The advent and proliferation of social media has allowed the world to connect easily by computer or phone. With Facebook boasting over 500 million users and Twitter's ever expanding reach, social media is everywhere. From wedding photos and vacation photos to photos from a Friday night with friends, they're all there. From wishing someone 'Happy Birthday' to venting about an annoyance and commenting on a friends post, they're all there too. The best part? Through privacy settings, who sees comments, pictures and posts can be limited to a select group. Maintaining ...

Amid the ongoing trauma of the foreclosure crisis, some borrowers and their advocates are questioning lenders' rights to foreclose on their homes. Across the country, several lawsuits have been filed challenging the framework the mortgage-lending industry relies on to bundle and sell mortgages and then seek to foreclose on mortgages when homeowners fall behind on their payments. Upon closer scrutiny, evidence of faulty foreclosure proceedings by mortgage lenders has accumulated over the past year. Now-notorious practices of some mortgage lenders, like using "robo-signers" ...

A lot of courage is sometimes required to report an employer's illegal activity or unsafe working conditions. A panoply of relatively recent laws and new amendments to existing laws offer legal protections and remedies for the courageous among us who wish to blow the whistle on corporate wrongdoing in the workplace. The laws address specific industries. Whistleblower Protection Laws The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) oversees the Office of the Whistleblower Protection Program and is responsible for enforcing 21 federal-level whistleblower protection ...

A 16-year-old girl with a learner's permit panicked, jumped a curb and hit a nine-year-old boy biking on the sidewalk. The boy died soon after the auto accident in New York's Floral Park. New York auto accident lawyer David Perecman, who has been following the story, agrees with the boy's mom who wondered why a person would teach a teen to drive in a residential neighborhood. "There is a lot of responsibility that comes with driving - and teaching teenagers to drive. Inexperienced teen drivers are more likely to make simple mistakes that can lead to both minor ...

It's a story that no parent likes to hear, but that many have heard in one form or another. Junior borrows the car and gets into an accident. It may be that he ran the car into a mailbox or it could be more serious. In the case of injury-causing accidents, who is liable for those injuries? Sixteen-year-old Junior? His parents? The registered car owner? Generally under New York Vehicle and Traffic Law, when someone gets into a car accident while driving with the owner's consent, the owner can be held liable for the driver's negligence. This means that if parents give ...

A new report from Duke University suggests that natural gas drilling operations in the Marcellus Shale region could be responsible for polluting nearby sources of drinking water. Although industry insiders insist that further study is required before jumping to conclusions, for those who live close to drilling sites, stepped-up governmental oversight could not come too soon. Extracting Natural Gas The Marcellus Shale is a black shale formation rich in natural gas deposits: scientists estimate it contains some 168 trillion to 516 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. ...

PHILADELPHIA — When semiconductor nanorods are exposed to light, they blink in a seemingly random pattern. By clustering nanorods together, physicists at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that their combined "on" time is increased dramatically providing new insight into this mysterious blinking behavior. The research was conducted by associate professor Marija Drndic's group, including graduate student Siying Wang and postdoctorial fellows Claudia Querner and Tali Dadosh, all of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. They ...

According to the New York Daily News, a New York City highway worker was killed in a truck accident that involved a Department of Transportation vehicle. Errol Wilson, a 59-year old veteran employee of the New York Department of Transportation, was killed when a co-worker accidentally backed over him with a giant Mack Truck. Wilson was crushed to death by the truck while directing the driver during construction in Queens, New York. The driver reportedly lost sight of Wilson. The NYPD is investigating the cause of the fatal truck accident and New York auto accident ...

SPOKANE, Wash.—Birth defects are significantly more common in areas of mountaintop coal mining and are on the rise as the practice becomes more common, according to a study by researchers at Washington State University and West Virginia University. The researchers, led by Melissa Ahern, health economist and associate professor in WSU's College of Pharmacy, found 235 birth defects per 10,000 births where mountaintop mining is most common in four central Appalachian states. That's nearly twice the rate of 144 defects per 10,000 in non-mining areas. Previous studies have ...

A new advance by UCLA biochemists has brought scientists one step closer to developing treatments that could delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease and prevent the sexual transmission of HIV. The researchers report that they have designed molecular inhibitors that target specific proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease and HIV to prevent them from forming amyloid fibers, the elongated chains of interlocking proteins that play a key role in more than two dozen degenerative and often fatal diseases. "By studying the structures of two key proteins that form amyloids, ...

TORONTO, Ont., June 22, 2011 – Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital have put forward a new theory as to what causes sepsis, an often fatal condition that occurs when infection spreads throughout the body. Leaking blood vessels may actually be a cause of sepsis, rather than a symptom as previously thought, said Dr. Warren Lee. Dr Lee's hypothesis and a review of recent research on sepsis were published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Sepsis kills about 1,400 people a day worldwide and is the second-leading cause of death in intensive care units ...

Have a tough time remembering where you put your keys, learning a new language or recalling names at a cocktail party? New research from the Lisman Laboratory at Brandeis University points to a molecule that is central to the process by which memories are stored in the brain. A paper published in the June 22 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience describes the new findings. The brain is composed of neurons that communicate with each other through structures called synapses, the contact point between neurons. Synapses convey electrical signals from the "sender" neuron to ...

Cambridge, Mass. – June 23, 2011 – Albert Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Practicing the same task repetitively, though, tends to be the default procedure when trying to learn a new motor skill. A study led by Maurice Smith and colleagues at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) suggests that simple task repetition may not be the most efficient way for the brain to learn a new move. Their results, published in PLoS Computational Biology, demonstrate "motion-referenced learning." ...

A freight elevator malfunctioned and crashed into a basement in Chelsea, according to the New York Post. Four people were seriously hurt and ten others suffered minor injuries in the New York elevator accident. "Although not as common as construction accidents or auto accidents, elevator accidents resulting in injury or death happen more often than people think," New York personal injury lawyer David Perecman said. As reported, the elevator suddenly plunged three floors shortly before 7 a.m. It was carrying 24 men, all construction workers. The elevator ...

Overall spending on construction in New York declined by 12 percent last year, according to a study released by the New York Building Congress and reviewed by New York construction accident lawyer David Perecman. In the same period of time, the number of construction jobs dropped more than 15 percent. As construction work has slowed, so have the number of construction site deaths and injuries. There was a 28% decrease in construction-related accidents in New York City in 2010 compared to 2009, reported the city Buildings Department. New York construction accident ...

Familial hemiplegic migraine is a rare and severe subtype of migraine with aura, an unusual sensory experience preceding the migraine attack. Researchers from the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, and CNR Institute of Neuroscience in Pisa, Italy, have developed a mouse model of Familial Hemiplegic Migraine type 2 (FHM2) and used it to investigate the migraine's cause. The study will be published on June 23rd in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. The researchers developed a knock-in animal model for FHM2 by inserting the W887R mutation of the ATP1A2 gene ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah and EMERYVILLE, Calif. – PRESS RELEASE EMBARGOED UNTIL 12:00 P.M. EASTERN, June 23, 2011 – Scientists from the University of Utah and Omicia, Inc., a privately held company developing tools to interpret personal genome sequences, today announced the publication in Genome Research of a new software tool called VAAST, the Variant Annotation, Analysis and Selection Tool, a probabilistic disease-causing mutation finder for individual human genomes. The dramatic decline in DNA sequencing costs is making personal genome sequencing a reality. Already, significant ...

Massachusetts General Hospital investigators appear to have found the mechanism behind a previously reported link between the rare genetic condition Gaucher disease and the common neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson's disease. In a report to appear in the July 8 issue of Cell and receiving early online release, they describe how disruption of the molecular pathway that causes Gaucher disease leads to the toxic neuronal deposits of the protein alpha-synuclein (α-syn) found in Parkinson's and related disorders. In addition, rising α-syn levels further inhibit ...

A third car lost control on the 59th Street Bridge exit ramp this past weekend and New York auto accident lawyer David Perecman wants the Department of Transportation to fix the dangerous problem. In the latest auto accident on the Queensboro Bridge off-ramp, the car hit a barrier, became airborne, and landed on the top of a parked livery cab. The car accident in New York left the driver with minor injuries. New York auto accident lawyer Perecman notes that the car accident happened at the exact same hairpin turn as two recent - and fatal - auto accidents. "By ...

Harnessing the new generation of rapid, highly accurate gene-sequencing techniques, a research team has identified the disease-causing mutation in a newly characterized rare genetic disease, by analyzing DNA from just a few individuals. The power and speed of the innovative bioinformatics tool marks a step toward personalized genomics—discovering causative mutations in individual patients. "Our research is proof-of-principle that a new software tool called VAAST can identify disease-causing mutations with greater accuracy, using DNA from far fewer individuals, more rapidly, ...

VIDEO: Caltech-led researchers measure body temperatures of dinosaurs for the first time. Interviews with the Caltech researchers, John Eiler and Rob Eagle. Click here for more information. PASADENA, Calif.—Were dinosaurs slow and lumbering, or quick and agile? It depends largely on whether they were cold or warm blooded. When dinosaurs were first discovered in the mid-19th century, paleontologists thought they were plodding beasts that had to rely on their environments ...

HOUSTON - (June 24, 2011) – Imagine two flat screen televisions tuned to the same channel and sitting side-by-side. From a distance, their pictures are virtually the same, however up close, you can see subtle variations in the pixels – one blurred here, another dropped out there. Suppose some of these 'bad pixels' are known to produce periodic black-out spells on the screen. Would a sharper image revealing all of the defects help identify which of the screens works perfectly, and which one needs repair? Seven years ago, Dr. Jeffrey Noebels (http://www.bcm.edu/neurology/noebels.cfm) ...

After successfully pushing through two measures to curb distracted driving in Georgia last year in an effort to reduce motor vehicle accidents, lawmakers are turning their attention this year to passing a law against drivers using cell phones while driving. HB 67 would prohibit Georgia motorists from talking on hand-held cell phones while operating a motor vehicle. Under the proposed law, drivers would be able to use cell phones so long as they did so with a hands-free device. If the law is passed, Georgia would become the ninth state in the US to adopt a hands-free ...

A discovery by a team of researchers led by a Syracuse University physicist sheds new light on how the vision process is initiated. For almost 50 years, scientists have believed that light signals could not be initiated unless special light-receptor molecules in the retinal cells first changed their shape in a process called isomerization. However, the SU research team, which includes researchers from Columbia University, has demonstrated that visual signals can be initiated in the absence of isomerization. "We have demonstrated that chromophores (light-absorbing substances ...

HOUSTON -- (June 23, 2011) – The ability to identify self and non-self enables cells in more sophisticated animals to ward off invading infections, but it is critical to even simpler organisms such as the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum. Dictyostelium exists as a single cell when times are good, but when starved, the cells aggregate and become multi-cellular fruiting bodies with a dead stalk and live spores that allow the cells to survive and pass on genes. When the social amoeba aggregates, it prefers to do so with "kin," the cells that are genetically most like ...