Who wouldn't pay a penny for a sports car? That's the mentality some popular online auctions take advantage of -- the opportunity to get an expensive item for very little money. In a study of hundreds of lowest unique bid auctions, Northwestern University researchers asked a different question: Who wins these auctions, the strategic gambler or the lucky one? The answer is the lucky. But, ironically, it's a lucky person using a winning strategy. The researchers found that all players intuitively use the right strategy, and that turns the auction into a game of pure ...

Le Bonheur Professor Russell Chesney, M.D. believes he knows what was ailing Tiny Tim, the iconic character from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Based on detailed descriptions of both the symptoms and living conditions of 18th century London, Dr. Chesney hypothesizes that Tiny Tim suffered from a combination of rickets and tuberculosis (TB). His findings were published in the March 5 edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Dr. Chesney noted during the time the novel was written, 60 percent of children in London had rickets and nearly 50 percent ...

While there is always going to be more to an individual than their appearance, the power of a great outfit can never be underestimated. Those with a perfect look are going to exude confidence in all that they do. For some, this often means a stylish men's suit that complements their personality. This is why Megasuits.com is now offering their spring collection of men's suits at hugely discounted prices for those that would like to look and feel great in the coming months. Purchasing suits has often been a monotonous and expensive chore in the past. Storefronts charged ...

Eighty-eight percent of Americans now own a cell phone, forming a massive network that offers scientists a wealth of information and an infinite number of new applications. With the help of these phone users — and their devices' cameras, audio recorders, and other features — researchers envision endless possibilities for gathering huge amounts of data, from services that collect user data to monitor noise pollution and air quality to applications that build maps from people's cell phone snapshots. Today, user data provides some opportunities; for example, researchers ...

SAN DIEGO -- Obesity appears to significantly increase the risk of death tied to sleeping pills, nearly doubling the rate of mortality even among those prescribed 18 or fewer pills in a year, researchers reported Friday. "Obesity emerged as a marker of increased vulnerability," said Robert Langer, M.D., M.P.H., at the annual American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention | Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2012 Scientific Sessions in San Diego. "The associations between sleeping pills and increased mortality were present, and relatively stronger, ...

Northern Australia's Pilbara coast is under warnings, alerts and watches as powerful Cyclone Lua nears for a landfall. NASA's Aqua satellite has been providing infrared, visible and microwave data on Lua that have shown forecasters the storm is strengthening on its approach to land. Two of the most recent infrared images of Cyclone Lua were captured from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument onboard NASA's Aqua satellite. The AIRS instrument captured infrared images of Cyclone Lua on March 15 at 1741 UTC and March 16 at 0553 UTC. The later image appeared ...

There are quite a few things around the house that many take for granted, no matter how often they are used. Individuals will find themselves enjoying the features and utility of high end appliances to cook their food, clean dishes, and help to wash clothes. When these appliances begin to break down, it is going to put an immediate halt to almost everything in the household. For locals that are going to need these devices back up in working condition as quickly and affordably as possible, the leading Los Angeles appliance repair company, AM PM, is now offering specialty ...

MAYWOOD, Il. -- Loyola University Medical Center is one of the major enrollers in a landmark clinical trial that found that plugging a hole in the heart works no better than drugs in preventing strokes. The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Loyola enrolled 24 patients, one of the highest patient enrolments in the multicenter trial, and more than any other Chicago-area hospital. Principal investigators at the Loyola site are stroke specialist Dr. Michael Schneck and interventional cardiologist Dr. Fred Leya. About 1 in 4 adults has a small hole ...

PHILADELPHIA -- The number of U.S. medical student seniors at medical schools choosing internal medicine residencies leveled in 2012 after two years of significant increases. According to the 2012 National Resident Matching Program, 2,941 U.S. medical school seniors matched internal medicine, nearly unchanged from 2011 when 2,940 matched internal medicine. "After seeing increases in 2010 and 2011 for the internal medicine residency match for U.S. medical students, we are disappointed that there was not a bigger increase this year," said Virginia L. Hood, MBBS, MPH, FACP, ...

As the desert Southwest becomes hotter and drier, semi-arid grasslands are slowly being replaced by a landscape dominated by mesquite trees, such as Prosopis velutina, and other woody shrubs, a team of University of Arizona researchers has found. In a "leaf-to-landscape" approach, the team combined physiological experiments on individual plants and measurements across entire ecosystems to quantify how well grasslands, compared to mesquite trees and woody shrubs, cope with heat and water stress across seasonal precipitation periods. "Our results show that even the smallest ...

Washington, D.C. -- Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have revealed how a mutation in a single gene is responsible for the inability of neurons to effectively pass along appetite suppressing signals from the body to the right place in the brain. What results is obesity caused by a voracious appetite. Their study, published March 18th on Nature Medicine's website, suggests there might be a way to stimulate expression of that gene to treat obesity caused by uncontrolled eating. The research team specifically found that a mutation in the brain-derived ...

Like any law-abiding train passenger, a molecule called oskar RNA carries a stamped ticket detailing its destination and form of transport, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found. They show that for this molecule, moving in the right direction isn't enough: speed is of the essence. Their study, published online today in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, also provides clues as to how a single molecule could receive tickets for different destinations, depending on what type of cell it is in. For a fruit fly ...

Ferrer Shane, PL is proud to announce that one of its attorneys, Diana E. Gonzalez, is running for Miami-Dade County Court Judge. Starting her career in 2004, Diana Gonzalez was rapidly promoted up the ranks in the Public Defender's Office, first handling misdemeanor charges, then defending young people in the juvenile division, to ultimately defending clients charged with the most serious felonies - all in the span of just five years, trying everything from a traffic ticket to a murder case. Having traveled abroad with the U.S. Department of Defense and with USAID ...

LA JOLLA, Calif., March 18, 2012 – Autoimmune diseases, such as Type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, are caused by an immune system gone haywire, where the body's defense system assaults and destroys healthy tissues. A mutant form of a protein called LYP has been implicated in multiple autoimmune diseases, but the precise molecular pathway involved has been unknown. Now, in a paper published March 18 in Nature Chemical Biology, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) show how the errant form of LYP can disrupt the immune system. ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Combining known factors in a new way, theoretical physicists Boris Svistunov and Nikolai Prokof'ev at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with three alumni of their group, have solved an intractable 50-year-old problem: How to simulate strongly interacting quantum systems to allow accurate predictions of their properties. It could open the door to practical superconductor applications, as well as to solving difficult "many-body" problems in high-energy physics, condensed matter and ultra-cold atoms. The theoretical breakthrough by Prokof'ev and ...

When people don't feel well, they see a doctor. They probably assume that the doctor will not spread anything to them to make them sicker. Ohio residents may be disturbed to find out that hygiene in hospitals is not as high of a priority as one would expect. Hospital-acquired infections are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. A 2004 study done by the American College of Physicians found that only 57 percent of doctors washed their hands when they were supposed to. The study also showed that the busier the doctor was and the more patients needing ...

New York, NY—March 18, 2012—As nanotechnology becomes ever more ubiquitous, researchers are using it to make medical diagnostics smaller, faster, and cheaper, in order to better diagnose diseases, learn more about inherited traits, and more. But as sensors get smaller, measuring them becomes more difficult—there is always a tradeoff between how long any measurement takes to make and how precise it is. And when a signal is very weak, the tradeoff is especially big. A team of researchers at Columbia Engineering, led by Electrical Engineering Professor Ken Shepard, together ...

When a proton – the bare nucleus of a hydrogen atom – transfers from one molecule to another, or moves within a molecule, the result is a hydrogen bond, in which the proton and another atom like nitrogen or oxygen share electrons. Conventional wisdom has it that proton transfers can only happen using hydrogen bonds as conduits, "proton wires" of hydrogen-bonded networks that can connect and reconnect to alter molecular properties. Hydrogen bonds are found everywhere in chemistry and biology and are critical in DNA and RNA, where they bond the base pairs that encode genes ...

DURHAM, N.C., AND SINGAPORE – A multi-national research team led by scientists at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School has identified the reason why some patients fail to respond to some of the most successful cancer drugs. Tyrosine kinase inhibitor drugs (TKIs) work effectively in most patients to fight certain blood cell cancers, such as chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), and non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC) with mutations in the EGFR gene. These precisely targeted drugs shut down molecular pathways that keep these cancers flourishing and include TKIs for treating ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University engineers believe that continued advances in creating ever-more exotic and sophisticated man-made materials will greatly improve their ability to control light at will. The burgeoning use of metamaterials in the field of optics does not rely on the limited set of materials found in nature, but rather man-made constructs that can be designed to control light's many properties. This control is gained by use of metamaterials, which are not so much single substances but entire man-made structures that can be engineered to exhibit properties ...

As we most of us already know, aging usually means we'll experience more problems with our hearing, vision and motor skills. In order to grow older safely, we must first recognize our vulnerabilities. Once we do this, we can adapt our behavior in order to create a safer environment for ourselves and everyone else. The following statistics shed light on the special safety issues facing seniors both behind the wheel and when walking around as pedestrians. Safety Issues for Senior Drivers/Pedestrians (Note: In 2009, approximately 40 million Americans were age 65 and ...

A paper published online today in Nature describes the results of using bone marrow transplant (BMT) to replace faulty immune system cells in models of Rett Syndrome. The procedure arrested many severe symptoms of the childhood disorder, including abnormal breathing and movement, and significantly extended the lifespan of Rett mouse models. Exploring the function of microglia deficient in methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (Mecp2), the protein encoded by the "Rett gene," principal investigator Jonathan Kipnis, Ph.D. and his team at the University of Virginia School of Medicine ...

House mice (Mus musculus) happily live wherever there are humans. When populations of humans migrate the mice often travel with them. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology has used evolutionary techniques on modern day and ancestral mouse mitochondrial DNA to show that the timeline of mouse colonization matches that of Viking invasion. During the Viking age (late 8th to mid 10th century) Vikings from Norway established colonies across Scotland, the Scottish islands, Ireland, and Isle of Man. They also explored the north ...

Microglia are the first line defence of the brain and are constantly looking for infections to fight off. Overactive microglia can cause uncontrolled inflammation within the brain, which can in turn lead to neuronal damage. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Journal of Neuroinflammation shows that, honokiol (HNK) is able to down-regulate the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and inflammatory enzymes in activated microglia via Klf4, a protein known to regulate DNA. Scientists from the National Brain Research Centre, Manesar, India, used ...

A 'see-sawing' atmosphere over 2.5 billion years ago preceded the oxygenation of our planet and the development of complex life on Earth, a new study has shown. Research, led by experts at Newcastle University, UK, and published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, reveals that the Earth's early atmosphere periodically flipped from a hydrocarbon-free state into a hydrocarbon-rich state similar to that of Saturn's moon, Titan. This switch between "organic haze" and a "haze-free" environment was the result of intense microbial activity and would have had a profound effect ...