Spinal surgeries are risky procedures that require hours under anesthesia, and days of hospitalization, so no patient likely takes the decision to undergo such surgery lightly. Most are following their doctors' recommendations, but such recommendations are coming under increased scrutiny. Chronic back pain--one of the common complaints that cause doctors to recommend spinal surgery--is one of the top 10 diseases in the US according to Forbes.com. It is also one of the most expensive: Americans spend $32 billion per year treating back pain, including spinal surgeries. ...

Researchers at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology say they have found further proof that the wolf ancestors of today's domesticated dogs can be traced to southern East Asia -- findings that run counter to theories placing the cradle of the canine line in the Middle East. Dr Peter Savolainen, KTH researcher in evolutionary genetics, says a new study released Nov. 23 confirms that an Asian region south of the Yangtze River was the principal and probably sole region where wolves were domesticated by humans. Data on genetics, morphology and behaviour show clearly ...

VIDEO: Animation of PMN-PT microcantilever. Click here for more information. A team of university researchers, aided by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have succeeded in integrating a new, highly efficient piezoelectric material into a silicon microelectromechanical system (MEMS).* This development could lead to significant advances in sensing, imaging and energy harvesting. A piezoelectric material, such as quartz, expands slightly when ...

Rezidor, a rapidly-expanding worldwide hotel company, has announced a partnership with World Clean Up 2012, a global campaign which aims to clean up illegal stray garbage in 100 countries and raise people's environmental awareness worldwide. Together with Carlson, majority shareholder and strategic partner of Rezidor, the company will join and support World Clean Up activities throughout the year and celebrate the end of the campaign 2012 in September during Rezidor's traditional "Responsible Business Action Month." Rezidor and Carlson are the only global partners ...

Urban legend warns shoveling snow causes heart attacks, and the legend seems all too accurate, especially for male wintery excavators with a family history of premature cardiovascular disease. However, until recently this warning was based on anecdotal reports. Two of the most important cardiology associations in the US include snow -shoveling on their websites as a high risk physical activity, but all the citation references indicate that this warning was based one or two incidents. "We thought that this evidence should not be enough to convince us that snow -shoveling ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A new study involving bat skulls, bite force measurements and scat samples collected by an international team of evolutionary biologists is helping to solve a nagging question of evolution: Why some groups of animals develop scores of different species over time while others evolve only a few. Their findings appear in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. To answer this question, Elizabeth Dumont at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Liliana Dávalos of Stony Brook University together with colleagues at ...

Kuoni, a leading travel operator in the UK, has revealed in its new 'Discover' brochure, a collection of enthralling holidays aimed at adventurous travellers. Whether it's hot air ballooning in Jaipur, tea with a Gurkha family, zip-lining in Honduras, horse riding in Uruguay, cruising in Antarctica, snorkeling in the San Blas Islands in Panama, wildlife spotting in Guyana or walking the Inca trail in Peru, readers of the brochure are invited to engage with the many adventures available through Kuoni travel. These exciting and iconic experiences are just a few that fill ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine describe for the first time a key target of DNA damage checkpoint enzymes that must be chemically modified to enable stable maintenance of chromosome ends by telomerase, an enzyme thought to play a key role in cancer and aging. Their findings are reported online in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Telomeres are the natural ends of chromosomes, consisting of specialized DNA-and-protein structures that protect chromosome ends and ensure faithful duplication of chromosomes in actively dividing ...

The Rezidor Hotel Group, one of the fastest growing hotel companies worldwide, announced the first Park Inn by Radisson hotel in Italy. The hotel group revealed that the Grand Hotel Milan Malpensa will be transformed into the Park Inn by Radisson Milan Malpensa. The property, which features 138 rooms, is 10 minutes from Milan Malpensa Airport and has easy access to nearby businesses and Milan's exhibition centres. "We are delighted to bring our dynamic mid-market brand Park Inn by Radisson to Italy. We also further strengthen our position as one of Europe's largest ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- If dark matter exists in the universe, scientists now have set the strongest limit to date on its mass. In a paper to be published on Dec. 1 in Physical Review Letters (available in pdf), Brown University assistant professor Savvas Koushiappas and graduate student Alex Geringer-Sameth report that dark matter must have a mass greater than 40 giga-electron volts in dark-matter collisions involving heavy quarks. (The masses of elementary particles are regularly expressed in terms of electron volts.) Using publicly available data collected from an instrument ...

The sun doesn't always shine and the breeze doesn't always blow and therein lie perhaps the biggest hurdles to making wind and solar power usable on a grand scale. If only there were an efficient, durable, high-power, rechargeable battery we could use to store large quantities of excess power generated on windy or sunny days until we needed it. And as long as we're fantasizing, let's imagine the battery is cheap to build, too. Now Stanford researchers have developed part of that dream battery, a new electrode that employs crystalline nanoparticles of a copper compound. In ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Patients overall in the United States are very satisfied with their physicians and with treatment they receive in outpatient settings, according to new information which challenges common public perceptions about outpatient medical treatment. "Particularly surprising is that even a lot of patients who reported average encounters with physicians, such as average national wait times and average physician encounter time, seem to be giving full marks to their physician in terms of visit satisfaction," said Rajesh Balkrishnan, lead study author and associate ...

Durham, NC — If you eat bread stuffing or grain-fed turkey this Thanksgiving, give thanks to the grasses — a family of plants that includes wheat, oats, corn and rice. Some grasses, such as corn and sugar cane, have evolved a unique way of harvesting energy from the sun that's more efficient in hot, arid conditions. A new grass family tree reveals how this mode of photosynthesis came to be. The results may one day help scientists develop more drought-tolerant grains, say scientists working at the U. S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. From the grasslands of ...

Stena Line's Superfast VII ship has arrived at her new Loch Ryan Port home in Cairnryan in preparation for the opening of the new ferry route between Scotland and Northern Ireland on November 21st. Superfast VII will be joined by her sister ship Superfast VIII at their new purpose built 27 acre Scottish port that will also encompass a brand new 1,500 square metre passenger and freight terminal. The ships will be the largest ever to sail between Scotland and Northern Ireland. The new port, new route and new ships are part of a GBP200M rolling investment programme, ...

ARLINGTON, Va.— The History Channel will feature an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored device that could help Sailors and Marines scale walls like Batman during its "Modern Marvels" show Nov. 28. Funded by ONR's TechSolutions program, the Powered Rope Ascender was originally designed for use by soldiers in urban combat and cave exploration. The handheld climbing tool allows warfighters to ascend and descend vertical surfaces quickly, at a rate of six feet per second. As ONR's rapid-response science and technology program, TechSolutions funded the project to create ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — An inexpensive drug that treats Type-2 diabetes has been shown to prevent a number of natural and man-made chemicals from stimulating the growth of breast cancer cells, according to a newly published study by a Michigan State University researcher. The research, led by pediatrics professor James Trosko and colleagues from South Korea's Seoul National University, provides biological evidence for previously reported epidemiological surveys that long-term use of the drug metformin for Type-2 diabetes reduces the risk of diabetes-associated cancers, ...

JUPITER, FL, November 23, 2011 – Against the backdrop of the growing epidemic of obesity in the United States, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have made an important new discovery regarding a specific gene that plays an important role in keeping a steady balance between our food intake and energy expenditure. The study may help scientists better understand the keys to fighting obesity and related disorders such as diabetes. The study, which was published in the November 25, 2011 print edition of The Journal of Biological Chemistry, ...

Door2Tour.com, the website tour consolidator, has announced that its tour packages to watch Andre Rieu in concert are incredibly popular among the site's customers. Even though Andre Rieu will not be touring the UK until December 2012, the demand for tickets to see him perform is higher than any other product available on the Door2Tour.com website. To many, Andre Rieu is affectionately known as the 'King Of Waltz' and he is often revered as one of the world's greatest musical entertainers. He has been able to recreate the atmosphere of 19th century Viennese Dance Halls ...

As Cyber Monday approaches, a new study of e-commerce giants eBay and Amazon challenges a common assumption that trust and risk are always important considerations for buyers in online marketplaces, arguing instead that auction sites may have "over-invested in institutional structures" to reduce buyers' economic risk while ignoring social elements of their transactions. It has been widely assumed that online auction sites always need to build trust and reduce risk, but a forthcoming article in Information Systems Research counters that it is not necessarily "the higher ...

HSBC today (24th Nov 2011) launches its first-ever sub 4% interest rate for mortgage borrowers with a 10% deposit - a 3.84% two-year discount deal with no fee to pay. During 2011 HSBC has continuously helped first time buyers, and those looking to move on, by offering competitive rates for customers with a relatively small deposit. In addition to great variable rates, HSBC continues to offer two-year and five-year fixed rates at 85% and 90% LTV fee-free. Peter Dockar, Head of Mortgages at HSBC, said: 'We are committed to supporting first time buyers and last ...

Guppies in the wild have evolved over at least half-a-million years — long enough for the males' coloration to have changed dramatically. Yet a characteristic orange patch on male guppies has remained remarkably stable, though it could have become redder or more yellow. Why has it stayed the same hue of orange over such a long period of time? Because that's the color female guppies prefer. "Sometimes populations have to evolve just to stay the same," said Greg Grether, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-author of a study published Nov. 23 ...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a common condition associated with obesity and heart disease long thought to undermine health and longevity. But a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests the condition does not affect survival. A report on the study was published online last week in BMJ, the British medical journal. "Physicians have considered fatty liver disease a really worrisome risk factor for cardiovascular disease," says study leader Mariana Lazo, M.D., Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Welch ...

Collaborations between Johns Hopkins and National Taiwan University researchers have successfully manipulated the life span of common, single-celled yeast organisms by figuring out how to remove and restore protein functions related to yeast aging. A chemical variation of a "fuel-gauge" enzyme that senses energy in yeast acts like a life span clock: It is present in young organisms and progressively diminished as yeast cells age. In a report in the September 16 edition of Cell, the scientists describe their identification of a new level of regulation of this age-related ...

Lumbering around during the final weeks before delivery is tough for any pregnant mum. Most females adjust their movements to compensate for the extreme physical changes that accompany the later stages of pregnancy. However, no one had been able to find a distinct gait change – such as a change in stride length or frequency – associated with the latter stages of pregnancy. Intrigued by the ways that newborn dolphins learn to swim after birth, Shawn Noren from the Institute of Marine Science, University of California Santa Cruz, realised that she had the perfect opportunity ...

The internet today is rife with all kinds of gaming sites, which includes poker sites as well. For the person who wants to play online poker, there are hundreds of poker sites to choose them. Yet you must be sure that you choose a reliable one. With all poker sites making a lot of tall claims, choosing the right one is indeed a tricky affair. PlayPokerOnline.com tells you some of the ways by which you can make sure if a poker site is trustworthy or not. Customer reviews are one way by which you can gain some idea about the reliability of a site. There are many sites ...