The Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium (PGSC), a team of scientists from institutions worldwide, including Virginia Tech, has published its findings in the Sunday July 10 online issue of the journal Nature. The successful sequencing of the genome of the world's third most important crop began when Richard Veilleux, who is the Julian and Margaret Gary Professor of Horticulture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, wondered if the then new applications of plant tissue culture could be used to develop parent lines for hybrid potatoes. The concept ...

Becoming a Workamajig expert requires a replete understanding of the platform (Client Services, Project Management, Trafficking, CRM and Finance modules) and the rollout of the solution for a minimum of three agency clientele. We are extremely pleased, states Vanessa Edwards, President and Founder of CPI. "My journey with Workamajig began nearly five years ago, when I was searching for a solution to help improve my own agency's realization rates, drive efficiency and improve profitability. Post-adoption, our AGI went from 75% to 200% of the national average... providing ...

BURGESS, the superyacht leader, joins OCEANA's prestigious group of corporate donors and becomes active sponsors of the group's major events and activities. Partly founded by actor Ted Danson and recently named a 4-star charity for sound fiscal management, Oceana is the largest international advocacy group working solely to protect the world's oceans. The initial collaboration of the two organizations resulted in this year's highly successful "Bid To Save The Earth" Green Auction when heated bidding on a four day/three night BURGESS luxury yacht charter courtesy ...

Saranac Lake, N.Y. – New research from the Trudeau Institute may help to explain why anticoagulant therapies have largely failed to extend the lives of patients with sepsis. The study was led by Deyan Luo, a postdoctoral fellow in Stephen Smiley's laboratory. It shows that fibrin, a key product of the blood clotting process, is critical for host defense against Yersinia enterocolitica, a gram-negative bacterium that causes sepsis in humans and experimental mice. The new data will be published in the August 15 issue of The Journal of Immunology and is available now online ...

Applying a vaccine patch to the skin with thousands of tiny micro-needles could help boost the body's immune response and prevent the spread of life-threatening infections like HIV and TB, a major Cardiff University study aims to uncover. Professor Vincent Piguet from Cardiff University's School of Medicine, has been awarded almost a million dollars by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to examine how key immune cells in the skin can be targeted to cause the immune system to produce antibodies against infection. Recent advances in the prevention and treatment of ...

A new drug has recently been discovered in Russia, and is taking the country by storm. The drug is called krokodil or crocodile, named for the gruesome effects the drug has on the users' appearance. The skin of the user literally begins to rot. At the injection site, which can be anywhere where there is a suitable vein, the users complexion becomes greenish and scaly, like a crocodile's, blood vessels rupture and the skin tissue dies. Gangrene and amputations are a common result, bone tissue, especially in the lower jaw begins to deteriorate, slowly being disintegrated ...

College athletes tend to be less likely than their non-athlete peers to smoke marijuana. But when they do, they may have some different reasons for it, according to a study in the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Past studies have shown that athletes generally smoke marijuana less often than other college students do. "But there is still a pretty large number who choose to use it," said Jennifer F. Buckman, Ph.D., of the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Because marijuana could have ill health effects—and ...

Cancer is not invincible but its weaknesses can be difficult to detect. An effort known as Project Achilles — named after the Greek warrior whose one vulnerability led to his undoing — was launched to develop a systematic way of pinpointing these weak spots. In their largest and most comprehensive effort to date, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute examined cells from over 100 tumors, including 25 ovarian cancer tumors, to unearth the genes upon which cancers depend. One of these genes, PAX8, is altered in a significant ...

Researchers have discovered that a protein found in the walls of blood vessels plays a key role in maintaining healthy blood pressure; a discovery that could one day lead to new treatments for people with high blood pressure. The research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the British Heart Foundation (BHF), shows that malfunction of the protein – a potassium channel called Kv7.4 – contributes to the maintenance of high blood pressure. The discovery is published this evening (2100hrs, 11 July) in the journal Circulation. Dr ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 11, 2011 – In people with Parkinson's Disease (PD), the inability to make quick movements limits basic functioning in daily life. Movement can be improved by various cueing techniques, such as providing visual or auditory stimuli when movements are started. In a study scheduled for publication in the August issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, researchers report that virtual reality (VR) and physical reality exercises can be used to provide effective stimuli to increase movement speeds in PD patients. Investigators from ...

A freeroll tournament requires no buy-in and anyone can play it for free. Because of the lack of deposit, playing freerolls is really a win-win situation as you can earn money without losing a single penny. Such tournaments are excellent for novice poker players who are new to the game and these tournaments are good enough to improve a player's skills in a poker game. When playing free poker, there are certain approaches a player needs to learn in order to play the game strategically, and learning these can take some time. To get better, play freerolls and gain experience ...

Tampa, Fla. (July 11, 2011) – A team of researchers from Spain and Switzerland have developed a new model for studying the development of testicular germ cell tumors by transplanting embryonic stem cells into the seminiferous tubules in mouse models, resulting in the development of testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT) that mimic the early stages of TGCT development. The study, published in Cell Transplantation (20:5), is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/. "Over the last fifteen years, cell transplantation into seminiferous tubules ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Which U.S. metro region is most likely to come out of the next recession, natural disaster or other regional "shock" relatively unscathed? Rochester, Minn. A little more battered might be College Station-Bryan, Texas. These two regions are ranked first and last, respectively, by a new online tool measuring more than 360 U.S. metros for their "regional resilience," or capacity to weather acute and chronic stresses ranging from gradual economic decline to rapid population gains to earthquakes and floods. The Resilience Capacity Index (RCI), developed ...

Since 2008, Habitatter.com has been offering the highest quality in home decorating accessories, and Good Night Irene! has been with them since the beginning. Good Night Irene! is a one-woman studio in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina who has been creating imaginative switch plates since 1992. Her designs reflect nature and all have texture to thrill your hands as well as your eyes. These light switch plates are made with polymer clay, a versatile and durable synthetic material, and cured directly onto plastic switch plates to ensure a perfect fit. All good things ...

A difficult-to-treat form of childhood leukemia relies on changes in the structure of DNA – so-called epigenetic changes – to wreak genomic havoc within white blood cells, according to one of two studies conducted by a research team at Children's Hospital Boston and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Together with collaborators from a biotechnology company, the same team also showed that a new drug that blocks these changes could deactivate cancer-promoting genes and halt the growth of this cancer. These studies, reported in a pair of papers in the July 11, 2011 issue of Cancer ...

Tampa, Fla. (July. 11, 2011) – A study published in the current issue of Cell Transplantation (20:5) investigating optimal routes for transplanting neural stem/progenitor cells (NS/PCs) in animal models of spinal cord injury (SCI) has demonstrated that intralesional (IL) injection conferred benefits over intravenous injection (IV) and intrathecal (IT) injection. The study, by a team of Keio University (Japan) researchers, is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/ . "Spinal cord injury usually results in severe, paralytic damage ...

They may not dress like Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez, but parents are a whole lot like their teenagers when it comes to their behaviour on Facebook. That's the finding of a new study by University of Guelph researchers. Parents are just as likely as their kids to disclose personal information on the social networking site, according to the research, which will be published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science and is available online now. And (gasp!) mom and dad are just as susceptible to the need for popularity. "Facebook is not just a phenomenon ...

Tampa, Fla. (July 11, 2011) – Two papers published in the current issue of Cell Transplantation (20:5), now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/, highlight the therapeutic potential of human Sertoli cells that are present in the testes and are also called "nurse" or "mother" cells because they nurture the developing sperm cells. Sertoli cells form the blood-testes barrier that separates the blood compartment of the testes from the compartment of the seminiferous tubules. Once differentiated to form the blood-testes barrier, Sertoli cells ...

WASHINGTON – Pets can serve as important sources of social and emotional support for "everyday people," not just individuals facing significant health challenges, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. And, the study found, pet owners were just as close to key people in their lives as to their animals, indicating no evidence that relationships with pets came at the expense of relationships with other people, or that people relied more on pets when their human social support was poorer. Psychologists at Miami University and Saint ...

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana University and Regenstrief Institute researchers report that it takes significantly longer for orders to forgo resuscitation in the event of cardiac arrest to be written for patients who had that decision made for them by a surrogate decision-maker compared to patients who made their own decisions, even though patients with a surrogate were sicker and the resuscitation issue might arise sooner. Among patients who died, patients with a surrogate had a shorter time frame between writing the DNR order and time of death compared to patients who made ...

Researchers in the US are testing biofilter systems as a viable alternative to releasing methane from passive landfill vents into the atmosphere. The technology could reduce the overall impact of old landfills on global warming. Details are reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Environmental Engineering. Organic matter rotting in smaller, old landfill sites generates a slow trickle of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, into the atmosphere, amounting to just 2 or 3 kilograms per day per vent. In contrast to controlled methane generate for biofuel ...

Carlos Bello, executive director of the Mexican Federation of Aerospace Industries, recently sat down with The Offshore Group to discuss the current state of affairs in Mexico's rapidly developing aerospace sector. During the session, Bello informed that Mexico is currently home to 232 aerospace and aerospace industry related companies that employ a combined 29,000 workers. According to Bello, "In recent years, aerospace manufacturing in Mexico has been "experiencing a growth rate of about 20% annually, with the exception of 2009, which was a difficult year ...

Alexandria, VA – China sent the high-tech industry and markets reeling last fall when it blocked exports of raw rare earth minerals to Japan, Europe and the U.S. The sudden severing of rare earths supply was a frightening prospect as the minerals are key ingredients in a broad range of high-tech products, from smartphones to wind turbines and hybrid cars. Although the bans have since been lifted, governments around the world saw the ban as a kind of wake-up call and started looking at ways to develop their own mineral resources — for rare earths as well as basic industry ...

Tel Aviv — Most marketing departments work hard to establish a flawless reputation for their product or service. But new research from Tel Aviv University is showing that perfection is not all it's cracked up to be. Dr. Danit Ein-Gar of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Management at the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, working in collaboration with Baba Shiv and Zakary Tormala from Stanford University, has uncovered the "blemishing effect," a counterintuitive benefit of negative information. When utilized in the right way, she says, a small flaw ...

TORONTO, Ont., July 11, 2011—More patients are tested and treated for osteoporosis when fracture clinics have someone dedicated to screening for the bone disease, a new study has found. Those patients also do better when the clinic actually provides bone mineral density (BMD) testing or prescription drug treatment as part of its program rather than just referring fracture patients elsewhere. Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital led by Joanna Sale, a clinical epidemiologist, reviewed osteoporosis screening and management programs involving patients treated for fragility ...