Owing money to the IRS can be so daunting, so overwhelming, that it can literally take over your life. The whole idea of having to apply any income to unpaid taxes, usually with interest, creates a lot of problems with a lot of families. This is the tough situation Therese (Warren, MI) found herself in when she entered the offices of Blue Tax. She had a tax debt close to $27,000! All returns were filed and she was compliant with the IRS. The challenge was to prove to the IRS that Therese was in a hardship position and to try to place her into a Currently Non-Collectible ...

With just 30 days to go until the 2012 London Olympics, the finishing touches are being put to the greatest sporting spectacle on Earth as London prepares to wow the world. After hosting the Summer Games in 1908 and 1948, London is ready to take centre stage for the third time in history - an unprecedented landmark for what is arguably the most cosmopolitan city on the planet. But the next 30 days in London do not simply represent a month-long finger-twiddling vacuum to fill. Before the fabled Olympic flame is lit at Danny Boyle's "Green and Pleasant" British ...

The new GBP60 million Thames cable car spanning the river from the O2 Arena in Greenwich to the ExCeL Exhibition Centre opens at midday on Thursday 28th June. Sponsored by the Dubai-based airline Emirates, the Thames cable car will carry up to 2,500 passengers per hour in each direction (the equivalent of 50 buses) and will be accessible with an ever-trusty Oyster Card before, during and after the London Olympics. A single adult pay-as-you-go Oyster fare will cost GBP3.20 while the cash fare will be GBP4.30, Transport for London (TfL) said. Children under the age of ...

BEYOND Stores, one of the leading and most secure online furniture websites offering competitive prices, has announced that they are now carrying two additional furniture manufacturing companies: Modus Furniture International and Diamond Sofa. By expanding its product and offering with these two quality brands, BEYOND Stores continues to keep up with the latest trends in interior design. Modus Furniture International manufactures contemporary bedroom and dining room furniture, as well as top quality home entertainment systems. Diamond Sofa designs urban loft contemporary ...

Small-group-tour specialist Adventures Abroad Worldwide Travel is delighted to announce a brand new series of tours to North Korea, a landmark 'first' for the company, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The new North Korea tours provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit one of the most secretive and intriguing countries in the world; an organized tour is the only way to visit the DPRK--there is no alternative. North Korea is the second atypical destination to be added to Adventures Abroad's tour schedule in 2012; Iraqi Kurdistan tours have been ...

Squeeze on spending power remains as inflationary pressures ease The 0.3% decline in spending power, after inflation, illustrates that conditions for consumers remain tough largely due to weak income growth. On average, consumers had around GBP34 less to spend on non-essential items in May compared with the same time last year. Due to unseasonal weather and calendar effects, extra caution should be applied when interpreting recent short term movements in the data. However, it does appear that there were some positive signs for consumers in May as growth in essential ...

Robert Egby's seventh book in which he explores the peculiar earth energies and their powers of attraction and healing in the south-west has been published. Entitled "Holy Dirt, Sacred Earth: A Dowser's Journey in New Mexico" the author sets out by asking the question: Is there truth in the much talked about magnetism that has drawn so many personalities to northern New Mexico, the so-called Enchanted Land? D.H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Arnold Ronnebeck, Georgia O'Keefe, Carl Gustav Jung, Dennis Hopper were among the cutting edge celebrities who openly ...

Los Gatos Research (LGR), the leader in precision trace gas analyzers, has formally documented and independently validated a software analysis package that enables the company's water isotope analyzers to simultaneously measure multiple isotopic ratios directly from contaminated samples with high accuracy and without sample treatment or purification. LGR's Spectral Contamination Identifier (SCI) software, which LGR makes available at no additional cost to its users, has been documented in two independent peer-review journal publications(1,2) to reliably and accurately measure ...

A fungicide used on farm crops can induce insulin resistance, a new tissue-culture study finds, providing another piece of evidence linking environmental pollutants to diabetes. The results will be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston. "For the first time, we've ascribed a molecular mechanism by which an environmental pollutant can induce insulin resistance, lending credence to the hypothesis that some synthetic chemicals might be contributors to the diabetes epidemic," said investigator Robert Sargis, M.D., Ph.D., instructor in ...

Among children born full term, those conceived with the help of fertility drugs are slightly shorter than naturally conceived children but overall are physically healthy, a new study finds. Results of the study will be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston. "Reassuringly, these children remained well within the normal height range for both their sex and age," said researcher Tim Savage, MD, a pediatrician and research fellow at The Liggins Institute, University of Auckland, in Auckland, New Zealand. Because some studies have found ...

The hot flashes and night sweats that most women experience early in menopause are not linked to increased levels of cardiovascular disease risk markers unless the symptoms persist or start many years after menopause begins. These new study results will be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston. "Our study provides reassurance that the common experience of menopausal symptoms in early menopause is not associated with increases in blood pressure or other risk markers for cardiovascular disease," said lead researcher Emily Szmuilowicz, ...

An investigational parathyroid hormone replacement effectively treated a rare disorder characterized by low calcium and high phosphate levels in the blood, a new study finds. The results will be presented Saturday at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston. The parathyroid hormone replacement is called recombinant human parathyroid hormone, or rhPTH(1-84). It is produced in the lab using a replica of the human parathyroid hormone gene. rhPTH(1-84) is identical to the naturally occurring parathyroid hormone and acts to regulate calcium levels in the same ...

June 25, 2012 – The human gut is home to a teeming ecosystem of microbes that is intimately involved in both human health and disease. But while the gut microbiota is interacting with our body, they are also under constant attack from viruses. In a study published online in Genome Research, researchers have analyzed a bacterial immune system, revealing a common set of viruses associated with gut microbiota in global populations. Viruses that prey on bacteria, called phages, pose a constant threat to the health of bacterial communities. In many ecological systems, viruses ...

Nuremberg, Germany: The use of genome-wide array analysis[1] in parents whose children are suspected of having a genetic disease shows that the parents frequently also have previously undetected genetic abnormalities, a researcher from The Netherlands told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Sunday). Being aware of this is important to parents because it means that their risk of having another affected child is significantly increased. Dr. Nicole de Leeuw, a clinical laboratory geneticist in the Department of Human Genetics of the ...

Nuremberg, Germany: The first report of the diagnostic use of the technique of exome sequencing, where short sequences of DNA are analysed, shows that it can give good results at low cost, a researcher from The Netherlands will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Monday). The scientists were able to perform a genetic diagnosis in around 20% of 100 cases of patients with intellectual disability (ID) and 50% of the 25 cases of blindness studied. Not only is the exome test cheaper, but results are available more quickly than with ...

PITTSBURGH—With the University of Pittsburgh's development of a cell-free, biodegradable artery graft comes a potentially transformative change in coronary artery bypass surgeries: Within 90 days after surgery, the patient will have a regenerated artery with no trace of synthetic graft materials left in the body. Research published online June 24 in Nature Medicine highlights work led by principal investigator Yadong Wang, a professor in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering and School of Medicine's Department of Surgery, who designed grafts that fully harness the body's ...

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have zeroed in on a set of neurons in the part of the brain that controls hunger, and found that these neurons are not only associated with overeating, but also linked to non-food associated behaviors, like novelty-seeking and drug addiction. Published in the June 24 online issue of Nature Neuroscience, the study was led by Marcelo O. Dietrich, postdoctoral associate, and Tamas L. Horvath, the Jean and David W. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Research and chair of comparative medicine at Yale School of Medicine. In attempts to ...

Normally a material can be either magnetically or electrically polarized, but not both. Now researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have studied a material that is simultaneously magnetically and electrically polarizable. This opens up new possibilities, for example, for sensors in technology of the future. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Nature Materials. Materials that can be both magnetically and electrically polarized and also have additional properties are called multiferroics and were previously discovered ...

The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) is a concept at the heart of many health care reform models that aim to both improve the quality of care and reduce wasteful spending. But a new analysis of federally qualified health centers finds that clinics with higher scores as medical homes also had higher per-patient operating costs. The research, published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association and presented today at the AcademyHealth conference in Orlando, Fla., is the first national study to put a price on these additional costs. "We're not saying ...

Every day the human brain is presented with tasks ranging from the trivial to the complex. How much mental effort and attention are devoted to each task is usually determined in a split second and without conscious awareness. Now a study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers finds that a structure deep within the brain, believed to play an important role in regulating conscious control of goal-directed behavior, helps to optimize behavioral responses by predicting how difficult upcoming tasks will be. The report is receiving advance online publication ...

MADISON -- The blood-brain barrier -- the filter that governs what can and cannot come into contact with the mammalian brain -- is a marvel of nature. It effectively separates circulating blood from the fluid that bathes the brain, and it keeps out bacteria, viruses and other agents that could damage it. But the barrier can be disrupted by disease, stroke and multiple sclerosis, for example, and also is a big challenge for medicine, as it can be difficult or impossible to get therapeutic molecules through the barrier to treat neurological disorders. Now, however, the ...

CINCINNATI - New research in Nature Medicine shows that boosting a protein pathway in the body's blood making system protects mice from otherwise fatal radiation poisoning. Scientists in the multi-institutional study – posted online by the journal on June 24 – say their findings open the potential for new treatments against radiation toxicity during cancer treatment or environmental exposures – such as in a nuclear explosion or accident. By identifying a target-specific intervention to protect the hematopoietic system against radiation toxicity, the study addresses ...

Hemimegalencephaly is a rare but dramatic condition in which the brain grows asymmetrically, with one hemisphere becoming massively enlarged. Though frequently diagnosed in children with severe epilepsy, the cause of hemimegalencephaly is unknown and current treatment is radical: surgical removal of some or all of the diseased half of the brain. In a paper published in the June 24, 2012 online issue of Nature Genetics, a team of doctors and scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, ...

The vagaries of South Asian summer monsoon rainfall impact the lives of more than one billion people. A review in Nature Climate Change (June 24 online issue) of over 100 recent research articles concludes that with continuing rise in CO2 and global warming, the region can expect generally more rainfall, due to the expected increase in atmospheric moisture, as well as more variability in rainfall. In spite of the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 70 parts per million by volume and in global temperatures of about 0.50°C over the last 6 decades, the All India ...

Kyoto, Japan -- In what may prove to be a significant boon for industry, separating mixtures of liquids or gasses has just become considerably easier. Using a new process they describe as "reverse fossilization," scientists at Kyoto University's WPI Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) have succeeded in creating custom designed porous substances capable of low cost, high efficiency separation. The process takes place in the mesoscopic realm, between the nano- and the macroscopic, beginning with the creation of a shaped mineral template, in this case ...