COLUMBIA, Mo. – Despite billions of dollars spent on health care each year, the United States ranks 27th out of 33 developed countries for life expectancy at birth. Leading causes of infant mortality are complications related to pre-term birth or low birth weight-outcomes that have been linked with domestic violence. A University of Missouri researcher says a key factor in addressing this issue is preventing violence against mothers and children. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released "Healthy People 2020", a 10-year plan for improving the health ...

Montreal, June 7, 2011 – Sex work is unprotected, increasingly dangerous and needs to be decriminalized, according to a new report published in the Canadian Review of Sociology. Co-authored by Concordia University and University of Windsor researchers, the study calls for sweeping changes to sex work performed on and off the streets. "We must not only change our laws, we must also revamp our attitudes and implement policies that protect the social, physical and psychological rights of sex workers," says first author Frances Shaver, chair and professor in Concordia's ...

Macmillan has revealed the line-up for Macmillan's Big Mix 2011, featuring a number of acts including musicians, comedians, fashion designers and artists. The event will take place on Saturday 18 June across venues in Shoreditch. First lady of festivals and BBC Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman will be gracing the decks on the night, playing her pick of the latest and greatest from the world of indie and alternative music. Edith, a long time supporter of Macmillan, said: "I love how Macmillan have put the Big Mix together - they've got everything in there from folk artists ...

Europcar, the leader in car hire services in Europe for both leisure and business users, just made car hire easier, with the launch of its new freeDeliver service. Now customers hiring a car for two days or more can sit back and Europcar will deliver it to their door as well as collect it when their trip is finished - at no extra charge. The new, unique, service reflects Europcar's sustained commitment to bring travellers added value on every booking. freeDeliver offers Europcar customers the convenience of free car hire delivery and collection to their home address, ...

In work published in the June 2011 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, Kolossov, Spring and their co-investigators - a multidisciplinary team within the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois - have transferred the concept of redox-sensitive Green Fluorescent Proteins (GFPs) to a quantitative Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) imaging platform. For the FRET-based sensors, a change in redox induces a conformational change in a redox-sensitive switch that links two fluorescent proteins (the donor and acceptor), changing their distance, which ...

As it turns out, humans aren't the only organisms that turn to caffeine for a pick-me-up. University of Iowa scientists have identified four different bacteria that actually can live on caffeine. One of them, known as Pseudomonas putida CBB5, was found in a flowerbed outside a UI research laboratory. The research team says the discovery -- and the new understanding of how the process works -- could in the future allow scientists to convert waste from leftover coffee, tea and even chocolate into useful substances, like pharmaceuticals, animal feed or biofuels. Previous ...

Confused.com has revealed the unluckiest make of car in the UK by looking at 12 months' worth of customers quotes and finding out which make and model had the highest accident rates. Top of the list was Honda's FR-V six-seater. 2,529 owners of this vehicle made 466 accident claims in the past five years. That's a claim rate of 18.4 per cent, or almost one in five. Next came Volvo's XC90. Of the 3,886 drivers of this model who bought cover through Confused.com, 619 made claims for accidents - a rate of 15.9 per cent. The Lexus RX had a claim rate of 15.5 per cent ...

As warm weather arrives and the great outdoors beckons, more and more men and women will be taking to the trails, the beaches, or their yards and gardens, embarking on physical activities that may result in sore, aching, swollen joints. While it may be tempting to ignore these aches and pains or treat them with a little over-the-counter liniment, a wiser choice is to visit a physician who can determine if the symptoms are due to bursitis, inflammation of the fluid-filled bursae, or sacs, that surround and cushion the joints. Bursitis occurs when the bursae become irritated ...

June 6, 2011 – (BRONX, NY) – Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed a desktop genome analyzer and browser that allows biologists to rapidly and easily analyze and process their high-throughput data. The open-source software, called GenPlay, is described in the May 19 online edition of Bioinformatics. Currently, genomic data is analyzed mainly by information specialists rather than by the biologists who designed the experiments that produce the data. GenPlay was created with the goal of offering biologists a user-friendly, ...

VIENNNA, Austria – At the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) meeting this week, American researchers are unveiling a new tool for detecting illegal nuclear explosions: the Earth's global positioning system (GPS). Even underground nuclear tests leave their mark on the part of the upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere, the researchers discovered, when they examined GPS data recorded the same day as a North Korean nuclear test in 2009. Within minutes on that day, GPS stations in nearby countries registered a change in ionospheric electron density, ...

Measured in billionths of a meter, self-assembling nano-sized devices designed to carry drugs and imaging agents into the body are revolutionizing medicine by improving drug solubility and bio-distribution, providing a platform for combining targeting and imaging agents, and enabling membrane barriers to be crossed as well as making drug and imaging agent combination therapies possible. Self-assembling nano devices are now enlisted in the nanomedicine revolution, a story as told by researchers from Duke University and the University of Southern California in an article ...

ExpertPages.com, the first and leading online directory for expert witnesses and consultants in litigation and forensic matters, today announced the release of its much anticipated iPhone and iPad ExpertFinder App. ExpertFinder enables attorneys and legal professionals to effortlessly and effectively identify and contact highly qualified experts from the palm of their hand. The ExpertFinder App is available to lawyers and legal professionals for free in the App Store. The no cost download can be accessed on iTunes at http://expertpages.com/press/expertfinder.htm. ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A new drug to treat prostate cancer shows early promise, particularly against tumors that have spread to the bone, a multi-site study shows. The drug Cabozantinib is designed to target mainly two important pathways linked to the growth and spread of prostate cancer. The drug had the most effect on tumors that had spread to the bone. "Not only did three-quarters of bone scans have partial or complete resolution, but this was accompanied by improvement in bone pain and decreased need for narcotic use," says lead study author Maha Hussain, M.D., FACP, ...

Selling PS: It's So Sunny!, one of the Palm Springs area's most creative real estate marketing brands, has added Market Snapshot to their already user friendly website. In an ongoing effort to enhance the consumer's experience on the website (http://www.SellingPS.com), Market Snapshot provides valuable and timely data, allowing consumers to simply click on the icon and instantly compare home prices in their neighborhood and get community and school information as well. Market Snapshot provides up-to-the minute MLS graphical reports - automatically delivered and ...

New research focusing on the Houston area suggests that widespread urban development alters weather patterns in a way that can make it easier for pollutants to accumulate during warm summer weather instead of being blown out to sea. The international study, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), could have implications for the air quality of fast-growing coastal cities in the United States and other mid-latitude regions overseas. The reason: the proliferation of strip malls, subdivisions and other paved areas may interfere with breezes needed to ...

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite called TRMM has the ability to see rainfall rates and heights of thunderstorm clouds within a tropical cyclone, and data from the satellite confirmed a "hot tower" near the center of the first tropical depression of the eastern Pacific Hurricane Season. Tropical Depression 1E formed when the low pressure area called System 91E strengthened overnight. Today, June 7, Tropical Depression 1E (TD1E) was located about 365 miles (590 km) south of Acapulco, Mexico near 11.6 North and 100.0 West. It had maximum sustained winds ...

PHILADELPHIA - Dieticians will tell you it isn't healthy to eat late at night: it's a recipe for weight gain. In fruit flies, at least, there's another consequence: reduced fertility. That's the conclusion of a new study this week in Cell Metabolism by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in which they manipulated circadian rhythms in fruit flies and measured the affect on egg-laying capacity. Lead author Amita Sehgal, PhD, John Herr Musser Professor of Neuroscience, stresses, though, that what is true in flies grown in ...

GALVESTON, Texas — A universal influenza vaccine targeting a protein common to all strains of influenza A has safely produced an immune response in humans. If proven effective, the vaccine could eliminate the practice of creating a new flu vaccine annually to match predicted strains, with major implications for global health. The results of the clinical trials, led by the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in collaboration with biotechnology company VaxInnate and funded by $9.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, were published today ...

Cue the surfing music. Scientists have spotted the iconic surfer's wave rolling through the atmosphere of the sun. This makes for more than just a nice photo-op: the waves hold clues as to how energy moves through that atmosphere, known as the corona. Since scientists know how these kinds of waves -- initiated by a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability if you're being technical -- disperse energy in the water, they can use this information to better understand the corona. This in turn, may help solve an enduring mystery of why the corona is thousands of times hotter than originally ...

Bat Blue Corporation, a provider of end-to-end network and security technologies and services, today announced that it will participate in World IPv6 Day on June 8th. World IPv6 Day is being organized by the Internet Society to motivate organizations to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses deplete. Bat Blue has been a proponent of IPv6 for several years and has had IPv6 enabled on its extreme-performance IP network, BlueNET, since 2008. During this time, Bat Blue has invested in many IPv6 peering relationships with other ...

The Sun unleashed an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare, an S1-class (minor) radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME) on June 7, 2011 from sunspot complex 1226-1227. The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed the flare's peak at 1:41a.m. ET (0641 UT). SDO recorded these images (above) in extreme ultraviolet light that show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there ...

Fixed mortgage rate averages fell for a seventh consecutive week according to ForTheBestRate.com, a popular consumer mortgage rate research website. The company reports that interest rates advertised in the rate tables displayed on the site have continued to move lower over the past few weeks reaching lows not seen since the end of 2010, with current posted 30 year fixed rates as low as 4.250% (4.372% APR, Lender: Gateway Bank Mortgage). Freddie Mac, a government sponsored enterprise that purchases residential mortgage loans in the secondary market, confirms the trend ...

If you're like most consumers, when it comes to shopping for new home furnishings, there may be some lingering doubts about what furniture is best for you and your home. And if you are like many furniture buyers, you may be unsure if leather furniture is right for your home, or even how to find the leather that best fits your decor and lifestyle. To help consumers in this buying process, American Leather, a leading Dallas-based manufacturer of premium leather and upholstered furniture, has addressed the most common myths and misperceptions about leather furniture - and ...

Minority youth aged 8 to 18 consume an average of 13 hours of media content a day -- about 4-1/2 hours more than their white counterparts, according to a Northwestern University report, the first national study to focus exclusively on children's media use by race and ethnicity. "In the past decade, the gap between minority and white youth's daily media use has doubled for blacks and quadrupled for Hispanics," says Northwestern Professor Ellen Wartella, who directed the study and heads the Center on Media and Human Development in the School of Communication. "The big question ...

A blood protein known as surfactant protein-D (SP-D), which is mainly synthesised in the lungs, has been described as "a good predictor" of cardiovascular disease following a large study in North America. Reporting the study online today in the European Heart Journal, the investigators said that circulating SP-D levels were clearly associated with CVD and total mortality in patients with angiographically diagnosed coronary artery disease independent of other well established risk factors (such as age, smoking, cholesterol and C-reactive protein levels).(1) In the lungs ...