The sharp downturn in the real estate market has impacted millions of Americans, and seniors are one of the groups most affected. This is particularly true of seniors who have so-called "reverse mortgages." This type of mortgage can potentially be a good way for people over the age of 62 to get money out of their homes. But in a market in which so many mortgages are underwater, it can also raise the risk of foreclosure. Reverse Mortgages Reverse mortgages are not new. But older homeowners are increasingly turning to them to improve their situations later ...

Jerusalem, May 18, 2011 – In case you thought that octopuses were smart only in guessing the outcome of soccer matches (remember the late Paul the octopus in Germany who picked all the right winners in last year's world cup matches in Johannesburg?), scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have now shown that not only are they smart, they can make some pretty good moves as well. Octopuses are among the most developed invertebrates. They have large brains and are fast learners. With eight arms and no rigid skeleton, they perform many tasks like crawling, swimming, ...

Throughout the 1990s, many states revamped their juvenile criminal laws to make it easier for judges to sentence children to adult prison. This was obviously done in an effort to appear "tough on crime" after a number of high-profile and sensational juvenile-offender cases had caused a media and public outcry. What many suspected at the time, however, and what has been proven to be true over time, is that this approach has been a poor solution to a complex problem. The pendulum is now beginning to swing the other way. A report by the Campaign for Youth Justice ...

A new international Task Force has been set up to promote 'a fair day's work for a fair day's pay' for workers and to develop organisational capacity in lower income countries. The research which found discrepancies between the salaries earned by local and those earned by expatriate aid workers was instrumental in setting up the task force. According to the findings from a jointly funded project by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Department for International Development (DFID) an expatriate aid worker will be paid on average four times more (and sometimes ...

Greater awareness of 'specific language impairment' (SLI), a language disorder, is needed to ensure better outcomes for the 3-6 per cent of UK school children affected by this disability. Children with SLI have difficulties with most or all aspects of language including grammar, vocabulary and literacy as well as with short term memory. According to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), they also have problems with higher order thinking skills. SLI may have a greater impact on these children than the better know disorder, dyslexia. "The ...

Irony has hit the health care system. While its goal is to safely heal injuries and diseases, the U.S. healthcare system has created an epidemic of medical errors. Recent studies reveal the physical and financial toll these medical mistakes continue to take on the quality of patient care. While medical malpractice reforms have attempted to curb the damages patients may recover after an injury caused by medical negligence, the health care system still suffers from a lack of incentive for doctors and hospitals to impose and adhere to stricter safety measures. In the meantime, ...

Scientists have used the latest computer-imaging technology to produce stunning three-dimensional pictures of a 49 million-year-old spider trapped inside an opaque piece of fossilized amber resin. University of Manchester researchers, working with colleagues in Germany, created the intricate images using X-ray computed tomography to study the remarkable spider, which can barely be seen under the microscope in the old and darkened amber. Writing in the international journal Naturwissenscaften, the scientists showed that the amber fossil – housed in the Berlin Natural ...

The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case that has the potential to make it easier for accident victims and their families to bring products liability claims against automobile manufacturers. In Williamson v. Mazda Motor Corp. of America (No. 08-1314), the Court has been asked to decide whether federal safety regulations preempt state-based products liability claims against car manufacturers. In Williamson, 32-year-old Thanh Williamson died as a result of injuries sustained in a 2002 car crash. Williamson was sitting in the second row seat of a 1993 ...

ATS 2011, DENVER – A Wednesday morning session will explore the inhalational exposures and respiratory outcomes of military deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Presenters will review current knowledge on complex inhalational exposures, epidemiologic studies, animal toxicology studies, and clinical lung findings in U.S. military men and women who are returning from Southwest Asia. D6 "Occupational Lung Diseases in U.S. Military Personnel Deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan" will take place from 8:15 to 10:45 a.m. in the Wells Fargo Theatre Section 1 on the street level of ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — About half of prostate cancers have a genetic anomaly that appears to make tumor cells responsive to a new class of cancer-fighting drugs, a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center finds. The drugs, called PARP inhibitors, are currently being tested in breast cancer patients with mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are found in up to 10 percent of all breast cancers. Half of prostate cancers have a genomic rearrangement that causes the fusion of two genes called TMPRSS2 and ERG. This gene fusion, believed to ...

Head injuries can be classified in one of two ways, open and closed. Open, or penetrating, head wounds are what most of us think of when picturing common brain injuries. They occur when an object pierces the skull, and are usually easy to observe and detect. Closed head injuries, on the other hand, typically involve a blow from an object that does not break the skull. Closed head injuries are often difficult to diagnose, since they often evince no external signs. Yet, they can be just as damaging as their open counterparts. An article by Leonardo Rangel-Castilla, ...

The results from a very well-done meta-analysis support other data generated on the risk of alcohol consumption and gastric cancer – that is – that the risk may be real for heavy alcohol consumption but not for moderate intake. The type of gastric cancer relating to heavier alcohol intake in this study tended to be tumors involving the noncardia, but differences between the association with tumors of the gastric cardia were not significant. There was no increased risk of gastric cancer from alcohol intake among Asians; this may be due to their lower alcohol intake; ...

PHILADELPHIA—Cancer researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson and an international team of collaborators have discovered a biomarker in breast cancer that may help identify which women will respond to anti-estrogen therapy. The research appears in the May 16 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Anti-estrogen drugs, most notably tamoxifen, are widely used in patients diagnosed with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. However, as many as a third of the women given tamoxifen fail to respond. In this new study, the investigators found ...

Baylor University, in collaboration with the U.S Forest Service (USFS) Rocky Mountain Research Station, has developed a model that predicts the risk of wetland habitat loss based on local wetland features and characteristics of the landscape surrounding the wetland. The new model was used to predict the fate of wetland habitats over a 13-state area in the southern United States and was published in the journal Ecological Applications. "Because conservation resources are scarce, it is essential to focus conservation efforts on those geographic areas where the risks for ...

"Seeing something invisible with your own eyes is an exciting experience," say Joachim Fischer and Tolga Ergin. For about one year, both physicists and members of the team of Professor Martin Wegener at KIT's Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) have worked on refining the structure of the Karlsruhe invisibility cloak to such an extent that it is also effective in the visible spectral range. In invisibility cloaks, light waves are guided by the material such that they leave the invisibility cloak again as if they had never been in contact with the object to be ...

When we speak, our enunciation and pronunciation of words and syllables fluctuates and varies from person to person. Given this, how do infants decode all of the spoken sounds they hear to learn words and meanings? To replicate the challenges of learning language as an infant, Carnegie Mellon University's Lori Holt and Sung-Joo Lim and Stockholm University's Francisco Lacerda used video game training with a mock "alien" language. They discovered that listeners quickly recognize word-like units. They will present their findings at the Acoustical Society of America's ...

A recent story shows the potential mischief that can be caused by simply having a Facebook page. Richard Leon Barton Jr. posted pictures of his wedding on his Facebook page. One problem. Technically, he wasn't divorced from his first wife. And she saw the pictures. He is now facing polygamy charges in Michigan. Apparently, he believed he was divorced from his first wife, Adina Quarto. While they had discussed divorce, and were separated, they had never finalized the divorce. He had "defriended" his first wife before he married his second, but Quarto came ...

Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed pigment-free, intensely coloured polymer materials, which could provide new, anti-counterfeit devices on passports or banknotes due to their difficulty to copy. The polymers do not use pigments but instead exhibit intense colour due to their structure, similar to the way nature creates colour for beetle shells and butterfly wings. These colours were created by highly ordered polymer layers, which the researchers produced using block copoylmers (an alloy of two different polymers). By mixing block copolymers ...

NEW YORK – Slowing down the aggregation or "clumping" of vitamin A in the eye may help prevent vision loss caused by macular degeneration, research from Columbia University Medical Center has found. Rather than changing the way the eye processes vitamin A, a team of researchers led by Ilyas Washington, a professor in the department of ophthalmology at Columbia's Harkness Eye Institute, decided to focus on changing the structure of vitamin A itself. In turn, Dr. Washington and his lab have taken a novel step toward treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a top ...

Teplis Travel, a leading corporate travel agency, recently moved its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, GA to a new, nearby location in Atlanta's prestigious Central Perimeter area. Previously located on Perimeter Center Parkway, Teplis Travel's global headquarters is now in The Terraces South, part of a twin 11-story tower complex that is situated on a lush, wooded 25-acre site with a lake. At The Terraces tenants can enjoy the buildings' sunlit atriums, beautiful reflecting pools and fountains inside the facility and stunning views of downtown Atlanta. The property ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —Dairy products can be high in harmful saturated fat but not necessarily in risk to the heart. A newly published analysis of thousands of adults in Costa Rica found that their levels of dairy consumption had nothing to do statistically with their risk of a heart attack. "Things like milk and cheese are very complex substances," said Stella Aslibekyan, a community health graduate student at Brown University and the lead author of the study, published in advance online May 4 in the journal Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases. ...

The research group AGR 206 at the University of Granada Department of Physiology and Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology "Jose Matáix", coordinated by professor Margarita Sánchez Campos, have proven that goat milk has nutritional characteristics beneficial to health. The regular consumption of goat milk by individuals with iron deficiency anemia improves their recovery, since it enhances the nutritional use of iron and enhances the regeneration of hemoglobin; this means that this type of milk minimizes calcium and iron interactions. Conversely, this type of milk ...

A new survey of hospice care in the United States says that the rapidly growing role of for-profit companies in providing end-of-life care for terminally ill patients raises serious concerns about whose interests are being served under such a commercial arrangement: those of shareholders or those of dying patients and their loved ones. "Under a corporate model of hospice care, there's an inherent conflict of interest between a company's drive to maximize profits and a patient's need for the kind of holistic, multidisciplinary and compassionate care originally envisioned ...

Thomson, a leading tour operator, has launched three new May Edition Summer 12 brochures; Summer Collection, Faraway Shores and Florida. Following on from sister-brand First Choice's move to 100% all-inclusive from next summer, Thomson will continue to offer holidays across all boards, from room only in Florida, to all inclusive at its exclusive Sensatori properties. Due to First Choice's re-branding, all Florida properties will now be available through Thomson, and to reflect this, the new Florida brochure contains all the top International-drive hotels, villas and ...

New research from North Carolina State University shows that a "gatekeeper" protein plays an important role in skin-cancer prevention in humans and lab mice. The protein, C/EBP alpha, is normally abundantly expressed to help protect skin cells from DNA damage when humans are exposed to sunlight. The NC State research shows, however, that the protein is not expressed when certain human skin cancers are present. Moreover, when the protein is inactivated in special lab mice exposed to small amounts of the UVB solar radiation, the mice become more susceptible to skin cancer. Dr. ...