Governmental agencies in the United Kingdom recently instituted guidelines banning physicians' white coats and the wearing of long-sleeved garments to decrease the transmission of bacteria within hospitals due to the belief that cuffs of long-sleeved shirts carry more bacteria. However, a new study published today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine shows that after an eight-hour day, there is no difference in contamination of long- and short-sleeved shirts, or on the skin at the wearers' wrists. A group of researchers from the University of Colorado, USA, decided to ...

A breakthrough by scientists at Queen's University Belfast could help reduce heart failure in cancer patients around the world, and ultimately increase survival rates. Scientists at Queen's Centre for Vision and Vascular Science have discovered the role of an enzyme which, when a patient receives chemotherapy, can cause life-threatening damage to the heart. This has, until now, restricted the amount of chemotherapy doses a patient can receive; but while protecting the heart, this dilutes the chemotherapy's effectiveness in destroying cancerous tumours. By identifying ...

The "glass ceiling" for women administrators in college athletics may be cracked, but is not completely broken, according to a new study co-authored by a North Carolina State University researcher. Results of the study, which surveyed athletic administrators at universities across the country to determine how, and if, gender roles made a difference in hiring practices, may disappoint those who think double standards for women have been relegated to the past. Dr. Heidi Grappendorf, assistant professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at NC State, and colleagues ...

Maloof Skateboarding will host the final round of its Maloof High Ollie Challenge on February 14-15 in Las Vegas during MAGIC, the most influential event in the business of fashion. Pro Skaters Torey Pudwill, Corey Duffel, Johnny Layton, Levi Brown, Garrett Hill, Darren Harper and Steve Nesser will compete against 14 skaters who won regional contests at skate shops across the country, the winner of an online video contest, as well as top amateur skaters Luis Tolentino, Anthony Schultz, Kechaud Johnson, Austyn Gillette and Aldrin Garcia. The winner will take home $10,000 ...

The owner of Plagiarisma.Net noticed that most students could copy and paste any text coming from the Google books because they are not included in most of plagiarism tools available in the internet. This theft and copyright violation has been rampant because most software is not able to detect the copied text. "Well, it is high time that we push on adding more script to existing plagiarism checker tools and help students and other writers polish their talents by writing their articles and their thesis in their own words and understanding. We need to raise awareness about ...

A three-month EcoHearth.com investigation has revealed a developing environmental catastrophe that almost no one is paying attention to and which gravely threatens ecosystems worldwide. There are at minimum 2.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells, none permanently capped, littering the US, and an estimated 20-30 million globally. There is no known technology for securely sealing these tens of millions of abandoned wells. Many--likely hundreds of thousands--are already hemorrhaging oil, brine and greenhouse gases into the environment. Habitats are being fundamentally ...

When the 2011 Hurricane forecast was announced, the people in the gulf states were not too happy. The leading U.S. tarps supplier is trying to lessen the blow with preparedness. The tarps company has increased if poly tarps inventory by 20% and anticipates another re-stock of the high demand poly tarp cover. The natural disasters that are often associated with unusual weather changes are happening all too often these days. Families are left devastated as they lose their homes and sometimes their entire families to these tragic occurrences. Hurricanes cause oil spills ...

HIPAA Ready LLC announced today that it has been honored as a Top 50 Diversity Owned Business in Colorado by DiversityBusiness.com. This privileged distinction marks the third for the company in recent months following their placement as one of the Top 50 Privately Held Businesses in Denver and Top 500 Asian Owned Businesses in the U.S. For the past 10 years, DiversityBusiness.com has awarded its Top Diversity Businesses by highlighting top performing privately-held businesses with diverse staff, diverse ownership and progressive annual gross revenue. Shem Isukh, President ...

When President Obama signed the voluminous Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law last summer, there must have been an audible gulp from the pencil-pushers working at federal agencies. After all, they would be charged with the task of taking all 2,223 pages of the new law and administering it at the regulatory level. As those rule makers continue to churn out official releases on Dodd-Frank, it is up to the rest of us to keep track of the process, and to make sense of how those changes affect our work. Knowledge Mosaic Inc. was one of the ...

Of the top 10 commercials as ranked by Ad Bowl, http://adbowl.com/winner.php, the majority of advertisements in the Super Bowl have a strong emotional appeal. Kathy Doyle Thomas, Chairman of the Board for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, a division of the National Retail Federation and Executive Vice President of Half Price Books, which is based in Dallas, Texas, said that doesn't surprise her. "The data has shown that winning a consumer's heart is still the best avenue for marketers to take," explained Doyle Thomas. "One of my personal favorites was ...

Diamonds are a girl's best friend, but it seems Google is a diamond's best friend! New York and Israel based diamond jeweler Shiree Odiz will use the popular search-engine to find 20 world class Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts, offering the top applicant, to be named the "SEO Idol" a minimum of $10,000 dollars just for turning up to interview! ShireeOdiz.com are launching the largest ever SEO competition to keep pace with market leaders Tiffany & Co. and Blue Nile, who between them made over $450m dollars in online sales in 2009, according to their public financial ...

Life on Earth, came from other planets, and has a genetic ancestry leading backwards in time over 10 billion years - so proclaims a revolutionary, paradigm busting text, The Biological Big Bang, edited by famed astrobiologist and astrophysicist Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe. Chandra, along with his colleague astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, are the "fathers" of the field known today as "astrobiology." Hoyle coined the term "The Big Bang"; and Dr. Wickramasinghe and he coined the term "Astrobiology" in 1981, invented the science of astro-chemistry and have published major controversial ...

The Smarter World contest at Inter-Xect is now open for enterprises and individuals. Prize money offered ranges from $200 to $18,000 in cash. All contest and working details available at www.Inter-Xect.com. Inter-Xect is designed to work with six entities - individuals, universities, communities and large-medium-small enterprises. Enterprises and people are allowed to broadcast intelligent systematic information about a product, a service, contests, jobs, finance, property, services, books, blogs, exhibitions, new product launches, news, etc through the Inter-Xect ...

Embvue Inc. (www.embvue.com), a leading provider of certifiable embedded systems, network and testing products, and professional services for mission-critical, safety-critical and security-sensitive systems, announced today the availability of the first of its revolutionary Generator software tools - Generator-RTC. Generator is a powerful system-level tool suite that enables efficient, automated, requirements-based testing of any electronics system, sub-system or software module. Following on from the successful launch of its Generator tool suite on September 13th ...

What's your favorite prime-time crime show? Do you enjoy the fictional world of "CSI" or "Law & Order," or do you find real-life tales like "The First 48" or "Dateline" more engrossing? Your answers to those questions may say a lot about your fears and attitudes about crime, a new study finds. Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln surveyed hundreds of adults about how often they watched various kinds of crime TV – made-up dramas, documentary-style "real crime" programs, and local and national news. They found that how each type of program depicts crime was ...

Like listeners adjusting a high-tech radio, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have tuned in to precise frequencies of brain activity to unleash new insights into how the brain works. "Analysis of brain function normally focuses on where brain activity happens and when," says Eric C. Leuthardt, MD. "What we've found is that the wavelength of the activity provides a third major branch of understanding brain physiology." Researchers used electrocorticography, a technique for monitoring the brain with a grid of electrodes temporarily implanted ...

A new study has provided the first conclusive evidence that cannabis use significantly hastens the onset of psychotic illnesses during the critical years of brain development – with possible life-long consequences. The first ever meta-analysis of more than 20,000 patients shows that smoking cannabis is associated with an earlier onset of psychotic illness by up to 2.7 years. The analysis, by an international team including Dr Matthew Large, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Psychiatry and Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital, is published today in ...

The human brain operates as a highly interconnected small-world network, not as a collection of discrete regions as previously believed, with important implications for why many of us experience cognitive declines in old age, a new study shows. Australian researchers have mapped the brain's neural networks and for the first time linked them with specific cognitive functions, such as information processing and language. Results from the study are published in the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience. The researchers from the University of New South Wales are now examining ...

Rhizanthella gardneri is a cute, quirky and critically endangered orchid that lives all its life underground. It even blooms underground, making it virtually unique amongst plants. Last year, using radioactive tracers, scientists at The University of Western Australia showed that the orchid gets all its nutrients by parasitising fungi associated with the roots of broom bush, a woody shrub of the WA outback. Now, with less than 50 individuals left in the wild, scientists have made a timely and remarkable discovery about its genome. Despite the fact that this ...

In the developing brain, countless nerve connections are made which turn out to be inappropriate and as a result must eventually be removed. The process of establishing a neuronal network does not always prove precise or error free. Dr. Peter Scheiffele's research group at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have been able to document this phenomenon using advanced microscopy techniques in the developing cerebellum, a brain area required for fine movement control. Dr. Scheiffele's group has discovered that a protein traditionally associated with bone development is ...

The health impacts of human rights violations in Chin State, home to the Chin ethnic minority in Burma, are substantial and the indirect health outcomes of human rights violations probably dwarf the mortality from direct killings. These findings from a study by Richard Sollom from Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and colleagues will be published in this week's PLoS Medicine and should encourage the international community to intensify its efforts to reduce human rights violations in Burma. The military junta, which seized power in Burma in 1962, ...

In a systematic review of current evidence published in this week's PLoS Medicine, the authors—Jim McCambridge from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK, and colleagues—conclude that there is enough evidence to recommend that reducing drinking during late adolescence is likely to be important for preventing long-term adverse consequences of drinking, as well as protecting against more immediate harms. Although there is an urgent need for better studies in this area, research to date provides some evidence that high alcohol consumption in late adolescence ...

CHICAGO – Among patients with early-stage breast cancer that had spread to a nearby lymph node and who received treatment that included lumpectomy and radiation therapy, women who just had the sentinel lymph node removed (the first lymph node to which cancer is likely to spread from the primary tumor) did not have worse survival than women who had more extensive axillary lymph node dissection (surgery to remove lymph nodes found in the armpit), according to a study in the February 9 issue of JAMA. Axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) has been part of breast cancer surgery ...

CHICAGO – Patients who underwent coronary artery bypass graft surgery and had elevated levels of the cardiac enzymes creatine kinase or troponin in the 24 hours following surgery had an associated intermediate and long-term increased risk of death, according to a study in the February 9 issue of JAMA. "About 400,000 coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures are performed annually in the United States, giving public health significance to factors that affect the outcome of these procedures," the authors write. Increases in creatine kinase (CK-MB) or troponin levels ...

CHICAGO – In a study that included infants from South Africa, those who were exposed to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) at birth but did not become infected had lower levels of antibodies to diseases such as pertussis, tetanus and pneumococcus, compared to infants of non-HIV infected mothers, according to a study in the February 9 issue of JAMA. Infectious diseases account for nearly 6 million deaths worldwide annually in children younger than 5 years. Immunization against vaccine-preventable infections is essential to reducing childhood mortality. "The high prevalence ...