Standards of care in children's intensive care units come under scrutiny in a new audit report published today by the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester. The report, commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership and carried out by the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) showed that death rates in children's intensive care units are low and continue to fall. However, there continues to be a higher risk of mortality for children of south Asian origin observed in earlier years. This national audit also found that only 5 children's ...

Montreal, September 13, 2012 – Share and share alike is a concept we all learn as youngsters. Of course, when it comes to something as personal – and expensive – as a car, sharing's not so easy. Due to rising fuel costs hitting hard, increased concerns about the environment and overcrowded cities, car-sharing services like Communauto are becoming a popular way to get around. Can they be more popular still? Researchers from the Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering can answer this question with a resounding "yes." They have piloted a computer model that ...

Every year, nervous high school juniors and seniors, clutching #2 pencils and armed with hours of test preparation, sit down and take the SAT. At their most basic, these tests focus on verbal, math, and writing ability, and performance on these tests has been linked to subsequent academic performance. As a result, college admissions teams use SAT scores along with other information, such as high school grades, in choosing their incoming freshman classes. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the SAT has been the subject of much scrutiny. Some researchers have asserted ...

CHICAGO --- More can be done to properly manage the care of American children with food allergies, especially when it comes to diagnostic testing and recognizing non-visual symptoms of severe allergic reactions, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. "Every child with a food allergy should be diagnosed by a physician, have access to life-saving medication such as an epinephrine autoinjector and receive confirmation of the disease through diagnostic testing," said lead author Ruchi Gupta, M.D., an associate professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg ...

Toronto – Tax collectors and insurance agencies trying to boost honest reporting could improve compliance simply by asking people to sign their forms at the beginning instead of at the end. That's because attesting to the truthfulness of the information before a form is filled out tends to activate people's moral sense, making it harder for them to fudge their numbers after, says a new paper. "Based on our previous research we knew that an honour code is useful, but we were wondering how much the location mattered," says Nina Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing ...

Tropical Storm Sanba exploded in intensity between Sept. 12 and 13, becoming a major Category 4 Typhoon on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data that showed a large area of powerful thunderstorms around the center of circulation, dropping heavy rain over the western North Pacific Ocean. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Sanba on Sept. 13 at 0447 UTC (12:47 a.m. EDT). The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of Sanba and found an eye about 20 nautical miles (23 miles/37 km) wide, surrounded ...

AMHERST, Mass. – In the fight against cancer, knowing the enemy's exact identity is crucial for diagnosis and treatment, especially in metastatic cancers, those that spread between organs and tissues. Now chemists led by Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a rapid, sensitive way to detect microscopic levels of many different metastatic cell types in living tissue. Findings appear in the current issue of the journal ACS Nano. In a pre-clinical non-small-cell lung cancer metastasis model in mice developed by Frank Jirik and colleagues ...

A new study finds that smart growth approaches to urban planning could substantially reduce the number of miles that residents drive in a year. The research was published this week in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. Smart growth focuses on the development of compact, walkable cities with houses and jobs located close together. By shortening residents' commutes, this form of urban design aims to cut transportation-related energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. California is already pursuing smart growth in order to meet emissions reductions set by the ...

Tropical Storm Nadine is struggling against wind shear and some dry air. Infrared satellite imagery from NASA showed that Nadine's most powerful thunderstorms were being pushed east of the center. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Nadine early on Sept. 13 and saw several factors that indicated the storm was still struggling to achieve hurricane status. Infrared data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) that flies aboard Aqua found the strongest thunderstorms with very cold cloud temperatures (colder than -63F/-52C) were being pushed east of Nadine's ...

Gardeners and landscapers may want to rethink their fall tree plantings. Warming temperatures have already made the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new cold-weather planting guidelines obsolete, according to Dr. Nir Krakauer, assistant professor of civil engineering in The City College of New York's Grove School of Engineering. Professor Krakauer developed a new method to map cold-weather zones in the United States that takes rapidly rising temperatures into account. Analyzing recent weather data, he overhauled the Department of Agriculture's latest plant zone map released ...

Researchers have developed new software that can rapidly calculate the carbon footprints of thousands of products simultaneously, a process that up to now has been time consuming and expensive. The methodology should help companies to accurately label products, and to design ways to reduce their environmental impacts, said Christoph Meinrenken, the project's leader and associate research scientist at Columbia University's Earth Institute and Columbia Engineering. A new study, published online in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, describes the methodology. The project ...

In a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 12, 2012, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled a new laboratory designed to demonstrate that a typical-looking suburban home for a family of four can generate as much energy as it uses in a year. Following an initial year-long experiment, the facility will be used to improve test methods for energy-efficient technologies and develop cost-effective design standards for energy-efficient homes that could reduce overall energy consumption and harmful pollution, and save families money ...

Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a novel technology that can fabricate, in mere seconds, microscale three dimensional (3D) structures out of soft, biocompatible hydrogels. Near term, the technology could lead to better systems for growing and studying cells, including stem cells, in the laboratory. Long-term, the goal is to be able to print biological tissues for regenerative medicine. For example, in the future, doctors may repair the damage caused by heart attack by replacing it with tissue that rolled off of a printer. Reported ...

Children of immigrants are outperforming children whose family trees have deeper roots in the United States, learning more in school and then making smoother transitions into adulthood, according to sociologists at The Johns Hopkins University. Researchers Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo tracked nearly 11,000 children from as young as age 13 into their early 30s, coming from families with diverse backgrounds. When comparing children with similar socioeconomic status and school conditions, Hao and Woo found that the best students, and later the most successful young adults, ...

With sea ice in the Arctic melting to record lows in summer months, marine animals living there face dramatic changes to their environment. Yet some crustaceans, previously thought to spend their entire lives on the underside of sea ice, were recently discovered to migrate deep underwater and follow ocean currents back to colder areas when ice disappears. "Our findings provide a basic new understanding of the adaptations and biology of the ice-associated organisms within the Arctic Ocean," said Mark Moline, director of the University of Delaware's School of Marine Science ...

Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. —Voltaire In the first scientific study to test whether doubts about getting married are more likely to lead to an unhappy marriage and divorce, UCLA psychologists report that when women have doubts before their wedding, their misgivings are often a warning sign of trouble if they go ahead with the marriage. The UCLA study demonstrates that pre-wedding uncertainty, especially among women, predicts higher divorce rates and less marital satisfaction years later. "People think everybody has ...

KANSAS CITY, Kan.—A new study finds that Americans living in rural areas are more likely to be obese than city dwellers. Published in the National Rural Health Association's Fall 2012 Journal of Rural Health, the study indicates that residential location may play an important role in the obesity epidemic. Led by researchers at the University of Kansas, the study analyzed data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and is the first in more than three decades to use measured heights and weights. Previous studies have relied on self-reported data, which typically ...

Adult cystic fibrosis (CF) patients of low socioeconomic status (SES) have a greater chance of not being accepted for lung transplant after undergoing initial evaluation, according to a new study. "While earlier studies have indicated that SES does not affect access to care for cystic fibrosis, ours is the first study to examine the relationship between SES and access to lung transplantation in these patients," said lead author Bradley S. Quon, MD, MSc, MBA, of the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. "In our nationally representative sample of adult patients ...

Four outstanding New Zealand employees within Choice hotels were celebrated with highly coveted awards at the tenth Choice Hotels Australasia annual conference in Melbourne this week. The 2012 Champions of Choice Award recipients from New Zealand were: Olivier Lacoua, General Manager at Quality Hotel Wellington; Carlyn McClintock, Sales and Marketing Manager for Clarion Suites Highview; Wayne Darbyshire, General Manager for Quality Hotel Barrycourt; and Hammond Cardon, General Manager at Quality Hotel Lincoln Green. The winners were chosen from the 270 properties throughout ...

Housing experts from Shea Homes San Diego will offer advice and field questions from first-time and move-up buyers during a free Homebuying Workshop at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 22. The event is open to all San Diego County residents and is conveniently located in Mission Valley at Shea's Origen community at Civita. The one-hour seminar will focus on key strategies to help achieve home ownership and examine mortgage programs now available to first-time buyers, members of the military, those looking to move up into larger homes, and for those that have gone through a ...

Beverly Hills hotspot brow bar Billion Dollar Brows receives a much needed "brow lift" for their website http://www.billiondollarbrows.com. To kickoff the launch, BDB is offering fans an exclusive 30% discount code available through Facebook (www.facebook.com/billiondollarbrows) on their popular brow kit, Three Steps to Beautiful Brows. The breakthrough website offers an exciting shopping experience complete with the entire line of Billion Dollar Brows product offerings, customer testimonials that include an interactive slider to show before/after brow transformations ...

Recognized as a AAA Four Diamond Hotel, Hilton Orlando is located in the heart of the city near famous attractions, fine dining, and entertainment, making it an ideal venue for couples planning an elegant affair or a destination wedding. Indian weddings vary in size with anywhere from 300 to 2,000 or more guests attending. Hilton Orlando's three spacious ballrooms and several outdoor areas can accommodate up to 4,000 guests serving as an ideal venue. As Indian weddings consist of at least three events, Hilton Orlando's myriad of spacious, well-designed, and tastefully ...

Vision Dream Technology (http://www.visiondream.net.my), a nationwide e-commerce and customized solutions provider, announced the debut of their new online SMS service, AuraSMS (http://www.aurasms.com ). AuraSMS (http://www.aurasms.com), is an online 2-in-1 business SMS tool that provides businesses the ease, convenient and the most affordable way of communicating to their customers. "AuraSMS ties the knot for businesses who want bulk SMS as well as premium SMS (or sometimes called 2-way SMS). It provides a full end to end marketing communication tool" said ...

Have just availed of Shoebooks online accounting and bookkeeping software? Do you or your staff still need to be trained on your Shoebooks online accounting software? Don't worry as Shoebooks offers free online webinars and training sessions of their online accounting software! Shoebooks, Australia's leading Australian-owned web-based bookkeeping and accounting solution provider for SME Businesses that is known to provide the simplest and most comprehensive and flexible yet affordable web accounting and bookkeeping software that enables you to take your business accounts ...

The Penn State Los Angeles Alumni is proud to announce that they will be hosting an advance screening of the film "Why We Dance: The Story of THON," a documentary that chronicles the 46-hour Penn State Dance Marathon (THON), the children, families, and students who are changed by their experience this Saturday, September 15, 2012. THON is the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. The Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon, affectionately known as THON, is a yearlong effort to raise funds and awareness for the fight against pediatric cancer, which ...