Patients with facial paralysis who underwent surgical treatment for a condition that leaves them unable to completely close their eyes reported improvement in comfort around the eyes and overall quality of life, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The inability to close the eye can be a devastating result of facial paralysis. "The resulting loss of corneal protection can lead to exposure keratitis [inflammation of the cornea], corneal ulceration, and potentially permanently vision loss," the ...

Ecologists have developed a better way of rearing bee larvae in the laboratory that could help discover why honey bee populations worldwide are declining. The technique, together with details of how statistics adapted from other areas of ecology can aid bee research, is published this week in the British Ecological Society's journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Human food security depends on bees because they pollinate so many of our crop plants. As a result, worldwide declines in both honey bee colonies and solitary bees are causing widespread concern. But faced ...

Over 10,000 people have attended the summit in previous years and the 2011 summit is expected to be the best yet. Anyone interested in attending the event must register for tickets at the Developer Summit website. Entrance will be denied in the absence of tickets. This year's event promises to be the most impressive yet with a packed schedule of 37 speakers including: Mark Miller (Chief Architect of IDE Tools division at Developer Express), Venkat Subramaniam (founder of Agile Developer, Inc.), and Tim Berglund. Alongside attending workshops and focused group sessions, ...

A new "templated growth" technique for fabricating nanoribbons of epitaxial graphene has produced structures just 15 to 40 nanometers wide that conduct current with almost no resistance. These structures could address the challenge of connecting graphene devices made with conventional architectures – and set the stage for a new generation of devices that take advantage of the quantum properties of electrons. "We can now make very narrow, conductive nanoribbons that have quantum ballistic properties," said Walt de Heer, a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia ...

A replica of HMB Endeavour, used by Captain James Cook for his epic 18th century world voyage, will call at Brisbane next month. The original vessel was sent to the South Seas by King George III in order to view planet Venus's transit across the sun in 1769. It was hoped this would enable astronomers to calculate the distance between the earth and the star. Cook was also given secret orders from the Admiralty to discover the rumoured "Great South Land". Although he was unable to do this, he charted New Zealand's north and south islands and also sailed the east coast ...

VIDEO: Mahadevan and Liang created an animated model to show how peripheral growth causes the developing petals to ruffle at the edges and curve outward, leading to blooming. Click here for more information. Cambridge, Mass. - March 21, 2011 - The "lily white" has inspired centuries' worth of rich poetry and art, but when it comes to the science of how and why those delicately curved petals burst from the bud, surprisingly little is known. Now, however, mathematics has ...

The food truck frenzy is sweeping Orange County! On Thursday, April 14, 2011, The Alzheimer's Association will be front and center of the rolling food craze when it hosts an incredible gourmet food truck event. With authentic, innovative cuisine rumbling into Irvine from all over Southern California, you can bet the Alzheimer' s Food Truck Block Party will be packed with hungry mobile gourmands chomping at the bit to try the latest meals on wheels from more than 20 of the most popular gourmet food trucks in Southern California. So work up an appetite and bring everyone ...

Each of us carries a unique collection of trillions of friendly microbes in our intestines that helps break down food our bodies otherwise couldn't digest. This relationship between humans and their microbes is generally a healthy one, but changes to the mix of microbes in the digestive tract are suspected to play a role in obesity, malnutrition, Crohn's disease and other ailments. Now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis show they can grow and manipulate personalized collections of human intestinal microbes in the laboratory and pluck ...

Doctors are encouraged to consider therapies in addition to blood thinners to treat certain patients with potentially dangerous blood clots that form in the deep veins and travel to the lungs, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association. The statement is published online in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. More than 250,000 people in the United States are hospitalized with deep vein thrombosis each year. Previously, there has been limited guidance for physicians on some of the more serious conditions caused by deep ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Some 3 million children in the United States have some form of food allergy, ranging in severity from mild to life-threatening. Milk allergy is the most common, affecting 2.5 percent of children under age 3. In a small clinical study, immunologists and allergists at Children's Hospital Boston and the Stanford University School of Medicine report effectively desensitizing milk-allergic patients by increasing their exposure to milk in tandem with an allergy drug called omalizumab, allowing children to build up resistance quickly with limited allergic reactions. Their ...

Coupling an electronic prescription drug ordering system with a computerized method for reporting adverse events can dramatically reduce the number of medication errors in a hospital's psychiatric unit, suggests new Johns Hopkins research. "Medication errors are a leading cause of adverse events in hospitals," says study leader Geetha Jayaram, M.D., M.B.A., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "With the use of electronic ordering, training of personnel and standardized information technology systems, ...

Roger Johnson, editor of the District Messenger, the Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, writes: "The Crack in the Lens by Darlene A Cypser... tells an engrossing story of the boy Holmes and at the same time explores the reasons why the man Holmes turned out as he did - a brilliant, unconventional, and apparently emotionless righter of wrongs." In this account Mycroft, Sherrinford and Sherlock are the sons of Squire Siger Holmes of Mycroft Manor in Yorkshire, where Sherlock is educated by a private tutor, Professor James Moriarty. These inventions of William ...

A software package designed to minimize the potential risks of synthetic biology for the nation's defense and security is now available to the gene synthesis industry and synthetic biology community in an open-source format. Virginia Tech has licensed GenoTHREAT, a software tool that helps detect the use of synthetic DNA as bioterrorism agents. Developed as an open-source project by a team led by Jean Peccoud, associate professor at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, it is being released using the Apache License Version 2.0 to ensure broad accessibility. ...

A joint study by local oyster growers and researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science shows that moving farmed oysters into saltier waters just prior to harvest nearly eliminates the presence of a bacterium that can sicken humans. The findings—reported by VIMS professors Kim Reece and Howard Kator, and local oyster growers Thomas Gallivan, A.J. Erskine, and Tommy Leggett—may offer a relatively low-cost solution to a controversial change in FDA regulations that many growers believe will eventually affect the oyster industry in Chesapeake Bay. The Food and ...

Washington, D.C., 21 March, 2011 – Alcohol use during pregnancy is common and is associated with significant threats to the health and development of exposed offspring. Despite warnings from the Surgeon General to limit alcohol use if pregnant or contemplating pregnancy, a recent survey by the National Birth Defects Prevention Study(1) found that nearly one-third of women drank alcohol at some time during their pregnancy, with one-fourth of the women surveyed having drunk during the first trimester. Heavy use of alcohol during pregnancy may lead to fetal alcohol syndrome ...

A new study by Baylor University geology researchers shows that Native Americans' land use nearly a century ago produced a widespread impact on the eastern North American landscape and floodplain development several hundred years prior to the arrival of major European settlements. The study appears on-line in the journal Geology. Researchers attribute early colonial land-use practices, such as deforestation, plowing and damming with influencing present-day hydrological systems across eastern North America. Previous studies suggest that Native Americans' land use in ...

Jimmie Lee aka The Jersey Outlaw's new explosive single "I'm All In" is capturing the emotion of poker players across the country. The newest tune from the Jersey Outlaw channels the emotions of what poker players feel when they're waiting for that crucial card. The song is unique in the fact that it combines rock with crossover country and just a dash of rap. Insiders say that I'm All In will chart soon and become an anthem for the world of poker. Super Model Cindy Margolis commented, "The only thing hotter than Jimmie's song...is Jimmie himself!" The airplay of the ...

Princeton researchers have invented an extremely sensitive sensor that opens up new ways to detect a wide range of substances, from tell-tale signs of cancer to hidden explosives. The sensor, which is the most sensitive of its kind to date, relies on a completely new architecture and fabrication technique developed by the Princeton researchers. The device boosts faint signals generated by the scattering of laser light from a material placed on it, allowing the identification of various substances based on the color of light they reflect. The sample could be as small ...

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that between 2002 and 2003, more than 40 million people changed residences. That's a lot of furniture being moved and a lot of moving vans and trucks being rented to transport it all. Even though changing residences can, for many, be an incredible hassle that couldn't be over soon enough, there are many administrative tasks that need to be given proper attention. When it comes time to rent a vehicle to move all of one's belongings, the person moving should know whether they have or need insurance for it before they reach the rental counter. ...

Monash University researchers have found the number of years individuals live with obesity is directly associated with the risk of mortality. The research shows that the duration of obesity is a strong predictor of mortality, independent of the actual level of Body Mass Index (BMI). As the onset of obesity occurs earlier and the number of years lived with obesity increases, the risk of mortality associated with adult obesity in contemporary populations is expected to increase compared with previous decades. Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, 5209 participants ...

A report into the legal risks associated with the use of social networking sites (eg. Facebook, myspace) has found that while 95 per cent of Victorian students in years 7 to 10 use social networking sites, nearly 30 per cent did not consider social networking held any risks. The project was established to investigate the legal risks of social networking as experienced by Victorian secondary school students, teachers and parents. Survey and interview data was gathered from over 1000 Victorian middle school students (years 7-10), 200 teachers and 49 parents. The report, ...

The first set of findings from the survey are based on data from more than 22,000 individuals and show that people with degrees are 25% more likely, on average, than people with no education qualifications to adopt pro-environmental behaviours, at least in terms of paying more for environmentally-friendly products. However, they are less likely to turn off the TV overnight or to use public transport. Overall the survey, which will follow 40,000 UK households over many years, found that 60% of people believed that a major environmental disaster is pending if things continue ...

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Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have developed a new method for studying gene regulation, by employing a jumping gene as an informant. Published online today in Nature Genetics, the new method is called GROMIT. It enables researchers to systematically explore the very large part of our genome that does not code for proteins, and which likely plays a large role in making each of us unique, by controlling when, where and to what extent genes are turned on, or expressed. Thanks to GROMIT, scientists can also create mouse ...

New research has revealed that prenatal exposure to nicotine increases the vulnerability to nicotine self-administration in adolescent mice. The results support the hypothesis that adolescents with prenatal nicotine exposure are more likely to start smoking earlier than their peers and that they are also more susceptible to the addictive effects of nicotine, especially as a result of stress and peer pressure. The study performed with mice is part of a project researching the behavioural and molecular mechanisms of nicotine addiction. The research project was carried out ...