New York, NY, April 20, 2011 - A 20-member blue-ribbon panel, the Study Group on Corporate Boards, co-sponsored by Columbia Business School and the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, today released "Bridging Board Gaps," a report designed to improve board performance and effectiveness by offering a series of recommendations in critical areas of governance. The report calls for a renewed commitment to the purpose of corporate boards, and suggests guidelines to improve board practices and standards along seven core dimensions: ...

WASHINGTON — Those childhood music lessons could pay off decades later - even for those who no longer play an instrument – by keeping the mind sharper as people age, according to a preliminary study published by the American Psychological Association. The study recruited 70 healthy adults age 60 to 83 who were divided into groups based on their levels of musical experience. The musicians performed better on several cognitive tests than individuals who had never studied an instrument or learned how to read music. The research findings were published online in the APA ...

Scientists are reporting development of a new battery that extracts and stores energy produced from the difference in saltiness at the point where freshwater in rivers flows into oceans. A report on the battery, which could supply about 13 percent of the world's energy needs, appears in ACS' journal Nano Letters. Yi Cui and colleagues cite the intensive global scientific effort to develop renewable energy sources to supplement supplies of oil and other traditional fuels like coal, which contribute to global warming. Solar, wind, and geothermal are renewable, sustainable ...

New technology that combines production of electricity with capture of carbon dioxide could make billions of barrels of oil shale — now regarded as off-limits because of the huge amounts of carbon dioxide released in its production — available as an energy source in a greenhouse world of the future. That's the conclusion of a report on "electricity production with in situ carbon capture" (EPICC) in ACS' journal Energy & Fuels. Adam Brandt and Hiren Mulchandani explain that almost 3 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in the world's deposits of oil-shale, a dark-colored ...

The North Carolina Legislature is considering proposed medical malpractice legislation that would limit damages for non-economic damages. The state has already enacted a law that caps monetary damages in negligence cases to $1 million where the parties agree to go to binding arbitration, but Bloomberg reports that few have actually exercised this option. Proposed Malpractice Damage Cap The legislation calls for a limit of $250,000 on non-economic damages, which include compensation for pain and suffering, disfigurement, mutilation, loss of a limb, paralysis, and death. ...

A needle-in-the-haystack search through nearly 390,000 chemical compounds had led scientists to a substance that can sneak through the protective barrier surrounding the brain with effects promising for new drugs for Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. They report on the substance, which blocks formation of cholesterol in the brain, in the journal, ACS Chemical Biology. Aleksey G. Kazantsev and colleagues previously discovered that blocking cholesterol formation in the brain could protect against some of the damage caused by chronic brain disorders like Parkinson's ...

The costly, often-frustrating quest for new ways of preventing and treating diseases that strike vegetables, fruits, and other food crops bears striking similarity to the better-known saga of the pharmaceutical industry's pricey search for new drugs for humans. That's the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. C&EN Senior Business Editor Melody M. Bomgardner points out that the R&D investment in new herbicides, fungicides, and other plant chemicals almost rivals that for human pharmaceuticals on a one ...

Atlanta landscape lighting company NightVision Outdoor Lighting is offering its lighting maintenance services to the former customers of Southern Nights, Inc., a landscape lighting, design, and contracting company local to Atlanta. NightVision Outdoor Lighting specializes in Atlanta outdoor lighting for residential and commercial needs, using the highest quality bulbs and fixtures combined with years of experience and dependable service. Having recently gone out of business after 18 years in the industry, Southern Nights, Inc. left many homeowners across the metro Atlanta ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A major discovery about an enzyme's structure has opened a window on understanding DNA repair. Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have determined the structure of a nuclease that will help scientists to understand several DNA repair pathways, a welcome development for cancer research. DNA repair pathways are very important in the context of cancer biology and aging, but the tools the cell uses to do those repairs are not well understood. "Until we saw the structure using X-ray crystallography, we didn't understand how it could recognize so many ...

FAIRFAX, Va.—The Society of Interventional Radiology has a long-term commitment to radiation safety, taking a leading role in measuring and assessing radiation dosage; developing educational programs on radiation safety, radiation protection and reduction of skin dosage; and promoting the safety of patients and health care professionals. Four articles, published this month in the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, illustrate SIR's frontline stance on facets of patient safety and standards of care by exploring opportunities to improve patient safety through ...

A new discovery in a deadly lung disease may change the direction of research while uncovering increased risk for many patients and families. The Coalition for Pulmonary Fibrosis (CPF) and the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation (PFF) applaud the efforts of scientists that led to the discovery of a genetic variation associated with the MUC5B gene which may increase the risk of developing Pulmonary Fibrosis (PF). The two patient organizations partner with National Jewish Health (NJH), which led the team of researchers in the study, on a genetic counseling line that provides ...

(Boston) – A pulse oximetry training video produced by Rafael Ortega, MD, the vice-chair of academic affairs for the department of anesthesiology at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and professor of anesthesiology at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), and his colleagues is featured in this week's New England Journal of Medicine. The training video, which is the fifth BMC-produced video to appear in the NEJM's Videos in Clinical Medicine section, provides best practices for physicians utilizing pulse oximetry. Pulse oximeters are small, non-invasive sensors placed ...

If a friend or relative won $100 and then offered you a few dollars, would you accept this windfall? The logical answer would seem to be, sure, why not? "But human decision making does not always appear rational," said Read Montague, professor of physics at Virginia Tech and director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. According to research conducted over the last three decades; only about one-fourth of us would say, "Sure. Thanks." The rest would say, "But that's not fair. You have lots. Why are you only giving me a ...

Glover's Flooring America, an Atlanta flooring company, has announced the addition of Tigressa Soft Style carpet to its line of flooring options. Glover's is a family-owned company offering huge selections of Atlanta carpet, hardwood floors, tile, laminate, vinyl and area rugs. Tigressa Soft Style only enhances the already expansive Atlanta flooring showroom available at Glover's Flooring America. The advanced flooring blends strength and durability with softness and elegance. "With its abundance of styles and colors combined with its supreme durability, we believe ...

PHILADELPHIA - Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are delving into the details of the complex structure at the ends of chromosomes. Recent work, e-published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology last month, describes how these structures, called telomeres, can be protected by caps made up of specialized proteins and stacks of DNA called G-quadruplexes, or "G4 DNA." Telomere caps are like a knot at the end of each chromosome "string," with the knot's role preventing the string from unraveling. "Although G4 DNA has been studied in test tubes ...

Littlewoods Europe has announced it will be stocking the new season range from Coleen Rooney. The range was previously only available in the UK but Littlewoods Europe customers will now be able to choose from Coleen Rooney's range of clothes including women's coats, women's dresses, women's shoes, bedding, curtains, perfume and cosmetics. Coleen's newest range is inspired by the latest trends, and has been hugely popular in the UK already, receiving lots of press coverage and fashion features. The new range will now be available to the 25 European countries ...

HiTech Creations is offering a new scenario, Road To Rangoon, for gamers on their highly popular online WWII combat simulation, Aces High. Registration has already begun and will continue throughout the month of April. Road To Rangoon offers players a chance to reenact one of the early aerial engagements in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Japan was determined to cut off China from the rest of the world and to do so they needed to shut down the main supply line to China, the Burma Road. In late December of 1941 Japan launched a series of bombing runs against ...

WASHINGTON, April 20—For more than 150 years, spark plugs have powered internal combustion engines. Automakers are now one step closer to being able to replace this long-standing technology with laser igniters, which will enable cleaner, more efficient, and more economical vehicles. In the past, lasers strong enough to ignite an engine's air-fuel mixtures were too large to fit under an automobile's hood. At this year's Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2011), to be held in Baltimore May 1 - 6, researchers from Japan will describe the first multibeam laser ...

WASHINGTON — To help alleviate the effects of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), the U.S. Department of Defense should ensure that all military personnel with this type of injury receive adequate protein and calories immediately after the trauma and through the first two weeks of treatment, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Evidence from several studies of severely brain-injured patients shows that providing energy and protein to patients early reduces inflammation and improves their outcomes, said the committee of experts who wrote the report. This ...

Queen's University professor Kate Harkness has found that a history of physical, sexual or emotional abuse in childhood substantially increases the risk of depression in adolescence by altering a person's neuroendocrine response to stress. Adolescents with a history of maltreatment and a mild level of depression were found to release much more of the stress hormone cortisol than is normal in response to psychological stressors such as giving a speech or solving a difficult arithmetic test. "This kind of reaction is a problem because cortisol kills cells in areas of ...

BUFFALO, NY -- Exposure to air pollution early in life and when a woman gives birth to her first child may alter her DNA and may be associated with premenopausal breast cancer later in life, researchers at the University at Buffalo have shown. The findings indicated that higher air pollution exposure at birth may alter DNA methylation, which may increase levels of E-cadherin, a protein important to the adhesion of cells, a function that plays an essential role in maintaining a stable cellular environment and assuring healthy tissues. Methylation is a chemical process ...

Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees -- not ancestral apes -- for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist. CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker said there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite variety of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the ...

Researchers at Rice University and Texas A&M have discovered a way to pattern active proteins into bio-friendly fibers. The "eureka" moment came about because somebody forgot to clean up the lab one night. The new work from the Rice lab of biochemist Kathleen Matthews, in collaboration with former Rice faculty fellow and current Texas A&M assistant professor Sarah Bondos, simplifies the process of making materials with fully functional proteins. Such materials could find extensive use as chemical catalysts and biosensors and in tissue engineering, for starters. Their ...

Despite economic anxiety and concern for the future of the country, most Houstonians perceive an improving quality of life locally and 90 percent believe that Houston is a better place to live than most other metropolitan areas, according to the 30th annual Kinder Houston Area Survey conducted by Rice University. The findings were released today during a luncheon hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership and Rice's Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The survey showed that Harris County residents have become a little more upbeat in their personal economic outlooks ...

(Baltimore, MD) – Today, the Interactive Autism Network (IAN), www.ianproject.org, the nation's largest online autism research project, reveals the preliminary results of the first major survey on wandering and elopement among individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and announces the launch of a new research survey on the association between pregnancy factors and ASD. The wandering and elopement survey found that approximately half of parents of children with autism report that their child elopes, with the behavior peaking at age four. Among these families, nearly ...