Congratulations on your recent engagement! Now that you're engaged, the next step is to find your perfect dress. Gown search can be very overwhelming and time consuming. You will need to pick out the perfect gown for yourself, the perfect style for your bridesmaids, and the perfect dress for your mother. And all of that will have to coordinate with your wedding theme and color. That's a lot of work ahead for you! Nonetheless, it is a very exciting process to experience. While you're taking notes for your gown research, make sure you note this one down and check ...

Tableware and home furnishings store Didriks officially announced the launch of its Dinner Series blog site - www.dinnerseries.com. The blog features ideas and inspirations on cooking, entertaining, and dining with Didriks' lines of tableware, housewares and home furnishings. The Dinner Series blog site represents a unique approach to combining commerce with social media. Didriks, a retailer with an established national online presence, also hosts two other blogs featuring its products: blog.didriks.com and blog.belgian-linen.com. Five dinner parties have already ...

ManGlaze INK.'s new RAWKband is the low-profile leather restraint designed specifically to transform the iPod Nano into an iWatch! With RAWKband's James Bondage styling and Dual Snap technology, this manacle will look stunning and fit most wrists. The guys at ManGlaze INK. focused their design on style and functionality with their constant underlying goal being to attract women. This was not an easy task, considering you have to be a bit of a geek to wear an iPod Nano as a watch. Supreme functionality was achieved in RAWKband's design by adding no additional wrist-height ...

Boulder, CO, USA - Geology includes two papers on the 2009 6.3 L'Aquila earthquake, one of which features a new analysis technique, Focal Mechanism Tomography; a study on the impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the middle Yangtze; three papers on methane hydrates; findings of "easily recognized signatures of life" in iron-oxide-rich spheres and pipes near Escalante, Utah; and examination of a ~300-million-year-old bivalve shell. GSA Today investigates what caused the Dead Interval after the Cambrian explosion. Keywords: methane hydrates, Sri Lanka, monsoons, L'Aquila earthquake, ...

When it comes to understanding where tendencies to overweight and obesity develop, you have to begin with the very young, says John Spence, a behavioural scientist in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta. His research, the first of its kind to look at North American kids and published in the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity, examined four- and five year olds' avoidance or approach behaviours to food and their relationship with body weight. What he's found may help to unlock the causes of obesity and what we can do ...

Astronomers are used to looking millions of years into the past. Now scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look thousands of years into the future. Looking at the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster in the Milky Way, they have calculated how the stars there will move over the next 10 000 years. The globular star cluster Omega Centauri has caught the attention of sky watchers ever since the early astronomer Ptolemy first catalogued it 2000 years ago. Ptolemy thought Omega Centauri was a single star and probably wouldn't have imagined that ...

VIDEO: Researchers at EPFL Signal Processing Laboratory 5 in collaboration with the University of Lausanne and partners in the US have studied how the brain makes connections between its different parts. Click here for more information. The brain's inner network becomes increasingly more efficient as humans mature. Now, for the first time without invasive measures, a joint study from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL), ...

US scientists have found a correlation between increased circuit activity in the right side of the brain and the suffering of involuntary flashbacks by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers. Using a technique called Magnetoencephalography (MEG), which involves analysing the occurrence of magnetic charges given off when neuronal populations in our brain connect and communicate, the researchers have undertaken clinical trials to try and find differences between brain activity of PTSD sufferers and those with a clean bill of mental health. The findings, published ...

A clinical trial of a potential new targeted treatment drug has provided powerful evidence that it can halt or reverse the growth of lung tumors characterized by a specific genetic abnormality. In their report in the October 28 New England Journal of Medicine, a multi-institutional research team reports that daily doses of the investigational drug crizotinib shrank the tumors of more than half of a group patients whose tumors were driven by alterations in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene. In another one-third of study participants, crizotinib treatment suppressed ...

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania…Today in the journal Nature, a new discovery described by a team of international scientists, including Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Christopher Beard, suggests that anthropoids—the primate group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys—"colonized" Africa, rather than originally evolving in Africa as has been widely accepted. According to this paper, what is exceptional about these new fossils—discovered at the Dur At-Talah escarpment in central Libya—is the diversity of species present: the site includes three distinct families ...

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered the most massive neutron star yet found, a discovery with strong and wide-ranging impacts across several fields of physics and astrophysics. "This neutron star is twice as massive as our Sun. This is surprising, and that much mass means that several theoretical models for the internal composition of neutron stars now are ruled out," said Paul Demorest, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "This mass measurement also has implications for our understanding of all ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A team of scientists, led by biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside, has found new evidence linking "Snowball Earth" glacial events to the rise of early animals. The controversial Snowball Earth hypothesis posits that the Earth was covered from pole to pole by a thick sheet of ice lasting, on several occasions, for millions of years. These glaciations, the most severe in Earth history, occurred from 750 to 580 million years ago. The researchers argue that the oceans in the aftermath of these events were rich in phosphorus, a nutrient ...

Boston, MA—A new study has found that regular consumption of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with a clear and consistently greater risk of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. According to the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers, the study provides empirical evidence that intake of sugary beverages should be limited to reduce risk of these conditions. The study appears online October 27, 2010, in the journal Diabetes Care and will appear in the November print edition. "Many previous studies have examined the relationship between ...

Pancreatic cancer develops and spreads much more slowly than scientists have thought, according to new research from Johns Hopkins investigators. The finding indicates that there is a potentially broad window for diagnosis and prevention of the disease. "For the first time, we have a quantifiable estimate of the development of pancreatic cancer, and when it would be best to intervene," according to Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pathology and oncology at Hopkins' Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, "so there is potentially ...

Researchers at the University of Bristol reveal today in the journal Nature that they have developed a seismological 'speed gun' for the inside of the Earth. Using this technique they will be able to measure the way the Earth's deep interior slowly moves around. This mantle motion is what controls the location of our continents and oceans, and where the tectonic plates collide to shake the surface we live on. For 2,900 km (1800 miles) beneath our feet, the Earth is made of the rocky mantle. Although solid, it is so hot that it can flow like putty over millions of years. ...

Green tea does not protect against breast cancer. A study of data from approximately 54,000 women, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research, found no association between drinking green tea and breast cancer risk. Motoki Iwasaki, from the National Cancer Center, Tokyo, worked with a team of researchers to carry out the study. He said, "Although in vitro and animal-based studies have suggested that green tea may have beneficial protective effects against breast cancer, results from human studies have been inconclusive. Our large-scale, population-based ...

In new research published today, researchers uncover evolution in action in cancer cells. They show the forces of evolution in pancreatic tumours mean that not only is cancer genetically different between different patients, but each new focus of cancer spread within a patient has acquired distinct mutations. Effectively, ten different foci of cancer spread are ten different, but related, tumours. The complexity of pancreatic cancer genetics uncovered in this work helps to explain the difficulty of treating the disease but also strengthens the need for improved methods ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Just seven months after University of Utah geneticists took part in a landmark study that sequenced for the first time the genome of an entire Utah family, U of U researchers have taken part in another historic study that is the first large-scale genome sequencing project – 179 people representing three continents – and 60 Utahns played a major role in this study, too. Published Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010, in Nature, the study demonstrates how quickly the science of genome sequencing is expanding – first from individuals, then to families, and now to large ...

BOSTON--A new oral drug caused dramatic shrinkage of a patient's rare, aggressive form of soft-tissue cancer that was driven by an abnormally activated protein, physician-scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Oct. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. A second patient who had a similar tumor that was not fueled by the mutant protein, called ALK (named for the first disease in which it was found, anaplastic lymphoma kinase), failed to respond to the drug, said the researchers, confirming the inhibitor's specificity for the abnormal protein. ...

Scientists have invented methods to scout the human genome's repetitive landscapes, where DNA sequences are highly identical and heavily duplicated. These advances, as reported today in Science, can identify subtle but important differences among people in the number and content of repeated DNA segments. These copy number variations partly account for the normal diversity among people. Copy number variations might also be why some people, and not others, have certain disorders or disease susceptibilities, and might also determine how severely they are affected. Until ...

STANFORD, Calif. — The immune system may play a critical role in ensuring the success of certain types of cancer therapies, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The research showed treatments that disable cancer-promoting genes called oncogenes are much more successful in eradicating tumors in the presence of a signaling molecule secreted by kind of immune cell called a T helper cell. The finding is important because many drugs now in use in humans are often tested in lab animals with weakened immune systems and many human ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Five years ago, neuroscientist Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried of UCLA, and their colleagues discovered that a single neuron in the human brain can function much like a sophisticated computer and recognize people, landmarks, and objects, suggesting that a consistent and explicit code may help transform complex visual representations into long-term and more abstract memories. Now Koch and Fried, along with former Caltech graduate student and current postdoctoral fellow Moran Cerf, have found ...

Pancreatic tumors are one of the most lethal cancers, with fewer than five percent of patients surviving five years after diagnosis. But a new study that peers deeply into the genetics of pancreatic cancer presents a bit of good news: an opportunity for early diagnosis. In contrast to earlier predictions, many pancreatic tumors are, in fact, slow growing, taking nearly 20 years to become lethal after the first genetic perturbations appear. "There have been two competing theories explaining why pancreatic cancers are so lethal," says Bert Vogelstein, the Howard Hughes ...

Small genetic differences between individuals help explain why some people have a higher risk than others for developing illnesses such as diabetes or cancer. Today in the journal Nature, the 1000 Genomes Project, an international public-private consortium, published the most comprehensive map of these genetic differences, called variations, estimated to contain approximately 95 percent of the genetic variation of any person on Earth. Researchers produced the map using next-generation DNA sequencing technologies to systematically characterize human genetic variation ...

VICTORIA – Industrial-scale aquaculture production magnifies environmental degradation, according to the first global assessment of the effects of marine finfish aquaculture (e.g. salmon, cod, turbot and grouper) released today. This is true even when farming operations implement the best current marine fish farming practices. Dr. John Volpe and his team at the University of Victoria developed the Global Aquaculture Performance Index (GAPI), an unprecedented system for objectively measuring the environmental performance of fish farming. "Scale is critical," said Dr. ...