A new federal ban on hand-held mobile phone use in commercial motor vehicles took effect Jan. 3, 2012. The regulations were issued jointly by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, both divisions of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and will affect about 4 million commercial truck drivers, plus commercial bus drivers. The ban reaches cell phone use while moving or when stopped for a light or stop sign, but allows emergency calls. Hands-free devices like Bluetooth headsets may still be used. Anyone ...

The Georgia Court of Appeals has reversed a former court ruling that forced an injured worker to authorize their physicians to talk ex parte with employers. In 2006, Laura McRae suffered serious burns to her esophagus when she drank a cup of lye that she mistook for her beverage in the break room of the Arby's restaurant where she worked. McRae signed a form allowing for the release of her medical information, which was set to expire within 90 days, when she revoked it in writing or in the event of a pending hearing. Three years later, McRae's physician concluded ...

Beginning July 1, 2012, every first-time drunk-driving offender in Virginia will be required to install an ignition interlock device in his or her vehicle as a condition of further driving. An ignition interlock is a Breathalyzer on wheels, preventing a car from starting if the driver fails an on-board alcohol breath test. About the size of a mobile phone, the ignition interlock is integrated into the vehicle's starting mechanisms. Ignition interlock standards are set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And, in Virginia, the ignition interlock device's ...

David K. Miller, of the Oregon law firm Miller & Wagner, LLP, represented a Portland-area couple who was awarded almost $3 million last Friday in a "wrongful birth" case. The couple gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome, even though the couple was previously told prenatal tests had "definitively" ruled out their child having the chromosomal abnormality. As a result of the negligently performed prenatal tests, the couple based their difficult and personal decision to continue the pregnancy on incorrect information. Although the couple loves ...

Japanese honeybees face a formidable foe in the Asian giant hornet, a fierce predator that can reach 40mm long or larger, but the bees have developed a novel defense mechanism: they create a "hot defensive bee ball," swarming around the hornet and literally cooking it. Now, a new study published Mar. 14 in the open access journal PLoS ONE uncovers some of the neural activity that underlies this unusual behavior, which is not practiced by the Japanese honeybee's European relative. The researchers, including Takeo Kubo of the University of Tokyo and Masato Ono of Tamagawa ...

Retired Navy SEAL - Senior Chief - Don Shipley spent 24 years operating as a REAL US Navy SEAL. Shipley has teamed up with noted Tampa Bay Trial Attorney - Gene Odom, Esq. in order to pursue his passion of exposing and eliminating the growing problem of fake and phony SEALs. Gene Odom, Esq. has earned a reputation as a Trial Lawyer winning numerous multimillion dollar verdicts in a variety of civil cases involving forensics, security breaches, science, medicine and engineering. Ret. Senior Chief Shipley and Attorney Odom have settled on Tampa, Florida as the jurisdiction ...

Twentieth-century tobacco control programs and policies were responsible for preventing more than 795,000 lung cancer deaths in the United States from 1975 through 2000, according to an analysis funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. If all cigarette smoking in this country had ceased following the release of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health in 1964, a total of 2.5 million people would have been spared from death due to lung cancer in the 36 years following that report, according to the analysis. ...

CLEVELAND -- New research published in the March 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (embargoed 5 pm ET March 14) identifies gene mutations associated with improved overall survival with higher doses of chemotherapy for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). According to one of the authors, Hillard M. Lazarus, MD, Director of Novel Cell Therapy at Seidman Cancer Center at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, the findings explain why some AML patients are more likely ...

The seas are creeping higher as the planet warms. But how high will they go? Projections for the year 2100 range from inches to several feet, or more. The sub-tropical islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas contain important sites where researchers have gone looking for answers; by pinpointing where shorelines stood on cliffs and reefs there during an extremely warm period 400,000 years ago, they hope to narrow the range of global sea-level projections for the future. After correcting for what they say were the sinking of the islands at that time, a new study in the journal ...

SEATTLE – Declines in cigarette smoking among Americans since the mid-1950s – particularly since tobacco-control policies and interventions were implemented after the U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health was released in 1964 – prevented nearly 800,000 lung cancer deaths between 1975 and 2000, according to a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Results of the National Cancer Institute-funded study, conducted by a consortium of six research groups in the U.S. and the Netherlands, are published online in the Journal of the National ...

Individuals suffering from Mesothelioma know all too well the aggressive nature of the disease. Fortunately, a new clinical trial shows positive results for some patients taking a particular type of chemotherapy combination. What is Mesothelioma? Mesothelioma is a rare type of cancer that afflicts the meothelium or thin membrane that covers a person's lungs, heart and other vital organs. The cancer is most commonly caused by the inhalation of microscopic asbestos fibers. Asbestos fibers were first used by U.S. manufacturers and builders in the late 19th century ...

Fossils from two caves in south-west China have revealed a previously unknown Stone Age people and give a rare glimpse of a recent stage of human evolution with startling implications for the early peopling of Asia. The fossils are of a people with a highly unusual mix of archaic and modern anatomical features and are the youngest of their kind ever found in mainland East Asia. Dated to just 14,500 to 11,500 years old, these people would have shared the landscape with modern-looking people at a time when China's earliest farming cultures were beginning, says an international ...

Prison inmates frequently have a strong history of drug use and misuse, especially during the time prior to incarceration, and drugs often are the driving force behind the offense itself. New research, published in BioMed Central's newly launched open access journal Addiction Science & Clinical Practice, shows that ex-offenders struggle to remain drug free after release from prison and identifies factors that can help them succeed. Interviews with former inmates show that they themselves recognize that returning to former living environments (former friends and an easy ...

It can be difficult for someone outside of a specialist field to identify subject experts and the ever increasing amount of available data can be bewildering. New research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal, Journal of Biomedical Semantics, describes a method of social network analysis, similar to finding friends on Facebook, able to sift through scientific literature and news articles to identify opinion leaders and media experts. Pharmaceutical companies and public health programs rely on opinion leaders to clarify and condense research into a format ...

New York, NY (March 14, 2012) — Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists have developed a way to recreate an individual's immune system in a mouse. The "personalized immune mouse" offers researchers an unprecedented tool for individualized analysis of abnormalities that contribute to type 1 diabetes and other autoimmune diseases, starting at the onset of disease. The findings were published today in the online edition of Science Translational Medicine. The mouse model could also have clinical applications, such as predicting how a particular patient might ...

CLEVELAND -- A catheter procedure that closes a hole in patients' hearts was no more effective than medical therapy in preventing recurrent strokes, according to a new study published in the March 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. In the CLOSURE I trial, clinical researchers compared a catheter procedure plus medical therapy with medications alone to prevent new strokes or transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) in patients between 18 and 60 years old with an unexplained ("cryptogenic") stroke or TIA and a patent foremen ovale (PFO) – a hole between the heart's ...

VIDEO: Using two-photon imaging, the researchers were able to see dendritic cells, shown in green, in the intestine of a living mouse. Click here for more information. With every meal, immune cells in the intestine stand like sentries at a citadel, turning away harmful bacteria but allowing vitamins and nutrients to pass. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified the cells that chaperone food antigens, or proteins, in the ...

Of the $25 billion federal settlement funds for mortgage foreclosure abuses, Wisconsin will receive $140 million. The settlement money is being paid by J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo & Co, Citigroup and Ally (formerly GMAC), and is intended to help homeowners having difficulty making their mortgage payments and individuals who were the victims of improper foreclosures. According to Assistant Attorney General Holly Pomraning in a recent TheNorthwestern.com article, Wisconsin's share of the settlement will be divided and distributed as follows: - ...

Foodborne disease outbreaks caused by imported food appeared to rise in 2009 and 2010, and nearly half of the outbreaks implicated foods imported from areas which previously had not been associated with outbreaks, according to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presented today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta. "It's too early to say if the recent numbers represent a trend, but CDC officials are analyzing information from 2011 and will continue to monitor for these outbreaks in the future," said Hannah ...

A team of researchers led by scientists at The Rockefeller University has identified a novel mechanism by which influenza interferes with antiviral host response. The finding, reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature, shows that the immunosuppressive NS1 protein of the influenza A virus hijacks key regulators of antiviral gene function by mimicking a core component of gene regulating machinery. The results they describe have major implications for our understanding of the biology of seasonal influenza virus and its pathogenesis. This research also suggests a ...

There was a lot of excitement a few years ago following the discovery of the DNA origami technique. The approach could be used to build nanoparticles of a given shape and size. However, real applications, such as nano-tweezers, remained out of reach. An international team of researchers led by Professor Tim Liedl of the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitaet Muenchen and Professor Friedrich Simmel of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have now succeeded in building nanoparticles using optically active DNA building blocks that can be used to modify light in very specific ways. Coupling ...

STANFORD, Calif. -- A week ago, you started a new prescription medication for acne. Today, you feel dizzy and short of breath and have difficulty concentrating. Your symptoms are not listed in the package insert as possible side effects of the drug, but why else would you be feeling so odd? Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. Clinical trials are designed to show that a drug is safe and effective. But even the largest trials can't identify irksome or even dangerous side effects experienced by only a tiny proportion of those people taking the drug. They also aren't designed ...

Menlo Park, Calif. — Researchers from Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the first-ever system of "designer electrons" – exotic variants of ordinary electrons with tunable properties that may ultimately lead to new types of materials and devices. "The behavior of electrons in materials is at the heart of essentially all of today's technologies," said Hari Manoharan, associate professor of physics at Stanford and a member of SLAC's Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, who led the research. ...

Families throughout the nation continue to struggle financially. In fact, the prospect of economic stability continues to look so grim professionals have coined this period of time the Great Recession. Many depend on unemployment benefits to make ends meet during these difficult times, but what happens when they run out? Now, more and more people are looking to Social Security Disability benefits when their unemployment ends. Whether people were disabled before their unemployment began or became disabled while receiving unemployment, Social Security Disability offers ...

In preclinical studies, researchers at SRI International and Astraea Therapeutics have recently evaluated the role of a new drug receptor target that shows promise for the treatment of drug addiction. This potential new drug target belongs to a class of receptors called the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). One subtype of nAChRs, called alpha4beta2 is a well-known target for nicotine's addictive effects and the therapeutic effect of the smoking cessation drug varenicline. SRI researchers are now studying another, lesser-known subtype, called alpha3beta4 nAChR, ...