High profile drunk driving cases like those involving actress Lindsay Lohan have brought nationwide attention to a problem that has been worrying North Carolina lawmakers for years -- how do you both fairly punish drunk drivers for their actions and keep drunk drivers off the road in an effort to reduce drunk driving accidents? "Laura's Law" With the recent passage of "Laura's Law," a North Carolina statute that dramatically increases the penalties facing repeat drunk drivers, the state's legislature has shown a desire to keep repeat DWI offenders ...

University of California, Berkeley, chemists are reimagining catalysts in ways that could have a profound impact on the chemical industry as well as on the growing market for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Catalysts are materials typically metals that speed up chemical reactions and are widely used in the synthesis of chemicals and drugs. They also are employed in automobile catalytic converters to change combustion chemicals into less-polluting emissions and in fuel cells to convert water into hydrogen. The problem with catalysts, however, is that chemical reactions ...

Few people want to consider their own mortality, so it can be difficult for some to ponder the issue of estate planning. Even so, everyone -- from the very rich to those with much more modest asset holdings -- will benefit from a comprehensive estate plan that dictates how and where their property should go after they are gone. It is never too early or too late to get started on an estate plan, but an ounce of estate planning prevention is worth way more than a pound of cure. Taking steps now by drafting a will, trust, living will or health care directive can keep your ...

America's divorce rate has maintained an average of about 50 percent for first-time marriages for several years now. There is one demographic that has seen a sharp rise in its divorce rate, though: the so-called "baby boomers." Couples over the age of 50 are now divorcing more than twice as often as they did back in the 1990s, and now one in four marital splits results in a "gray divorce." How Are Late-Life Divorces Different? Couples who have been together for 20, 30, 40 years or more are intrinsically linked in countless ways. They likely share ...

NEW YORK (February 23, 2012) – The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) announced today Sumatra's first ever successful sentence of an illegal orangutan owner and trader in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia. The seven-month prison sentence is only the third for Indonesia, despite orangutans being strictly protected under Indonesian law since 1924. Although there have been over 2,500 confiscations of illegally held orangutans in Indonesia since the early 1970's, the first actual prosecution of an illegal orangutan ...

A jackknifing 18-wheeler truck poses significant danger to not only the truck driver but to anyone sharing the road. It is essential for drivers to take safety measures to avoid disastrous results. It is also important for operators of passenger vehicles to take extra precautions when driving near tractor-trailers. Briefly, a semi-truck jackknifing accident occurs when a commercial truck driver loses control of the rig and the back of the trailer slides out from behind the truck forming an L or a V shape. In the process of rotating around the tractor, the trailer will ...

Boulder, CO, USA – A recent American Geosciences Institute (AGI) workforce evaluation estimates that by 2021, 150,000 to 220,000 geoscience jobs will need to be filled. The AGI report notes that at current graduation rates, most of these jobs will not be able to be filled by U.S. citizens. Citing great concern about the acute need for well-trained, well-educated geoscience graduates to fill the geoscience workforce, Geological Society of America President John Geissman is calling for colleges and universities to recognize the value of strong, adequately supported geoscience ...

A recent head-on crash on State Road 9A in Jacksonville tied up traffic for hours and sent a Duval School Board employee to the hospital in critical condition. Extremely Dangerous Hazards at the Scene of the Car and Truck Collision The accident occurred during morning rush hour when an Anheuser-Busch tractor-trailer hauling beer through a construction zone blew a tire on the St. John's Bluff Overpass. The beer truck crossed the median after the blowout, ended up in the southbound lane still traveling north and collided head-on with an oncoming school district maintenance ...

Traditionally, the marital home was the most valuable asset to be divided during a divorce. Couples would fight about who got to keep the home, or how much each party would leave with after the property was sold. The real estate crisis of 2008 left many couples upside down in their mortgages (having negative equity). Because of that, divorcees now fight about who will be left to pay off the debt. Some people believe a short sale would be appropriate. They don't care to pay for a home they no longer live in, and they want to leave a bad investment behind. Others believe ...

The debate about the potential severity of an outbreak of airborne H5N1 influenza in humans needs to move on from speculation and focus instead on how we can safely continue H5N1 research and share the results among researchers, according to a commentary to be published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, on Friday, February 24. H5N1 influenza has been at the center of heated discussions in science and policy circles since the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) asked the authors of two recent H5N1 ...

The immune system protects from infections by detecting and eliminating invading pathogens. These two strategies form the basis of conventional clinical approaches in the fight against infectious diseases. In the latest issue of the journal Science, Miguel Soares from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal) together with Ruslan Medzhitov from Yale University School of Medicine and David Schneider from Stanford University propose that a third strategy needs to be considered: tolerance to infection, whereby the infected host protects itself from infection by reducing ...

A deadly school bus collision took the life of an 11-year-old girl and seriously injured 17 others, including both drivers. The girl who was fatally injured when a dump truck collided with the school bus in New Jersey was a triplet and her two sisters were both critically injured in the collision. It's unclear what caused the crash at the intersection of Bordentown-Chesterfield and Old York roads in Chesterfield Township. The intersection has been the site of 15 accidents since 2007. The Huffington Post reported than another minor accident occurred the day after the ...

Tragedy Strikes in an Illinois Park Last spring, a strange accident took the life of an Illinois man. Derek Posey and two coworkers were taking a break from their community service park work in a unique place: the bucket of an Illinois Department of Natural Resources construction tractor. Unbeknownst to Posey and his compatriots, disaster was about to strike. A car driven by 20-year-old Eduardo Lopez careened into the parking lot. Later found to be under the influence of cannabis and methamphetamine, Lopez slammed into the tractor containing the workers. All three ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on the nanoscale and the ever-elusive quantum computer are among the advancements edging closer toward the realm of possibility, and a new study co-authored by a UC Santa Barbara researcher may give both an extra nudge. The findings appear today in Science Express, an online version of the journal Science. Ania Bleszynski Jayich, an assistant professor of physics who joined the UCSB faculty in 2010, spent a year at Harvard working on an experiment that coupled nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to nanomechanical ...

The funeral service of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham was held at a Bronx church on Saturday, reported WNYC (2/18/2012). The Bronx teen was gunned down by police inside his home in early February. New York civil rights violation lawyer David Perecman agrees with a number of mourners that the killing appeared to be unjustified. According to the New York Daily News (2/18/2012), Graham was killed by an officer from the NYPD's narcotics unit who believed he spotted a gun in Graham's waistband and followed him to his family's apartment. Graham was shot in the bathroom after ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered the means by which a polymer known as PVDF enables capacitors to store and release large amounts of energy quickly. Their findings could lead to much more powerful and efficient electric cars. Capacitors are like batteries in that they store and release energy. However, capacitors use separated electrical charges, rather than chemical reactions, to store energy. The charged particles enable energy to be stored and released very quickly. Imagine an electric vehicle that can accelerate from zero to 60 miles ...

A 6-year-old boy died in a two-car accident in upstate New York on Saturday night, reported The Wall Street Journal (2/19/2012). Tyler McIntyre was killed when a 2008 Mercury failed to yield the right of way to another vehicle at an intersection in the town of Milton, said the YNN Hudson Valley (2/19/2012). The boy died several hours after the upstate New York auto accident. The other people involved in the auto accident were treated for non-life threatening injuries and there was no indication alcohol was involved, according to the WSJ. "Having an experienced ...

PHILADELPHIA -- The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light. "Looking at the success of electronics over the last century, I have always wondered why we should be limited to electric current in ...

SEAT is revealing an expansion to the Mii city car line-up with the first glimpse of an even more versatile five-door version. The additional rear doors turn the super-compact SEAT into a unique combination of exceptional driving fun, sporty design and outstanding functionality. Of course the new five-door Mii remains true to core SEAT principles - meaning it's both a pleasure to drive, and a pleasure to own. In either three- or five-door form the Mii scores top marks for fuel consumption and emissions thanks to its lightweight design and efficient drivetrains. ...

Only 10 years ago, deciphering the genetic information from one individual in a matter of weeks to find a certain disease-causing genetic mutation would have been written off as science fiction. It was the time of the Human Genome Project, and it had taken armies of sequencing robots working around the clock for almost a decade to unravel the complete sequence of the human genetic code – referred to as the genome – by churning out the DNA alphabet letter by letter. Now a team headed by Michael Hammer from the University of Arizona applied Next Generation Genome Sequencing ...

Russian dating websites HotRussianBrides.com and RussianLoveMatch.com announced that both will live stream "Precious Pearl", a beauty pageant taking place in Odessa, Ukraine on February 25, 2012 at approximately 12:30pm Eastern Time. Complete with choreographed dance numbers, a talent segment, and a fashion segment, the pageant will feature single Ukrainian women from around the country, all vying to be crowned Miss Precious Pearl. The event is coordinated by a local dating agency affiliate based in Odessa with branches all over Ukraine. This is the second ...

Could blind, buck-toothed, finger-sized naked mole-rats harbor in their brain cells a survival secret that might lead to better heart attack or stroke treatments? University of Illinois at Chicago biologist Thomas Park and colleagues at UIC and the University of Texas Heath Science Center at San Antonio think the subterranean lifestyle of the pasty-looking rodents may indeed hold clues to keeping brain cells alive and functioning when oxygen is scarce. The key may lie in how brain cells regulate their intake of calcium. "Normally, calcium in brain cells does wonderful ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo engineers have developed a one-step, low-cost method to fabricate a polymer with extraordinary properties: When viewed from a single perspective, the polymer is rainbow-colored, reflecting many different wavelengths of light. Used as a filter for light, this material could form the basis of handheld multispectral imaging devices that identify the "true color" of objects examined. An image of the material is available here: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13214. "Such portable technology could have applications in a wide range of fields, ...

Felix Sanchez (also known as El Super Sanchez) is one of the most decorated 400m Hurdlers in history. To his name, he already has an Olympic Gold Medal, 2 Outdoor World Championships, 2 Pan American Championships and numerous other accolades. This past week, the 34 year old Sanchez made history again by breaking the Indoor World Record in two consecutive races by nearly half a second in each race. The previous World Record of 49.73 seconds was set in 2010 by Sanchez as well. On February 4th, Sanchez competed in Mondeville, France, finishing his race in 49.25 seconds, ...

Cambridge, Mass. - February 23, 2012 – Engineers at Harvard have demonstrated a new kind of tunable color filter that uses optical nanoantennas to obtain precise control of color output. Whereas a conventional color filter can only produce one fixed color, a single active filter under exposure to different types of light can produce a range of colors. The advance has the potential for application in televisions and biological imaging, and could even be used to create invisible security tags to mark currency. The findings appear in the February issue of Nano Letters. Kenneth ...