New York, NY (May 3, 2012) — Blacks and Hispanics have a significantly higher risk of developing precancerous colorectal polyps compared with whites, according to a study by researchers at NewYork – Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. The findings appeared in the online edition of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics. "Our data suggest that we need to redouble our efforts to increase colon cancer screening in areas with large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities," said lead author Benjamin Lebwohl, MD, MS, assistant professor of clinical medicine ...

New York, NY (May 3, 2012) — Blacks and Hispanics have a significantly higher risk of developing precancerous colorectal polyps compared with whites, according to a study by researchers at NewYork – Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. The findings appeared in the online edition of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics. "Our data suggest that we need to redouble our efforts to increase colon cancer screening in areas with large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities," said lead author Benjamin Lebwohl, MD, MS, assistant professor of clinical medicine ...

A team led by Johns Hopkins engineers has discovered some previously unknown properties of a common memory material, paving the way for development of new forms of memory drives, movie discs and computer systems that retain data more quickly, last longer and allow far more capacity than current data storage media. The work was reported April 16 in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research focused on an inexpensive phase-change memory alloy composed of germanium, antimony and tellurium, called GST for short. The material is already ...

If you are one of the millions of Americans suffering from the pain of dry cracked skin, chances are you've searched the aisles of your local drug store for a cure only to be disappointed by product after product. And most likely you've invested hundreds of dollars over the years on lotions that just end up sitting on your bathroom shelves or in the trash. You are not alone. Wonder ingredients that go nowhere: The skin care industry is a multi-billion dollar industry with companies racing to create the newest wonder ingredients and fight for top celebrity endorsements ...

Two researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth have helped to identify switches that can turn on or off genes associated with colorectal cancer. The finding offers clues about the development of colorectal cancer and could—potentially—provide targets for new therapies. Jason Moore, Third Century Professor of genetics and the director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences, and Richard Cowper-Sal.lari, a graduate student in Moore's lab, were part of a team that included researchers from Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic. ...

Corcentric, a leading provider of Accounts Payable automation solutions, today announced Rob DeVincent will be co-hosting an educational session at the Institute of Financial Operations' 2012 Fusion Conference, the largest conference for AP professionals and professionals working in all areas of financial operations. The session titled "The Retail Advantage: Case Study on P2P Automation at The Children's Place," is session #1710 in the AP, P2P, and TAWPI focus disciplines. This session, which offers one Business Management and Organization credit to attendees, ...

Compared to the Q1 results of 2011, in which revenue was $75 million, the results for Q2 of 2012 is high at $94 million. One of the key factors that played a role in this rise was an increase in the number of players who signed up at 888 Holdings' sites. On March 31, 2012, the number of customers at 888's sites was close to 11.5 million. The number of players active at 888 Holdings' sites was 566,000 in the first three months of March 2012, which is a rise of 87% compared to the same point last year. According to a spokesperson for RealMoneyCasino.net, this is a ...

RENO, Nev. – From the highest peak in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney at 14,000 feet in elevation, to the 10,000-foot-peaks near Lake Tahoe, scientific evidence from the University of Nevada, Reno shows the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range is rising at the relatively fast rate of 1 to 2 millimeters every year. "The exciting thing is we can watch the range growing in real time," University of Nevada, Reno's Bill Hammond, lead researcher on the multi-year project to track the rising range, said. "Using data back to before 2000 we can see it with accuracy better ...

Traditional silicon-based integrated circuits are found in many applications, from large data servers to cars to cell phones. Their widespread integration is due in part to the semiconductor industry's ability to continue to deliver reliable and scalable performance for decades. However, while silicon-based circuits continue to shrink in size in the relentless pursuit of Moore's Law — the prediction that the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every two years — power consumption is rising rapidly. In addition, conventional silicon electronics ...

The German states will soon enact the new Interstate Treaty on Gambling, which will liberalise the German sports betting market starting in 2012. Liberalisation in general always sounds good, but the question is whether it will turn into a success story in Germany. Therefore, the consulting and research company MECN has analysed the situation in depth and compiled the most comprehensive and detailed report on the German betting and gambling market available. Liberalising a giant gambling market The discussion and legal disputes will surely continue in the coming months ...

PITTSBURGH—A doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips and a chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining or leaning forward are among the many possible applications of Touché, a new sensing technique developed by a team at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University. Touché is a form of capacitive touch sensing, the same principle underlying the types of touchscreens used in most smartphones. But instead of sensing electrical ...

Athens, Ga. – Low oxygen levels in cells may be a primary cause of uncontrollable tumor growth in some cancers, according to a new University of Georgia study. The authors' findings run counter to widely accepted beliefs that genetic mutations are responsible for cancer growth. If hypoxia, or low oxygen levels in cells, is proven to be a key driver of certain types of cancer, treatment plans for curing the malignant growth could change in significant ways, said Ying Xu, Regents-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and professor of bioinformatics and computational ...

Southwest Solutions Group has been selected as a key field sales and service organization for KardexRemstar products. Services include layout and design, installation, relocations, parts, and routine service and preventative maintenance agreements for KardexRemstar products. Products include Vertical Lift Modules (VLM), Vertical Storage and Retrieval Carousels (VSR), and Lektriever Series 80, 90, 2000 electric filing cabinets throughout the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. "As a full service KardexRemstar Dealer, we are pleased that ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed and published a new protocol for communicating with biometric sensors over wired and wireless networks—using some of the same technologies that underpin the web. The new protocol, called WS-Biometric Devices (WS-BD), allows desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones to access sensors that capture biometric data such as fingerprints, iris images and face images using web services. Web services themselves are not new; for example, video-on-demand services use web services to stream videos ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel way of producing light pulses that are "superluminal"—in some sense they travel faster than the speed of light.* The technique, called four-wave mixing, reshapes parts of light pulses and advances them ahead of where they would have been had they been left to travel unaltered through a vacuum. The new method could be used to improve the timing of communications signals and to investigate the propagation of quantum correlations. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, ...

A new study by a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) indicates that thin polymer films can have different properties depending on the method by which they are made. The results* suggest that deeper work is necessary to explore the best way of creating these films, which are used in applications ranging from high-tech mirrors to computer memory devices. Thin films spread atop a surface have many applications in industry. Inexpensive organic solar cells might be made of such films, to name one potential use. Typically ...

Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles up in the atmosphere. This electromagnetic signature, known as Schumann Resonance, had only been observed from Earth's surface until, in 2011, scientists discovered they could also detect it using NASA's Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a prototype bioreactor—a device for culturing cells to create engineered tissues—that both stimulates and evaluates tissue as it grows, mimicking natural processes while eliminating the need to stop periodically to cut up samples for analysis. Tissue created this way might someday be used to replace, for example, damaged or diseased cartilage in the knee and hip. Conventional methods for evaluating the development and properties of engineered tissue are time-consuming, destructive ...

In this month's grammar post we are taking another look at some frequently confused homophones. All of the homophones below have been recently spotted, used erroneously, in business communications or copy! Click here for our first homophones blog post, and here for our second. insure / ensure You only insure something in the legal sense - dealing with an insurance company. If you want to make sure something happens you will ensure it. Hence: You insure your car to ensure you will not lose out financially if it is stolen or damaged. precede / proceed If something ...

Radiologists and nuclear medicine physicians recommended additional imaging about 30% of the time in oncologic PET/CT reports, with about half of those recommendations being unnecessary, a new study shows. The study, conducted at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, included 250 patients. The study found that there were 84 recommendations made for additional imaging. When study reviewers examined the patients' records, they concluded that 43 of those recommendations were unnecessary, said Atul Shinagare, MD, one of the authors of the study. No adverse patient outcome ...

Short term follow-up of patients who have had a negative (benign) MRI-guided vacuum assisted breast biopsy may not be necessary, a new study indicates. The study, conducted at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, included 144 patients with 176 lesions that were followed anywhere from three months to 36 months. The study found no malignancies on follow-up MR imaging, said Jaime Geisel, MD, one of the authors of the study. Two patients had suspicious findings at follow-up and underwent a second biopsy six months after the initial biopsy; one yielded benign results and ...

Newly diagnosed breast cancer patients should undergo a preoperative MRI exam even if their breasts are not dense, a new study indicates. The study found no difference between the usefulness of 3T breast MRI in detecting additional malignancies and high risk lesions in dense versus non-dense breasts. "There are currently no guidelines that define the role of breast density in determining if a preoperative MRI should be performed. However, anecdotally, we know that preoperative MRI exams tend to be ordered more frequently in younger patients and/or patients with dense ...

The Balearic islands of Mallorca, Ibiza, Minorca and Formentera, along with mainland cities such as Barcelona, Valencia and Marbella can now be added to Europe's established 'charter' destinations. With the longest summer season in Europe, and reliable sunshine from April through until late Autumn, these exclusive destinations can now add as much as 75 days to the European cruising season - This now brings a season that incorporates Easter through until the famous "Club closing parties of Ibiza" and the late Autumn sunshine on the southern Iberian peninsula. ...

Advanced imaging has been identified as one factor that contributes to the overall rising cost of healthcare in the US. Unnecessary or inappropriate imaging utilization magnifies the cost burden associated with advanced imaging studies like MRIs and PET/CT scans. Though these studies often provide the best clinical information for making a diagnosis or planning treatment, experts suspect that a significant number of unnecessary studies are performed. Determining the rate of unnecessary imaging can help guide both policy-makers and physicians to develop guidelines that would ...

Comorbidities are common among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and a number of these comorbidities are independently associated with an increased mortality risk, according to a new study. "We followed 1,664 COPD patients recruited from five pulmonary clinics in the United States and Spain for a median of 51 months," said lead author Miguel Divo, MD, a physician in the Pulmonary and Critical Division at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Among the 79 comorbidites we observed in these patients, ...