The Secret Society of Happy People announces its 13th annual Happiest Events and Moments of the year: 5. The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear lead by Jon Stewart and in-character Stephen Colbert served as a much-needed reminder that most Americans are still moderates. 4. President Obama signed into law the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell allowing all military personnel to serve with integrity. 3. Social media shows its influence as Facebook fans revive Betty White's career by petitioning for her to host Saturday Night Live ... and Mark Zuckerman graces the ...

Uniquegiftsanddecor.com announced that its first holiday selling season was very successful and increased its online presence as a destination site for truly unusual and special gifts and home decor products. Don Oppenheim, vice president stated: "For a site that just went live in mid October of 2010, we did extremely well. Above all we met our goal of excelling at customer service." Unique Gifts and Decor was established to provide consumers with a one-stop place for finding gifts and home decor items that are not easily found. "My son and I both like things that ...

Measurement Systems International (MSI) announces a new generation "MSI-3460 Challenger 3" Digital Crane Scale with an enhanced electronics package and larger display readout, complimenting their full line of crane scales and other weighing products. "The MSI Challenger series was first introduced to the industrial marketplace in 1985 and has since become a world-renown standard for digital crane scales," according to MSI National Sales Manager, Tim Carroll. Now in its third generation, the Challenger 3 crane scale incorporates a newly developed and highly integrated ...

USSelfStorageLocator.com today launched a state-of-the-art search engine-rental website which allows consumers the ability to easily find the best storage facility nationwide that fits their needs. Equipped with the newest web technology available in the industry, USSelfStorageLocator.com's marketing presence will predictably benefit owner/operators immensely. Finding self-storage and comparing facilities with ease is now available thanks to USSelfStorageLocator.com (http://www.USSelfStorageLocator.com). As the website name indicates, this visually attractive and ultra ...

The Central Ohio Home & Garden Show announced today that it will again hold its Amateur Cake Decorating Competition. This year's competition will take place on Sunday, March 6, 2011, when five of the region's most talented amateur cake decorators will have the chance to compete for cash prizes before a live audience. The 2011 Central Ohio Home & Garden Show is slated for February 26 - March 6 at the Ohio Expo Center. Show guests can watch the Amateur Cake Decorating Competition from 2:00-3:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 6, with setup taking place from 1:00-2:00 p.m. Judging ...

The spirit of Christmas was never felt more for 50 struggling Southeast Los Angeles families than when La Bella joined with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) and Univision Radio to host a Posada Navidena event full of joy and hope for the neediest. Eager children frolicked around a jolly red-suited Santa Claus whose day job finds him as LAPD Southeast Los Angeles Captain Phillip Tingirides. Every child received toys, and all enjoyed the presence of Latin pop artist Luz Rios, along with a festive hot dinner followed by a ...

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Dec. 23, 2010—Studying how bacteria incorporate foreign DNA from invading viruses into their own regulatory processes, Thomas Wood, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is uncovering the secrets of one of nature's most primitive immune systems. His findings, which appear in "Nature Communications," a multidisciplinary publication dedicated to research in all areas of the biological, physical and chemical sciences, shed light on how bacteria have throughout the course of millions of years developed ...

DALLAS – Dec. 26, 2010 – New findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers may solve a 17-year-old mystery about how the so-called "starvation hormone" affects multiple biological systems, including preventing insulin sensitivity and promoting cell survival. The results connect multiple observations about how the hormone adiponectin functions and eventually could lead to new treatments for conditions ranging from diabetes and weight loss to heart disease and cancer. "Until now, there wasn't really an obvious connection between all these different phenomena," ...

Las Vegas, NV (Dec. 24, 2010) - Three weeks of oral resveratrol or Longevinex® ingestion prior to an induced heart attack returned microRNA activity close to their pre-event levels in excised animal hearts. Among thousands of microRNA's studied, just six were attributed to exerting the majority of the gene-switching effects measured in the animal heart study — four microRNA optimally regulated by Longevinex® and two optimally by plain resveratrol. A pre-conditioning effect with resveratrol and Longevinex® had already been demonstrated in prior studies where these small ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. –Epilepsy, a common and serious neurologic disorder that affects millions of people, is not getting the public attention and funding for research it deserves, according to an editorial on a study published in the January 4, 2011, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "We have almost nonexistent epilepsy surveillance, or ongoing collection of data on newly diagnosed epilepsy, in the United States," said Edwin Trevathan, MD, MPH, Dean of the St. Louis University School of Public Health in St. Louis and a member ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A novel potential therapy based on a natural human protein significantly slows muscle damage and improves function in mice who have the same genetic mutation as boys with the most common form of muscular dystrophy, according to a paper published online Dec. 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is a fatal genetic mutation in about one of every 3,500 boys. They are unable to produce a protein called dystrophin that keeps muscles strong. By eight years of age, the boys begin to have trouble ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A newly engineered yeast strain can simultaneously consume two types of sugar from plants to produce ethanol, researchers report. The sugars are glucose, a six-carbon sugar that is relatively easy to ferment; and xylose, a five-carbon sugar that has been much more difficult to utilize in ethanol production. The new strain, made by combining, optimizing and adding to earlier advances, reduces or eliminates several major inefficiencies associated with current biofuel production methods. The findings, from a collaborative led by researchers at the University ...

Just as raging hormones are part of the process of a child's maturation through the teen years to adulthood, juvenile hormones, a group of insect isoprenoids, play an important role as butterflies, fruit flies and mosquitoes transform their body structures as they molt from larva to pupa and then adults. Unlike humans, in insects the juvenile hormone inhibits development of adult characteristics until the insects reach a proper stage. Juvenile hormones also play a prominent role in regulating reproductive maturation in adult insects and synthetic juvenile hormone mimics ...

In a collaborative effort involving 74 researchers from 38 research institutes, scientists have produced the full genome of a wild strawberry plant. The research appeared today in Nature Genetics. Drs. Asaph Aharoni and Avital Adato of the Weizmann Institute's Plant Sciences Department were the sole Israeli scientists participating in the project, but they made a major contribution in mapping the genes and gene families responsible for the strawberry's flavor and aroma. The woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca) is closely related to garden-variety cultivated strawberry. ...

An expert working group of the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC) has released a new position paper which reviews the evidence of bone turnover markers (BTMs) in fracture risk prediction and monitoring of osteoporosis therapy. More importantly, it identifies research priorities and recommends that specific markers be used as reference analytes for BTMs in clinical and observational studies. BTMs have been extensively studied in relation to fracture risk assessment and have ...

It may come as a surprise to many that quails are able to distinguish one another, let alone that they form close relationships with other quails. Nevertheless, it has long been known that disruption of the birds' social environment causes them stress. A group within the UMR 6552 at the CNRS-Université de Rennes 1 in France has been studying the influence of adults on the behavioural development of their offspring. Together with scientists in Austria, they have now shown that changing the composition of groups of quails housed together causes the birds to behave more ...

Most galaxies in the universe, including our own Milky Way, harbor super-massive black holes varying in mass from about one million to about 10 billion times the size of our sun. To find them, astronomers look for the enormous amount of radiation emitted by gas which falls into such objects during the times that the black holes are "active," i.e., accreting matter. This gas "infall" into massive black holes is believed to be the means by which black holes grow. Now a team of astronomers from Tel Aviv University, including Prof. Hagai Hetzer and his research student Benny ...

PHILADELPHIA - A team from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Utrecht University has deciphered a key step in an evolutionarily old branch of the immune response. This system, called complement, comprises a network of proteins that "complement" the work of antibodies in destroying foreign invaders. It serves as a rapid defense mechanism in most species from primitive sponges to humans. In a study published in the December 24 issue of Science, the groups of John Lambris, PhD, the Dr. Ralph and Sally Weaver Professor of Research Medicine at Penn, and ...

ALBANY, Calif.—Synthesizing more than 10 years of cooperative research on the exotic invasive, quarantine sudden oak death pathogen, the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) recently published "Sudden Oak Death and Phytophthora ramorum: A Summary of the Literature." This 181-page comprehensive report covers a wide range of topics, including a history of sudden oak death, identification and distribution of the disease, epidemiology and modeling, management and control, and economic and environmental impacts. Compiled by retired U.S. Forest Service ...

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) applauds Congressional reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act. Originally enacted in 2007, the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act underscored the nation's commitment to scientific research and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. Among other provisions, the 2007 and 2010 bills establish broad directions and set maximum funding levels for some of the nation's key science agencies, including the ...

BOULDER--Clues to future climate may be found in the way that an ordinary drinking glass shatters. A study appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that microscopic particles of dust, emitted into the atmosphere when dirt breaks apart, follow similar fragment patterns as broken glass and other brittle objects. The research, by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Jasper Kok, suggests there are several times more dust particles in the atmosphere than previously believed, since shattered dirt appears to produce an ...

Snows are finally winding down in New England today, Dec. 27, as a powerful low pressure system brought blizzard conditions from northern New Jersey to Maine over Christmas weekend. The GOES-13 satellite captured an image of the low's center off the Massachusetts coast and saw the snowfall left behind. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 captured the visible image. GOES satellites are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. creates ...

Irvine Family Health Center Spinal Decompression announced today that they have launched a new website at OCSpinalDecompression.com. The website provides information for sufferers of neck pain, lower back pain, degenerative disc disease, pinched sciatic nerve, bulging discs, herniated disc pain, and more. The website is designed to promote the physical therapy office located in Orange County, California. The website not only offers information related to many neck and back ailments, but it also discusses a new treatment called the DRX9000 Spinal Decompression unit. ...

i-Technosoft has been gradually rolling out hosted versions of Microsoft Business Software as part of its strategic move towards Cloud Computing. In June 2010, i-Technosoft rolled-out the cheapest SharePoint Foundation 2010 hosting plans with an offer at US $1.99. The recent launch of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Shared Cloud will now enable businesses to publish their Microsoft Access Databases on SharePoint using Access Services, seamlessly migrating their entire data, forms, queries and reports with secured user access to the database making it accessible via a web browser ...

Aside from your stunning white dress and amazing hairstyle, there still seems to be one thing missing in your getup. So, what do you think will best complement your radiant look on that special day? A pearly, white, bright, beautifully aligned radiant smile. Getting an extreme smile makeover prior to your wedding is a great idea! Why not? All you have to do is get a flight to Cancun Mexico at least 3 weeks before your big day and spend a week in Cancun while you get porcelain veneers or porcelain crowns performed at Cancun Cosmetic Dentistry. Cancun Cosmetic dentistry ...