A theatre production of the animated children's programme Shaun the Sheep will be staged at Liverpool's Empire Theatre later this month. Parents can take their children to see the show between May 25th and 28th. It features a mixture of music and dancing to ensure youngsters are kept entertained throughout the performance. Visitors can expect to see characters such as Shirley, Timmy and - of course - Shaun on stage in a raucous tale. In a statement, the venue described the plot, saying: "Shaun is stage-struck and has decided to put on a very special show ...

Practically every state in the nation requires that residents who own autos purchase car insurance coverage, but the necessary types and amounts differ widely. In a new FAQ from OnlineAutoInsurance.com, the writers explain the key aspects of the two main coverage systems in the U.S.: liability and no-fault. All states with compulsory coverage laws require drivers to purchase some property damage liability insurance, which goes to pay for property repairs caused by the policyholder. Where states differ, though, is how drivers get protected for bodily injury damages ...

A senior citizen preparing to retire has won a massive $167,648 progressive jackpot at WinADayCasino.com. All of the online slot machines at WinADay are tied to the same frequently hit jackpot but this time the player, known as GOLD1968, won the big one playing one of her favorites, Vegas Mania. Vegas Mania is a 5 reel, 21 payline slot machine with all the flashing lights and exciting sounds of The Strip. There are Wild and Double Wild symbols that boost winnings and players can win up to 15 free spins. "I've often imagined what it must feel like to win a big ...

Recently published research shows that coffee drinkers enjoy not only the taste of their coffee but also a reduced risk of cancer with their cuppa. More detailed research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research shows that drinking coffee specifically reduces the risk of antiestrogen-resistant estrogen-receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer. Researchers from Sweden compared lifestyle factors and coffee consumption between women with breast cancer and age-matched women without. They found that coffee drinkers had a lower incidence of ...

An analysis of over 400,000 IVF cycles in the UK has shown that doctors should aim to retrieve around 15 eggs from a woman's ovaries in a single cycle in order to have the best chance of achieving a live birth after assisted reproduction technology. The study, which is published online in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1], found that there was a strong relationship between live birth rates and the number of eggs retrieved in one cycle. The live birth rate rose with an increasing number of eggs up to about 15; it levelled off between ...

Medicines regulators are protecting drug company profits rather than the lives and welfare of patients by withholding unpublished trial data, argue researchers on bmj.com today. They call for full access to full trial reports (published and unpublished) to allow the true benefits and harms of treatments to be independently assessed by the scientific community. Despite the existence of hundreds of thousands of clinical trials, doctors are unable to choose the best treatments for their patients because research results are being reported selectively, write Professor ...

ORLANDO, Fla., May 10, 2011 –Traditionally, RNA was mostly known as the messenger molecule that carries protein-making instructions from a cell's nucleus to the cytoplasm. But scientists now estimate that approximately 97 percent of human RNA doesn't actually code for proteins at all. A flurry of research in the past decade has revealed that some types of non-coding RNAs switch genes on and off and influence protein function. The best studied non-coding RNAs are the microRNAs. Now, researchers led by Dr. Ranjan Perera at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) ...

Hamilton, ON (May 10, 2011) – It's a disease affecting those closest to us – our fathers, brothers and sons. Prostate cancer impacts one in six men in Canada. Last year, roughly 24,600 men were diagnosed with the disease. Most types of prostate cancer are curable if caught and treated early. But little is understood about the mechanisms that cause a tumour to metastasize and spread to other parts of the body. Damu Tang, an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Nephrology of the McMaster University's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and St. Joseph's ...

DALLAS – May 10, 2011 – Children whose mothers are successfully treated for depression show progressive and marked improvement in their own behaviors even a year after their moms discontinue treatment, new UT Southwestern Medical Center-led research shows. Additionally, the faster mothers got better, the faster their kids improved – and the greater the degree of improvement experienced. "If you treat the mother when she is depressed and don't even go through the process of treating the children of these mothers, they still get better as their mothers get better," said ...

The acidification of the world's oceans could have major consequences for the marine environment. New research shows that coccoliths, which are an important part of the marine environment, dissolve when seawater acidifies. Associate Professor Tue Hassenkam and colleagues at the Nano-Science Center, University of Copenhagen, are the first to have measured how individual coccoliths react to water with different degrees of acidity. Coccoliths are very small shells of calcium carbonate that encapsulate a number of species of alga. Algae plays an important role in the global ...

AMES, Iowa -- Douglas Gentile is painfully aware of how research on the effects of video games on kids is often oversimplified to say that games are either "good" or "bad." The associate professor of psychology at Iowa State University has had his own research typecast on the "bad" side with studies on violent video game's effects and video game addiction, even though he's also done studies demonstrating the benefits of games. A new article by Gentile appearing in the journal Child Development Perspectives argues that existing video game literature can't be classified ...

Greater powers introduced by the government to enable specially trained nurses and pharmacists to prescribe medication in England have been successfully adopted, according to a new report. Health service researchers from the universities of Southampton and Keele found widespread acceptance of the new powers among patients and that prescribing practices were safe and appropriate for the type of medical conditions being treated. The Department of Health-funded report, published today (Tuesday, 10 May 2011), gives a national 'snapshot' of how successfully nurse and pharmacist ...

Similar to humans, the bacteria and tiny plants living in the ocean need iron for energy and growth. But their situation is quite different than ours — for one, they can't exactly turn to natural iron sources like leafy greens or red meat for a pick-me-up. So where does their iron come from? New research published by "Nature Geoscience" points to a source on the seafloor: minute particles (called nanoparticles) of pyrite, or fool's gold, from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Scientists already knew the vents' cloudy plumes emitted from the earth's interior ...

This release is available in French and German. Capsule systems for making coffee are convenient and practical and therefore very popular. In terms of their environmental friendliness, however, a large question mark hangs over them. Roland Hischier, Empa's ecobalance expert, has just finished investigating various capsule systems as well as fully automatic machines, filter and soluble coffee making techniques, and has prepared a simplified life cycle analysis. This shows that it is the content which matters most. "A well-informed choice of coffee is in any case the ...

The antibody 5750 recognises a specific sugar residue on the cell surface, which is called LewisX. The research group lead by Prof. Dr. Andreas Faissner has now been able to use LewisX for the first time to separate different types of stem cells. The researchers report on their results in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Unexpected sugar diversity Antibodies that recognise the LewisX sugar residue are used routinely to identify so-called neural stem cells from which the various cells of the nervous system originate. Prof. Faissner's team has now shown that the designation ...

The process to expunge criminal record in California is a legal relief for many people with a criminal charge in their record. More people are learning that the mistakes they have made in the past are now coming back to haunt them due to public background checks. The law firm of Matian and Moaddel is now extending their legal services to expunge criminal charges from permanent criminal records to help people live a normal and peaceful life. People can make poor decisions in life and go through an arrest and get charged for a criminal offense. The convicted person may ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Boys and girls have put many of the trappings of teenagerhood behind them by the age of 18 or 19, but at least some of the brain resculpting that characterizes the decade of adolescence may still be going as strong as ever, according to findings in a new study that measured brainwaves of subjects in their midteens and again in their late teens. One of the kinds of neurological changes underway in a teen brain is a pruning of unneeded connections forged earlier in life — the brain invests in developing some connections but sheds a ...

Until now, the scientific community had assumed that wild animals died before they got old. Now, a Spanish-Mexican research team has for the first time demonstrated ageing in a population of wild birds (Sula nebouxii) in terms of their ability to live and reproduce. "It was always thought that senescence was something particular to humans and domestic animals, because we have an extended life expectancy", Alberto Velando, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Ecology and Animal Biology Department of the University of Vigo, tells SINC. However, the idea that ...

Salmonella enterica, one of the main causes of gastrointestinal infections, modulates its virulence gene expression, adapting it to each stage of the infection process, depending on the free iron concentration found in the intestinal epithelium of its host. Researchers at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have demonstrated for the first time that the pathogen activates these genes through the Fur protein, which acts as a sensor of iron levels in its surroundings. The research, published online in the journal PLoS ONE and entitled "Fur activates the expression of ...

A new study published in the journal Respirology reveals that adult patients admitted to the hospital with pneumonia are more likely to die if they have Vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is known to be involved in the innate immune response to infection. The team of researchers at Waikato Hospital and the Universities of Waikato and Otago, measured vitamin D in the blood samples of 112 adult patients admitted with community acquired pneumonia during the winter at the only acute-care hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand. The researchers found that Vitamin D deficiency was ...

(WASHINGTON) -- The European Space Agency (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, home to the largest single mirror telescope in space, has detected massive amounts of molecular gas gusting at high velocities — in some cases in excess of 1000 kilometers per second — from the centers of a sample of merging galaxies. Herschel was built by a European-led, multi-national team, including U.S. contributions from researchers at NASA's JPL, Caltech, and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). It opens a new terahertz window on the cold and dusty Universe, enabling its scientific objective: ...

Munster Eye Care Associates has been an integral part of the ophthalmology community in Munster, Indiana for 30 years. Munster Eye Care Associates specializes in providing patients with the personalized care that everyone deserves. MECA offers complete eye healthcare by using the latest techniques, refractive surgery, and general ophthalmology treatments to obtain the optimal visual health. MECA has one of the best equipped eye care facilities in Northwest Indiana. Munster Eye Care Associates exists for the purpose of providing patients with the highest quality eye ...

The first study into the prevalence of overall cardiovascular risk in the Spanish working population (ICARIA) shows that 6% of workers have a high risk (8% on men and 2% in women). This prevalence increases with age in both sexes, and is highest in the farming sector, followed by construction, industry and services. "In Spain, approximately one million workers have a high level of cardiovascular risk, but only a minority of these people classify themselves as at risk", Miguel Ángel Sánchez Chaparro, coordinator of the ICARIA study and a researcher at the University of ...

Montreal, May 10, 2010 – As people face a terminal illness and are confined to a hospital bed or hospice room, music can provide a great source of solace. North American healthcare professionals have increasingly recognized the benefits of music therapy in palliative care, since end-of-life treatment is designed to meet the psychosocial, physical and spiritual needs of patients. Sandi Curtis, a music therapy professor in the Concordia University Department of Creative Arts Therapies, has published a new study on the topic in the journal Music and Medicine. Her findings ...

UPTON, NY - In a step toward engineering ever-smaller electronic devices, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have assembled nanoscale pairings of particles that show promise as miniaturized power sources. Composed of light-absorbing, colloidal quantum dots linked to carbon-based fullerene nanoparticles, these tiny two-particle systems can convert light to electricity in a precisely controlled way. "This is the first demonstration of a hybrid inorganic/organic, dimeric (two-particle) material that acts as an electron donor-bridge-acceptor ...