Jumeirah Emirates Towers, the luxury city hotel and a Dubai landmark, was presented with the award for the Best Business Hotel in the Middle East at the Business Traveller Magazine Awards. Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts were also awarded Best Business Hotel Chain in the Middle East. The Business Traveller Magazine Awards are judged independently by the magazine's readers and are widely recognised as the leading accolades in the business travel industry. On receiving the award at the ceremony held at The Royal Garden Hotel in London, Imran Changezi, Hotel Manager ...

The search is on for the best sustainable travel initiatives in Europe as the 2013 Eurostar Ashden Award for Sustainable Travel opens for entries. The Award, which is free to enter, recognises pioneering sustainable travel schemes from Belgium, France and the UK that are leading the way in encouraging people to adopt more sustainable forms of travel, helping improve quality of life, reducing congestion and pollution, and cutting CO2 emissions. Entry to the Award is open until the 30th October 2012, and up to two winners will be awarded with a share of the GBP30,000 ...

The National Trust has announced it is backing a Government Minister's call to save the great British pudding. After being appointed in a recent cabinet reshuffle, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson urged people to be patriotic with their puddings, choosing traditional British recipes over foreign imports. In an interview with Farmers Weekly, Paterson said: "There is a huge dessert deficit in this country. We have a huge opportunity to replace imported desserts with desserts made here." He encouraged diners to swap desserts such as creme brulee and panna ...

Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc. (MMPI) kicked-off the International Casual Furniture & Accessories Market at the Chicago Merchandise Mart this week. While the Casual Market is a trade show, a special New Product Gallery and near-countless product and style trends on display at the event are a comprehensive tell-tale of how consumers will decorate their outdoor spaces for the year to come. With the Casual Market now open, the New Product Gallery includes a wide range of casual outdoor furniture and accessories from showrooms and exhibitors, including furniture designs, ...

KMR Medical, LLC is pleased to announce a new Join Venture Partnership with leading Medical Alert provider USlifecare. USlifecare provides industry-leading medical alert devices that help protect seniors in case of a medical emergency or other medical related needs they have in their home. KMR Medical will provide 100% of the installation and training on the medical alert device for all USlifecare customers. "We are extremely excited about this relationship as it helps strengthen our mission to better service our senior customers and help keep them in their own ...

A mosquito sample collected three decades ago in Israel's Negev Desert has yielded an unexpected discovery: a previously unknown virus that's closely related to some of the world's most dangerous mosquito-borne pathogens but, curiously, incapable of infecting non-insect hosts. Researchers believe this attribute could make the Eilat virus a uniquely useful tool for studying other alphaviruses, a genus of largely mosquito-borne pathogens that includes the viruses responsible for chikungunya, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, western equine encephalitis and eastern equine ...

The old adage "you are what you eat" is helping scientists better understand the threatened loggerhead turtle, which is the primary nester on Central Florida's beaches. A study published today in the journal PLOS ONE describes how scientists at the University of Central Florida used a technique that links chemical signatures of the turtles' diets and their watery environments to their migratory routes. They found the technique just as effective as expensive satellite tracking. Little is known about the turtles, which spend 99 percent of their time in the water and return ...

The rotten egg gas leaking from sewer pipes and costing billions of dollars worldwide in odour control may soon be far less of a problem thanks to new research discussed at the 2012 International Water Association (IWA) conference this week. Trials with a magic mix of chemicals, called Cloevis, on sewers in the Gold Coast region in Australia stopped 99 per cent of the rotten egg gas or hydrogen sulphide emitted from these pipes. Lead researcher, Professor Zhiguo Yuan from the University of Queensland, told IWA delegates that one week after dosing for a few hours, in ...

Fabricating precise biomolecular structures at extremely small scales is critical to the progress of nanotechnology and related fields. Traditionally, one of the ways this has been accomplished has been through the use of rubber stamps with tiny features — similar to those used by children in play, but detailed at the microscopic scale — which are covered with molecular "inks" and then stamped onto substrate surfaces, creating a molecular patterns. But when using this technique at the nanoscale, molecules tend to diffuse on the surface both during and after stamping, ...

With traumatic injuries claiming almost six million lives a year, improvements in care, including in the challenging areas of brain and bone injuries, and haemorrhage, are urgently needed. Leading medical journal The Lancet today published a series led by researchers and clinicians from the National Trauma Research Institute (NTRI), a collaboration between Monash University and Alfred Health, which notes the difficulties and charts the progress in improving three critical areas of trauma care. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of trauma-related deaths ...

Adding a missing protein to infertile human sperm can 'kick-start' its ability to fertilise an egg and dramatically increase the chances of a successful pregnancy, a team of Cardiff University scientists have uncovered. The team from Cardiff University's School of Medicine first found that sperm transfers a vital protein, known as PLC-zeta (PLCz), to the egg upon fertilisation. This sperm protein initiates a process called 'egg activation' which sets off all the biological processes necessary for development of an embryo. Now, the team has found that eggs that don't ...

This press release is available in French.Global climate change means that recently discovered ancient forests in Canada's extreme north could one day return, according to Alexandre Guertin-Pasquier of the University of Montreal's Department of Geography, who is presenting his findings at the Canadian Paleontology Conference in Toronto today. "According to the data model, climate conditions on Bylot Island will be able to support the kinds of trees we find in the fossilized forest that currently exist there, such as willow, pine and spruce. I've also found evidence of ...

If approached in the right way, citizens are willing to change their behaviour and do more to help themselves and others, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project, carried out jointly at the universities of Manchester and Southampton, experimented with different interventions techniqueswhich encourage citizen participation and explored people's motivations for community involvement. The researchers focused on comparing the effectiveness of 'nudge' techniques, where people are offered incentives to change their behaviour, ...

Volcanic activity on and around La Réunion is driven by a localized upwelling of hot buoyant magma. Unlike most magma sources, this is not located on the boundary between two tectonic plates, and rises from much greater depths. It is a so-called hotspot, and has left behind on the overlying mobile crust a track of volcanic activity that stretches 5500 km northwards to the Deccan Plateau in India. Some 65 million years ago, in a process that had a massive impact on world climate, the Deccan area was covered with enormous amounts of lava as the Indian Plate passed over the ...

When elite-level athletes retire, they often struggle to adapt to their new lives. When finding that the characteristics that were valuable in sport are not equally useful in 'ordinary' life, they often start experiencing disorientation, depression, self-doubt or even illness. This is concluded in research from the University of Gothenburg. Successful athletes at the elite level develop characteristics that should generate success also later in life. However, this notion may be wrong, according to the new research. As part of a study, ex-Olympians from Sweden, Switzerland, ...

The tsunami in Japan in March 2011 unleashed a series of negligence related with the resulting nuclear disaster. A scientific study headed by Spanish researchers has for the first time identified those atomic power plants that are more prone to suffering the effects of a tsunami. In total, 23 plants are in dangerous areas, including Fukushima I, with 74 reactors located in the east and southeast of Asia. Tsunamis are synonymous with the destruction of cities and homes and since the Japanese coast was devastated in March 2011 we now know that they cause nuclear disaster, ...

An enzyme in the bacterium that causes potato scab could help create new, environmentally-benign biocatalysts with the potential to cut use of the highly corrosive chemical nitric acid. Chemists at the University of Warwick in the UK, in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University in the USA, have reported in the journal Nature Chemical Biology the discovery of an enzyme in the bacterium Streptomyces scabies that catalyses an aromatic nitration reaction. TxtE, a cytochrome P450 enzyme, is the first example of an enzyme that has specifically evolved to catalyse ...

On the political scale, Swedish journalists can be placed to the left of the Swedish public and their elected politicians. And the distance between the two sides has increased significantly in recent decades, although this is more due to the public and politicians having moved to the right than to journalists having moved to the left. These are the results of a study conducted at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. 'The transition of journalists farther and farther to the left on the political scale stagnated in the mid-1990s,' says Professor Kent Asp, who headed the ...

Primary care physicians are at the heart of health care in the United States, and are often the first to diagnose patients and ensure those patients receive the care they need. But researchers from North Carolina State University, East Carolina University (ECU) and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York have found that many students are choosing to pass up a career in primary care because those physicians make substantially less money than specialists, such as dermatologists or radiologists. "We found that students who placed a premium ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — President Barack Obama holds a substantial lead in Michigan over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, although many of the state's voters remain undecided, according to Michigan State University's latest State of the State Survey. In the quarterly survey, completed in August, the Democratic incumbent leads Romney 39 percent to 30 percent among likely voters, for a margin of 9 percentage points. The results come on the heels of an EPIC-MRA poll for the Detroit Free Press and a Detroit News/WDIV Local 4 survey that both show Obama with a commanding lead. The ...

Scientists have discovered an unusual symbiosis between tiny single-celled algae and highly specialized bacteria in the ocean. The partnership plays an important role in fertilizing the oceans by taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fixing" it into a form that other organisms can use. Details of the finding, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, emerged from the investigation of a mysterious nitrogen-fixing microbe that has a very small genome. First detected in 1998 by Jonathan Zehr, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa ...

Lithium is a 'gold standard' drug for treating bipolar disorder, however not everyone responds in the same way. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders finds that this is true at the levels of gene activation, especially in the activation or repression of genes which alter the level the apoptosis (programmed cell death). Most notably BCL2, known to be important for the therapeutic effects of lithium, did not increase in non-responders. This can be tested in the blood of patients within four weeks of treatment. A ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 21, 2012 – Coronary heart disease is a major cause of death in women. A new study has found that a diet rich in antioxidants, mainly from fruits and vegetables, can significantly reduce the risk of myocardial infarction. The study is published in the October issue of The American Journal of Medicine. "Our study was the first to look at the effect of all dietary antioxidants in relation to myocardial infarction," says lead investigator Alicja Wolk, DrMedSci, Division of Nutritional Epidemiology, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska ...

September 21, 2012 – (BRONX, NY) – Primary care physicians – America's front line healthcare practitioners – are usually the first to diagnose illness, refer patients to specialists and coordinate care. Yet, despite that critical role, primary care physicians remain among the lowest paid of all doctors at a time when there's an acute primary care shortage. A unique longitudinal study of medical students by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, and North Carolina State University ...

Several years ago researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) reported discovering a novel, evolutionary trait in a long-studied population of Escherichia coli, a rod-shaped bacterium commonly found in the lower intestine of mammals. The E. coli added a helping of citrate to its traditional diet of glucose, even though other E. coli can't consume citrate in the presence of oxygen. These same biologists have now analyzed this new trait's genetic origins and found that in multiple cases, the evolving E. coli population needed more than one mutational step before the ...