Motor yacht IONIAN PRINCESS is a luxury yacht for charter based in Athens and can be chartered in Greece or anywhere on the Mediterranean this summer. Able to accommodate 12 guests in elegant yet comfortable quarters the motor yacht IONIAN PRINCESS is an exceptional vessel to sail upon. Charter guests can choose to dine in one of three designated areas. One option is the sundeck, complete with barbeque; alternatively the aft deck of the sky lounge offers fantastic views or, for more formal dining there is the main salon. Appointed with only the finest of materials throughout ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Brain-tumor cells that are infected with a cancer-killing virus release a protein "alarm bell" that warns other tumor cells of the impending infection and enables them to mount a defense against the virus, according to a study led by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). The infected tumor cells release a protein called CCN1 into the narrow space between cells where it initiates an antiviral response. The response limits the spread ...

Philadelphia, PA, March 15, 2012 – Over the last few decades there has been an explosion in the discovery of biomarkers for diagnosis, disease monitoring, and prognostic evaluation. In the April issue of Translational Research, entitled "Biomarkers: New Tools of Modern Medicine," an international group of medical experts explores the promise and challenges of biomarker discovery and highlights the latest advances in the use of biomarkers in various diseases. In a commentary introducing this single-topic issue, Nikolaos G. Frangogiannis, MD, The Wilf Family Cardiovascular ...

Smoking, the leading preventable cause of mortality in the United States, continues to disproportionately impact lower income members of racial and ethnic minority groups. In a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how perceived discrimination influences smoking rates among these groups. "We found that regardless of race or ethnicity, the odds of current smoking were higher among individuals who perceived that they were treated differently ...

NEW YORK (March 15, 2012)—New evidence on the link between suicide and the economy shows that the monthly suicide rate in New York City from 1990 to 2006 was 29% higher at the economic low point in 1992 than at the peak of economic growth in 2000. The study, conducted by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy, the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing, and Weill Cornell Medical College, appears in the February 22 American Journal of Epidemiology and is available online. "The ...

Cap and trade programs to reduce emissions do not inherently provide incentives to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change, according to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, said author Margaret Taylor, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who conducted the study while an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, the success of some cap and trade programs in achieving predetermined pollution ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found several examples of galaxies containing quasars, which act as gravitational lenses, amplifying and distorting images of galaxies aligned behind them. Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe, far outshining the total starlight of their host galaxies. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes. To find these rare cases of galaxy-quasar combinations acting as lenses, a team of astronomers led by Frederic Courbin at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) selected 23,000 ...

GREENBELT, Md. -- Researchers and flight crew with NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne mission to study changes in polar ice, began another season of science activity with the start of the 2012 Arctic campaign on March 13. From mid-March through mid-May, a modified P-3 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., will conduct daily missions out of Thule and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland —with one flight to Fairbanks, Alaska and back—to measure sea and land ice. The campaign will also feature instrument tests, continued international collaboration and educational ...

Warnings are in effect and evacuations have taken place along the northern Australia coast near Port Hedland. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Lau as it strengthened into a Cyclone today, March 15, 2012. On March 15, 2012 at 02:31 UTC, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Cyclone Lua when it was about 400 nautical miles northwest of Port Hedland, Australia. In the image, the bulk of clouds and showers appear to be over the northern and western quadrants of the storm. Satellite imagery ...

The risk of type 2 diabetes is significantly increased if white rice is eaten regularly, claims a study published today on bmj.com. The authors from the Harvard School of Public Health look at previous studies and evidence of the association between eating white rice and the risk of type 2 diabetes. Their study seeks to determine whether this risk is dependent on the amount of rice consumed and if the association is stronger for the Asian population, who tend to eat more white rice than the Western world. The authors analysed the results of four studies: two in Asian ...

Distinct patterns of activity—which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants-- appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face—even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that reflect preparation for movement and speech as well as feelings of reward. The findings raise the possibility that studying this activity will yield insights into care giving behavior, but ...

In what became known as the 'Scotch tape technique," researchers first extracted graphene with a piece of adhesive in 2004. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb, hexagonal pattern. It looks like chicken wire. Graphene is a wonder material. It is one-hundred-times better at conducting electricity than silicon. It is stronger than diamond. And, at just one atom thick, it is so thin as to be essentially a two-dimensional material. Such promising physics have made graphene the most studied substance of the last decade, particularly in nanotechnology. ...

The addition of changes in inflammatory biomarkers to established clinical variables improves the prediction of mortality in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a new study. "COPD is characterized by low-grade inflammation, so we hypothesized that the addition of inflammatory biomarkers to established predictive factors would improve the prediction of mortality," said lead author Bartolome Celli, lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School and member of the Pulmonary and Critical Care Division of Brigham and Women's Hospital in ...

Copenhagen, 16 March 2012: Stroke survivors who like art have a significantly higher quality of life than those who do not, according to new research. Patients who appreciated music, painting and theatre recovered better from their stroke than patients who did not. The research was presented at the 12th Annual Spring Meeting on Cardiovascular Nursing, 16-17 March, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Stroke is the third cause of death in the western world and the first cause of disability in adults. More and more older people are having strokes and undergoing recovery. "We know ...

Copenhagen, 16 March 2012: Depression increases the risk of death in patients who have a coronary stent implanted. After seven years of follow up, depressed patients were 1.5 times more likely to have died than non-depressed patients. The findings were independent of age, gender, clinical characteristics, anxiety and the distressed (Type D) personality. The research was presented at the 12th Annual Spring Meeting on Cardiovascular Nursing, 16-17 March, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Depression has been associated with poor outcomes in coronary artery disease but previous ...

Copenhagen, 16 March 2012: Poor dental hygiene behaviours in patients with congenital heart disease are increasing their risk of endocarditis. Teens with congenital heart disease floss, brush and visit the dentist less than their peers. But they have healthier behaviours when it comes to alcohol, cigarettes and illicit drugs. Adults with single ventricle physiology (a type of congenital heart disease) also have poorer dental hygiene practices than their peers despite having better health behaviours overall. The findings were presented in two studies at the 12th Annual ...

Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25 000 light-years from Earth, near the centre of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic centre pull it slightly out of shape. Globular clusters are thought to harbour some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, born when the Universe was just a small fraction of its current age. As well as being far older than the Sun — around twice its age — the stars of Messier 9 also have a markedly different composition, and are enriched with far fewer ...

For the first time, the melting of glaciers in Greenland could now be measured with high accuracy from space. Just in time for the tenth anniversary of the twin satellites GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) a sharp image has surface, which also renders the spatial distribution of the glacial melt more precisely. The Greenland ice shield had to cope with up to 240 gigatons of mass loss between 2002 and 2011. This corresponds to a sea level rise of about 0.7 mm per year. These statements were made possible by the high-precision measurements of the GRACE mission, ...

Widely used antibiotics may increase incidence and severity of allergic asthma in early life, according to a University of British Columbia study. The study, published today in the journal EMBO reports, shows that certain antibiotics that affect intestinal bacteria also had a profound impact on allergic asthma. "It has long been suspected that kids exposed to more antibiotics – like those in developed countries – are more prone to allergic asthma," says the study's author, UBC microbiologist Brett Finlay. "Our study is the first experimental proof that shows how." Finlay's ...

One of the world's leading Internet security experts, Eugene Kaspersky, has described the World Cyber Security Technology Research Summit at Queen's University Belfast as key in preventing a Cyber World War. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of the largest antivirus company in Europe, Kaspersky Lab, will be giving a keynote address at the second annual Cyber Security Technology Research Summit on Friday 16 March. The cyber security guru is joining some of the world's leading cyber security experts and government policy makers from around the world for a two-day meeting ...

PITTSBURGH, March 16 – Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have identified a cell-signaling pathway that plays a key role in increasing insulin secretion during pregnancy and, when blocked, leads to the development of gestational diabetes. Their findings are available online today in Diabetes, one of the journals of the American Diabetes Association. During pregnancy, pancreatic beta cells should expand and produce more insulin to adapt to the needs of the growing baby, explained senior investigator Adolfo Garcia-Ocana, Ph.D., associate professor ...

CHICAGO – In a study that included a nationally representative sample of nearly 45,000 adults, participants who met more of seven recommended cardiovascular health behaviors or factors (such as not smoking, having normal cholesterol levels, eating a healthy diet), had a lower risk of death compared to participants who met fewer factors, although only a low percentage of adults met all seven factors, according to a study appearing in JAMA. The study is being published early online to coincide with its presentation at a specialty meeting of the American Heart Association. "Cardiovascular ...

The northeastern U.S. should prepare for a surge in Lyme disease this spring. And we can blame fluctuations in acorns and mouse populations, not the mild winter. So reports Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY. What do acorns have to do with illness? Acorn crops vary from year-to-year, with boom-and-bust cycles influencing the winter survival and breeding success of white-footed mice. These small mammals pack a one-two punch: they are preferred hosts for black-legged ticks and they are very effective ...

Nanoparticles containing chitosan have been shown to have effective antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus saprophyticus and Escherichia coli. The materials could be used as a protective wound-healing material to avoid opportunistic infection as well as working to facilitate wound healing. Chitosan is a natural, non-toxic and biodegradable, polysaccharide readily obtained from chitin, the main component of the shells of shrimp, lobster and the beak of the octopus and squid. Its antimicrobial activity is well known and has been exploited in dentistry to prevent ...

New biotechnological and chemical methods will facilitate efficient production of chemicals, materials and fuels from renewable natural resources. The Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence (CoE) in White Biotechnology – Green Chemistry Research focuses on the research and development of microbial cells, or cell factories, for producing new useful compounds from sugars in plant biomass. These compounds can be used, for example, for manufacturing bioplastics or in medical applications. "By means of gene technology, we can modify microbial metabolism and thereby produce ...