The UK's largest credit card provider, MBNA, has announced the start of its two-year programme that will see its 6 million customer base moved over to contactless cards by January 1st 2012. To achieve this, MBNA will issue a new contactless credit card each time a new or replacement card request is made by a customer, the lender estimates that most of its card-holders will have the ability to pay without a PIN by the start of 2012. Contactless payment is a relatively new option at the checkout and is currently limited to GBP15 per transaction, but the card provider can ...

Married people may think they communicate well with their partners, but psychologists have found that they don't always convey messages to their loved ones as well as they think — and in some cases, the spouses communicate no better than strangers. The same communication problem also is true with close friends, a recent study has found. "People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the 'closeness-communication bias,'" said Boaz ...

NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 20, 2011 – Results from the PROSPECT clinical trial shed new light on the types of vulnerable plaque that are most likely to cause sudden, unexpected adverse cardiac events, and on the ability to identify them through imaging techniques before they occur. The trial, Providing Regional Observations to Study Predictors of Events in the Coronary Tree (PROSPECT), is the first prospective natural history study of atherosclerosis using multi-modality imaging to characterize the coronary tree. The study findings were published in the January 20, 2011 ...

Just over a year after the earthquake in Haiti killed 222,000 people there's a new problem that is killing Haitians. A cholera outbreak has doctors in the area scrambling and the water-borne illness has already claimed 3600 lives according to officials with Médicin Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). Stefan Pukatzki, a bacteriologist in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta, is hoping that down the road he can help prevent deadly cholera outbreaks. His lab studies Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that makes up the disease, and he has discovered ...

Mutations in a gene called INF2 are by far the most common cause of a dominantly inherited condition that leads to kidney failure, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The results may help with screening, prevention, and therapy. Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) attacks the kidney's filtering system and causes serious scarring. Approximately 20,000 persons are currently living with kidney failure due to FSGS in the United States, with an associated annual cost of more than $3 billion. In ...

Routine mammograms performed for breast cancer screening could serve another purpose as well: detecting calcifications in the blood vessels of patients with advanced kidney disease, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). Mammograms show calcium deposits in the breast arteries in nearly two-thirds of women with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), according to the study by W. Charles O'Neill, MD (Emory University, Atlanta). "Breast arterial calcification is a specific and useful marker of medial ...

Athens, Ga. – It's a common assumption that animal migration, like human travel across the globe, can transport pathogens long distances, in some cases increasing disease risks to humans. West Nile Virus, for example, spread rapidly along the East coast of the U.S., most likely due to the movements of migratory birds. But in a paper just published in the journal Science, researchers in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology report that in some cases, animal migrations could actually help reduce the spread and prevalence of disease and may even promote the evolution ...

In a new paper published Jan. 21 in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by Microbiology and Immunology professor Blossom Damania, PhD, has shown for the first time that the Kaposi sarcoma virus has a decoy protein that impedes a key molecule involved in the human immune response. The work was performed in collaboration with W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Jenny Ting, PhD. First author, Sean Gregory, MS, a graduate student in UNC's Department of Microbiology and Immunology played a critical role in this work. The virus-produced protein, called ...

VIDEO: This video shows the micropipette adhesion frequency assay used to study the mechanical interactions between a T cell and an antigen presented on a red blood cell. Click here for more information. Researchers have for the first time mapped the complex choreography used by the immune system's T cells to recognize pathogens while avoiding attacks on the body's own cells. The researchers found that T cell receptors – molecules located on the surface of the T cell ...

The discovery of an ancient fossil, nicknamed 'Mrs T', has allowed scientists for the first time to sex pterodactyls – flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs between 220-65 million years ago. Pterodactyls featured prominently in Spielberg's Jurassic Park III and are a classic feature of many dinosaur movies where they are often depicted as giant flying reptiles with a crest. The discovery of a flying reptile fossilised together with an egg in Jurassic rocks (about 160 million years old) in China provides the first direct evidence for gender in these extinct ...

In 2008, an international team of scientists studying an exotic new superconductor based on the element ytterbium reported that it displays unusual properties that could change how scientists understand and create materials for superconductors and the electronics used in computing and data storage. But a key characteristic that explains the material's unusual properties remained tantalizingly out of reach in spite of the scientists' rigorous battery of experiments and exacting measurements. So members of that team from the University of Tokyo reached out to theoretical ...

Scientists from the University of Leeds have made a fundamental step in the search for therapies for amyloid-related diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes mellitus. By pin-pointing the reaction that kick-starts the formation of amyloid fibres, scientists can now seek to further understand how these fibrils develop and cause disease. Amyloid fibres, which are implicated in a wide range of diseases, form when proteins misfold and stick together in long, rope-like structures. Until now the nature of the first misfold, which then causes a chain reaction of ...

The anti-diuretic hormone "vasopressin" is released from the brain, and known to work in the kidney, suppressing the diuresis. Here, the Japanese research team led by Professor Yasunobu OKADA, Director-General of National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), and Ms. Kaori SATO, a graduate student of The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, clarified the novel function of "vasopressin" that works in the brain, as well as in the kidney via the same type of the vasopressin receptor, to maintain the size of the vasopressin neurons. It might be a useful result for ...

Humans use their senses to help keep track of short intervals of time according to new research, which suggests that our perception of time is not maintained by an internal body clock alone. Scientists from UCL (University College London) set out to answer the question "Where does our sense of time come from?" Their results show that it comes partly from observing how much the world changes, as we have learnt to expect our sensory inputs to change at a particular 'average' rate. Comparing the change we see to this average value helps us judge how much time has passed, ...

For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math. On Friday, Emory mathematician Ken Ono will unveil new theories that answer these famous old questions. Ono and his research team have discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals. They have unlocked the divisibility properties of ...

SPOKANE, Wash.— Washington State University sleep researchers have determined that the air traffic controller in the crash of a Lexington, Ky., commuter flight was substantially fatigued when he failed to detect that the plane was on the wrong runway and cleared it for takeoff. Writing in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the researchers come short of saying his fatigue caused the accident. But they say their findings suggest that mathematical models predicting fatigue could lead to schedules that reduce the risk of accidents by taking advantage of workers' ...

The ESHRE Task Force on Ethics and Law acknowledges the benefits that IMAR may bring to those choosing this approach and concludes that certain forms of IMAR are morally acceptable under certain conditions. The group advises to evaluate each request for IMAR individually, based on four ethical principles in health care: the respect for autonomy, beneficence and non-maleficence and justice. The Task Force explains that the right for individual autonomy is elementary: any individual should have the principle of choice with whom to reproduce. It is understandable that couples ...

Depending on the level of smoking and dietary vitamin C intake, vitamin E supplementation may extend the life-span of restricted groups of men, according to a study published in the Age and Ageing. Several large randomized trials of humans found that vitamin E supplementation does not reduce mortality. However, the average effect on mortality in a group of people with a wide age range may mask an effect of vitamin E on the life-span. Dr. Harri Hemila, and Professor Jaakko Kaprio, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, studied the age-dependency of vitamin E effect ...

Out of every 1000 patients, two at most wake up during their operation. Unintended awareness in the patient is thus classified as an occasional complication of anesthesia—but being aware of things happening during the operation, and being able to recall them later, can leave a patient with long-term psychological trauma. How to avoid such awareness events, and what treatment is available for a patient who does experience awareness, is the subject of a report by Petra Bischoff of the Ruhr University in Bochum and Ingrid Rundshagen of the Charité Berlin in the current issue ...

Unemployment has a negative impact on a worker's future salary if it continues for a long time, particularly in countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal. This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Spanish researchers, who have analysed the impact of job loss on relative salaries in six European countries. "Out of the countries studied, Spain, Italy and Portugal are the European Union countries in which long-term unemployment is likely to have the most negative effect on salary when the individual in question returns to work", Carlos García Serrano, a researcher ...

A prototype computer game has been developed to help improve decision making skills in all aspects of our lives. Supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), a team at Queen's University Belfast has developed a prototype that could be built on by commercial games manufacturers and turned into an e-learning or training tool for professionals in all walks of life – and for the general public too. Alternatively, some of its features could be incorporated into existing computer games that have a strategy element. The team has explored ...

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) or cell phone mesh network uses software to transparently hook together numerous active cell phones in a location to provide greater bandwidth and better network connections by allowing users to share "spare" resources while they use their phones, making data transfers faster and smoother. However, the usefulness of such ad hoc networks can be offset by vulnerabilities. Like any network, a MANET can be susceptible to attack from people with malicious intent. Illicit users might, for instance, hook up to such a network and impersonate a ...

Research conducted at the University of Granada warns about the negative effects of the so-called "benevolent sexism", a term used for apparently "positive" ideas and attitudes of men towards women, which are based on the assumption that men must take care of and sacrifice themselves for women. The research revealed that when individuals are told that a man has attitudes socially considered as "good" towards his wife –even although those attitudes are sexist– they tend to justify sexual violence within the couple and to exonerate the man (as they consider that he is entitled ...

A new study reports on the success of growing human liver cells on resorbable scaffolds made from material similar to surgical sutures. Researchers suggest that this liver tissue could be used in place of donor organs during liver transplantation or during the bridge period until a suitable donor is available for patients with acute liver failure. Findings of this study appear in the February issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. As of January 2011, more than 16,000 ...

Women who have survived childhood cancer should be advised to breastfeed if they can, in order to offset some of the negative health effects of their earlier cancer treatment. According to Susan Ogg and colleagues from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, making women aware of the benefits of breastfeeding should be part of routine post-cancer diet and healthy lifestyle recommendations. Their work is published online in Springer's Journal of Cancer Survivorship. It is estimated that one in every 640 young adults between the ages of 20 and 39 will ...