A new study conducted by researchers from McGill University, the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC), and Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre, Montreal, has put the accuracy of rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs) under the microscope. The meta-analysis of 159 studies showed three key findings: that RIDTs can be used to confirm the flu, but not to rule it out; that test accuracy is higher in children than it is in adults; and that RIDTs are better at detecting the more common influenza A virus than they are at detecting ...

Researchers from The University of Nottingham have demonstrated how a species of flatworm overcomes the ageing process to be potentially immortal. The discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) and may shed light on the possibilities of alleviating ageing and age-related characteristics in human cells. Planarian worms have amazed scientists with their apparently limitless ability to regenerate. Researchers ...

Durham, NC — Coyotes today are pint-sized compared to their Ice Age counterparts, finds a new fossil study. Between 11,500 and 10,000 years ago — a mere blink of an eye in geologic terms — coyotes shrunk to their present size. The sudden shrinkage was most likely a response to dwindling food supply and changing interactions with competitors, rather than warming climate, researchers say. In a paper appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers studied museum collections of coyote skeletons dating from 38,000 years ago to the present ...

Have you purchased an automobile based on its advertised fuel economy? Have you found that when you actually take the car out on the road the average gas mileage is much less than advertised? If so, you might be able to sue your automobile manufacturer in small claims court for misleading advertising. The attorneys at Chenoweth Law Group can help you assess your environmental litigation options, and then help you prepare the evidence and arguments necessary to argue a small claims court case. Recently, a California woman successfully sued Honda in small claims court ...

AURORA, Colo. (Feb. 27, 2012) - A group of scientists from across the world have come together in a just-published study that provides new insights into how fructose causes obesity and metabolic syndrome, more commonly known as diabetes. In this study which was performed in lab animals, researchers found that fructose can be metabolized by an enzyme that exists in two forms. One form appears to be responsible for causing how fructose causes fatty liver, obesity, and insulin resistance. The other form may actually protect animals from developing these features in response ...

4t Networks is proud to announce that it is now offering CentOS 6 for its Virtual Private Server and Cloud hosting services clients. CentOS 6 is a Linux based operating system which is geared towards creating an accessible Linux environment for commercial users. CentOS 6 is a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and is one of the most popular Linux distribution systems for servers available today. "We are excited to have the newest version of CentOS available for our clients," notes Kevin Gray, President of 4t Networks. "Linux is a great ...

(ST. LOUIS): Humans are frequently blamed for deforestation and the destruction of environments, yet there are also examples of peoples and cultures around the world that have learned to manage and conserve the precious resources around them. The Yanesha of the upper Peruvian Amazon and the Tibetans of the Himalayas are two groups of indigenous peoples carrying on traditional ways of life, even in the face of rapid environmental changes. Over the last 40 years, Dr. Jan Salick, senior curator and ethnobotanist with the William L. Brown Center of the Missouri Botanical Garden ...

Boston – Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have for the first time identified a novel pathway that is necessary for infection to occur with the pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which is responsible for the second most common infectious disease worldwide, gonorrhea. The study, which was recently published online in the Journal of Bacteriology, may lead to new treatment methods for this sexually transmitted disease. N. gonorrhoeae is a pathogenic bacterium that readily develops resistance to antibiotics such as sulfanilamides, penicillins, tetracyclines ...

Heart transplant patients who receive new organs before the age of 55 and get them at hospitals that perform at least nine heart transplants a year are significantly more likely than other people to survive at least 10 years after their operations, new Johns Hopkins research suggests. Examining data from the more than 22,000 American adults who got new hearts between 1987 and 1999, researchers found that roughly half were still alive a decade after being transplanted and further analysis identified factors that appear to predict at least 10 years of life after the operations. ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – In a look at how major stressors during childhood can change a person's biological risk for psychiatric disorders, researchers at Butler Hospital have discovered a genetic alteration at the root of the association. The research, published online in PLoS ONE on January 25, 2012, suggests that childhood adversity may lead to epigenetic changes in the human glucocorticoid receptor gene, an important regulator of the biological stress response that may increase risk for psychiatric disorders. The association between childhood adversity, including parental ...

A long-standing controversy regarding the semiconductor gallium manganese arsenide, one of the most promising materials for spintronic technology, looks to have been resolved. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)in collaboration with scientist from University of Notre Dame have determined the origin of the charge-carriers responsible for the ferromagnetic properties that make gallium manganese arsenide such a hot commodity for spintronic devices. Such devices utilize electron spin rather than charge to read ...

This February, Atlanta dumpster rental company Haul Masters celebrates its twelfth year in business. The best in Atlanta full service junk removal and Southeast dumpster rentals, Haul Masters looks forward to many more years of meeting the Southeast's trash removal needs. "We're thrilled to be celebrating twelve years in the trash removal industry," says Haul Masters owner Chris Tavormina. "Twelve years ago, we were just a little startup with big dreams, but we've grown and evolved to become the efficient, service-oriented company you see today." Local ...

Stanford, CA -- The major difference between plant and animal cells is the photosynthetic process, which converts light energy into chemical energy. When light isn't available, energy is generated by breaking down carbohydrates and sugars, just as it is in animal and some bacterial cells. Two cellular organelles are responsible for these two processes: the chloroplasts for photosynthesis and the mitochondria for sugar breakdown. New research from Carnegie's Eva Nowack and Arthur Grossman has opened a window into the early stages of chloroplast evolution. Their work is published ...

HOUSTON - A protein abundantly found in treatment-resistant cancers holds an important tumor-suppressor out of the cell nucleus, where it would normally detect DNA damage and force defective cells to kill themselves, a team of scientists reports in the current Cancer Cell. "Overexpression of Aurora Kinase-A in tumors has been correlated with resistance to DNA-damaging chemotherapy, but we haven't known how this occurs," said senior author Subrata Sen, Ph.D., professor in The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Department of Molecular Pathology. "Our discovery ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA - The March GSA TODAY, the Geological Society of America's open-access science and news magazine, is now online at http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/22/3/. This month's science article, by Todd LaMaskin of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, presents uranium-lead dating analyses of detrital zircon grains in Paleozoic-Mesozoic basin sediments in the Cordillera of western North America. LaMaskin's analysis shows a systematic variation in age distribution within the depositional age and setting of the host sediments. Four such ...

Most of us know what it means when it's said that someone is depressed. But commonly, true clinical depression brings with it a number of other symptoms. These can include anxiety, poor attention and concentration, memory issues, and sleep disturbances. Traditionally, depression researchers have sought to identify the individual brain areas responsible for causing these symptoms. But the combination of so many symptoms suggested to UCLA researchers that the multiple symptoms of depression may be linked to a malfunction involving brain networks — the connections that ...

Athens, Ga. – Heat-related deaths among football players across the country tripled to nearly three per year between 1994 and 2009 after averaging about one per year the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of weather conditions and high school and college sports data conducted by University of Georgia researchers. The scientists built a detailed database that included the temperature, humidity and time of day, as well as the height, weight and position for 58 football players who died during practice sessions from overheating, or hyperthermia. The study, published ...

A striking discovery in the study of human genetics was the focus of the most-visited press release posted on EurekAlert! in 2011. Researchers found that part of the non-African human X chromosome came from Neanderthals, confirming that they interbred with early human populations. Breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and medicine, along with discoveries in zoology, psychology, and astrobiology, were also featured in the 10 releases most often viewed by EurekAlert! readers in 2011. Website statistics collected over the course of the year identified the year's ...

The Holiday Inn Express & Suites Newberry SC Hotel offers special rates to guests attending the Irish Fling Celebration. The annual Newberry Irish Fling will take place on Friday, March 16, 2012 in downtown Newberry. It will celebrate St. Patrick's Day and includes live entertainment and festivities at various locations in Newberry. Performing live at the Newberry Opera House, headline entertainment will be Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Show time is 8:00 PM and tickets can be purchased at the Newberry Opera House Box Office. "The Newberry Irish Fling is ...

Fairbanks, Alaska -- On Saturday, Feb. 18 at 8:41 p.m. Alaska time, scientists launched a NASA sounding rocket from Poker Flat Research Range into a brilliant aurora display. The rocket mission, designed to gather information on space weather conditions that affect satellite communications, was a success. "It was a terrific aurora, the rocket worked great, the instruments worked great and the supporting radar (at Poker Flat) worked wonderfully," said Steve Powell of Cornell University, the principal investigator for the launch. "We achieved all of our objectives. We're ...

A curious correlation between the mass of a galaxy's central black hole and the velocity of stars in a vast, roughly spherical structure known as its bulge has puzzled astronomers for years. An international team led by Francesco Tombesi at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now has identified a new type of black-hole-driven outflow that appears to be both powerful enough and common enough to explain this link. Most big galaxies contain a central black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass, but galaxies hosting more massive black holes also ...

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have discovered previously unsuspected aspects of the guidance system used by the body's first line of defense against infection. The new work focuses on the regulation of immune response by two forms of the signaling molecule IL-8, as well as IL-8's interaction with cell-surface molecules called glycosaminoglycans (or GAGs for short). Infected or injured tissues release IL-8 to attract bacteria- and virus-killing white blood cells known as neutrophils, a process known as "recruitment." As IL-8 proteins disperse ...

The upper class has a higher propensity for unethical behavior, being more likely to believe – as did Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street" – that "greed is good," according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley. "The increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed," said Paul Piff, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (Monday, Feb. 27) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Piff's study ...

NASA satellites have been watching the low pressure area called System 92S for days, and infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed cloud temperatures were cooling, indicating the storm was getting more organized after it moved over northern Madagascar. Now it may be headed for landfall in Mozambique. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared imagery on developing System 92S as it moved from the Southern Indian Ocean, west across northern Madagascar and into the Mozambique Channel. On February 25 at 0941 UTC, ...

The Hays Career Outlook Survey has revealed that workers are being trapped in career silos because they don't believe they can cross sector or industry boundaries, according to new data from the Hays Career Outlook Survey. The survey also highlights that employers in both sectors are often unable to recognise the transferable skills that might help them to identify potential candidates who are capable of supporting their growth plans. The survey reveals the vast majority of employers believe that previous experience in the same sector is important. Whilst only just ...