar, and see no effect on VA loans on our end. It's good to see more and more veterans using the home loan benefits ...

P&O Cruises has added nine short cruises ranging from two to five nights in 2013, visiting the Channel Islands, Belgium and the Netherlands (find out more here). Classical singing sensations Jonathan Antoine & Charlotte Jaconelli, who shot to fame in this year's Britain's Got Talent, will appear on Azura's four-night cruise on April 18. Their first album is now certified gold and was the highest ever entry by a classical album into the main album chart. This cruise provides an opportunity to see them before the start of their UK tour next summer. Available ...

InfoTech, a leading software house and system solutions company has delivered MarketTrax, a customized direct response campaign management system, to JWTAction. This comes after JWTAction contracted with InfoTech for a survey and analysis of its unique needs. "We started by thoroughly reviewing InfoTech's Media Management System, and we found it to be the best direct response solution on the market," said Carol Howell, JWTAction's EVP, Business Director. "We decided that with some customizations, MMS would be perfectly suited to our unique way of doing business." Matti ...

PersonalLoansForBadCredit.net, the North American online Personal loans comparison specialist, has announced that consumers can now experience a higher rate of approval when applying through its service for unsecured loans. The site has improved on its already high ratio of inquiries to loan offers from lenders by increasing the ambit of its membership to more dedicated bad credit lenders. The service has made a name for itself as a respected, independent aggregator site that offers impartial, objective and comprehensive information on improving consumer finances. Additionally, ...

In the first national survey of enrollment policies at hospices, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Yale University have found that the vast majority of hospices in the United States have at least one enrollment policy that could restrict access for terminally ill Medicare patients with high-cost medical needs. The study, which is published in the December issue of Health Affairs (http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/31/12/2690.abstract), calls for reform of Medicare reimbursement rates and hospice eligibility requirements. Led by Melissa Aldridge ...

A surprising discovery about the physical properties of cancer cells could help improve a new diagnostic approach – a liquid biopsy – that detects, measures, and evaluates cancer cells in blood. Cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream can form metastases – new tumors. Detecting these rare circulating cancer cells in a blood sample is much less invasive than a standard tumor biopsy, and could prove useful for monitoring cancer progression and detecting recurrence. While studying what happens to cancer cells when they are subjected to powerful fluid forces, like ...

Phoenix, AZ Dec. 2, 2012) -- A team of brain cancer researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center has effectively treated brain tumor cells using a unique combination of diet and radiation therapy. The study, "The Ketogenic Diet Is an Effective Adjuvant to Radiation Therapy for the Treatment of Malignant Glioma," was published in PLOS ONE. Led by Adrienne C. Scheck, PhD, Principal Investigator in Neuro-Oncology and Neurosurgery Research at Barrow, the groundbreaking research studied the effects of the ketogenic diet in conjunction ...

Rain in Southern Arizona is scarce and precious to begin with, but the afternoon shower that soaked the soil 25 miles north of Tucson on Nov. 29 was unusual in several ways. Spouting from a network of pipes, thousands of gallons of water drizzled down onto the world's only and largest manmade experimental watershed, recently completed at the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2. Six-hundred tons of ground-up volcanic rocks blanket a giant steel tub resting at an incline to form an artificial hillslope. Three identical such hillslopes, each measuring 100 feet long ...

In a well-known fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin used magic to weave straw into gold. Today, scientists are reversing that formula — using gold to turn straw (and other forms of biomass) into today's global currency: energy. The magic involves a special nanocatalyst, in which minute particles of gold dot the surface of titanium-oxide. The forces that emerge from the combination of these two materials are strong enough to breaks the O-O bond of oxygen molecules and the C-O bond of acetic acid, a byproduct of biomass conversion that, when combined with hydrogen, forms ethanol, ...

LA JOLLA, CA---- A new method for generating stem cells from mature cells promises to boost stem cell production in the laboratory, helping to remove a barrier to regenerative medicine therapies that would replace damaged or unhealthy body tissues. The technique, developed by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, allows for the unlimited production of stem cells and their derivatives as well as reduces production time by more than half, from nearly two months to two weeks. "One of the barriers that needs to be overcome before stem cell therapies ...

Sydney, Australia - Using a super-resolution fluorescent microscope, Australian medical scientists are a step closer to understanding why and how human immune cells decide to activate or not, thus enabling or preventing disease taking hold in the body. Professor Katharina Gaus and her team at the Centre for Vascular Research based at UNSW's Lowy Cancer Research Centre used some of the most advanced super-resolution optical microscope technology available anywhere in the world to see changes in individual proteins in T-cells – the workhorse of our immune system. "Every ...

BETHESDA, MD – DECEMBER 4, 2012 -- It's common knowledge that excessive UV exposure from sunlight raises your chances for skin cancer, but predicting whether someone will actually develop skin cancer remains difficult. In a new research report, scientists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison show that the risk for skin cancer involves numerous genetic factors including family history, ethnicity, and genetic variations specific to each individual. Using these factors, the researchers developed a more precise model for ...

Bethesda, MD—December 4, 2012 – Listed below are the selected highlights for the December 2012 issue of the Genetics Society of America's journal, Genetics. The December issue is available online at www.genetics.org/content/current. Please credit Genetics, Vol. 192, December 2012, Copyright © 2012. Please feel free to forward to colleagues who may be interested in these articles. ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Genetic variation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: Circuit diversification in a signal transduction network, pp. 1523-1532 Brian L. Chin, Owen Ryan, Fran Lewitter, Charles ...

When we eat too much, obesity may develop as a result of chronically high insulin levels, not the other way around. That's according to new evidence in mice reported in the December 4th Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication, which challenges the widespread view that rising insulin is a secondary consequence of obesity and insulin resistance. The new study helps to solve this chicken-or-the-egg dilemma by showing that animals with persistently lower insulin stay trim even as they indulge themselves on a high-fat, all-you-can-eat buffet. The findings come as some of ...

Emory researchers announced results of a new study that has proven successful in the prevention of depression in people diagnosed with epilepsy. Depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in people with epilepsy. It affects between 32 and 48 percent of people with the disease. Depression is known to have more of an impact on quality of life than frequent seizures. A team of researchers at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University led a study that applied a revised version of a web- and phone-based method focused on preventing, rather ...

Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn't live a charmed life; it survives on a diet of roundworm. But a discovery by a team led by Mingjun Zhang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, could give the fungus's life more purpose—as a cancer fighter. Zhang and his team have discovered that nanoparticles produced by A. oligospora hold promise for stimulating the immune system and killing tumors. The findings are published in this month's edition of Advanced Functional Materials. Zhang commonly looks to nature for solutions ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The more states spend on home-delivered meals under the Older Americans Act, the more likely they are to help people who don't need nursing home care to stay in their homes, according to a newly published Brown University statistical analysis of a decade of spending and nursing home resident data. "Despite efforts to rebalance long-term care, there are still many nursing home residents who have the functional capacity to live in a less restrictive environment," wrote gerontology researchers Kali Thomas and Vincent Mor in the article ...

The new generation of bio-based plastic packaging is not only eco-friendly but also has several superior qualities compared to traditional plastic packaging. The plastic packaging industry is moving towards completely bio-based products. The volume of oil used every year in the production of plastics equates to approximately five per cent of the world's total oil consumption. Approximately 40 per cent of all plastics are used in packaging, which puts special pressure on the packaging industry to reduce dependence on oil. The use of renewable natural resources in industrial ...

Scientists have taken inspiration from one of the oldest natural materials to exploit the extraordinary qualities of graphene, a material set to revolutionise fields from computers and batteries to composite materials. Published today in Nature Communications, a Monash University study led by Professor Dan Li has established, for the first time, an effective way of forming graphene, which normally exists in very thin layers, into useful three-dimensional forms by mirroring the structure of cork. Graphene is formed when graphite is broken down into layers one atom thick. ...

"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 natural gas, from underground shale formations," said Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University. "In this talk we present, from a university perspective, a few examples of fundamental research needs related to improved energy and resource recovery." Zoback, an authority on shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing, served on the U.S. Secretary of Energy's Committee on Shale Gas ...