Fans and critics of the ABC comedy "Modern Family" hail it as a landmark depiction of contemporary American life because, for one of the first times on television, a gay couple and their adopted Vietnamese daughter are included in the extended family unit. As the numbers of gay families grow either through adoption or assisted reproduction, real "modern families" are becoming more prevalent and accepted. In January of this year, Newsweek published "Meet My Real Modern Family" by acclaimed author Andrew Solomon. In the article Andrew described ...

Nuance Communications, Inc. has already proven itself a leading provider of imaging and speech solutions. It has previously introduced to the technology crowd its Nuance PDF Converter for Windows. The company follows up the move with another good one - the release of the Nuance PDF Converter for MAC. This action allows MAC users to do just about everything with PDF files. MAC versus Windows Though the MAC operating system (OS) is frequently encased in stylish exteriors, which Apple is known for, the OS itself is still just a runner up to Windows. So, the introduction ...

Launching a busy summer with a wonderful day of community on May 21, the village of Questa at Mountain House hosted nearly 800 Bay Area home shoppers and established residents to "100% Celebration," a family-friendly day of food, fun, photo opps and Facebook postings, plus new home model tours at Questa, the latest village of Mountain House. Home to some 3,000 residents, Mountain House is a thriving new town east of Livermore. It prides itself on state-of-the art schools, a wealth of recreational opportunities and neighborhoods of charming and refined traditional ...

The first comprehensive study of sea creatures around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia reveals a region that is richer in biodiversity than even many tropical sites, such as the Galapagos Islands. The study provides an important benchmark to monitor how these species will respond to future environmental change. Reporting this week in the online journal PLoS ONE, the team from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), funded by the British Government's Darwin Initiative and the South Georgia Heritage Trust, describe how they examined over 130 years of polar records. About ...

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing the discovery of a very massive, isolated star in a galaxy near our Milky Way. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the star VFTS 682 is one of the more massive stars ever known, because it is about 150 times the mass of the Sun. But the major surprise is that the star lies on its own and is not a member of a dense star cluster. The international team of astronomers [1] who are publishing this discovery is involved in a large survey of the Tarantula Nebula in the LMC. The region in and around the Tarantula Nebula is a ...

DURHAM, NC and SINGAPORE – Increased transportation of live pigs appears to have driven an increase in the diversity of swine influenza viruses found in the animals in Hong Kong over the last three decades, according to a new study. In the longest study of its kind, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School researchers found that swine viruses crossed geographic borders and mixed with local viruses, increasing their diversity. "The majority of reported human infections have been people with close contact to farm animals," said Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, Ph.D., an assistant professor ...

Regret has long been viewed as an exclusively human thought, one which helps prevent us from repeating bad choices but becomes debilitating when it triggers obsessive thoughts about past actions. Now a new study by Yale University researchers shows that monkeys also can be Monday morning quarterbacks and visualize alternative, hypothetical outcomes. The findings, reported in the May 26 issue of the journal Neuron, pinpoint areas of the brain where this process takes place and may give scientists new clues into how to treat diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. "Regret ...

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - May 25, 2011 - Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new method of design-dependent process monitoring for semiconductor wafer manufacturing. The advance promises to provide semiconductor chip manufacturing cost and productivity savings up to 15 percent, potentially increase profit per chip by as much as 12 percent and ultimately lead ...

Imagine shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep. When you wake up, will you perceive yourself as tiny or the world as being populated by giants? Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden may have found the answer. According to the textbooks, our perception of size and distance is a product of how the brain interprets different visual cues, such as the size of an object on the retina and its movement across the visual field. Some researchers have claimed that our bodies also influence our perception of the world, so that the taller you are, the shorter distances ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Primary care doctors have long been on the front lines of depression treatment. Depression is listed as a diagnosis for 1 in 10 office visits and primary care doctors prescribe more than half of all antidepressants. Now doctors at the University of Michigan Health System have developed a new tool that may help family physicians better evaluate the extent to which a patient's depression has improved. The issue, the researchers explain, is that the official definition of when a patient's symptoms are in remission doesn't always match up with what doctors ...

The world's first international polypill trial has shown that a four-in-one combination pill can halve the predicted risk of heart disease and stroke. The results are published online today in the open access journal PLoS One [1]. The once-a-day polypill contains aspirin and agents to lower blood pressure and cholesterol. These drugs are currently prescribed separately to millions of patients and are known individually to cut the risk of disease, but many experts believe that combining them into a single pill will encourage people to take the medications more reliably. The ...

Results of a study of 1032 patients with early (less than one year), active RA initially assessed response to treatment after 26 weeks with ADA 40mg every other week + MTX versus MTX alone. Results show that 44% of patients treated with the combination therapy achieved the target of sustained low disease activity at week 26, versus 24% of those treated with MTX alone. Patients reaching the target on ADA+MTX were considered responders and then further randomised to continue or withdraw from treatment with ADA 40mg every other week. Patients who continued treatment maintained ...

The study, involving 257 students, highlights that a higher degree of pain was experienced with the use of gaming devices compared to mobile phones. Pain reported by children using Xbox and Gameboy was statistically higher than pain reported for the iPhone (p=0.036 and p=0.042 respectively). Importantly, the length of time spent on the devices heightened the pain suffered, as the data demonstrated that length of time was independently associated with the pain reported, with the odds of reporting pain increasing by two (95* CI [1.50, 2.89, p END ...

Most adverse events were mild and no new safety signals were reported, according to study authors. Results of the 12 month multinational study, conducted with 792 patients also show that 36.6% and 16.2% of patients achieved ACR50 and ACR70 responses respectively in the 10mg BID group, a significant improvement in symptoms compared to placebo, where 31.2%, 12.7% and 3.2% of patients achieved ACR 20, 50 and 70 respectively. Significant improvements in the Disease Activity Score physician index (DAS28***) were also observed in the treatment groups compared to placebo, along ...

An international team of UK and US astronomers have spotted the most distant explosion, and possibly the most distant object, ever seen in the Universe. University of Warwick astronomer Dr Andrew Levan was one of the first members of that team to spot the exploding star, known as a Gamma-ray Burst (GRB), which was briefly as bright as several thousand galaxies (more than a million million times the brightness of the sun). This very bright explosion allowed it to be detected at an extreme estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years - putting it 96% of the way to ...

Northridge dentist, Dr. Farshid Ariz, DMD, and Dr. Shahdad Arami, DDS, are popular with local residents for many reasons. The technologies that are provided to diagnose and treat dental problems constantly evolve, but these dentists make new investments in technology and stay current with the required education to provide safe and precision dental care. The i-CAT and E4D technologies are now used at Northridge Dental Group to provide patients with safer and more comfortable treatments. Early detection is a key component in diagnosing severe gum diseases like periodontal ...

STANFORD, Calif. — A widely used combination of two common medications may cause unexpected increases in blood glucose levels, according to a study conducted at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University and Harvard Medical School. Researchers were surprised at the finding because neither of the two drugs — one, an antidepressant marketed as Paxil, and the other, a cholesterol-lowering medication called Pravachol — has a similar effect alone. The increase is more pronounced in people who are diabetic, and in whom the control of blood sugar levels ...

Japan's earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant damage have done more than reduce shipments of popular automobiles and car parts to the United States. Damage from the March disaster at Japanese chemical plants that produce raw materials for the electronics components, although modest in itself, has had some of the most severe impacts in history on the global electronics industry. That's the message from one story in a package of status reports on the disaster in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. In the articles, C&EN ...

"Sweet wheat" has the potential for joining that summertime delight among vegetables — sweet corn — as a tasty and healthful part of the diet, the scientific team that developed this mutant form of wheat concludes in a new study. The report appears in the ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Just as sweet corn arose as a mutation in field corn — being discovered and grown by Native American tribes with the Iroquois introducing European settlers to it in 1779 — sweet wheat (SW) originated from mutations in field wheat. Toshiki Nakamura, Tomoya Shimbata and ...

The formation of abnormal strands of protein called amyloid fibrils — associated with two dozen diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to type-2 diabetes — may not be permanent and irreversible as previously thought, scientists are reporting in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Rather, protein molecules are constantly attaching and detaching from the fibrils, in a recycling process that could be manipulated to yield new treatments for Alzheimer's and other diseases. In a study that focused on the fibrils associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), Natàlia Carulla ...

Temptations to exceed the speed limit are always plentiful, but only reckless drivers give in to such impulses. Likewise, numerous growth factors always abound in our bodies, but only cancerous cells are quickly "tempted" by these chemicals to divide again and again. Healthy cells, in contrast, divide only after being exposed to growth factors for eight continuous hours. What happens during these eight hours in a healthy cell that resists the call to divide? And even more important, what fails to work properly in the cancerous cell during these same hours? Why do cancerous ...

The lab, though it may seem quiet and insulated, can be as full of background noise as a crowded train station when we're trying to catch the announcements. Our brains can filter out the noise and focus on the message up to a certain point, but turning up the volume on the loudspeakers – improving the signal-to-noise ratio – helps as well. Separating out the signal from the noise – increasing one while reducing the other – is so basic that much of scientific research could not take place without it. One common method, developed by the physicist Robert Dicke at Princeton ...

The molecular machines that defend our body against infection don't huff and puff, but some of them The molecular machines that defend our body against infection don't huff and puff, but some of them apparently operate on the same principle as a steam engine. Weizmann Institute scientists have discovered a mechanism that controls inflammation similarly to a steam-engine valve: Just when the inflammatory mechanism that protects cells against viruses reaches its peak of activity, the molecular "steam-release valve" interferes, restoring this mechanism to its resting state, ...

Establishing an economically and environmentally beneficial, 'bio-derived' Australian and New Zealand aviation fuels industry is a viable proposition, according to a report compiled by CSIRO in collaboration with the region's major aviation industry players.The report, Flight Path to Sustainable Aviation, predicts that over the next 20 years a new, sustainable, Australia-New Zealand aviation fuels industry could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent, generate more than 12,000 jobs and reduce Australia's reliance on aviation fuel imports by $2 billion per annum. "This ...

A team of scientists from the University of Sheffield and Bangor University have used a computer climate model to study how freshwater entering the oceans at the end of the penultimate Ice Age 140,000 years ago affected the parts of the ocean currents that control climate. A paper based on the research, co-authored by Professor Grant Bigg, Head of the University of Sheffield's Department of Geography, his PhD student Clare Green, and Dr Mattias Green, a Senior Research fellow at Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences, is currently featured as an Editor's Highlight ...