Scientists are reporting new evidence on how studded tires — wintertime fixtures in some areas but banned in others for causing damage to pavement — may also damage the health of motorists and people living near highways. Studded tires have small metal protrusions from the rubber tread that improve traction on icy or snow-covered roads. Their study appears in ACS' Chemical Research in Toxicology, a monthly journal. Anders Ljungman and colleagues note that studded tires grind away at the road surface, generating the kind of dust particles believed to contribute to heart ...

Momentum is building for a new energy "smart grid" that would overhaul the U.S.'s 100-year-old electrical power network. The impact would be huge –– from installation of a new web of electrical transmission lines to smart meters to control home appliances. The meters would offer consumers discounted rates if they use electricity at off-peak hours. A key objective of the $1.5 trillion dollar plan is "time of use" electricity pricing that would increase the cost to consumers of energy at peak mid-day hours and lower it at others, according to an article in the current edition ...

Alexandria, VA – Over the past five decades, OPEC has earned a reputation for being a powerful cartel that controls the world's oil production and prices - but there are limits to OPEC's influence and wealth. In fact, many OPEC countries face grave problems, which are to some extent the result of their oil-income dependence. EARTH examines OPEC's past, current and future place in this world. Will OPEC continue to control the planet's oil for the next 50 years? Learn more about this eye-opening subject in February's featured article "OPEC and Oil: The Next 50 Years," and ...

Dr. Emil Kozarov and a team of researchers at the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine have identified specific bacteria that may have a key role in vascular pathogenesis, specifically atherosclerosis, or what is commonly referred to as "hardening of the arteries" – the number one cause of death in the United States. Fully understanding the role of infections in cardiovascular diseases has been challenging because researchers have previously been unable to isolate live bacteria from atherosclerotic tissue. Using tissue specimens from the Department of Surgery ...

PHILADELPHIA – Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) are characterized by protein clumps in brain and spinal-cord cells that include an RNA-binding protein called TDP-43. This protein is the major building block of the lesions formed by these clumps. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a team led by Virginia M.-Y. Lee, PhD, director of Penn's Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, describes the first direct evidence of how mutated TDP-43 can cause neurons to die. Although ...

A team led by Patrick T. Mather, director of Syracuse Biomaterials Institute (SBI) and Milton and Ann Stevenson professor of biomedical and chemical engineering in Syracuse University's L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science (LCS), has succeeded in applying the concept of functionally graded materials (FGMs) to shape memory polymers (SMPs). SMPs are a class of "smart" materials that can switch between two shapes, from a fixed (temporary) shape to a predetermined permanent shape. Shape memory polymers function as actuators, by first forming a heated article ...

The oceans became oxygen-rich as they are today about 600 million years ago, during Earth's Late Ediacaran Period. Before that, most scientists believed until recently, the ancient oceans were relatively oxygen-poor for the preceding four billion years. Now biogeochemists at the University of California-Riverside (UCR) have found evidence that the oceans went back to being "anoxic," or oxygen-poor, around 499 million years ago, soon after the first appearance of animals on the planet. They remained anoxic for two to four million years. The researchers suggest that ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In one University of Illinois lab, invisibility is a matter of now you hear it, now you don't. Led by mechanical science and engineering professor Nicholas Fang, Illinois researchers have demonstrated an acoustic cloak, a technology that renders underwater objects invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves. "We are not talking about science fiction. We are talking about controlling sound waves by bending and twisting them in a designer space," said Fang, who also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "This ...

The bulk of the world's fisheries--including the kind of small-scale, often non-industrialized fisheries that millions of people depend on for food--could be sustained using community-based co-management. This is the conclusion of a study reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature. "The majority of the world's fisheries are not--and never will be--managed by strong centralized governments with top-down rules and the means to enforce them," says Nicolas Gutiérrez, a University of Washington fisheries scientist and lead author of the Nature paper. "Our findings ...

Boston, MA -- The deaths of 1.8 million female infants and children in India over the past 20 years are related to domestic violence against their mothers, according to a new study led by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). In their examination of over 158,000 births occurring between 1985 and 2005, the researchers found that husbands' violence against wives increased the risk of death among female children, but not male children, in both the first year and the first five years of life. "Being born a girl into a family in India in which your mother ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers have determined the lifetime risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis and six other autoimmune rheumatic diseases for both men and women. The findings appear online in Arthritis and Rheumatism. VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including excerpts from an interview with Cynthia Crowson describing the research, are available on the Mayo Clinic News Blog(http://newsblog.mayoclinic.org/2011/01/05/whats-your-risk-of-developing-rheumatoid-arthritis/) "We estimated the lifetime risk for rheumatic disease for both ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Most people like to play it safe when combining colors for an article of clothing or outfit, a new study suggests. When consumers were asked to choose colors for seven different parts of an athletic shoe, they tended to pick identical or similar colors for nearly every element. They usually avoided contrasting or even moderately different color combinations. A red and yellow athletic shoe? Not going to happen. Blue and grey? That's more like it. This is one of the first studies to show how consumers would choose to combine colors in a realistic ...

An international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible. In a paper that appeared Dec. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the United Kingdom describe two improvements that allow full three-dimensional brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical 2 to 3 seconds. "When we made the first images, it was unbelievable ...

Cardiologists at the University of Connecticut Health Center have identified a protein fragment that when detected in the blood can be a predictor of heart attack. Their research, led by Dr. Bruce Liang, director of the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center, is published in the Jan. 11 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. It found heart attack patients had elevated levels of the protein fragment known as Caspase-3 p17 in their blood. "We've discovered a new biomarker for heart attack, and showed that apoptosis, or a particular kind of cell death, ...

Cancer cells reproduce by dividing in two, but a molecule known as PML limits how many times this can happen, according to researchers lead by Dr. Gerardo Ferbeyre of the University of Montreal's Department of Biochemistry. The team proved that malignant cancers have problems with this molecule, meaning that in its absence they can continue to grow and eventually spread to other organs. Importantly, the presence of PML molecules can easily be detected, and could serve to diagnose whether a tumor is malignant or not. "We discovered that benign cancer cells produce the ...

St. Louis, MO, January 6, 2011 – Thanks to the Let's Move initiative, society is becoming more aware of alarming statistics like 1 in 4 children are obese and childhood obesity has nearly doubled over the past two decades! With this platform, nutrition education and physical activity in the classroom have taken the forefront against this growing epidemic. A study in the January/February 2011 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior explores twenty-six school-based nutrition interventions in the United States. Investigators performed a content analysis ...

News Body (Max 2800 characters) Stuttgart, Germany — According to InfoCom most recent release of the Quarterly TV Monitoring, the top-10 largest groups, at World level, collectively posted 145m paid-for* TV subscriptions, 54% of which attributed to satellite TV (2Q10). The top-10 ranking is lead by US-based satellite TV player, DirecTV, with 25m subscriptions, of which 25% from its Latin American subsidiaries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela). DISH Network, another US-based satellite TV player, is ranked 4th, with 14.3m subscriptions, ...

UAE Exchange, the leading global remittance and foreign exchange brand, today opened its new spacious and more convenient premises in Musaffah Sector 10, in a move to enhance the service and value proposition of the brand to its loyal customers in and around Mussaffah. The branch was inaugurated by H. E. Abdulla Humaid Ali Al Mazroei, Chairman, and Dr. B. R. Shetty, MD & CEO, UAE Exchange in the presence of Mr. Sudhir Kumar Shetty, COO - Global Operations, other senior officials of UAE Exchange, special invitees and the Press fraternity. The new branch is located in ...

National Office Systems-SYSTEMATICS, http://www.systematics.biz and http://www.nosinc.com, one of the nation's leading providers of storage and information management systems, expands its presence in the Northeast today with the acquisition of East Coast Storage Solutions of Berlin, CT. The acquisition was announced jointly this morning at SYSTEMATICS' headquarters in Westborough, MA and National Office Systems' headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Bradford Ostiguy, President of East Coast Storage Systems, and staff will continue ...

There are more people in the United States that can read and don't than those who are illiterate (To Read or Not To Read- National Endowment for the Arts, 2007). Why? Fact: Less than 1/3 of 13 year olds are daily readers (National Endowment for the Arts, 7). 52% of Americans ages 18-24 reported reading books for pleasure in a 2002 study. This was a 12% decline from 1992. However, this is not a young American isolated age group of non-readers. This decline was consistent within the 25-34 at 8% and 34-44 age brackets at 11% too. Why? There is less of a focus now than ...

Imagine the luxurious service standard and amenities of the world's most famous train, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, arriving on the banks of the most pristine, free-flowing river system in the Lower 48. Far and Away Adventures (http://www.far-away.com/) has. For this flight of fancy on Idaho's Middle Fork of the Salmon River, instead of debarking from a train guests pull to shore in rafts. Here, instead of porters, adventure guides set up and break down five-star camps and serve locally sourced, organically raised Kobe Wagyu Beef on pre-heated stoneware while pouring ...

There has been much talk lately about whether record labels have a future in the digital age. Madonna recently quit her lifelong record label, Warner, in favor of a deal with concert promoter Live Nation, while Prince gave his latest album away, and there are a string of new websites that aim to cut label bosses out of the equation and hand more power to the musicians and their fans. But newly formed label Capella Records of Capella Music Group believes that not only do record labels have a future, they can also represent a good investment opportunity for music lovers. ...

Valentine's Central -- Don't get yourself in the dog house by waiting too long to get the perfect, thoughtful gift for your loved one for Valentine's Day. PantybyPost.com makes it easy for anyone to order in advance a gorgeous French panty or sexy brief, that will be packaged beautifully, along with your customized note, and delivered to your loved one in a delightfully old-fashioned way: by the local postman. Head Mistress of Panty by Post Natalie Grunberg says, "There is nothing worse than scrambling at the last minute to find the perfect gift for a loved one for Valentine's ...

ComplianceBridge, Inc., a provider of web-based policy and procedure management software announced the second online event covering best practices and tips for improving policy and procedure management in organizations. This webinar series is for managers and executives in human resources, IT, operations, finance, and legal in various industries such as healthcare, technology and Government. The upcoming webinar will be held on Tuesday, January 18, 2010 at 10 a.m. PST with the topic "7 Tips for more effective policy and procedure management." Industry expert, Bill Harrison, ...

The CDM Media team announced today the company's 2011 technology event schedule, including the addition of several new vertical-focused networking and educational events for CIOs and senior technology executives. CDM Media's technology summits bring together CIOs, senior IT executives, technology solution providers, and analyst representatives to network and attend educational sessions. Held over two and one-half days, each summit includes interactive agenda sessions, such as analyst Q&As, panel discussions, roundtables, and open forums to encourage in-depth conversations ...