Bloomberg reports that members of the "Recession Generation" are opting to rent when it comes to large purchases like cars and homes. The article asserts that members of this generation "are wary about making large purchases after entering adulthood in the deepest recession and weakest recovery since World War II." Bankier Apartments understands this hesitation and is working to provide renters with comfortable accommodations that fit their lifestyles. According to the article, some of the factors that have lead to higher rental rates include an ...

Statement-processing expert APEX Print Technologies ranks among the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. for the fifth consecutive year. For 2012, APEX ranked #3012, up from #3588 in 2011, among companies on the Inc. 500/5000 list. APEX has been recognized each year since 2008. A provider of innovative statement and document design services, e-statement and online payment tools, and fast processing of printed and electronic documents, APEX has grown revenues by 72% over the past three years and has added 41 new employee positions over the same period. APEX ...

Leading provider of Web Search Optimisation Alchemy Viral has announced this week that it is to support the operations of one of the UK's leading children's charities - Educating the Children. The Richmond-based agency will help support the charity's work highlighting problems and issues in the Masai Mara region of Kenya. The dedicated team at Educating the Children shines a light on the many issues and problems endured by children in Masai Mara - modern-day problems faced by youngsters include Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and enforced childhood marriages. Despite ...

After examining almost 275,000 accident claims across Australia between July 2011 and June 2012, the top five crash hotspots in Perth are: 1. Albany Highway, Kenwick 2. Canning Highway, Ardross 3. Great Eastern Highway, Belmont 4. Kwinana Freeway, Atwell 5. Mitchell Freeway, Perth "Each of the crash hot spots in Perth that AAMI has identified are both high-traffic and have relatively high speed limits. The Department of Transport does a lot of research and analysis of road conditions to ensure that the safety measures and speed limits in place are appropriate ...

Precise Manufacturing Inc., located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has recently completed a new redesign of their website. The site's new look is intended to better align Precise's branding and image to match their mission of being the leading provider of precision machined products by providing world class service, quality and delivery to their customers. Precise Manufacturing is an ISO 9001 and Q9001-2000 OEM supplier of precision machined products. Located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Precise is a privately held business providing high quality products and services for over ...

Medical research saves lives, suffering and dollars – while also creating jobs and economic activity. The United States has long led the world, with hundreds of thousands of jobs and marketable discoveries generated by government research funding every year. Top students from around the world come here for training -- and often stay to help fuel medical innovation. Now, warns a team of researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine, the U.S. risks losing out to Asia as the hub of medical discovery. The result, they caution, could be a "brain drain" of top young ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — California neighborhoods reeling from record foreclosures also experienced lower levels of voter turnout in the 2008 presidential election, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside. Voters who lost their homes were not the only ones who appear to have been affected, sociologist Vanesa Estrada-Correa and political scientist Martin Johnson determined in a study believed to be the first to assess the effect of foreclosure on political participation. Voters who remained in neighborhoods impacted by foreclosure were less likely ...

Scientists have pinpointed a gene that enables rice plants to produce around 20% more grain by increasing uptake of phosphorus, an important, but limited, plant nutrient. The discovery unlocks the potential to improve the food security of rice farmers with the lowest value phosphorus-deficient land allowing them to grow more rice to add to global production, and earn more. The gene – called PSTOL1 which stands for Phosphorus Starvation Tolerance – helps rice grow a larger, better root system and thereby access more phosphorus. Farmers can apply phosphorus fertilizers ...

Research presented today at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Beijing has found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local Universe. The Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy on its own, but when paired with its close neighbours - the Magellanic Clouds - it is very rare, and could have been one of a kind, until a survey of our local Universe found another two examples just like us. Astronomer Dr Aaron Robotham, jointly from the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy ...

Chimpanzees rarely get cancer, or a variety of other diseases that commonly arise in humans, but their genomic DNA sequence is nearly identical to ours. So, what's their secret? Researchers reporting in the September issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a Cell Press journal, have found that differences in certain DNA modifications, called methylation, might play a role. The researchers discovered hundreds of genes that display different patterns of methylation between the two species. These different patterns of methylation lead to different levels of expression, ...

Rather than trying to kill bacteria outright with drugs, Université de Montréal researchers have discovered a way to disarm bacteria that may allow the body's own defense mechanisms to destroy them. "To understand this strategy one could imagine harmful bacteria being like Darth Vader, and the anti-virulence drug would take away his armor and lightsaber," explained Dr. Christian Baron, the study's lead author and Professor at the Department of Biochemistry. "A naked Darth Vader would be an easy target and similarly, pathogenic bacteria without their virulence factors would ...

PHILADELPHIA—It's widely accepted that molecular mechanisms mediating epigenetics include DNA methylation and histone modifications, but a team from Thomas Jefferson University has evidence to the contrary regarding the role of histone modifications. A study of Drosophila embryos from Jefferson's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology published ahead of print in Cell August 23 found that parental methylated histones are not transferred to daughter DNA. Rather, after DNA replication, new nucleosomes are assembled from newly synthesized unmodified histones. "Essentially, ...

People will reject an offer of water, even when they are severely thirsty, if they perceive the offer to be unfair, according to a new study funded by the Wellcome Trust. The findings have important implications for understanding how humans make decisions that must balance fairness and self-interest. It's been known for some time that when humans bargain for money they have a tendency to reject unfair offers, preferring to let both parties walk away with nothing rather than accept a low offer in the knowledge that their counterpart is taking home more cash. In contrast, ...

HOUSTON, Aug. 23, 2012 – Scientists at the University of Houston (UH) have discovered what may possibly be a key ingredient in the fight against Parkinson's disease. Affecting more than 500,000 people in the U.S., Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system marked by a loss of certain nerve cells in the brain, causing a lack of dopamine. These dopamine-producing neurons are in a section of the midbrain that regulates body control and movement. In a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ...

The discovery of a 'switch' that modifies a gene known to be essential for normal heart development could explain variations in the severity of birth defects in children with DiGeorge syndrome. Researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute made the discovery while investigating foetal development in an animal model of DiGeorge syndrome. DiGeorge syndrome affects approximately one in 4000 babies. Dr Anne Voss and Dr Tim Thomas led the study, with colleagues from the institute's Development and Cancer division, published today in the journal Developmental Cell. Dr ...

Sodium chloride, better known as salt, is vital for the organism, and the kidneys play a crucial role in the regulation of sodium balance. However, the underlying mechanisms of sodium balance are not yet completely understood. Researchers of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of Kiel have now deciphered the function of a gene in the kidney and have thus gained new insights into this complex regulation process (PNAS Early Edition, doi/10.1073/pnas.1203834109)*. In humans, the kidneys ...

They are one of the most destructive forces of nature on Earth, but now environmental scientists are working to tame the hurricane. In a paper, published in Atmospheric Science Letters, the authors propose using cloud seeding to decrease sea surface temperatures where hurricanes form. Theoretically, the team claims the technique could reduce hurricane intensity by a category. The team focused on the relationship between sea surface temperature and the energy associated with the destructive potential of hurricanes. Rather than seeding storm clouds or hurricanes directly, ...

Vancouver, BC – August 23, 2012 – Vancouver-based clinician and researcher Dr. Andrei Krassioukov is packing for the upcoming Paralympic games in London. Rather than packing sports equipment, he has a suitcase full of advanced scientific equipment funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation that he will use to monitor the cardiovascular function of athletes with spinal cord injuries. Up to 90% of people with injuries between that cervical and high thoracic vertebrae suffer from a condition that limits their ability to regulate heart rate and blood pressure. For top-level ...

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have produced hydrogen, H2, a renewable energy source, from water using an inexpensive catalyst under industrially relevant conditions (using pH neutral water, surrounded by atmospheric oxygen, O2, and at room temperature). Lead author of the research, Dr Erwin Reisner, an EPSRC research fellow and head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, said: "A H2 evolution catalyst which is active under elevated O2 levels is crucial if we are to develop an industrial water splitting process - a chemical reaction ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The discovery of graphene, a material just one atom thick and possessing exceptional strength and other novel properties, started an avalanche of research around its use for everything from electronics to optics to structural materials. But new research suggests that was just the beginning: A whole family of two-dimensional materials may open up even broader possibilities for applications that could change many aspects of modern life. The latest "new" material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) — which has actually been used for decades, but not in its 2-D ...

ARLINGTON, Va.—The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is demonstrating the next phase of an augmented-reality project Aug. 23 in Princeton, N.J., that will change the way warfighters view operational environments—literally. ONR has completed the first year of a multi-year augmented-reality effort, developing a system that allow trainees to view simulated images superimposed on real-world landscapes. One example of augmented reality technology can be seen in sports broadcasts, which use it to highlight first-down lines on football fields and animate hockey pucks to help TV ...

Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish may suggest. Physicist Robert Nemiroff of Michigan Technological University reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009. The photons originated about 7 billion light years away from Earth in one of three pulses from a gamma-ray burst. They arrived at the orbiting telescope just one millisecond apart, in a virtual tie. Gamma-ray bursts are ...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23—Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit in 1990 it was discovered that the craft had blurred vision. Fortunately, Space Shuttle astronauts were able to remedy the problem a few years later with supplemental optics. Now, a team of Italian researchers has performed a similar sight-correcting feat for a microscope imaging technique designed to explore a universe seemingly as vast as Hubble's but at the opposite end of the size spectrum—the neural pathways of the brain. "Our system combines the best feature of one microscopy technique—high-speed, ...

Researchers from Rice University today unveiled a new multi-antenna technology that could help wireless providers keep pace with the voracious demands of data-hungry smartphones and tablets. The technology aims to dramatically increase network capacity by allowing cell towers to simultaneously beam signals to more than a dozen customers on the same frequency. Details about the new technology, dubbed Argos, were presented today at the Association for Computing Machinery's MobiCom 2012 wireless research conference in Istanbul. Argos is under development by researchers from ...

A study led by investigators from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), Nashville, Tenn., finds that black men with prostate cancer receive lower quality surgical care than white men. The racial differences persist even when controlling for factors such as the year of surgery, age, comorbidities and insurance status. Daniel Barocas, M.D., MPH, assistant professor of Urologic Surgery, is first author of the study published in the Aug. 17 issue of the Journal of Urology. Investigators from VICC, the Tennessee Valley Veterans Administration Geriatric Research, Education ...