On Sept. 1, 2011, a number of new modifications to the Texas traffic code take effect. Not surprisingly, this means more restrictions for some Texas drivers. However, the thrust of the new laws actually allows for greater freedom on Texas roadways. Young Drivers' Cell Phone Ban Currently, those Texans granted a provisional license are prohibited from using a cellular phone in any capacity (both talking and texting) for the first 12 months. After Sept. 1, the cell phone ban will be strengthened to include every driver under the age of 18. Increased Speed limits Texas ...

Coral Gables, FL (August 23, 2011) – As firms begin the 2011 annual report process, which many do at this time of year, they may want to pay closer attention to the way those reports look. A recent study out of the University of Miami School of Business Administration found that investors, regardless of their experience, place a higher value on firms with attractive annual reports than they do on those that produce less attractive reports. The study found that annual reports that utilize more color are perceived to have at least one percent higher annual revenues than ...

Most of us are familiar with the so-called "black boxes" used in airplanes that often capture information pointing to the cause of a crash. However, not everyone is aware that similar technology is available for automobiles. In fact, if you have purchased a new car within the last few years, it is likely an event data recorder ("EDR") is already keeping track of your driving habits. Now, a new rule proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ("NHTSA") could mandate that all vehicles contain EDRs. Benefits of Event Data ...

JUPITER, FL, August 23, 2011 – In a joint research effort with researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and with help from scientists at The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Minnesota, and the National Institutes of Health, investigators from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have defined a specific protein complex that allows cells to rid themselves of damaged mitochondria, which are the energy producing machines of the cell. "This protein complex is already being targeted in cancer therapeutics," said John Cleveland, chair ...

Every year, GMAC Insurance, one of the largest auto insurers in the United States, conducts a study that examines drivers' knowledge of the rules of the road. The GMAC Insurance National Driver's Test has become a widely-respected litmus test of the general state of safe conduct on the nation's highways. This year's results, although a marginal improvement over 2010, still reveal a sorely-lacking emphasis on care behind the wheel for a large segment of American motorists. Nearly One Fifth of Drivers Would Be Unable to Pass Written Test In 2011, 5,130 licensed drivers ...

The Tennessee Supreme Court recently approved the use of certain forms to be used in uncontested divorces throughout the state. Where litigants do not own real property or have minor children, they will be able to use plain-language forms to facilitate simple divorces. The Court incorporated a new rule making the forms acceptable in all Tennessee family courts beginning September 1, 2011. The forms will help parties in filing an "agreed divorce," which is also known as an uncontested divorce. The instructions that will accompany the forms will cover a range ...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which affects more than 1 million patients in North America, results from an uncontrolled immune response triggered by environmental factors, such as bacteria, in people genetically predisposed to the disorder. Ulcerative colitis, or inflammation of the lining of the colon, is one such condition. The aberrant immune response found in IBD is prompted by different cytokines – small signaling proteins secreted by various cells, including immune cells – that activate the immune system, causing chronic inflammation. Now researchers led ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Assembling chemicals can be like putting together a puzzle. University of Illinois chemists have developed a way of fitting the pieces together to more efficiently build complex molecules, beginning with a powerful and promising antioxidant. Led by chemistry professor Martin Burke, the team published its research on the cover of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. Burke's group is known for developing a synthesis technique called iterative cross-coupling (ICC) that uses simple, stable chemical "building blocks" sequentially joined in a repetitive ...

The approach of autumn means one thing for Wisconsin farmers -- harvest season. For most farmers this means picking corn or soy beans, for others it means harvesting marijuana. Following two busts of large-scale marijuana grow operations in the last two years, it appears that Wisconsin law enforcement officers are keeping a close watch on possible marijuana grow operations. Both busts involved the seizure of tens-of-thousands of marijuana plants -- with street values in the millions of dollars -- grown in remote corners of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Northern ...

Sunbathers have long known that melanin in their skin cells provides protection from the damage caused by visible and ultraviolet light. More recent studies have shown that melanin, which is produced by multitudes of the planet's life forms, also gives some species protection from ionizing radiation. In certain microbes, in particular some organisms from near the former nuclear reactor facilities in Chernobyl, melanin has even been linked to increased growth in the presence of ionizing radiation. Research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new physics-based theory could give researchers a deeper understanding of the unusual, slow dynamics of liquids composed of large polymers. This advance provides a better picture of how polymer molecules respond under fast-flow, high-stress processing conditions for plastics and other polymeric materials. Kenneth S. Schweizer, the G. Ronald and Margaret H. Professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, and graduate student Daniel Sussman published their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters. "This is the first ...

Many Americans are currently experiencing financial setbacks due to stagnant economic conditions. For some, this means child support payment amounts that were once manageable are becoming burdensome. Fortunately, there is a well-defined process facilitated by Arizona courts that can help you lower your child support load. In Arizona, only the Superior Court can legally change the payments required by a child support order and either parent may request a modification from the court. Changes to the income stream of one or both parent, changes in the costs of medical insurance ...

Now that the NFL lockout is over, football fans across the nation are excited for the upcoming season. One of the last issues to be resolved was the ability for players to file workers' compensation claims in states where their team is not based. This was a particularly thorny issue that owners did not want to concede. Because of the speed and violent collisions inherent to professional football, NFL players get injured on the job much like any other employee and they have the opportunity to file for workers' compensation. Since injuries are large part of the game, owners ...

State governments, including California as well as others in Canada and the United Kingdom, pour hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into major motion pictures that depict smoking -- leading to thousands of new teen smokers every year, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researcher has found. According to a survey published in PLoS Medicine, those subsidies, along with government inaction on stricter ratings for movies that depict smoking, also promote youth smoking and undermine tobacco control efforts. In California, approximately 70 percent of all ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – 79 million American adults have prediabetes and will likely develop diabetes later in life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the number of people diagnosed with diabetes continues to grow, researchers are focusing on discovering why the prevalence of the disease is increasing. John Thyfault, an assistant professor in MU's departments of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology and Internal Medicine, has found that ceasing regular physical activity impairs glycemic control (control of blood sugar levels), suggesting that inactivity ...

Until the last twenty years or so, most creditors didn't bother trying to collecting on old debts because the payments they received were rarely worth the trouble it took to collect them. Times have changed, however, and collecting on past due accounts is now a robust and highly profitable industry. For consumers, the rise of the debt collection industry means that that even very old debts can be extremely difficult to leave behind. Even if an original creditor gives up on trying to collect on a debt, it may sell the debt to a collection agency for a fraction of the ...

An extreme form of pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) takes a heavy toll on thousands of women each year and can lead to hospitalization and pregnancy termination. But new research suggests pregnant women are not the only victims. A joint study by UCLA and the University of Southern California has found that children whose mothers suffered from HG while carrying them were 3.6 times more likely to suffer from anxiety, bipolar disorder and depression in adulthood than individuals whose mothers did not have the condition. HG sends ...

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite has been busy measuring rainfall within Hurricane Irene, and forecasts call for between 5 and 10 inches in the southeastern and central Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands as Irene moves toward them today. It's been a busy season so far in terms of tropical storms with seven named storms already in the Atlantic basin; however, none of them have had a very large impact as they have either been small, short-lived or remained at sea and none of them have intensified into a hurricane until now. Irene, which originated from ...

Relatives of people with special needs often worry about who will care for their disabled loved ones when they are gone. One way that concerned family members can plan for their disabled relatives' futures is by creating a Special Needs Trust. But, people need careful estate planning to make sure that such trusts do not disqualify their loved ones from receiving public benefits, either at the time they establish the special needs trust or in the future should the trust beneficiary get money from another source. Special Needs Trusts A special needs trust is a flexible ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A delicate balance of atomic forces can be exploited to make nanoparticle superclusters that are uniform in size---an attribute that's important for many nanotech applications but hard to accomplish, University of Michigan researchers say. The same type of forces are at work bringing the building blocks of viruses together, and the inorganic supercluster structures in this research are in many ways similar to viruses. U-M chemical engineering professors Nicholas Kotov and Sharon Glotzer led the research. The findings are newly published online in ...

Applying for and receiving Social Security Disability (SSD) benefits can take time. For those with serious, life threatening conditions, a delay can mean the difference between life and death. For this reason, the Social Security Administration (SSA) offers compassionate allowances, which allow the agency to target obviously disabled individuals for expedited benefits consideration based on readily available medical information. The SSA recently held a series of public hearings to determine the necessity of adding cardiovascular disease to its list of compassionate allowance ...

In March, a team of surgeons at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital announced the results of the amazing case of Dallas Wiens, a construction worker from Fort Worth, Texas, who received the most complete face transplant in the United States to date. The 25-year-od construction worker suffered extreme injures from severe burns to his head, when the boom lift he was operating struck a power line. The horrific construction site accident left him in a coma for three months. In the following two and a half years, he underwent 22 surgeries. The damage to his face was ...

Wheezy toddlers who have a sensitivity to house dust mites are more at risk of developing asthma by the age of 12, a University of Melbourne led study has shown. Children aged one – two years with a family history of allergy, who had a positive skin prick test to house dust mites, had a higher risk of developing asthma later in life. Results showed 75 per cent of these children had asthma at aged 12 compared to 36 per cent of children without a positive skin prick test. Lead author Dr Caroline Lodge from the University of Melbourne's School of Population Health said ...

What Google is attempting for books, the University of California, Berkeley, plans to do for the world's vertebrate specimens: store them in "the cloud." Online storage of information from vertebrate collections at the Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History, National Museum of Natural History in Paris, UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) and from hundreds of other animal collections around the world – or at least, all collections that include animals with backbones – will make them readily available to academic researchers and citizen ...

Most industries now examine systems, rather than individuals, for ways to improve performance. However, in a June 2011 article in Radiology, researchers reported that the American College of Radiology continues to rely on the outdated practice of peer review, a procedure that could put patients at risk for inadequate or unnecessary treatment and increase the risk of medical malpractice errors. The Downsides of Peer Review Programs In radiology's peer review system, radiologists examine peer reports for reading errors or misdiagnosis. Cincinnati radiologist David B. ...