The streets of Singapore are to burst into life on February 3rd and 4th when the Chingay 2012 parade is held.   An annual cultural extravaganza, Chingay sees lavish floats and performers showcasing the multicultural nature of Singapore, entertaining visitors with shows by local and international performers.   The name of the event means "the art of masquerade" in the Chinese Hokkien dialect, with the parade having grown in size and scope since its inception as a neighbourhood celebration in 1973, attracting 150,000 spectators in 2011.   This year's Chingay ...

Visitors to Malaysia will be able to take in the unique spectacle of the Pasir Gudang World Kite Festival this February, a regular annual fixture of the region since 1995.   The 17th edition of the popular event runs from February 15th to 19th and will see the skies above Johor filled with colourful kites of all shapes and sizes.   Last year, the festival saw more than 180 international kite flyers from 25 countries attending in order to take part in competitions, demonstrations and amazing ground displays.   It begins with a parade in which participants demonstrate ...

Petrolheads are being encouraged to take part in the Phuket Classic Car New Year Trophy 2012, which will be taking place on January 22nd this year.   The competition is the first event to be organised by local automobile enthusiast community Classic Car Club Phuket in 2012, with proceedings to get underway at 11:00 local time on the Sunday morning.   It involves an exciting rally race around the north-eastern part of Phuket island, which combines high-octane racing action with some relaxing breaks in idyllic parts of the tropical location.   Competitors will be challenged ...

On January 4th, 2012, the Morrison County Rural Development Finance Authority presented Al Kuebelbeck, President of Larson Boats, a check for $500,000 as a loan for the Triumph Boats expansion. As the funds are paid back to the Rural Development Finance Authority they will be used to assist other businesses in Morrison County. Kuebelbeck stated, "I especially appreciate the efforts of Carol Anderson at Morrison Community Development, the community of Little Falls, and other organizations who partnered with us to provide additional funding to work with Larson Boats ...

Eco Bay Home is proud to announce the availability of its new iPad 2 case made from Premium eco-friendly Cork. The Eco Bay Home Cork iPad 2 case is truly a stand-out environmentally friendly product in a market with few real eco-friendly choices. "We are proud to offer this iPad 2 case made from our premium eco-friendly cork which we have been told is one of the most beautiful iPad 2 cases on the market. Our Cork iPad 2 case is uniquely designed so the cover folds back and sets up as a flip stand to enable horizontal viewing on the iPad 2 of any movies, TV shows ...

One issue that motorists across the US often ignore is temporary coverage when they travel from one state to another. Driving a car comes with inherent risks, which is why it is important to possess adequate car insurance. In a recent article published by Insure4USA.com, an independent online insurance service, the firm emphasizes the importance of temporary coverage for motorists travelling between states. According to Alex, CEO of Insure4USA.com, it is essential that drivers understand the type of insurance packages available in terms of period of coverage. The article ...

After a natural disaster, one often hears business leaders optimistically talk about rebuilding and emerging stronger than before. But deep inside one wonders how doable it will be, no matter how noble the intent, or how much a person admires the determination. The story of one Union, New Jersey-based company, however, can make a believer out of the most skeptical among us. Hurricane Irene caused major damage to the robust and diverse packaging distributor, O.Berk Company, Inc. In a matter of hours, this 101-year-old company was inundated by the historic and destructive ...

Medical Doctor Associates (MDA) announced today, that in honor of its 25th year as one of the nation's oldest and well-respected locum tenens providers of medical staffing solutions to hospitals, medical practices and governmental agencies, the company is introducing a new brand identity. In addition to a refreshed color palette and a new logo featuring intertwined circles symbolizing MDA's dedication to partnership, the company also is launching an updated website. The website address remains the same at www.mdainc.com. The new brand identity and accompanying website ...

Alexandria, VA –What is the lifespan of a natural gas deposit? How quickly is our planet's permafrost melting? And does life exist on other planets? Although seemingly unrelated issues, the answers to these questions are linked. And in this month's issue of EARTH Magazine, scientists show that we may be closer to answering them than we think. Ten years ago, John Eiler, a geochemist at Caltech, couldn't convince anyone to build him his dream machine. He wanted a mass spectrometer that could measure the mass of common gases with extreme precision and sensitivity. Using ...

(Boston) – A review article by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) debunks the widely-believed concept that hypertension, or high blood pressure, is the result of excess salt causing an increased blood volume, exerting extra pressure on the arteries. Published online in the Journal of Hypertension, the study demonstrates that excess salt stimulates the sympathetic nervous system to produce adrenalin, causing artery constriction and hypertension. The research was led by Irene Gavras, MD, and Haralambos Gavras, MD, both professors of medicine at BUSM. ...

ATLANTA –January 11, 2012– Updated guidelines on nutrition and physical activity for cancer prevention from the American Cancer Society stress the importance of creating social and physical environments that support healthy behaviors. The report includes updated recommendations for individual choices regarding diet and physical activity patterns, but emphasizes that those choices occur within a community context that can either help or hinder healthy behaviors. The updated guidelines include recommendations for community action to accompany the four major recommendations ...

Troy, N.Y. – A scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an anthropologist from the University at Albany teamed up to use ultra-modern chemical analysis technology at Rensselaer to analyze ancient Mayan pottery for proof of tobacco use in the ancient culture. Dmitri Zagorevski, director of the Proteomics Core in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer, and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, have discovered the first physical evidence of tobacco in a Mayan container. Their discovery ...

Why do heavy coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, a disease on the increase around the world that can lead to serious health problems? Scientists are offering a new solution to that long-standing mystery in a report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry. Ling Zheng, Kun Huang and colleagues explain that previous studies show that coffee drinkers are at a lower risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90-95 percent of diabetes cases in the world. Those studies show that people who drink four or more cups of coffee daily ...

Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, "Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf." Now, a new study is finally offering an explanation for why small dew drops do as Tagore advised and form on the tips, rather than the flat surfaces, of leaves. It appears in ACS' journal Langmuir. In the study, Martin E. R. Shanahan observes that drops of water have a preference for exactly where they collect on leaves as their surfaces cool in the morning and afternoon. Those droplets, which condense from water vapor — moisture — in the ...

Scientists are reporting development and initial laboratory tests of an imaging agent that shows promise for detecting the tell-tale signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the brain — signs that now can't confirm a diagnosis until after patients have died. Their report appears in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Masahiro Ono and colleagues explain that no proven laboratory test or medical scan now exists for AD, which is claiming an increasingly heavy toll with the graying of the world's population. Patients now get a diagnosis of AD based on their medical history ...

Promoting immunizations as a part of routine office-based medical practice is needed to improve adult vaccination rates, a highly effective way to curb the spread of diseases across communities, prevent needless illness and deaths, and lower health care costs, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Increasingly, vaccinations are being offered outside of physician offices at pharmacies, workplaces and retail medical clinics. Even so, office-based medical practice continues to be central to the delivery of recommended vaccinations to adults. "Regardless of where vaccines ...

Similar to the way pavement, softened by a hot sun, will slow down a car, graphene—a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon with wondrous properties—slows down an object sliding across its surface. But stack the sheets and graphene gets more slippery, say theorists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who developed new software to quantify the material's friction. "I don't think anyone expects graphene to behave like a surface of a three-dimensional material, but our simulation for the first time explains the differences at an atomic scale," says NIST ...

A new clinical Standard Reference Material (SRM) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will help health care professionals more accurately diagnose and treat cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common pathogen that is particularly dangerous for infants and persons with weakened immune systems. CMV is found in 50 to 80 percent of the population. It is a member of the herpes family of viruses that includes two herpes simplex viruses (the causes of cold sores and genital herpes), the varicella-zoster virus (the cause of chicken pox and shingles) and the Epstein-Barr ...

With a random-looking spatter of paint specks, a pair of cameras and a whole lot of computer processing, engineer Mark Iadicola of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been helping the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), in cooperation with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), to assure the safety of hundreds of truss bridges across the United States. Iadicola has been testing the use of a thoroughly modern version of an old technique—photographic measurement or "photogrammetry"—to watch the failure ...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has developed two new Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) for measurements of human exposure to environmental toxins. Used as a sort of chemical ruler to check the accuracy of tests and analytic procedures, the new reference materials replace and improve older versions, adding measures for emerging environmental contaminants such as perchlorate, a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has targeted for regulation as a contaminant ...

The chemical industry, which touches 96 percent of all manufactured goods, is seeing some positive signs for 2012, although the overall outlook is not very rosy. Growing demand for chemicals used in agriculture, electronics, cars and airplanes will boost an industry that generates $674 billion in sales in the U.S. alone, but expiring patents and global economic woes will take a toll. These forecasts and others are in the cover story in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific ...

Imagine the following scenarios: a co-worker is spoken to condescendingly, excluded from a meeting, or ignored by a supervisor. How does it make you feel? Do you feel differently depending on whether your co-worker is a man or a woman? According to a new study, workers who witness incivility towards colleagues feel negative emotions – especially when the incivility is aimed at workers of the same sex. The work, by Kathi Miner from Texas A&M University and Angela Eischeid from Buena Vista University, Iowa, is the first to look at the relationship between employees' observations ...

Astronomers using the partially completed ALMA observatory have found compelling evidence for how star-forming galaxies evolve into 'red and dead' elliptical galaxies, catching a large group of galaxies right in the middle of this change. For years, astronomers have been developing a picture of galaxy evolution in which mergers between spiral galaxies could explain why nearby large elliptical galaxies have so few young stars. The theoretical picture is chaotic and violent: The merging galaxies knock gas and dust into clumps of rapid star formation, called starbursts, ...

A better understanding of the universe will be the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, according to a team of University of Oklahoma researchers. The team predicts the discovery will lead to supersymmetry or SUSY—an extension of the standard model of particle physics. SUSY predicts new matter states or super partners for each matter particle already accounted for in the standard model. SUSY theory provides an important new step to a better understanding of the universe we live in. Howard Baer, Homer L. Dodge Professor of High Energy Physics in the OU Department ...

Tropical Storm Heidi is forecast to make landfall today along the Pilbara coast of Western Australia as warnings pepper the coast. NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead early in the day and captured a visible image showing Heidi's center still north of the Pilbara coast, while her outer bands continue to bring rainfall and gusty winds to coastal residents. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Heidi on January 11, 2012 at 02:30 UTC (Jan. 10 at 10:30 a.m. EST) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer captured a visible image of the storm. The image showed that ...