Preliminary results from a 2011 survey conducted by researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) suggest the production of a strong class of young-of-year striped bass in the Virginia portion of Chesapeake Bay. The 2011 year class represents the group of fish hatched this spring. The results are good news for the recreational and commercial anglers who pursue this popular game fish because this year class is expected to grow to fishable size in 3 to 4 years. The results are also good news for Chesapeake Bay, where striped bass play an important ecological ...

An international research team has discovered that a pervasive human RNA modification provides the physiological underpinning of the genetic regulatory process that contributes to obesity and type II diabetes. European researchers showed in 2007 that the FTO gene was the major gene associated with obesity and type II diabetes, but the details of its physiological and cellular functioning remained unknown. Now, a team led by University of Chicago chemistry professor Chuan He has demonstrated experimentally the importance of a reversible RNA modification process mediated ...

Innovative video effects creator and technology developer NewBlue, Inc. announces the inclusion of their new Titler Pro with Vegas Pro 11 from Sony, along with 13 other NewBlue plug-ins from 6 best-selling video plug-in collections. NewBlue Titler Pro (MSRP $299.95) is designed for the professional editor's schedule; to make it easy for editors to quickly create 2D & 3D graphics on a timeline. Titler Pro title animations use the computer's GPU to blend sophisticated 3D modeling with 2D raster processing to generate imagery in real time. Titler Pro also boasts an ...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12, 2011 — As millions of acres of farmland in the U.S. Midwest and South recover from Mississippi River flooding, scientists report that river flooding can increase levels of potentially harmful flame retardants in farm soils. But the higher levels apparently do not find their way into the milk produced by cows that graze on these lands. That's the reassuring message in the latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) award-winning "Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions" podcast series. Iain Lake, Ph.D., notes in the podcast that the flame ...

Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have identified a set of genes that act in muscles to modulate aging and resistance to stress in fruit flies. Scientists have previously found mutations that extend fruit fly lifespan, but this group of genes is distinct because it acts specifically in muscles. The findings could help doctors better understand and treat muscle degeneration in human aging. The results were published online this week by the journal Developmental Cell. The senior author is Subhabrata Sanyal, PhD, assistant professor of cell biology at ...

Designing a vessel to meet a tonnage parameter has proven to be the bane of designers, builders and owners since the earliest days of the maritime industry. Today, regulations initially established over 140 years ago in a surveyor's office in London can dramatically affect the construction of virtually every commercial vessel at work in the United States. "Every boat needs to have a tonnage certificate for whatever its type of function and any modification to a vessel can result in ramifications to the tonnage certificate," said David Krapf, editor in chief ...

An amorphous diamond – one that lacks the crystalline structure of diamond, but is every bit as hard – has been created by a Stanford-led team of researchers. But what good is an amorphous diamond? "Sometimes amorphous forms of a material can have advantages over crystalline forms," said Yu Lin, a Stanford graduate student involved in the research. The biggest drawback with using diamond for purposes other than jewelry is that even though it is the hardest material known, its crystalline structure contains planes of weakness. Those planes are what allow diamond ...

Canada Drug Pharmacy offers Wellbutrin XL at a cheaper price, much cheaper when compared to purchasing the same drug from traditional retail stores. As more and more people turn to the internet to shop online, they are also searching for ways to save money. One of the benefits of buying Canadian drugs from CanadaDrugPharmacy.com is that the price of prescription medications is cheaper than traditional brick and mortar pharmacies. Purchasing online is also convenient since the consumers don't have to leave their house to buy their medicine. Customers can now log-in to Canada ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Bad mortgage loans and rampant consumer debt were two of the primary causes for the recent economic recession in the U.S. Despite a national trend of debt problems, a University of Missouri researcher has found one American population that holds almost no consumer debt outside of typical home mortgages. Rui Yao, an assistant professor of personal financial planning in the College of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Missouri, found that while 72 percent of Chinese-American households hold a mortgage, only five percent of those households ...

UPTON, NY - It's a basic technique learned early, maybe even before kindergarten: Pulling things apart - from toy cars to complicated electronic materials - can reveal a lot about how they work. "That's one way physicists study the things that they love; they do it by destroying them," said Séamus Davis, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the J.G. White Distinguished Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University. Davis and colleagues recently turned this destructive approach - and a sophisticated tool for "seeing" ...

Saranac Lake, N.Y.—Research underway at the Trudeau Institute could lead to new treatments for people sickened by Listeria and other sepsis-causing bacteria. Dr. Stephen Smiley's laboratory has published a study in the scientific journal Infection and Immunity that supports a new approach to treating these infections. Listeria can cause serious illness, especially among the elderly, the very young and those with compromised immune systems. The bacteria can also cause significant complications in pregnant women, including miscarriage. The CDC is reporting that one miscarriage ...

Building on earlier work showing how nanowires carved in impurity-laden diamond crystal can efficiently emit individual photons, researchers have developed a scalable manufacturing process to craft arrays of miniature, silver-plated-diamond posts that enable even greater photon control. The development supports efforts to create robust, room-temperature quantum computers by setting the stage for diamond-based microchips. Additionally, the technology could support new tools capable of measuring magnetic fields at the nanometer scale. Appearing early online in Nature ...

Katy Water Heaters, a full-service residential and commercial water heater repair and installation Katy plumbing company founded by master plumber Steve Williams announces the launch of our new website. Potential and existing customers can go to http://katywaterheaters.com/ to locate the plumber Katy services they need and request service via our online form or by calling us at (832) 886-4282. Whether you own a tankless, solar, or conventional water heater, Katy Water Heaters has over 20 years of experience installing, repairing and replacing any type of water heater ...

A discovery by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies might explain why some premature infants fail to respond to existing treatments for a deadly respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and offers clues for new ways to treat the breathing disorder. The scientists identified a new form of RDS in newborn mice and traced the problem to a cellular receptor for thyroid hormone, a key player in many developmental processes in the body. They found that two drugs used for treating overactive thyroid glands saved mice with a deadly genetic alteration that mimicked ...

BOSTON - Since the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended all babies should be placed on their backs to sleep in 1992, deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome have declined dramatically. But sleep-related deaths from other causes, including suffocation, entrapment and asphyxia, have increased. In an updated policy statement and technical report, the AAP is expanding its guidelines on safe sleep for babies, with additional information for parents on creating a safe environment for their babies to sleep. "We have tried to make it easier for parents and providers ...

The search marketing agency SEO PAL says that with the growing popularity of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), there is a wide spread misconception that those services are really expensive and only big companies can afford them. SEO PAL offers search engine optimization services for any market World Wide, with prices starting from just 1000 euro per month. Although, no one can guarantee the first positions in the Google organic search results, we are going to increase the traffic to your website with more than 100% within the period ...

BOSTON -- The temptation to rely on media screens to entertain babies and toddlers is more appealing than ever, with screens surrounding families at home, in the car, and even at the grocery store. And there is no shortage of media products and programming targeted to little ones. But a new policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says there are better ways to help children learn at this critical age. In a recent survey, 90 percent of parents said their children under age 2 watch some form of electronic media. On average, children this age watch ...

Public health experts writing in this week's BMJ say the prime minister was wrong to claim they support the government's health reforms. Last week over 400 public health doctors, specialists, and academics from across the country wrote an open letter to the House of Lords stating that the Health and Social Care Bill will do "irreparable harm to the NHS, to individual patients and to society as a whole," that it will "erode the NHS's ethical and cooperative foundations and that it will not deliver efficiency, quality, fairness or choice." The Prime minister claimed that ...

Whole communities in Africa could be protected from pneumococcus by immunising young children A study led by the Medical Research Council in The Gambia in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and published in this week's PLoS Medicine shows for the first time in Africa, that vaccinating young children against the pneumococcus (a bacterium that can cause fatal infections) causes a herd effect in which the entire community is protected against this infection. In a randomised, controlled trial involving 21 villages in rural Gambia, the authors ...

Using outbreak data from 2003-2010, Kathleen O'Reilly of Imperial College London, UK and colleagues develop a statistical model of the spread of wild polioviruses in Africa that can predict polio outbreaks six months in advance. The authors' findings, published in this week's PLoS Medicine, indicate that outbreaks of polio in Africa over the study period resulted mainly from continued transmission in Nigeria and other countries that reported polio cases, and from poor immunization status. The authors highlight how the geographical risk of polio is changing over time in ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Francesca Celletti from the WHO, Geneva, Switzerland and colleagues argue that a transformation in the scale-up of medical education in low- and middle-income countries is needed. Such a transformative approach would require inter-sectoral engagement to determine how students are recruited, educated, and deployed and would assign greater value to the impact on population health outcomes as one of the criteria used for measuring excellence in educational initiatives. The authors say: "strategies to improve retention and increase student numbers ...

Young genes that appeared after the primate branch split off from other mammal species are more likely to be expressed in the developing human brain, a new analysis finds. The correlation suggests that evolutionarily recent genes, which have been largely ignored by scientists thus far, may be responsible for constructing the uniquely powerful human brain. The findings are published October 18 in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology. "We found that there is a correlation between new gene origination and the evolution of the brain," said senior author Manyuan Long, ...

Researchers from Sweden have uncovered an association between shift work and increased risk of multiple sclerosis (MS). Those who engage in off-hour employment before the age of 20 may be at risk for MS due to a disruption in their circadian rhythm and sleep pattern. Findings of this novel study appear today in Annals of Neurology, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Neurological Association and Child Neurology Society. Previous research has determined that shift work—working during the night or rotating working hours—increases the risk of ...

New research into evolutionary psychology suggests that physical stature affects our preferences in political leadership. The paper, published in Social Science Quarterly, reveals that a preference for physically formidable leaders, or caveman politics, may have evolved to ensure survival in ancient human history. The paper, published by Gregg R. Murray and J. David Schmitz, from Texas Tech University, focuses on evolutionary psychology, the study of universal human behavior which is related to psychological mechanisms which evolved to solve problems faced by humans in ...

Virginia Tech released today results from the first study ever to instrument child football helmets. Youth football helmets are currently designed to the same standards as adult helmets, even though little is known about how child football players impact their heads. This is the first study to investigate the head impact characteristics in youth football, and will greatly enhance the development of improved helmets specifically designed for children. The Auburn Eagles, a local, Montgomery County, Va., youth team consisting of 6 to 8 year old boys, has participated in ...