It was not a big surprise, but definitely a welcome move. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cut rates by a quarter of a basis point to 3.25% on Tuesday, the first rate movement since June's 0.25% drop. The cut is the RBA responding to global uncertainty and a slowing Chinese economy which impacts on our mining sector. Economists are also watching the US money markets closely as they haven't recovered as quickly as predicted. "I hope this rate cut boosts people's confidence as I believe we are nearing the bottom of the housing market, and the next few months ...

As October approaches, a dark, unsettling feeling is creeping through the South Snohomish back roads. As nighttime falls, numerous drivers on the Old Snohomish Monroe Road have reported it. Shivers run down their spine as they lose themselves in the fog. Heading south, their eyes widen as they become more alert to the possible dangers ahead. Little do they know that an accidental right turn at the Y in the road could be their last! After dark this October, innocent family fun takes a backseat at Snohomish's original pumpkin patch. For the first time ever, Craven Farm ...

As one of the most prestigious dry cleaners in the Albany New York area, we want your clothes to be treated like royalty. That's why we are introducing new machinery into our company to help give your clothing the extra love and attention that they need. We have invested in the new Lightning Series LS2 to make your shirts get that "Regal" care. The Lightning LS2 is specifically designed to press the sleeve pleats and vent areas without flattening the cuffs and also features formed bucks, contoured chests, side airbags, PVP Pleat Vent Press, and Automatic Pull-Down ...

The which/that conundrum continues to confuse many writers. If you are tired of Word producing green wiggly lines under your use of which read on! Simply put, that introduces a restrictive clause whereas which introduces a non-restrictive clause. The non-restrictive clause may contain information that is not essential to the sentence. For example: My car, which I just bought, has a leak in the radiator. The clause, which I just bought, is non-essential; it qualifies the subject, my car, but is non-restrictive; it provides additional information but the sentence ...

At EverydayActors.com the main goal is to link everyday people (our actors) with video content producers. Times have changed, budgets have been reduced, and content producers are looking for local everyday people to star in or work as background talent in films, commercials, corporate training videos, music videos and other productions. This isn't about becoming a star or having lofty Hollywood ambitions. For EverydayActors' members it is about getting work in the business just being oneself. A network of agency members use EverydayActors.com to find the specific ...

Three weeks of healing touch treatments, combined with listening to a guided imagery CD, provides significant clinical reductions in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms for combat-exposed, active duty Marines, according to a study released in the September issue of Military Medicine. The report finds that the 68 Camp Pendleton Marines who were randomly assigned to 6 sessions of the combined intervention within a three-week period also showed significant improvement in quality of life, as well as reduced depression and cynicism, as compared to the 55 subjects ...

Rockville, MD – A new study suggests caffeinated coffee drinkers should limit their intake to reduce their chances of developing vision loss or blindness. According to a scientific paper in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, heavy caffeinated coffee consumption is associated with an increased risk of developing exfoliation glaucoma, the leading cause of secondary glaucoma worldwide. The study, The Relation between Caffeine and Coffee Consumption and Exfoliation Glaucoma or Glaucoma Suspect: A Prospective Study in Two Cohorts, is the first to examine the link ...

NORMAN, Okla. – Move over money, a new currency is helping make the world go round. As increasing volumes of data become accessible, transferable and, therefore, actionable, information is the treasure companies want to amass. To protect this wealth, organizations use cryptography, or coded messages, to secure information from "technology robbers." This group of hackers and malware creators increasingly is becoming more sophisticated at breaking encrypted information, leaving everyone and everything, including national security and global commerce, at risk. But the threat ...

DENVER (Oct. 4, 2012) – A skull fragment unearthed by anthropologists in Tanzania shows that our ancient ancestors were eating meat at least 1.5 million years ago, shedding new light into the evolution of human physiology and brain development. "Meat eating has always been considered one of the things that made us human, with the protein contributing to the growth of our brains," said Charles Musiba, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, who helped make the discovery. "Our work shows that 1.5 million years ago we were not opportunistic ...

Researchers at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine have developed the first animal model that duplicates the human response in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an important step that may enable scientists to discover better medicines to treat the disease. Corresponding and senior author Harris Perlman, associate professor of rheumatology at Feinberg, introduced his team's new prototype mouse model in a recent online issue of the Journal of Translational Medicine. "This is the first time human stem cells have been transplanted into mice in order to find RA ...

CHICAGO — Surgeons are making progress toward preventing initial and recurrent episodes of clostridium difficile colitis (C. difficile or C. diff), a vicious bacterial infection that is estimated to affect about 336,000 people each year, typically patients on antibiotics. Using mouse models, researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston, found that an oral medication may prevent C. difficile infections (CDI). Also, surgeons at Penn State University College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, examined human patients to detect a genetic mutation that could steer ...

VIDEO: This is a direct observation of neuronal reprogramming of PDGFR-sorted pericyte-derived cells from the adult human brain by continuous live imaging in culture. Note the change in morphology of a cell... Click here for more information. Researchers have discovered a way to generate new human neurons from another type of adult cell found in our brains. The discovery, reported in the October 5th issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, is one step toward cell-based ...

VIDEO: For newborn mice to suckle for the very first time and survive, they depend on a signature blend of scents that is unique to their mothers. The findings, published online... Click here for more information. For newborn mice to suckle for the very first time and survive, they depend on a signature blend of scents that is unique to their mothers. The findings, published online on October 4 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveal that mom's natural perfume consists ...

MAYWOOD – Botox® (onabotulinum toxin-A) injections to the bladder are as effective as medication for treating urinary urgency incontinence in women, but the injection is twice as likely to completely resolve symptoms. These findings were published in the latest issue of The New England Journal of Medicine by a National Institutes of Health clinical trials network including Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine (SSOM). Urgency incontinence is urinary incontinence with a strong or sudden need to urinate. Traditionally, this condition has been treated with ...

The body's blood clot-busting enzymes are much busier than previously imagined, with new research showing that they also dispose of every cell that dies prematurely from disease or trauma. In research published today in Cell Reports, scientists from Monash University have demonstrated for the first time the enzyme t-PA, which plays a vital role in the removal of blood clots, is also a major player in the removal of necrotic, or dead, cells. Necrosis occurs when cells in living tissue die prematurely due to external stress or injury. The body's system for removing waste ...

LA JOLLA, CA – A team led by biologists at The Scripps Research Institute has solved the long-standing scientific mystery of how mice first know to nurse or suckle. This basic mammalian instinct, which could be a key to understanding instinctive behavior more generally, was thought to be triggered by a specific odor (pheromone) that all mouse mothers emit. But, as described online ahead of print by the journal Current Biology on October 4, 2012, the trigger in mice turns out to be a more complicated blend of nature and nurture: a signature mix of odors, unique for each ...

There are some genes that are only activated in the very first days of an embryo's existence. Once they have accomplished their task, they are shut down forever, unlike most of our genes, which remain active throughout our lives. EPFL scientists have unveiled part of this strange mechanism. The same process, accidentally initiated later in life, could be responsible for many kinds of cancer. The discovery is described in a recent article in the journal Cell Reports. The researchers identified a group of proteins that play a key role in this phenomenon. They bind to a ...

BOSTON, MA—Uterine fibroids are the most common type of pelvic tumors in women and are the leading cause of hysterectomy in the United States. Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) are the first to discover a genetic risk allele (an alternative form of a gene) for uterine fibroids in white women using an unbiased, genome-wide approach. This discovery will pave the way for new screening strategies and treatments for uterine fibroids. The study will be published online on October 4, 2012 in The American Journal of Human Genetics. The research team, led by ...

Oral medication for treating a type of incontinence in women is roughly as effective as Botox injections to the bladder, reported researchers who conducted a National Institutes of Health clinical trials network study, with each form of treatment having benefits and limitations. After six months, women in both treatment groups said that the average number of daily episodes had declined from about five per day to about 1-2 per day. In the study, the researchers compared the effectiveness of Botox injections to oral anticholinergic medications for treating urge urinary ...

Researchers show for the first time that a mammal begins to suckle its mother's milk through a learned response built on learning her unique combination of smells. When it is born, the newborn is exposed to the smell of its mother's amniotic fluid and the baby then responds to those smells to feed. Prevailing thought has been that pheromones –chemicals that trigger an innate behaviour – drove the suckling response as an automatic behaviour. The new work determines that, in mice, the smells must be learned before the behaviour can occur. Suckling is a critical step for ...

Researchers from IMIM, Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, have succeeded in determining the function of a new variant of enzyme IKKalpha (IKKα) to activate some of the genes taking part in the tumor progressions of colorectal cancer. In the future, this fact will make it possible to design new drugs that inhibit this enzyme specifically and are less toxic for the remaining body cells, hence improving the treatment for this disease. The study is the culmination of previous research by the IMIM Research Group on Stem Cells and Cancer that had proven the ...

PHILADELPHIA - Nearly 100 years after a British neurologist first mapped the blind spots caused by missile wounds to the brains of soldiers, Perelman School of Medicine researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have perfected his map using modern-day technology. Their results create a map of vision in the brain based upon an individual's brain structure, even for people who cannot see. Their result can, among other things, guide efforts to restore vision using a neural prosthesis that stimulates the surface of the brain. The study appears in the latest issue of Current ...

CHICAGO—Wounded soldiers who sustained chest injuries in Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) had higher mortality rates than soldiers in Korea and Vietnam, according to a military trauma study presented at the 2012 American College of Surgeons Annual Clinical Congress. However, better battlefield triage and transport may have meant that severely wounded soldiers whom would have been considered killed in action in previous conflicts are more likely to get sent to trauma centers in the United States sooner in their course of care, ...

Can you bite into an apple? If so, you are more likely to maintain mental abilities, according to new research from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The population is ageing, and the older we become the more likely it is that we risk deterioration of our cognitive functions, such as memory, decision-making and problem solving. Research indicates several possible contributors to these changes, with several studies demonstrating an association between not having teeth and loss of cognitive function and a higher risk of dementia. One reason for this could be that few ...

HEIDELBERG, 4 October 2012 – Scientists in Canada and the United States have used three-dimensional imaging techniques to settle a long-standing debate about how DNA and structural proteins are packaged into chromatin fibres. The researchers, whose findings are published in EMBO reports, reveal that the mouse genome consists of 10-nm chromatin fibres but did not find evidence for the wider 30-nm fibres that were previously thought to be important components of the DNA architecture. "DNA is an exceptionally long molecule that can reach several metres in length. This means ...