KNOXVILLE, TN —March 2, 2011 — In an effort to develop strategies for breast health awareness in rural populations researchers asked the question, "What message strategies will motivate Appalachian women to attend to breast health issues and become actively involved in their own breast health?" A new study published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs finds that two types of reasons motivate rural Appalachian women to perform breast health self-examinations, get mammograms, and to talk with doctors about their breast health. The women articulated their concerns with the ...

A reliable and trustworthy system of weights and measures is vital for economic activity. Maintaining that system requires constant vigilance, and that's where the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Weights and Measures Division (WMD) comes in. While the division routinely hosts meetings and online classes to help state regulators enforce compliance, NIST is now making an effort to reach out to industry and retailers so that they can proactively identify and address problems in their measurement procedures before the regulators show up. Proactive compliance ...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published the final version of a special publication that can help organizations to more effectively integrate information security risk planning into their mission-critical functions and overall goals. Managing Information Security Risk: Organization, Mission, and Information System View (NIST Special Publication 800-39) provides the groundwork for a three-tiered, risk-management approach that "fundamentally changes how we manage information security risk at the federal level," says Ron Ross, NIST Fellow and ...

While lab tests and imaging can sometimes help diagnose juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), a physical examination and thorough patient history are the most valuable tools in identifying this disease. According to a new literature review from the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS), the rate of false positives in laboratory evaluations and imaging studies meant to screen for juvenile arthritis makes their value limited. Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (formerly known as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis) is an autoimmune disease that affects nearly ...

PHILADELPHIA — New research from the University of Pennsylvania demonstrates a more consistent and cost-effective method for making graphene, the atomic-scale material that has promising applications in a variety of fields, and was the subject of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. As explained in a recently published study, a Penn research team was able to create high-quality graphene that is just a single atom thick over 95% of its area, using readily available materials and manufacturing processes that can be scaled up to industrial levels. "I'm aware of reports of ...

Intensive adherence counseling around the time of HIV treatment initiation significantly reduces poor adherence and virologic treatment failure in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a recent study in PLoS Medicine by Dr. Michael Chung, assistant professor of Global Health at University of Washington, who works at the Coptic Hope Center for Infectious Diseases in Nairobi, Kenya. The study published March 1 also found that using an alarm device has no effect on adherence counseling. The findings of this study define an adherence counseling protocol that is effective and ...

Boulder, CO, USA - LITHOSPHERE is now regularly posting pre-issue publication content -- finalized papers ready to go to press and not under embargo. GSA invites you to sign up for e-alerts and/or RSS feeds to have access to new journal content the minute it is posted online. Go to http://www.gsapubs.org/cgi/alerts and enter your e-mail address to manage your subscriptions for pre-issue postings, tables of contents alerts, and more. The following LITHOSPHERE articles were published online 10 Feb. 2011. Mafic granulite xenoliths from the East Indian Shield: Evidence ...

PHILADELPHIA—Reporting in Nature, scientists from Thomas Jefferson University have determined that a single protein called FADD controls multiple cell death pathways, a discovery that could lead to better, more targeted autoimmune disease and cancer drugs. Twelve years ago, internationally-known immunologist Jianke Zhang, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Thomas Jefferson University, realized FADD, which stands for Fas-Associated protein with Death Domain, played an important role in embryonic development and the onset of ...

PHILADELPHIA - The gene for the protein p53 is the most frequently mutated in human cancer. It encodes a tumor suppressor, and traditionally researchers have assumed that it acts primarily as a regulator of how genes are made into proteins. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine show that the protein has at least one other biochemical activity: controlling the metabolism of the sugar glucose, one of body's main sources of fuel. These new insights on a well-studied protein may be used to develop new cancer therapies. Xiaolu Yang, PhD, associate ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study of 45-million-year-old pollen from Pine Island west of Fort Myers has led to a new understanding of the state's geologic history, showing Florida could be 10 million to 15 million years older than previously believed. The discovery of land in Florida during the early Eocene opens the possibility for researchers to explore the existence of land animals at that time, including their adaptation, evolution and dispersal until the present. Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch, who ...

The deVere Group, the world's largest independent financial consultancy group has raised GBP72,030 in funds towards Combat Stress, Guillain-Barre syndrome support group, as well as Inspire, from world-wide sponsors including deVere partners and deVere staff. The deVere Group Malta team, which included deVere CEO Nigel Green, James Green, Hannah Green, Maria Stivala, Nadia Micallef and Svetlana Falzon, has successfully completed the 2011 Land Rover Malta Half Marathon on Sunday 27th February 2011, in a mission to raise funds towards four international charities. The ...

VIDEO: TechSolutions is a rapid-response program that accepts recommendations and suggestions from Navy and Marine Corps personnel on ways to improve mission effectiveness through the application of technology. Click here for more information. ARLINGTON, Va. – The next time a Navy chef sautés shrimp scampi, he may be managing the meal using food-preparation software developed by the Office of Naval Research. A product of ONR's TechSolutions program, Food Service Management ...

BidRivals have just released the new MacBook Pro for auction just a week after being launched by Apple. Using BidRivals.com's entertaining penny auction shopping system all Mac aficionados can now benefit from immediate discounts of up to 90 percent on the new 2011 version of the MacBook Pro. The new MacBook Pro comes with state of the art processors, all new graphics and breakthrough high-speed input /output communications systems with data transfer rates of up to 10 Gbps. The graphics processors on the new MacBook Pro are reported to be up to 3 times faster than previous ...

Any parent can tell you that raising a child is emotionally and intellectually draining. Despite their tales of professional sacrifice, financial hardship, and declines in marital satisfaction, many parents continue to insist that their children are an essential source of happiness and fulfillment in their lives. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that parents create rosy pictures of parental joy as a way to justify the huge investment that kids require. Richard Eibach and Steven Mock, psychological ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Quantum computers are computers that exploit the weird properties of matter at extremely small scales. Many experts believe that a full-blown quantum computer could perform calculations that would be hopelessly time consuming on classical computers, but so far, quantum computers have proven hard to build. At the Association for Computing Machinery's 43rd Symposium on Theory of Computing in June, associate professor of computer science Scott Aaronson and his graduate student Alex Arkhipov will present a paper describing an experiment that, if it worked, ...

Men who take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs three times a day for more than three months are 2.4 times more likely to have erectile dysfunction compared to men who do not take those drugs regularly, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published online in The Journal of Urology. While previous research showed a trend toward this same finding, this observational study used electronic health records, an automated pharmacy database and self-reported questionnaire data to examine NSAID use and ED in an ethnically diverse population of 80,966 men aged 45 to 69 years ...

Tobacco smoking is the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the U.S., with more than 400,000 deaths each year attributable to smoking or its consequences. And yet teens still smoke. Indeed, smoking usually begins in the teen years, and approximately 80 percent of adult smokers became hooked by the time they were 18. Meanwhile, teens who don't take up smoking usually never do. While studies have linked cigarette smoking to deficits in attention and memory in adults, UCLA researchers wanted to compare brain function in adolescent smokers and non-smokers, ...

In an effort to make it easier to build inexpensive, next-generation silicon-based electro-optical chips, which allow computers to move information with light and electricity, a University of Washington photonics professor, Dr. Michael Hochberg and his research team are developing design tools and using commercial nanofabrication tools. Silicon optical chips are critical to the Air Force because of their size, weight, power, rapid cycle time, program risk reduction and the improvements they can offer in data communications, lasers and detectors. The Air Force Office ...

A UCLA–University of Glasgow study of baseball tosses has found that body language is more likely to be judged as masculine when it seems to convey anger and as feminine when is seems to convey sadness. Researchers videotaped actors, both male and female, throwing baseballs in such a manner as to convey a range of emotions. Then, using technology that disguised the actors' sex, they presented the videos to observers and asked them to make judgments about the throwers' emotions and gender. "Even when observers received minimal information, they were able to discern ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Simply by eating the leaves of an invasive tree that soaks up river water, an Asian beetle may help to slow down water loss in the Southwestern United States. Two scientists from UC Santa Barbara, working with colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have published the first substantive data showing water savings that can result from using Asian beetles for the biological control of tamarisk, an invasive tree of western rivers. The study is now published online and in print in the journal Oecologia. "Widespread ...

Warming temperatures and melting ice in the Arctic may be behind a progressively earlier bloom of a crucial annual marine event, and the shift could hold consequences for the entire food chain and carbon cycling in the region. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, along with colleagues in Portugal and Mexico, plotted the yearly spring bloom of phytoplankton—tiny plants at the base of the ocean food chain—in the Arctic Ocean and found the peak timing of the event has been progressing earlier each year for more than a decade. The researchers ...

Swinglifestyle is rewarding Arizona swingers with a 1-year paid membership in appreciation for the lifestyle. For a limited time residents in Arizona will benefit with a no frills paid 1-year membership. The membership will include all the benefits of a regular one year account, a value of $69 dollars. New and existing free members will receive full access to all areas of the site including unlimited emails, chat, swingersboard, adult photo access and many more perks. Residents in Arizona are urged to participate in the limited time paid membership immediately. For local ...

Urbana, Ill.—Black holes are some of the heaviest objects in the universe. Electrons are some of the lightest. Now physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown how charged black holes can be used to model the behavior of interacting electrons in unconventional superconductors. "The context of this problem is high-temperature superconductivity," said Phillips. "One of the great unsolved problems in physics is the origin of superconductivity (a conducting state with zero resistance) in the copper oxide ceramics discovered in 1986." The results ...

Giving breastfeeding infants of HIV-infected mothers a daily dose of the antiretroviral drug nevirapine for six months halved the risk of HIV transmission to the infants at age 6 months compared with giving infants the drug daily for six weeks, according to preliminary clinical trial data presented today. The longer nevirapine regimen achieved a 75 percent reduction in HIV transmission risk through breast milk for the infants of HIV-infected mothers with higher T-cell counts who had not yet begun treatment for HIV. The study was presented at the 18th Conference on ...

Cincinnati, OH, March 3, 2011 -- Cerebral palsy is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects motor function, more often in children born prematurely. Because cerebral palsy is a result of brain injury received shortly before, during, or soon after birth, the number of infants being diagnosed with the condition is a good indicator of the quality of perinatal and neonatal care. An article soon to be published in the Journal of Pediatrics indicates that the rates of cerebral palsy have declined dramatically in the past 15 years. Dr. Ingrid van Haastert and colleagues ...