The Wu-Tang Clan, one of the most groundbreaking and influential groups in hip-hop, are set to perform in Paris next month. Visitors to the French capital can see the collective live on stage at L'Olympia on Tuesday June 28th, when they will perform a selection of hits from their back catalogue of classic albums. Emerging from the New York City borough of Staten Island in the early 1990s, the Wu-Tang Clan garnered widespread critical acclaim for their landmark debut LP Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Many members of the nine-man group went on to enjoy success ...

American singer and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Jarosz is set to play live at the Norwich Arts Centre this summer. The Texas-born performer, known for her formidable talents on the mandolin and banjo, will appear at the venue on Tuesday July 19th. Fresh from the release of her second LP Follow Me Down on May 17th, the musician is due to play a handful of dates across the UK. Her performance in Norfolk will give fans a chance to hear tracks from the new album, which includes a number of original compositions alongside covers of Radiohead and Bob Dylan songs. Inspired ...

This summer's Cotswold Show will offer visitors a chance to experience a range of country pursuits and family activities. Taking place at Cirencester Park on Saturday July 2nd and Sunday July 3rd, the annual event is set to feature dog display teams, practical horsemanship demonstrations, ferret racing, clay pigeon shooting and other special events. People heading to the show can also enjoy the talents of one of this year's star attractions, the White Helmets Motorcycle Display Team. These daredevil riders are expected to thrill the audience, performing extraordinary ...

Dizziness of Life is now open at Barcelona's Fundacio Joan Miro, showcasing the work of Su-Mei Tse. The collection combines photography and video with sculpture and will be on display until July 3rd 2011. According to the organisers, the artist aims to transcend language and communicate ideas on a universal level. In a statement, they explained: "The daughter of a Chinese violinist and an English pianist, Su-Mei Tse studied cello and her pieces often incorporate rhythmic or musical aspects. "She seems to be able to hear and see music where others ...

A free exhibition entitled 100 Years of Hong Kong's Aviation Development gives air passengers a fascinating display to view before boarding a flight from the region. The installation is on show until June 30th in the departure hall of Hong Kong International Airport's Terminal 1. It is split into three sections, with the first covering the pre-Kai Tak period before 1925 and the second including everything until 1998 - what is known as the Kai Tak era. Finally, the third area looks at modern innovations that have been developed in the region over the past decade ...

Video an Art a History will be opening at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) on June 10th and includes pieces by Nam June Paik and Jean-Luc Godard. Running until September 18th 2011, the collection combines media and video works from SAM's own archives with several high-profile projects borrowed from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. As well as Paik, Godard and a host of other internationally acclaimed creators, visitors can expect to discover art by south-east Asian contributors such as Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. In a statement, the organisers ...

In addition to the usual admonitions given to consumers looking to keep their auto insurance payments slim -- like making sure to keep a clean driving record and to comparison-shop -- many authorities on cost-cutting say to consider lowering coverage or raising deductibles. By doing this, the policyholder is assuming more risk. In a new FAQ from OnlineAutoInsurance.com, the writers discuss the merits and drawbacks of using this method. A comprehensive or collision deductible is a set dollar limit up to which the consumer will have to pay if he or she files a claim under ...

An international research group headed by Professor and Research Director Yrjö Helariutta has discovered the genetic process that controls the development of wood cells in the roots of plants. Wood is the vascular tissue that transports water and nutrients upward from the root, also contributing to the formation of the woody element in the stem. The work, published in the online version of the prestigious Current Biology journal, presents a potential method for engineering plants to produce more wood. All multicellular organisms start life as a single cell. This cell ...

Women with ovarian cancer could be helped by a new test that identifies the specific type of tumour they have, a conference will hear this week. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh hope this improved diagnosis will help doctors to personalise treatment programmes so that patients receive the most effective drugs. The Edinburgh team worked with scientists from Ireland to identify six subgroups of the disease, each of which had a different genetic signature. To do this, they analysed tissue samples from more than 350 ovarian cancer patients and compared this ...

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the third most common type of cardiovascular disease after coronary heart disease and stroke. Researchers at the Centre for Primary Health Care Research in Malmö have mapped the significance of hereditary factors for venous thromboembolism in the entire Swedish population by studying the risk of VTE in children of parents with VTE compared with the children of parents who have not had VTE. "Previously, hereditary factors for venous thromboembolism have only been studied on a small scale. We based our study on the entire Swedish population", ...

Montreal, May 30, 2011 — Misconceptions about the Church of Satan abound. For many people, anything with the word Satan is synonymous with evil, conjuring up images of gory offerings and babies bred for sacrifice. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Cimminnee Holt, a graduate student from Concordia University's Department of Religion, who has published a new study "Death and Dying in the Satanic Worldview," in the Journal of Religion & Culture. Her unraveling of the myths and distortions surrounding the Church of Satan shows it to be a law-abiding, atheistic ...

TORONTO, Ont., May 30, 2011 — Private health clinics across Canada providing weight-loss surgeries are offering much shorter wait times but at a hefty cost and at the expense of quality patient care, according to a new study led by St. Michael's Hospital physician Dr. Chaim Bell. "The private clinics in Canada offer adjustable gastric banding surgery – a weight-loss procedure that involves banding the upper stomach to restrict food intake– to patients with a median wait time of only one month compared to 21 months in the public health-care system," says Bell. "While ...

May 30 – Fredericton, NB – A student writing an essay for their teacher may be tempted to plagiarize or leave facts unchecked. A new study shows that if you ask that same student to write something that will be posted on Wikipedia, he or she suddenly becomes determined to make the work as accurate as possible, and may actually do better research. Brenna Gray, an instructor at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C., was presenting the results of the study at the 2011 Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New Brunswick ...

May 30, 2011 – Fredericton, N.B. – In recent years, the apparent decline in boys' academic success rates has troubled politicians, researchers, and educators. It has been described as an educational crisis and a failure of the traditional school setting. The decline has spurred scores of potential solutions to the problem, including the adoption of same-sex classrooms as a way to better address boys' educational needs. New research that will be presented at the 2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, New Brunswick, indicates that the picture ...

In flowering plants, the beginning of embryogenesis is almost exclusively governed by maternal gene activity. Maternal factors regulate the development of the embryo and silence paternal genes during early stages of development. This finding – obtained using next generation sequencing technology – was reported by an international team of researchers including plant geneticists from the University of Zurich. This newly uncovered mechanism may be involved in the maintenance of species boundaries and could play an important role in the development of novel crop varieties. ...

Excessive noise is not the only thing that causes damage to hearing. In many cases, genetic factors are responsible for the loss of hearing at a young age. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin together with colleagues from Nijmegen have discovered a previously unknown genetic cause of progressive hearing impairment: the disease is caused by mutations of the SMPX (small muscle protein) gene, which is located on the X chromosome. It was not previously known that this gene, which is active in the skeletal muscle and heart, also plays a role ...

Information technology is now a huge part of the administration of healthcare facilities in the United States. Keeping up with new regulations, payment paradigms, and care delivery models is a daunting but necessary responsibility; providers need help to accomplish this, and there are plenty of IT advisory firms willing to offer assistance. Providers must consider ARRA funds, Meaningful Use, and the rest of the litany of technology advancements the healthcare industry will demand of them over the next few years. The new KLAS report, "Advisory Services: Navigating ...

The researchers base their work the fact that climate change has become one of the main problems of the 21st Century, as is demonstrated by numerous studies that confirm the seriousness of its effects. In this sense, similar to what occurs in the area of energy, the issues that are raised regarding its characteristics, extent, and consequences have a decisive effect on public policy and, therefore, on the Law, which is the means of formalizing and enforcing those policies. "In this way, the Law, which has always been called upon to generate confidence and certainty by adequately ...

A study published in this week's PLoS Medicine suggests that there might be an association between maternal immunization with inactivated influenza vaccine during pregnancy and reduced likelihood of prematurity and the baby being small for gestational age. The study, led by Saad B. Omer from the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, Georgia, used a large surveillance dataset (the Georgia Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System) to analyze the relationship between receipt of inactivated influenza vaccine during any trimester of pregnancy by mothers ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Anoop Shah of University College London and colleagues report that, in people with stable coronary disease, there were threshold haemoglobin values below which mortality increased in a graded, continuous fashion. As well as a systematic review and statistical analysis of previous studies, the researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of patients from a prospective observational cohort. Their findings suggest that there are thresholds of haemoglobin that are associated with increased risk of mortality in patients with angina or myocardial ...

Reporting the findings of a cluster randomized trial carried out in rural Kenya, Beth Kangwana and colleagues find that provision of packs of the malaria therapy artemether-lumefantrine in shops at a subsidized price more than doubled the proportion of children with fever who received drugs promptly. Importantly, whilst enabling cheap and easy purchase of malaria treatment in shops enabled treatment of about 44% of children with fever, this is still much lower than the target of treating 80% of children with fever set by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. So in addition ...

The influence of "Big Alcohol" in the health arena deserves as much scrutiny as Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, especially in light of evidence of bias in funded research, unsupported claims of benefit, and inappropriate promotion and marketing by the alcohol industry, says a new editorial in this week's PLoS Medicine. The PLoS Medicine editors argue that the statistics about problem drinking are troubling enough, but what also demands more attention and research is the influence of the alcohol industry on health research, government policy, and public perceptions of the harms ...

Deerfield, IL (May 31, 2011) With recent deadly cholera outbreaks in Haiti and Cameroon providing the latest indication of a menacingly resurgent disease, scientists have discovered rain and temperature fluctuations in at-risk areas could predict epidemics months in advance, according to a new study published today in the June 2011 issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. After analyzing several years of disease and environmental data from cholera-endemic areas of Zanzibar, Tanzania, scientists from the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, ...

Debate about the public health response to Haiti's cholera epidemic continues as the crisis enters its ninth month, with some experts arguing that a vaccination campaign in Haiti would be neither feasible nor cost-effective, and advocating putting forth other measures. In a viewpoint article published on May 31st in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a coalition of medical and public health researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, led by Paul Farmer, cofounder of Partners In Health and United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti, argue that ...

In this month's Physics World, Jason Reese, Weir Professor of Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the University of Strathclyde, describes the role that carbon nanotubes (CNTs) could play in the desalination of water, providing a possible solution to the problem of the world's ever-growing population demanding more and more fresh drinking water. Global population projections suggest that worldwide demand for water will increase by a third before 2030. But with more than a billion people already experiencing drinking-water shortages, and with a potential 3𔃄 ...