Scientists have increased the estimate on the number of humpback whales in the North Pacific Ocean in a paper published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. The increase follows a refined statistical analysis of data compiled in 2008 from the largest whale survey ever undertaken to assess humpback whale populations throughout the North Pacific. The number of North Pacific Humpback Whales in the 2008 study known as the Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance and Status of Humpbacks, or SPLASH, was estimated at just under 20,000 based on a preliminary look at the ...

Girl Scouts of California's Central Coast today announced the appointment of Charles G. Alvarez as Chief Financial Officer. With over 30 years in financial management, Mr. Alvarez has held a number of executive-level financial positions in the Silicon Valley and will now be responsible for the long-term business and financial strategies of the council. "We are thrilled that Mr. Alvarez will be bringing his breadth of financial management experience to the council," said Sherry Sybesma, Chief Executive Officer of Girl Scouts of California's Central Coast. "His ...

Being hospitalized for heart failure (HF) was about 30 percent less likely in 2008 than in 1998, according to a study by Yale physicians in the Oct. 19 issue of JAMA. The team also found that the rate of hospitalization for black men dropped at a lower rate, and that one-year mortality rates declined slightly during this period, but remained high. Led by Jersey Chen, M.D., assistant professor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine, the study examined data from 55,097,390 fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized in the United States and Puerto Rico ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – America's elderly population will nearly double by 2050, according to a Pew Research report. As baby boomers enter retirement, concern exists as to who will care for them as they age. Traditionally, children have accepted the caregiving responsibilities, but those caregiving roles are becoming blurred as more families are affected by divorce and remarriage than in previous decades. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that relationship quality trumps genetic ties when determining caregiving obligations. Lawrence Ganong, a professor and co-chair ...

Napa Technology, developer of the WineStation Intelligent Preservation and Dispensing System, commissioned a survey of 40 top wine retailers nationwide on wine purchasing trends and best practices for increasing bottle sales. Respondents agreed that today's consumers are willing to pay more, when given the opportunity to sample wine before they buy. And those retailers willing to look outside the wine bottle for creative and technologically innovative solutions are seeing the profits pour in. The survey found that 76 percent of retailers agree that wine buying customers ...

It's a pattern that no doubt repeats itself daily in hundreds of millions of offices around the world: People sit down, turn on their computers, set their mobile phones on their desks and begin to work. What if a hacker could use that phone to track what the person was typing on the keyboard just inches away? A research team at Georgia Tech has discovered how to do exactly that, using a smartphone accelerometer—the internal device that detects when and how the phone is tilted—to sense keyboard vibrations and decipher complete sentences with up to 80 percent accuracy. ...

A UCSF study gives hope to those suffering from severe cases of bacterial corneal ulcers, which can lead to blindness if left untreated. The use of topical corticosteroids in a randomized controlled trial was found to be neither beneficial nor harmful in the overall patient population in the study. However, it helped patients who had more serious forms of bacterial corneal ulcers, according to UCSF researchers. In a paper published this month in the Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, researchers found significant vision improvement—one and a ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — First results from a large-scale Phase III trial of RTS,S*, published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), show the malaria vaccine candidate to provide young African children with significant protection against clinical and severe malaria with an acceptable safety and tolerability profile. The results were announced today at the Malaria Forum hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. Half the world's population is at risk of malaria. The disease is responsible for close to 800,000 deaths each year, ...

Book Espana has found that there are 693 active matadors in Spain during the 2011 bullfighting season and 2582 aspiring matadors. It appears the amount of bullfighters has increased slightly in 2011 compared to 2010, even if bullfighting in Barcelona has ended recently, mainly due to political reasons. This year Spain has held 648 traditional bullfights, 130 bullfights with the matador riding on a horseback and 1070 bullfights with younger bulls. It appears about 12 500 bulls has been killed in Spanish bullfights during the 2011 season, while zero matadors has been killed ...

Genetic resistance to a parasitic nematode that infects sheep has been discovered by a team of scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The researchers are the first to detect quantitative trait loci (QTL), genetic locations on chromosomes, for resistance to gastrointestinal nematode parasites in a double-backcross population derived from African native sheep. The parasites, common in tropical regions, cause significant economic and production losses in Africa each year. Sheep infected with parasites ...

Evolution of a Stream: Plants and sea-life claim new territory as glaciers retreat in Glacier Bay, Alaska As tidewater glaciers beat a hasty retreat up Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska, they uncover rocky, barren landscapes and feed cold lakes and streams — new habitat for life's hardy explorers. In the October issue of Ecology, researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Roehampton and Leeds describe the evolution and assembly of a stream ecosystem in newly de-glaciated terrain, from early insect and crustacean invaders to the arrival of migrating salmon. Sampling ...

Contact: Preeti Singh psingh@burnesscommunications.com 301-280-5722 703-862-2515 Kelsey Mertes kmertes@path.org 202-540-4422 301-312-7844 PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative First results from Phase 3 trial show malaria vaccine candidate reduces the risk of malaria First results from ongoing Phase III trial show malaria vaccine candidate, RTS,S* reduces the risk of malaria by half in African children aged 5 to 17 months Seattle, 18 October 2011 — First results from a large-scale Phase III trial of RTS,S, published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine ...

The custom framing industry has not yet made its mark on the Internet due to the fact that custom frames are not simple products. Customizable products have just recently begun to penetrate into the world of e-commerce due to advancements in development platforms and connection speeds. Frames4Less.com, a Menache Ecommerce company, aims to bring custom frames within reach of the general population using a fancy new website equipped with a state of the art Custom Framing Interface. Custom picture frames are expensive and time consuming to order, many don't resort to ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new study by researchers at Indiana University and George Mason University found the sexual repertoire of gay men surprisingly diverse, suggesting that a broader, less disease-focused perspective might be warranted by public health and medical practitioners in addressing the sexual health of gay and bisexual men. The study, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, tapped the largest sample of its kind in the United States to examine the sexual behaviors of gay and bisexual men. In collaboration with the OLB Research Institute ...

Smithsonian scientists have discovered two new, closely related bee species: one from Coiba Island in Panama and another from northern Colombia. Both descended from of a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved into Central America, the ancestors of Mayan honeybees. The presence of one of these new species on Coiba and Rancheria Islands, and its absence from the nearby mainland, is a mystery that will ultimately shed light on Panama's history and abundant biodiversity. At almost 200 square miles, Coiba Island is the largest offshore island along ...

PHILADELPHIA — An experimental vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine is the first veterinary cancer vaccine of its kind that shows an increase in survival time for dogs with spontaneous non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The work shows for the first time the feasibility and therapeutic efficacy of this alternative cell-based vaccine, which could be employed in the treatment of a number of different cancer types. The research was conducted by Nicola Mason, assistant professor of medicine at Penn Vet; Robert ...

On October 13, with little fanfare, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (NE-1) introduced the Veterans Entrepreneurial Transition (VET) Act of 2011, a landmark new GI Bill that would allow veterans to use their already budgeted educational benefits earned under existing GI Bills, to start up new small businesses. The VET Act (H.R. 3167) is a GI Bill aimed at addressing the unacceptably high veteran unemployment rate, as well as to help quickly re-build a new generation of veteran-owned small business enterprises across America as the backbone of new job creation. This GI ...

Why did the approval ratings of President George W. Bush— who was perceived as indecisive before September 11, 2001—soar over 90 percent after the terrorist attacks? Because Americans were acutely aware of their own deaths. That is one lesson from the psychological literature on "mortality salience" reviewed in a new article called "The Politics of Mortal Terror." The paper, by psychologists Florette Cohen of the City University of New York's College of Staten Island and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College, appears in October's Current Directions in Psychological Science, ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Oct. 18, 2011 – Family matters, especially when it comes to African-Americans and living kidney donation. In a study conducted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, researchers found that African-Americans donate almost exclusively to family members for living kidney transplants, as compared to Caucasians. The retrospective study, published in the September/October online issue of the journal Clinical Transplantation, compared medical records of all former successful kidney donors at Wake Forest Baptist between Jan. 1, 1991, and Dec. 31, 2009. The ...

A team of Canadian researchers has sequenced the genome of Cannabis sativa, the plant that produces both industrial hemp and marijuana, and in the process revealed the genetic changes that led to the plant's drug-producing properties. Jon Page is a plant biochemist and adjunct professor of biology at the University of Saskatchewan. He explains that a simple genetic switch is likely responsible for the production of THCA, or tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, the precursor of the active ingredient in marijuana. "The transcriptome analysis showed that the THCA synthase gene, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A study published online Oct. 18 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute provides some new but qualified support for the idea that the immune system's response to allergies may reduce the risk of developing deadly brain tumors. People with somewhat elevated blood levels of immunoglobulin E (IgE), antibodies that carry out the body's immune response to allergens, were significantly less likely to develop gliomas, and those who did survived somewhat longer, than those with clinically normal IgE levels, according to the study ...

The dazzling globular cluster called UKS 1 dominates the right-hand side of the first of the new infrared images from ESO's VISTA survey telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. But if you can drag your gaze away, there is a surprise lurking in this very rich star field — a fainter globular cluster that was discovered in the data from one of VISTA's surveys. You will have to look closely to see the other star cluster, which is called VVV CL001: it is a small collection of stars in the left half of the image. But VVV CL001 is just the first of VISTA's globular discoveries. ...

Casey Real Estate Investment, LLC and Casey Property Management, LLC are pleased to announce the acquisition of a 72,000 square foot self storage facility located at 201 Concord Street in Pawtucket RI. The new store will operate under the brand name, Casey Storage Solutions (http://www.caseystoragesolutions.com). The property will be managed by Casey Property Management, LLC. This acquisition brings Casey Storage Solutions' holdings to eight self storage properties consisting of over 450,000 square feet and over 3,500 self storage units. Casey Storage Solutions operates ...

(UC Santa Barbara –) Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new and highly efficient way to characterize the structure of polymers at the nanoscale – effectively designing a routine analytical tool that could be used by industries that rely on polymer science to innovate new products, from drug delivery gels to renewable bio-materials. Professor Omar Saleh and graduate student Andrew Dittmore of the UCSB Materials department have successfully measured the structure and other critical parameters of a long, string-like polymer molecule – polyethylene glycol, or ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 19, 2011 – Poorly managed pain in the neonatal intensive care unit has serious short- and long-term consequences, causing physiological and behavioral instability in preterm infants and long-term changes in their pain sensitivity, stress arousal systems, and developing brains. In a study published in the November issue of PAIN®, researchers report that breastfeeding during minor procedures mitigated pain in preterm neonates with mature breastfeeding behaviors. Currently, pain associated with minor procedures such as pricking for blood tests ...