Our understanding of what differentiates cancer cells from normal cells is limited by a lack of methods for studying the complex signal systems of individual cells. By combing two different methods, a team of Uppsala researchers have now provided the research world with a tool for studying signal paths on several levels at the same time. Their article is being published today in PLoS One. "We also show that the method can be used to determine the molecular effect of drugs or pharmaceuticals," says Ola Söderberg, who directed the study at the Department of Immunology, ...

The European Court of Justice has ruled that insurance companies can no longer set premium prices based on gender. The new rules could mean young drivers' car insurance could be significantly cheaper in the future for male drivers. The recently issued judgment will ensure that car insurance premiums in the UK and Ireland are based on a fair risk assessment which does not include gender. The European Court has passed a new ruling which removes gender considerations from a wide range of commercial activities. The basic principle behind this was whether or not it is legitimate ...

The number of young adults in the United States with high blood pressure may be much higher than previously reported, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Researchers analyzed data on more than 14,000 men and women between 24 and 32 years old in 2008 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, known as Add Health, funded by the National Institutes of Health. They found 19 percent had elevated blood pressure, also referred to as hypertension. Only about half of the participants with elevated blood pressure ...

In the largest stroke rehabilitation study ever conducted in the United States, stroke patients who had physical therapy at home improved their ability to walk just as well as those who were treated in a training program that requires the use of a body-weight supported treadmill device followed by walking practice. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, also found that patients continued to improve up to one year after stroke, defying conventional wisdom that recovery occurs early and tops out at six months. In fact, even patients who started rehabilitation ...

The European Court of Justice has recently issued a judgment relating to gender 'discrimination' in insurance. This ruling will see significant changes for companies in EU Member States selling car insurance, Ireland included. To understand what this might mean for you, it's necessary to look at the background, says car insurance specialist Quinn Direct. For many years, car insurance providers have set their car policy prices based upon the perceived risk associated with a given individual. This has been widely accepted as the fairest way of setting motor vehicle ...

Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature today. The experiment, which spanned more than a decade, suggests that the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. This means that if the electron was magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair. The physicists from Imperial's Centre for Cold Matter ...

Although swine influenza viruses usually sicken only pigs, potentially one might also spark a pandemic in people, as occurred with the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. Because few long-term studies have surveyed flu viruses in swine, however, gaps exist in what is known about the evolution of swine influenza viruses and the conditions that enable a swine virus to infect humans and cause disease. In new research reported in Nature, scientists analyzed the genetic makeup of more than 650 influenza viruses isolated during the systematic surveillance of pigs slaughtered in Hong ...

A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, the burst lies far beyond any known quasar and could be more distant than any previously known galaxy or gamma-ray burst. Multiple lines of evidence in favor of a record-breaking distance for this burst, known as GRB 090429B for the 29 April 2009 date when it was discovered, are presented in a paper by an international team of astronomers led by former Penn State University ...

The Rottenstein Law Group, which represents clients with claims stemming from the failures of defective hip replacement devices manufactured and sold by DePuy Orthopaedics, a division of Johnson & Johnson, believes the most effective way to raise awareness about the company's faulty products and the impact they've had on unsuspecting recipients, is to turn to the Internet to keep the public informed. Since DePuy's ASR XL Acetabular, and ASR Hip Resurfacing systems were recalled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August, 2010, and more recent revelations ...

Now it is possible to control all installed screensavers without switching between windows with the help of new version of NFS Screensavers Manager (http://newfreescreensavers.com/screensavers-manager/), created and updated by NewFreeScreensavers.com, a website with a collection of safe and free screensavers. NFS Screensavers Manager 2.0, which helps to manage multiple screensavers on a computer, was greatly changed. What is updated? 1. Interface. Now manager has one window, featuring all possible options and a playlist. No need in switching between windows. 2. Playlist. ...

Everybody has heard about echolocation in bats and dolphins. These creatures emit bursts of sounds and listen to the echoes that bounce back to detect objects in their environment. What is less well known is that people can echolocate, too. In fact, there are blind people who have learned to make clicks with their mouths and to use the returning echoes from those clicks to sense their surroundings. Some of these people are so adept at echolocation that they can use this skill to go mountain biking, play basketball, or navigate unknown environments. Researchers at Western's ...

New Haven, Conn.—Paleontologists have discovered that a group of remarkable ancient sea creatures existed for much longer and grew to much larger sizes than previously thought, thanks to extraordinarily well-preserved fossils discovered in Morocco. The creatures, known as anomalocaridids, were already thought to be the largest animals of the Cambrian period, known for the "Cambrian Explosion" that saw the sudden appearance of all the major animal groups and the establishment of complex ecosystems about 540 to 500 million years ago. Fossils from this period suggested these ...

Fans and critics of the ABC comedy "Modern Family" hail it as a landmark depiction of contemporary American life because, for one of the first times on television, a gay couple and their adopted Vietnamese daughter are included in the extended family unit. As the numbers of gay families grow either through adoption or assisted reproduction, real "modern families" are becoming more prevalent and accepted. In January of this year, Newsweek published "Meet My Real Modern Family" by acclaimed author Andrew Solomon. In the article Andrew described ...

Nuance Communications, Inc. has already proven itself a leading provider of imaging and speech solutions. It has previously introduced to the technology crowd its Nuance PDF Converter for Windows. The company follows up the move with another good one - the release of the Nuance PDF Converter for MAC. This action allows MAC users to do just about everything with PDF files. MAC versus Windows Though the MAC operating system (OS) is frequently encased in stylish exteriors, which Apple is known for, the OS itself is still just a runner up to Windows. So, the introduction ...

Launching a busy summer with a wonderful day of community on May 21, the village of Questa at Mountain House hosted nearly 800 Bay Area home shoppers and established residents to "100% Celebration," a family-friendly day of food, fun, photo opps and Facebook postings, plus new home model tours at Questa, the latest village of Mountain House. Home to some 3,000 residents, Mountain House is a thriving new town east of Livermore. It prides itself on state-of-the art schools, a wealth of recreational opportunities and neighborhoods of charming and refined traditional ...

The first comprehensive study of sea creatures around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia reveals a region that is richer in biodiversity than even many tropical sites, such as the Galapagos Islands. The study provides an important benchmark to monitor how these species will respond to future environmental change. Reporting this week in the online journal PLoS ONE, the team from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), funded by the British Government's Darwin Initiative and the South Georgia Heritage Trust, describe how they examined over 130 years of polar records. About ...

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing the discovery of a very massive, isolated star in a galaxy near our Milky Way. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the star VFTS 682 is one of the more massive stars ever known, because it is about 150 times the mass of the Sun. But the major surprise is that the star lies on its own and is not a member of a dense star cluster. The international team of astronomers [1] who are publishing this discovery is involved in a large survey of the Tarantula Nebula in the LMC. The region in and around the Tarantula Nebula is a ...

DURHAM, NC and SINGAPORE – Increased transportation of live pigs appears to have driven an increase in the diversity of swine influenza viruses found in the animals in Hong Kong over the last three decades, according to a new study. In the longest study of its kind, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School researchers found that swine viruses crossed geographic borders and mixed with local viruses, increasing their diversity. "The majority of reported human infections have been people with close contact to farm animals," said Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, Ph.D., an assistant professor ...

Regret has long been viewed as an exclusively human thought, one which helps prevent us from repeating bad choices but becomes debilitating when it triggers obsessive thoughts about past actions. Now a new study by Yale University researchers shows that monkeys also can be Monday morning quarterbacks and visualize alternative, hypothetical outcomes. The findings, reported in the May 26 issue of the journal Neuron, pinpoint areas of the brain where this process takes place and may give scientists new clues into how to treat diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. "Regret ...

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - May 25, 2011 - Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new method of design-dependent process monitoring for semiconductor wafer manufacturing. The advance promises to provide semiconductor chip manufacturing cost and productivity savings up to 15 percent, potentially increase profit per chip by as much as 12 percent and ultimately lead ...

Imagine shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep. When you wake up, will you perceive yourself as tiny or the world as being populated by giants? Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden may have found the answer. According to the textbooks, our perception of size and distance is a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues, such as the size of an object on the retina and its movement across the visual field. Some researchers have claimed that our bodies also influence our perception of the world, so that the taller you are, the shorter distances ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Primary care doctors have long been on the front lines of depression treatment. Depression is listed as a diagnosis for 1 in 10 office visits and primary care doctors prescribe more than half of all antidepressants. Now doctors at the University of Michigan Health System have developed a new tool that may help family physicians better evaluate the extent to which a patient's depression has improved. The issue, the researchers explain, is that the official definition of when a patient's symptoms are in remission doesn't always match up with what doctors ...

The world's first international polypill trial has shown that a four-in-one combination pill can halve the predicted risk of heart disease and stroke. The results are published online today in the open access journal PLoS One [1]. The once-a-day polypill contains aspirin and agents to lower blood pressure and cholesterol. These drugs are currently prescribed separately to millions of patients and are known individually to cut the risk of disease, but many experts believe that combining them into a single pill will encourage people to take the medications more reliably. The ...

Results of a study of 1032 patients with early (less than one year), active RA initially assessed response to treatment after 26 weeks with ADA 40mg every other week + MTX versus MTX alone. Results show that 44% of patients treated with the combination therapy achieved the target of sustained low disease activity at week 26, versus 24% of those treated with MTX alone. Patients reaching the target on ADA+MTX were considered responders and then further randomised to continue or withdraw from treatment with ADA 40mg every other week. Patients who continued treatment maintained ...

The study, involving 257 students, highlights that a higher degree of pain was experienced with the use of gaming devices compared to mobile phones. Pain reported by children using Xbox and Gameboy was statistically higher than pain reported for the iPhone (p=0.036 and p=0.042 respectively). Importantly, the length of time spent on the devices heightened the pain suffered, as the data demonstrated that length of time was independently associated with the pain reported, with the odds of reporting pain increasing by two (95* CI [1.50, 2.89, p END ...