Russell Jones & Walker, one of the UK's top family law firms, has opened a specialist international divorce division in response to the demand from ex-pats wishing to get divorced in England. The client base of Russell Jones & Walker includes people living in China, USA, Australia and Singapore, and, according to the firm's national head of family law, Amanda McAlister, there is often doubt as to which country proceedings should be issued in. In international family law, speed is very important. This is because the country where proceedings are issued first has jurisdiction, ...

New findings from Confused.com reveal that charity credit cards may not be as 'giving' as customers think. After analysing the rewards given on 45 of the UK's top charity credit cards Confused.com found that those wishing to be charitable could provide greater support by ditching their charity card and replacing it with a cash-back reward card instead, potentially earning up to three times as much 'cash' which can then be donated to a charity of the cardholder's choice.   Charitable giving in 2009 was 11% lower than 2008 according to the Charities Aid Foundation, no ...

Npower has announced that it is making a hundred pairs of tickets to Football league matches available in support of the Tickets for Troops charity. During the weekend of Remembrance Sunday serving members and those medically discharged from HM Forces will be able to attend football matches for free under the scheme set up by Tickets for Troops using tickets donated by npower, sponsors of the Football League. 28 npower Football League teams from Bournemouth to Yeovil will host men and women from the armed forces who will enjoy the match free of charge through the ticket ...

Standard Life Wealth, the investment specialist for private clients, has appointed five people to boost its team. The latest expansion brings a total of 15 new recruits* to Standard Life Wealth this year. The appointments will be made up of two senior client portfolio managers (Alastair Garvie and Gregg Henderson), one client portfolio manager (John Payne) and two client portfolio manager assistants (Eileen Morrison and Clare Messham) and will be based in Birmingham giving Standard Life Wealth a third fixed location in the UK alongside Edinburgh and London. Richard ...

M&S Money has revealed the results of its Under 18's Work and Money Survey 2010, showing that many of the UKs 'tweens' and teens are financially clued up and eager to start work. The survey - based on research of more than 3,000* UK under 18s - highlights that: - A child aged 8-9 has an average monthly income of GBP9.70 and by 18 years of age monthly income has soared to an average of GBP219. However, while the older age group 'earn' substantially more, they have to subsidise a greater range of expenses. - Both tweens (50%) and teens (30%) save significant percentages ...

San Diego, CA, November 10, 2010 – Heavy drinking among college students results in over 1800 deaths each year, as well as 590,000 unintentional injuries, almost 700,000 assaults and more than 97,000 victims of sexual assaults. In a new study published in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers report on the results of the Safer California Universities study, a successful community-wide prevention strategy targeted at off-campus settings. This is one of the first studies to focus on the total environment rather than on prevention aimed ...

The laboratory of Huda Zoghbi, where the discovery that mutations in the gene MECP2 cause the severe childhood neurological disorder Rett Syndrome was made, has taken yet another step toward unraveling the complex epigenetic functions of this gene, implicated also in cases of autism, bipolar disease and childhood onset schizophrenia. The November 11 issue of Nature reports that removing MECP2 from a small group of neurons that typically make the inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA, recapitulates many symptoms of Rett as well as numerous neuropsychiatric disorders. The ...

Millions will escape hunger and poverty in a widening campaign to achieve global food security and deliver major environmental gains within 25 years Hanoi, Vietnam – One of the world's largest global scientific partnerships for sustainable agricultural development has launched a bold new research initiative that aims to dramatically improve the ability of rice farmers to feed growing populations in some of the world's poorest nations. The efforts of the Global Rice Science Partnership, or GRiSP, are expected to lift 150 million people out of poverty by 2035 and prevent ...

LA JOLLA, CA—A collaborative effort between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego, successfully used human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from patients with Rett syndrome to replicate autism in the lab and study the molecular pathogenesis of the disease. Their findings, published in the Nov. 12, 2010, issue of Cell, revealed disease-specific cellular defects, such as fewer functional connections between Rett neurons, and demonstrated that these symptoms are reversible, raising the hope that, ...

WHAT: The 2010 Annual Meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (ACAAI) brings together leading allergists and immunologists from around the world. WHO: Scientists supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, will present their latest research findings at the ACAAI Annual Meeting. For more than 60 years, NIAID has supported allergy and immunology research at U.S. and international institutions and conducted studies within its own laboratories to improve the health ...

Using induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with Rett syndrome, scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have created functional neurons that provide the first human cellular model for studying the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and could be used as a tool for drug screening, diagnosis and personalized treatment. The research, led by Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics, will be published in the November 12 issue of the journal Cell. "This work is important because it puts us in a translational ...

The presence of certain markers in the urine might be a red flag for acute kidney injury (AKI), according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The results suggest that a simple urine test could help prevent cases of kidney failure. Unlike heart or brain injuries, which show obvious outward signs, physical symptoms are not typically present with AKI. Researchers have been looking for markers of AKI, with the hope that early detection will lead to early therapy to prevent kidney failure. Richard Zager, MD (Clinical ...

Researchers in France have uncovered a mechanism which explains how biological clocks accurately synchronize to the day/night cycle despite large fluctuations in light intensity during the day and from day to day. Following the identification of two central "clock genes" of a green alga, Ostreococcus tauri, a mathematical model reproducing their daily activity profiles has revealed that their internal clock is influenced by the naturally varying light levels throughout the day only at periods when it needs resetting. The results found by the biologists at Oceanologic Observatory ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Cat fanciers everywhere appreciate the gravity-defying grace and exquisite balance of their feline friends. But do they know those traits extend even to the way cats lap milk? Researchers at MIT, Virginia Tech and Princeton University analyzed the way domestic and big cats lap and found that felines of all sizes take advantage of a perfect balance between two physical forces. The results will be published in the November 11 online issue of the journal Science. It was known that when they lap, cats extend their tongues straight down toward the bowl ...

PHILADELPHIA—An international team of scientists, including a leading evolutionary biologist from the Academy of Natural Sciences, have reset the agenda for future research in the highly diverse Amazon region by showing that the extraordinary diversity found there is much older than generally thought. The findings from this study, which draws on research by the Academy's Dr. John Lundberg and other scientists, were published as a review article in this week's edition of Science. The study shows that Amazonian diversity has evolved as by-product of the Andean mountain ...

The steamiest places on the planet are getting warmer. Conservative estimates suggest that tropical areas can expect temperature increases of 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Does global warming spell doom for rainforests? Maybe not. Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and colleagues report in the journal Science that nearly 60 million years ago rainforests prospered at temperatures that were 3-5 degrees higher and at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels 2.5 times today's levels. "We're going to have a novel climate ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives. The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science. "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and ...

FRANKFURT. Many imminent problems facing the world today, such as deforestation, overfishing, or climate change, can be described as commons problems. The solution to these problems requires cooperation from hundreds and thousands of people. Such large scale cooperation, however, is plagued by the infamous cooperation dilemma. According to the standard prediction, in which each individual follows only his own interests, large-scale cooperation is impossible because free riders enjoy common benefits without bearing the cost of their provision. Yet, extensive field evidence ...

A new breakthrough in the fight against pneumonia, meningitis and septicaemia has been announced today by scientists in Dublin and Leicester. The discovery will lead to a dramatic shift in our understanding of how the body's immune system responds to infection caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae and pave the way for more effective vaccines. The collaborative research, jointly led by Dr Ed Lavelle from Trinity College Dublin and Dr Aras Kadioglu from the University of Leicester, with Dr Edel McNeela of TCD as its lead author, has been published in the international peer-reviewed ...

For the first time, scientists have been able to "freeze in time" a mysterious process by which a critical enzyme metabolizes drugs and chemicals in food. By recreating this process in the lab, a team of researchers has solved a 40-year-old puzzle about changes in a family of enzymes produced by the liver that break down common drugs such as Tylenol, caffeine, and opiates, as well as nutrients in many foods. The breakthrough discovery may help future researchers develop a wide range of more efficient and less-expensive drugs, household products, and other chemicals. The ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Tinkering with a single gene may give perennial grasses more robust roots and speed up the timeline for creating biofuels, according to researchers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP). Perennial grasses, including switchgrass and miscanthus, are important biofuels crops and can be harvested repeatedly, just like lawn grass, said Philip Benfey, director of the IGSP Center for Systems Biology. But before that can happen, the root system needs time to get established. "These biofuel crops usually can't be harvested until the second ...

STANFORD, Calif. — One protein single-handedly controls the growth of blood vessels into the developing brains of mice embryos, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Understanding how the protein, a cellular receptor, functions could help clinicians battle brain tumors and stroke by choking off or supplementing vital blood-vessel development, and may enhance the delivery of drugs across the blood-brain barrier. "The strength and specificity of this receptor's effects indicate that it could be a very important target," said Calvin Kuo, ...

Bethesda, MD—An original and progressive report on health information technology (HIT) vendors, their customers and patients, published online today, makes ground-breaking recommendations for new practices that target the reduction or elimination of tensions that currently mar relationships between many HIT vendors and their customers, specifically with regard to indemnity and error management of HIT systems. In light of the Obama Administration's $19 billion investment in HIT, paid out in ARRA stimulus funds, these recommendations are particularly significant in helping ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The website of the Nobel Prize shows a cat resting in a graphene hammock. Although fictitious, the image captures the excitement around graphene, which, at one atom thick, is the among the thinnest and strongest materials ever produced. A significant obstacle to realizing graphene's potential lies in creating a surface large enough to support a theoretical sleeping cat. For now, material scientists stitch individual graphene sheets together to create sheets that are large enough to investigate possible applications. Just as sewing ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A bulge of elevated topography on the farside of the moon--known as the lunar farside highlands--has defied explanation for decades. But a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows that the highlands may be the result of tidal forces acting early in the moon's history when its solid outer crust floated on an ocean of liquid rock. Ian Garrick-Bethell, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, found that the shape of the moon's bulge can be described by a surprisingly simple mathematical ...