COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research suggests that some patients develop a potentially deadly blood infection from their implanted cardiac devices because bacterial cells in their bodies have gene mutations that allow them to stick to the devices. Patients with implants can develop infections because of a biofilm of persistent bacterial bugs on the surfaces of their devices. Researchers found that some strains of the bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, have just a few genetic variants in the proteins on their surfaces that make them more likely to form these biofilms. The research ...

US Chemicals isn't your typical multi-million dollar chemical corporation. From a staff that's made up of roughly 80 percent women to corporate nutritionists to entryway waterfalls, the Darien, Conn. based company is really one-of-a-kind. CEO Carol Piccaro, daughter of founder Howard T. Von Oehsen, wouldn't have it any other way. "Corporate wellness is really important to me," Picarro explains. "Stress can kill you. We've tried to develop a different type of workplace here, and I think it really has a lot to do with wellness and performance and all ...

Originally founded as Blackman Field Services in 1989, Inter-Chillers has since seen its name change, but its commitment to excellence in the field of Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR) continues to prosper throughout the reaches of Australia. Based in Sydney and with an office in Melbourne, the company has extensive experience in the HVACR field, with over 800 years of accumulated knowledge in the industry. Graeme Blackman founded the company on the values of hard work and dedicated customer service, and those sentiments are clearly seen ...

Patients who take at least one blood pressure-lowering medication at bedtime have better control of their blood pressure and are less likely to experience heart problems than patients who take medications in the morning Sleep-time blood pressure is a better measure of heart health than wake-time blood pressure About one out of three U.S. adults has high blood pressure Washington, DC (Monday, October 24, 2011) — It's better to take blood pressure-lowering medications before bed rather than first thing in the morning, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue ...

Patient characteristics affect whether dialysis clinics achieve treatment success and receive Medicare reimbursement How well kidney disease patients follow their prescribed treatments has the greatest impact Dialysis clinics in low-income urban areas provide care to more patients who don't follow their prescribed treatments; these clinics get unfairly penalized Washington, DC (Monday, October 24, 2011) — Dialysis clinics that provide care to kidney disease patients who cannot or will not follow their prescribed treatments will be penalized under a new Medicare payment ...

Washington, DC -- Babies born with autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease (ARPKD) often develop kidney failure because they have very large kidneys filled with tiny cysts. Even with excellent medical care, about 30% die shortly after birth. New research now provides clues into how gene defects may cause this condition, which occurs in 1 out of 20,000 newborns. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN), a publication of the American Society of Nephrology. Mutations in a gene named PKHD1 cause ARPKD, but it's ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Infectious films of Staph bacteria around an implanted cardiac device, such as a pacemaker, often force a second surgery to replace the device at a cost of up to $100,000. But not all implanted cardiac devices become infected. Now researchers from Duke University Medical Center and Ohio State University (OSU) have discovered how and why certain strains of Staphylococcus aureus (SA) bacteria, the leading cause of these device infections, have infected thousands of implanted cardiac devices. About 4 percent of the 1 million annually implanted devices become ...

Rats exposed to an antidepressant just before and after birth showed substantial brain abnormalities and behaviors, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. After receiving citalopram, a serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), during this critical period, long-distance connections between the two hemispheres of the brain showed stunted growth and degeneration. The animals also became excessively fearful when faced with new situations and failed to play normally with peers – behaviors reminiscent of novelty avoidance and social impairments seen in ...

In a report in Energy Digital, the City of Kingston explains that through a cooperation among City, community and business Kingston is on its way to becoming the most energy efficient municipality in Canada. The City of Kingston is heavily focused on creating a more sustainable community. Through promotion of LEED construction, collaboration with community partners and the encouragement of renewable energy use, Kingston is already on its way to becoming the most sustainable municipality in Canada for generations to come. The City of Kingston's green initiatives are ...

The SHAW Center for Aesthetic Enhancement (www.theshawcenter.com) is the first plastic surgery practice to add CoolSculpting by Zeltiq to it's list of fat reduction, body contouring procedures in the Scottsdale / Phoenix Metro area. With over twenty-five years of body contouring experience, Dr. Lawrence W. Shaw, a Scottsdale plastic surgeon, feels there is definitely a place for this non-invasive fat reduction procedure in his busy plastic surgery practice. "I've been looking for many years, without success, to find an effective, scientifically proven, non-surgical ...

VIDEO: Using carbon nanotubes bent to act as springs, Stanford researchers have developed a stretchable, transparent skin-like sensor. The sensor can be stretched to more than twice its original length and... Click here for more information. Imagine having skin so supple you could stretch it out to more than twice its normal length in any direction - repeatedly - yet it would always snap back completely wrinkle-free when you let go of it. You would certainly never need ...

Soft matters maintain their structures via weak interactions, such as Van der Waals, capillary, hydrogen bonds etc. The entropy plays a key role in the ordering of this kind of materials. They behave as a solid until a sufficiently large stress is applied, and then behave as a viscoelastic liquid. Due to the unique structures and rheological properties, soft matter such as concentrated suspensions, emulsions, pastes and gels often exhibit unusual slow relaxation and aging effect. Studying the relaxation dynamics may gain more insight into the microstructure of the material ...

Introducing heterogeneities into the structure is an effective way to enhance the plasticity of metallic glasses (MGs). The original randomly distributed free volume in MGs, a natural heterogeneity, has been found to promote plasticity. However, the exact correlation between the free volume distribution and mechanical response is still unclear. Professor Dai Lanhong and his group from the State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, set out to tackle this problem. They investigated the shear banding in MGs with different ...

When Aaron & Sophia Rashkin began their first online business with CarbonCopy PRO Elite back in August of 2008, they had no idea that their persistence and tenacity would become their biggest allies en route to internet marketing success. The couple had a background in traditional multi-level marketing, but after building an organization of over 10,000 distributors and still hardly being able to pay for their two kids, two cars and two mortgages, they took their desire to become financially free to the internet. Recently named "Marketing Partners of the ...

"We have investigated the cycling of molybdenum (Mo) in ancient oceans by studying the elemental and isotopic composition of Mo in sedimentary rocks from Grand Canyon that formed in the oceans 750 million years ago", explains Tais W. Dahl, who did this research in collaboration with researchers from Arizona State University, Harvard University and the Nordic Center of Earth Evolution in Denmark (NordCEE). Molybdenum tracks the presence of poisonous sulfide in ancient oceans The study uses a new method to determine the extent of anoxia and presence of sulfide in the ...

CHICAGO - Five years ago, Sheri Scott was beginning a new chapter in her life. The recently engaged 31-year-old was eagerly browsing bridal magazines and busy planning for her big day. Unfortunately, just weeks following her engagement, Scott was diagnosed with breast cancer. Suddenly, she was juggling medical appointments and planning a double mastectomy instead of a wedding. Soon after her diagnosis, Scott was approached by her doctor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital about preserving her fertility. He explained that cancer treatment could compromise her fertility and ...

Boston, MA – Age- related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of severe visual loss among the elderly. Researchers had previously identified several relatively common genetic variants which together predict a person's increased risk for AMD, but a significant number of persons without the disease also have these variants. Now, for the first time, investigators have been able to clearly show a specific rare mutation called CFH R1210C that predicts a very high risk of disease and is extremely uncommon among individuals who do not have the disease. Although it ...

This press release is available in German. The heat which occurs in tiny computer processors might soon be no longer useless or even a problem. On the contrary: It could be used to switch these processors more easily or to store data more efficiently! These are two of the several potential applications made possible by a discovery made at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). This so-called "thermoelectric voltage" may well be very interesting – mainly for the use of nano-junctions, i.e. small components based on magnetic tunnel structures. The results obtained ...

The Fontainebleau Miami Beach condo hotel is one of the hottest properties in the South Florida real estate market today and Reiner Perez of Turnberry International Realty now offers the most comprehensive listings you can find online. His new website offers all of the current resales and updates with the newest listings as soon as they hit the market. Reiner has been with the Fontainebleau condo hotel project since its inception and nobody has a more detailed and intimate knowledge of this property and how the resale and rental programs work. Reiner has sold more than ...

This press release is available in Spanish. The study, recently published in the journal Climatic Change, is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between two researchers: one is UC3M Professor Santiago Fernández Muñoz, who has worked in the area of geographic history under the direction of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Professor Josefina Gómez Mendoza; the other is Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC – Spanish National Research Council) ecologist Juli Pausas. Specifically, the authors constructed a complete database of historical fires ...

There is an increasing need for pharmacological tools for biomedical and translational research applications. The field of diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) has been very fruitful in providing access to numerous new molecules with diverse shapes and chemical structures in order to discover candidate molecules for therapeutic use. Boston University researchers, in a paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry [23 OCTOBER 2011 | DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.1178], present a new approach to accessing new, biorelevant structures by "remodelling" natural products. In this case, they ...

Jerusalem -- Instinctive mothering behavior towards care of newborns has long been recognized as a phenomenon in humans and animals, but now research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has shown that motherhood is associated with the acquisition of a host of new behaviors that are driven, at least in part, by alterations in brain function. The research, by Dr. Adi Mizrahi of the and Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and the Silberman Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University, has just been published in the journal Neuron. It provides insight ...

Chapel Hill, NC – In a study published today in the journal Nature Genetics, a group of scientists including UNC biologist Jason Lieb, PhD, present experiments supporting a longstanding hypothesis that explains how males can survive with only one copy of the X chromosome. The finding provides clarity to a hotly debated topic in science and provides biologists with more information to interpret experiments involving genetic measurements in males and females. "The issue is important because many diseases are tied to a defect in a regulatory mechanism within the cell," said ...

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is critical to online marketing today. Good SEO can strengthen an organization's search engine ranking, enabling a self-employed small businessperson to jump ahead of even a major multinational corporation in search engine rankings. No longer does an organization's promotional outreach have to be limited by its resources. Los Angeles SEO Company, Avital Web, announces its new, free SEO services to help companies of all sizes reach their Internet marketing goals. Google SEO may be one of the biggest predictors of a website's success, ...

Athens, Ga. – Increasing acidification in coastal waters could compromise the ability of oysters and other marine creatures to form and keep their shells, according to a new study led by University of Georgia researchers. Their findings will be published in the November 2011 issue of Nature Geoscience. The researchers determined the combined effects of fertilizer runoff carried by the Mississippi River to the northern Gulf of Mexico and excess atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels result in an unexpected increase in the acidity of Gulf waters. "Before, ...