It's summer wildflower season in the Rocky Mountains, a time when high-peaks meadows are dotted with riotous color. But for how long? Once, wildflower season in montane meadow ecosystems extended throughout the summer months. But now scientists have found a fall-off in wildflowers at mid-season. They published their results, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the current issue of the Journal of Ecology. "Shifts in flowering in mountain meadows could in turn affect the resources available to pollinators like bees," says David Inouye of the University ...

BATON ROUGE – LSU Department of Physics Professors Thomas Kutter and Martin Tzanov, and Professor Emeritus William Metcalf, along with graduate and undergraduate students, have been working for several years on an experiment in Japan called T2K, or Tokai to Kamioka Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment, which studies the most elusive of fundamental subatomic particles – the neutrino. The team announced they have an indication of a new type of neutrino transformation or oscillation from a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino. In the T2K experiment in Japan, a ...

It has a number of hotels throughout the city and the boutique hospitality has provided the brand with a major facelift over the years. Being a highly recognized hotel chain it mainly has hotels in the Central London area which is one of the popular most areas of the city. The various London Hotel plans or packages which the group promotes consists a pool of new offers and discounts. These new offers and discounts are available at the various hotels of the group located in the different parts of the city. The London Club Rooms are one of the newest additions to the ...

A gel that creates a watertight seal to close surgical wounds provides a significant advance in the treatment of patients following spinal procedures, effectively sealing spinal wounds 100 percent of the time, a national multicenter randomized study led by researchers at UC Davis has found. The substance, a polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogel sealant, plugs miniscule leaks in the thin sheath inside the spinal column that encloses the spinal cord, called the dura. The spinal cord and nerves float in cerebrospinal fluid inside the sheath. The gel is an important step forward ...

Chevy Chase, MD – Diabetes leaders today are responding to the announcement made by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday that the use of the diabetes medication Actos (pioglitazone) for more than one year may be associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer. According to the FDA's Safety Announcement, information about this risk will be added to the Warnings and Precautions section of the label for pioglitazone-containing medicines. The patient Medication Guide for these medicines will also be revised to include information on the risk of bladder ...

PHILADELPHIA - There are ten microbial cells for every one human cell in the body, and microbiology dogma holds that there is a tight barrier protecting the inside of the body from outside invaders, in this case bacteria. Bacterial pathogens can break this barrier to cause infection and senior author Jeffrey Weiser, MD, professor of Microbiology and Pediatrics from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and first author Thomas Clarke, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Weiser lab, wondered how microbes get inside the host and circulate in the ...

The Pillars Hotel is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a "2011 Certificate of Excellence" award from TripAdvisor. This prestigious certificate is awarded to member properties of TripAdvisor who consistently receive excellence ratings from travelers around the world. To qualify, the property is expected to maintain an average rating of 4 or higher out of the possible 5, as reviewed by travelers on TripAdvisor. Additional criteria include the volume of reviews and how recent these reviews are submitted by TripAdvisor travelers. In addition, The Pillars ...

Imagining something with our mind's eye is a task we engage in frequently, whether we're daydreaming, conjuring up the face of a childhood friend, or trying to figure out exactly where we might have parked the car. But how can we tell whether our own mental images are accurate or vivid when we have no direct comparison? That is, how do we come to know and judge the contents of our own minds? Mental imagery is typically thought to be a private phenomenon, which makes it difficult to test people's metacognition of – or knowledge about –their own mental imagery. But a novel ...

The bacteria that cause Lyme disease, one of the most important emerging diseases in the United States, appear to hide out in the lymph nodes, triggering a significant immune response, but one that is not strong enough to rout the infection, report researchers at the University of California, Davis. Results from this groundbreaking study involving mice may explain why some people experience repeated infections of Lyme disease. The study appears online in the journal Public Library of Science Biology at: http://tinyurl.com/3vs8pm9. "Our findings suggest for the first ...

When Hansel and Gretel ventured into the forest, they left a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way home. In today's world, cellular phones, Global Positioning System (GPS), WiFi, and Bluetooth are the digital signals that connect us to friends, family, and colleagues while helping us find our location and map our routes. Yet, despite the ubiquity of such devices, with few exceptions, today's firefighters still rely on 20th-century radios, whose outdated analog signals have trouble penetrating debris and concrete. When a firefighter heroically plunges into a smoke-filled ...

The largest fire in the history of the state of Arizona continues to burn and emergency managers and responders are using satellite data from a variety of instruments to plan their firefighting containment strategies and mitigation efforts once the fires are out. The Landsat 5 satellite captured images of the Wallow North and Horseshoe 2 fires burning in eastern Arizona on June 15, 2011 at 19:54:23 Zulu (3:54 p.m. EDT). Both images are false-colored to allow ease of identification of various objects that will help firefighters and emergency managers. In the images burn ...

DALLAS – June 16, 2011 – UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists are shedding new light on why the anesthetic drug ketamine produces a fast-acting antidepressant response in patients with treatment-resistant depression. The drug's robust effect at low doses as a fast-acting antidepressant potentially has use in emergency rooms with high-risk patients. "Ketamine produces a very sharp increase that immediately relieves depression," said Dr. Lisa Monteggia, associate professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study published June 15 in Nature. Typical ...

A newborn described as a "happy blue baby" because of her bluish skin color but healthy appearance made a small mark in medical history when one of her physicians discovered something new in her genes—the hemoglobin Toms River mutation. Scientists have identified hundreds of mutations in genes that carry instructions for producing hemoglobin—the four-part protein that carries oxygen in everyone's red blood cells. By tradition, whoever discovers a mutation in hemoglobin genes names it after the hometown of the patient, said pediatric hematologist Mitchell J. Weiss, M.D., ...

Although most teens have the knowledge and reasoning ability to make decisions as rationally as adults, their tendency to make much riskier choices suggests that they still lack some key component of wise decision making. Why is this so? Because adolescents may not bother to use those thinking skills before they act. That's the finding of a new study by researchers at Temple University that appears in the journal Child Development. "The study's findings have important implications for debates about whether adolescents should be held to the same standards of criminal and ...

Home learning experiences that are consistently supportive in the early years may boost low-income children's readiness for school. That's the finding of a new longitudinal study that appears in the journal Child Development. The study was done by researchers at New York University based on research conducted as part of the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, which is funded by the Administration for Children and Families. The study was also supported by the National Science Foundation. Previous research has found that on average, children living ...

We know that poor social and physical environments can harm young children's cognitive and behavioral development, and that development often improves in better environments. Now a new study of children living in institutions has found that intervening early can help young children develop language, with those placed in better care by 15 months showing language skills similar to children raised by their biological parents. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota, Ohio University, The Ohio State University, ...

Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. "Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering. Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published ...

ATLANTA – June 17, 2011 – A steady reduction in overall cancer death rates translates to the avoidance of about 898,000 deaths from cancer between 1990 and 2007, according to the latest statistics from the American Cancer Society. However, the report, Cancer Statistics 2011, and its companion consumer publication Cancer Facts & Figures 2011 find that progress has not benefitted all segments of the population equally. A special section of the report finds cancer death rates for individuals with the least education are more than twice those of the most educated and that closing ...

A multicenter pilot study of etanercept for treatment of dermatomyositis found no major safety concerns and many patients treated with the drug were successfully weaned from steroid therapy. These results are encouraging, but larger studies are needed to further investigate the safety and efficacy of etanercept. Results of this clinical trial are available in Annals of Neurology, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Neurological Association. Dermatomyositis is a type of inflammatory myopathy that causes inflammation and progressive weakness ...

A Spanish-language version of the popular MyPlate poster and handouts tablet is now available from Learning ZoneXpress. MyPlate is the USDA's new healthy eating guide, replacing the familiar but confusing food pyramid. MyPlate clearly shows that half of all food intake should be fruits and vegetables, with the other half split between grains and protein-rich foods. It also encourages choosing fat-free or low-fat dairy products. It was unveiled on June 2 by First Lady Michelle Obama, who has repeatedly promoted better eating and healthier living - especially for children ...

A team of social scientists and medical and nursing researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom has pinpointed how a programme, which ran in more than 100 hospital intensive care units in Michigan, dramatically reduced the rates of potentially deadly central line bloodstream infections to become one of the world's most successful patient safety programmes. Funded in part by the Health Foundation in the UK, the collaboration between researchers at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Leicester and the University of Pennsylvania, has led to a deeper ...

A large, national multi-center study of thousands of children taken to emergency departments with minor blunt head trauma has found that most of those with normal computed tomography (CT) scans do not require hospitalization for further observation. Of the more than 13,500 children included in the study, less than 1 percent had subsequent abnormal CT scans or MRIs and none required neurosurgical intervention. The study was conducted under the auspices of the groundbreaking Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN). It is published online today in the ...

A new study published today in the journal Child Development (e-publication ahead of print) finds that having a poor "gut sense" of numbers can lead to a mathematical learning disability and difficulty in achieving basic math proficiency. This inaccurate number sense is just one cause of math learning disabilities, according to the research led by Dr. Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Approximately 6 to 14 percent of school-age children have persistent difficulty with mathematics, despite adequate learning opportunities and age-appropriate achievement ...

The Innovative 21st Century Enlightenment Conference hosted by RCIGI offers the "ultimate solutions" to the "widespread lies, deceit, cheat, dirty games, criminality, fraud, corruption megalomania, perversion, madness, lunacy, greed, and narcissism that currently celebrate their global culmination". RCIGI calls on future leaders in every field of society to attend the conference that plans to expose amongst other elements the "frightening and horrifying development of humanity and the planet", the "challenge for the leaders of tomorrow; ...

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