Brick Marketing, a Boston-based SEO firm will host a series of full-day SEO workshops in 10 major cities across the United States. For the past five years, Brick Marketing has hosted full-day SEO workshops in Boston, Massachusetts and will launch nationally in 2013. Attendees will discover how to increase website traffic and boost their online presence through an SEO program tailored to fit their business or organization. Brick Marketing is a SEMPO recommended training provider and all SEMPO members are eligible to receive $50 off workshop registration. Nick Stamoulis, ...

The New Year has arrived and Smokers Utopia has been busy re-evaluating the electronic cigarettes that are readily available to the smoking public and have adjusted their top 10 list. The website is known for its extreme e cigarette reviews, revealing the good, the bad and the ugly on products and the companies that sell them. Some companies that had top positions barley made the first page to kick off 2013 and are replaced with little known brands. Some of the old school e cigarette companies finally made it to the first page like the Volcano electronic cigarette ...

Clarity Services, Inc., the leading real-time credit bureau providing fraud detection and credit risk management solutions for Middle America announces its newest product, Clear PC Fraud. Clear PC Fraud was created in collaboration with iovation Inc., the leader in device-based fraud and abuse management tools. It combines information from both iovation and Clarity Services to help lenders mitigate fraud related to online transactions. "Clear PC Fraud is unlike any other Clarity product because it looks beyond a consumer's application information to assess the ...

Clarity Services, Inc., the leading real-time credit bureau providing fraud detection and credit risk management solutions for Middle America announces its partnership with iovation Inc., the leader in device-based fraud and abuse management tools with intelligence on more than one billion devices worldwide. iovation's service, ReputationManager 360, protects online businesses and end users against fraud and abuse by combining real-time IP geolocation, device identification, and device reputation to help determine if an online transaction is risky. "We're excited ...

Studies have shown that ten to fifteen percent of physicians and airline pilots will have a problem with addiction during their lifetime. Alcohol is prominent among these populations, and can affect many other professionals as well. Professionals Treatment Programs offer specific treatment elements for attorneys, doctors, airline pilots, and other licensed specialists. A key element for these treatment programs involves intensive monitoring to decrease the risks associated with relapse. SOBERLINK, Inc., a technology company based in Southern California, has developed a ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- University of Florida researchers and colleagues have identified a protein that, when absent, helps the body burn fat and prevents insulin resistance and obesity. The findings from the National Institutes of Health-funded study were published online ahead of print Sunday, Jan. 6, in the journal Nature Medicine. The discovery could aid development of drugs that not only prevent obesity, but also spur weight loss in people who are already overweight, said Stephen Hsu, M.D., Ph.D., one of the study's corresponding authors and a principal investigator ...

Animal cells behave like fluid-filled sponges in response to being mechanically deformed according to new research published today in Nature Materials. Scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at UCL have shown that animal cells behave according to the theory of 'poroelasticity' when mechanically stimulated in a way similar to that experienced in organs within the body. The results indicate that the rate of cell deformation in response to mechanical stress is limited by how quickly water can redistribute within the cell interior. Poroelasticity was ...

Jerusalem, January 6, 2013 – Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in collaboration with researchers at the Salk Institute in California, have found for the first time that a specific protein is essential not only for maintaining a healthy retina in the eye, but also may have implications for understanding and possibly treating other conditions in the immune, reproductive, vascular and nervous systems, as well as in various cancers. Their work, reported online in the journal Neuron, highlights the role of Protein S in the maintenance of a healthy retina ...

New research led by the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden and the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has identified a link between a human gene and the composition of human gastrointestinal bacteria. In a study published as a letter to the journal Gut, the team outline new evidence suggesting that the human genome may play a role in determining the makeup of the billions of microbes in the human gastrointestinal tract collectively known as the gut microbiota. Mauro D'Amato, Associate Professor at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at Karolinska Institutet, said: ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Even as policy makers and health experts point to an increased need for exercise, more than half of four-year colleges and universities in the United States have dropped physical education requirements compared to historic levels. Almost every U.S. college student was required to take physical education and exercise requirements in the 1920s; today, that number is at an all-time low of 39 percent, according to a new study. Oregon State University researcher Brad Cardinal, lead author of the study, examined data from 354 randomly selected four-year ...

A woman's exposure to high pollen levels in late pregnancy increases the risk of early asthma in the child, according to a group of researchers at Sweden's Umeå University in a recent study. A number of studies have previously shown that there is an association with being born during a pollen season and an increased risk of allergies. Although the pollen season is a regular annual event, there are large variations between years in pollen levels. Few studies have closely examined the significance of actual pollen content in different time periods before and after birth, ...

The surprising discovery of a massive outburst in a neighboring galaxy is giving astronomers a tantalizing look at what likely is a powerful belch by a gorging black hole at the galaxy's center. The scientists were conducting a long-term study of molecules in galaxies, when one of the galaxies showed a dramatic change. "The discovery was entirely serendipitous. Our observations were spread over a few years, and when we looked at them, we found that one galaxy had changed over that time from being placid and quiescent, to undergoing a hugely energetic outburst at the end," ...

Irvine, Calif., Jan. 7, 2013 – Halting climate change will require "a fundamental and disruptive overhaul of the global energy system" to eradicate harmful carbon dioxide emissions, not just stabilize them, according to new findings by UC Irvine and other scientists. In a Jan. 9 paper in Environmental Research Letters, UC Irvine Earth system scientist Steve Davis and others take a fresh look at the popular "wedge" approach to tackling climate change outlined in a 2004 study by Princeton scientists Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow. They had argued that the rise of dangerous ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Research findings from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine are shining a light on an important regulatory role performed by the so-called dark matter, or "junk DNA," within each of our genes. The new study reveals snippets of information contained in dark matter that can alter the way a gene is assembled. "These small sequences of genetic information tell the gene how to splice, either by enhancing the splicing process or inhibiting it. The research opens the door for studying the dark matter of genes. And it helps us further understand ...

Although immigrants from Italy and their offspring form one of the largest demographic groups in Switzerland, there are hardly any studies on their state of health and risk of mortality. In a first for Switzerland, Silvan Tarnutzer and Matthias Bopp from the University of Zurich's Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine calculated unbiased mortality risks for people with an Italian migrant background. Immigrants from Italy live longer than Swiss people Compared to Swiss people born in Switzerland, immigrant Italians exhibit a mortality risk that is roughly ten ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Peanuts are one of the most common triggers of severe food-induced allergic reactions, which can be fatal, and the prevalence of peanut allergy is increasing. However, there is currently no clinical treatment available for peanut allergy other than strict dietary elimination and, in cases of accidental ingestion, injections of epinephrine. But a new multicenter clinical trial shows promise for sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), a treatment in which patients are given daily doses, in gradually increasing amounts, of a liquid containing peanut powder. ...

VIDEO: The human TFIID core complex contains two copies each of TAF4 (green), TAF5 (red), TAF6 (blue), TAF9 (light blue) and TAF12 (light green). The density determined by cryo-electron microscopy is... Click here for more information. A research team of scientists from EMBL Grenoble and the IGBMC in Strasbourg, France, have, for the first time, described in molecular detail the architecture of the central scaffold of TFIID: the human protein complex essential for transcription ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Short interruptions – such as the few seconds it takes to silence that buzzing smartphone – have a surprisingly large effect on one's ability to accurately complete a task, according to new research led by Michigan State University. The study, in which 300 people performed a sequence-based procedure on a computer, found that interruptions of about three seconds doubled the error rate. Brief interruptions are ubiquitous in today's society, from text messages to a work colleague poking his head in the door and interrupting an important conversation. ...

Volunteers from the Planethunters.org website, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse project, have discovered 15 new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars. Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a 'traffic jam' of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life. Rather than being seen directly, the new planet candidates were found by Planethunters.org volunteers looking ...

Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed a camera that can be used to take powerful three dimensional colour X-ray images, in near real-time, without the need for a synchrotron X-ray source. Its ability to identify the composition of the scanned object could radically improve security screening at airports, medical imaging, aircraft maintenance, industrial inspection and geophysical exploration. The X-Ray system developed by Professor Robert Cernik and colleagues from The School of Materials can identify chemicals and compounds such as cocaine, semtex, ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (January 7, 2012) - Abnormalities of eye movement and fixation may contribute to difficulty in perceiving and recognizing faces among older adults with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), suggests a study "Abnormal Fixation in Individuals with AMD when Viewing an Image of a Face" appearing in the January issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part ofWolters Kluwer Health. Unlike people with normal vision focus, those with AMD don't ...

When it comes to solving puzzles, animals in captivity are, well, different animals than their wild brethren. Testing animals' ability to solve new problems has been historically conducted on animals in captivity. Only recently has a shift been made to run these tests on animals in their natural habitat. In a study appearing in Animal Behaviour, however, researchers at Michigan State University found vast differences in the problem solving skills between captive and wild spotted hyenas. Applying lessons learned from captive animals is potentially problematic because ...

WHAT: A new study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests that sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) can reduce the allergic response to peanut in adolescents and adults. SLIT is a treatment approach in which, under medical supervision, people place a small amount of allergen under the tongue to decrease their sensitivity to the allergen. This is one of the first randomized, placebo-controlled studies to test the efficacy and safety of SLIT to treat peanut allergy and is one of several federally funded trials investigating immune-based approaches to ...

Amsterdam, NL, 7 January 2013 – Scientists have wrestled to understand why Huntington's disease, which is caused by a single gene mutation, can produce such variable symptoms. An authoritative review by a group of leading experts summarizes the progress relating cell loss in the striatum and cerebral cortex to symptom profile in Huntington's disease, suggesting a possible direction for developing targeted therapies. The article is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Huntington's Disease. Huntington's disease (HD) is an inherited progressive neurological disorder ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — Researchers have discovered a new compound that restores the health of mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an otherwise dangerous bacterial infection. The new compound targets an enzyme not found in human cells but which is essential to bacterial survival. The research team, led by scientists at the University of Illinois and the University of California, San Diego, reports the new findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team discovered and developed several compounds that are promising ...