In May of 2008, event planner and marketing guru Tara Fontana took her first trip to Tuscany. After eight days of soaking up the art, culture, food, and wine, quite literally the wine, she knew this was a place that she would one day return. In November of 2009 she embarked on her second trip to give birth to a book; but instead she gave birth to a wedding business, Weddings Under The Tuscan Sun. With nearly two decades of success in various areas of the luxury goods industry, Fontana's prestigious resume reads like the pages of Vogue. A former marketing representative ...

Xplore Software Consulting Inc recognizes all-round performance and multiple talents in the areas of both software and the entertainment industry. Ankita Lokhande has been chosen by Xplore Software Consulting Inc as the winner of the Xplore Talent Award from the Indian TV entertainment industry as she possesses immense talent in the areas of acting, dancing, and drama. Ankita Lokhande, born and brought up in Indore, India, is an Indian television actor best known for playing the role of Archana in Pavitra Rishta. She moved to Mumbai, India and began his television ...

Pelican Brands, Calatrasi, and the Mineo Family announced today the formation of a long-term strategic partnership for the U.S. market. The Mineo Family represents the alliance between Calatrasi, a leading Italian wine producer, and 500 individual Sicilian growers. Italian wine is the number one imported wine category in the US. Calatrasi produces nearly one million cases of wine annually and controls more than 1,100 hectares (2,700) acres in Sicily, Puglia and Tunisia. Over the last 10 years, Calatrasi has reinvested over $14 million on improvements to the quality ...

PHILADELPHIA — Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have identified a possible biomarker for measuring progress in breast cancer chemoprevention trials, according to data presented at the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference, held here Nov. 7-10, 2010. Although breast cancer treatments are constantly being tested, the progress in chemoprevention has been slower because of a lack of reasonable outcomes that can be measured, according to lead researcher Victoria Seewaldt, M.D., director of the prevention program at the Duke University ...

PHILADELPHIA — Allopurinol, a relatively inexpensive anti-gout medication that has been on the market for more than 20 years, may have some activity against colorectal adenomas, according to data presented at the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference, held here Nov. 7-10, 2010. Specifically, the presence of a colorectal tumor tissue biomarker, Ki67, was markedly decreased in the preliminary results of a study of patients with colorectal polyps assigned to take allopurinol. "Allopurinol has a well-known and good safety profile, and a ...

PHILADELPHIA — The use of statins among a group of postmenopausal women did not reduce the risk for colorectal cancer, according to the results of a prospective analysis of data from the large population-based Women's Health Initiative (WHI). "The results of our study are consistent with the majority of the literature suggesting no significant reduction in colorectal cancer risk among users of statins," said Michael S. Simon, M.D., professor of oncology in the department of oncology at Wayne State University and Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, Detroit. Simon ...

PHILADELPHIA — Increased phytoestrogens commonly found in dietary soy may modify the risk of some types of breast cancer, according to findings presented at the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference, held Nov. 7-10, 2010. "This study was unique in that we looked at specific subtypes of breast cancer, and found a suggestion that menopausal status may play a role in risk," said Anne Weaver, a graduate student at the University at Buffalo and research apprentice at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Weaver and colleagues evaluated 683 women ...

PHILADELPHIA — Lung tumors in those who smoke and those who never smoked have different DNA alterations in the tumor genomes, according to results of a pilot study presented at the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference, held Nov. 7-10, 2010, in Philadelphia. Based on the results of this study, Kelsie Thu, a Ph.D. candidate at the BC Cancer Research Center in Vancouver, Canada, suggested that "lung cancer in never-smokers should be studied as a separate group," and that lung cancers in smokers and never-smokers may represent two different ...

PHILADELPHIA — Being a current smoker or having a history of smoking significantly increased the risk of breast cancer progression and overall death among a group of multiethnic women with breast cancer, according to the results of a large prospective cohort study. "We found that women who are current smokers or have history of smoking had a 39 percent higher rate of dying from breast cancer, even after we took into account a wide array of known prognostic factors including clinical, socioeconomic and behavioral factors," said Dejana Braithwaite, Ph.D, assistant professor, ...

PHILADELPHIA — Obesity was not associated with breast cancer risk in Mexican-American women, even when measured at numerous ages throughout a woman's lifetime, according to data presented at the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference, held here Nov. 7-10, 2010. However, data did show that weight gain during adulthood seemed to reduce breast cancer risk, regardless of menopausal status. "We found that for every 5 kg of weight gain there was a significant 8 percent decrease in the risk for breast cancer," said Krystal Sexton, Ph.D., a ...

The second wave of the pandemic (H1N1) was substantially greater than the first with 4.8 times more hospital admissions, 4.6 times more deaths and 4 times more ICU cases, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj100746.pdf. However, because of the larger number of people hospitalized during the second wave compared to the first, the percentage of people with severe outcomes was smaller. The researchers compared demographic and clinical characteristics as well as outcomes of patients ...

Health Canada's cancellation of plans to renew tobacco warning labels on cigarette packages may lead to increased smoking rates and smoking-related illnesses and deaths, states an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj101583.pdf. Ten years ago, Canada was a leader in warning labels and other effective tobacco policies. Abandoning this labeling policy may be a set back for efforts in Canada, particularly as labels are now the government's only remaining mass communication initiative warning of the ...

The findings are based on comparisons of virtual imprints of the developing brain and surrounding structures (known as endocasts) derived from the skulls of modern and fossilized humans, including that of a newborn Neanderthal. Philipp Gunz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explained that the differences researchers observe in early brain development likely reflect changes in the underlying brain circuitry. It is that internal organization of the brain that matters most for cognitive ability. "In modern humans, the connections between diverse ...

### These new findings will be presented in three invited talks at the American Physical Society, Division of Plasma Physics 52nd annual meeting on November 8-12 in Chicago. END ...

Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have successfully used Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI) to generate plasma current and couple it to a conventional current generation method at the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) fusion experiment. After coupling, the combined process generated 1 million amperes of current using 40 percent less energy than needed to generate this current using the conventional means by itself, thus demonstrating that a high-quality initial magnetic configuration was produced by CHI. Plasma confinement devices based on ...

Fusion plasmas in the laboratory typically reach 100 million degrees. These high temperatures are required to ignite the hydrogen plasma and maintain the fusion burn by the production of high-energy alpha particles. One challenge for a fusion reactor is how to contain the alpha particles in the vessel long enough for the particles to efficiently heat the hydrogen plasma. One way that these alpha particles can escape the fusion chamber prematurely is by exciting high frequency Alfvén waves and riding these waves to the vessel walls, like a surfer rides a wave to the beach. While ...

When physicists probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty. Much as when the Hubble Space Telescope sent back vivid images from space of ionized gas clouds (an interstellar plasma!), new 3D images of shear Alfvén waves are delighting both scientists and a new generation of science enthusiasts. Plasmas support a large variety of waves. Some of these are familiar, such as light and sound waves, but a great many exist nowhere else. One of the fundamental waves in magnetized plasma is the shear Alfvén wave, ...

Just like an electrical switch allows the flow of electricity into electrical circuits, relativistic transparency in plasma can act like a fast optical switch allowing the flow of light through otherwise opaque plasma. Modern day lasers, such as the Trident laser in Los Alamos National Laboratory delivers a 200 terawatt power pulse (roughly 400 times the average electrical consumption of the United States) in half a trillionth of a second (picosecond) time. As shown in Fig. 1, when the laser power reaches a threshold limit, relativistic transparency in plasma turns the ...

The Sun sporadically expels trillions of tons of million-degree hydrogen gas in explosions called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Such clouds—an example is shown in Figure 1a—are enormous in size (spanning millions of miles) and are made up of magnetized plasma gases, so hot that hydrogen atoms are ionized. CMEs are rapidly accelerated by magnetic forces to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second to upwards of 2,000 kilometers per second in several tens of minutes. CMEs are closely related to solar flares and, when they impinge on the Earth, can trigger spectacular auroral ...

Physicists working on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory are now one step closer to solving one of the grand challenges of magnetic fusion research—how to reduce the effect that the hot plasma has on fusion machine walls (or how to tame the plasma-material interface). Some heat from the hot plasma core of a fusion energy device escapes the plasma and can interact with reactor vessel walls. This not only erodes the walls and other components, but also contaminates the plasma—all challenges for practical fusion. One method ...

Whenever two pieces of metal at different voltages are brought near each other, as when an appliance is plugged into a live socket, there is a chance there will be an arc between them. Most of the arcs people see are a breakdown of the gas between the metal surfaces, but this type of breakdown can also occur in a vacuum. This vacuum breakdown, which until recently has not been well understood, has implications for applications from particle accelerators to fusion reactors. As part of an effort to understand the maximum accelerating field in particle accelerators, scientists ...

The outlook for patients with breast cancer is determined in part by whether or not their tumor has spread to other sites in the body. A team of researchers, led by Roman Perez-Fernandez and colleagues, at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has now identified in a subset of patients with breast cancer, a marker associated with the occurrence of tumors at distant sites; a finding that they hope might help predict a patient's outlook more accurately. Specifically, the team found that in patients with breast cancer that was accompanied by the presence of tumor ...

EDITOR'S PICK: PIT(-1)ting good and bad outcomes against each other in breast cancer The outlook for patients with breast cancer is determined in part by whether or not their tumor has spread to other sites in the body. A team of researchers, led by Roman Perez-Fernandez and colleagues, at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has now identified in a subset of patients with breast cancer, a marker associated with the occurrence of tumors at distant sites; a finding that they hope might help predict a patient's outlook more accurately. Specifically, the team ...

Females are more likely to have an unprotected first sexual encounter than their male counterparts. This finding was a surprise to Nicole Weller, an Arizona State University graduate student working toward her doctoral degree in sociology, who presented preliminary findings on research she is conducting on the relationship between early sex education and the onset of sexual activity at the 138th annual American Public Health Association Social Justice Meeting and Expo in Denver on Monday, Nov. 8. Weller is a student in the School of Social and Family Dynamics in the College ...

Using proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) and antiplatelet drugs (thienopyridines) together is an appropriate way of treating patients with cardiovascular (CV) disease who are at high risk of upper gastrointestinal (GI) bleeds, despite recent concerns about an adverse interaction between these two types of drugs, according to an Expert Consensus Document released jointly today by the American College of Cardiology Foundation (ACCF), the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), and the American Heart Association (AHA). The potential benefits of antiplatelet therapy for patients ...