Using human kidney cells and brain tissue from adult mice, Johns Hopkins scientists have uncovered the sequence of steps that makes normally stable DNA undergo the crucial chemical changes implicated in cancers, psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. The process may also be involved in learning and memory, the researchers say. A report on their study appears online April 14 in Cell. While DNA is the stable building block of all of an individual's genetic code, or genome, the presence or absence of a methyl group at specific locations chemically alters ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created a range of soft, elastic gels that change color when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light – and change back when the UV light is removed or the material is heated up. The gels are impregnated with a type of photochromic compound called spiropyran. Spiropyrans change color when exposed to UV light, and the color they change into depends on the chemical environment surrounding the material. The researchers made the gels out of an elastic silicone substance, which can be chemically modified to contain various other ...

alqemyiQ, a leader in demand data analytics for the consumer goods industry, announced today that it has signed an enterprise agreement with JOH to expand the DataAlchemy software solution for automating the category and sales reporting process across their entire organization. "JOH, a leading regional food broker in the United States, has been using DataAlchemy since 2008," said Glenn Geho, COO of alqemyiQ. "It has been thrilling to see the impact that our desktop software solution has had on JOH's reporting of insights. We look forward to helping JOH uncover more ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine will present several key studies at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting, including research providing critical insight into the prognosis and clinical treatment course of people with a certain subtype of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The meeting is taking place April 9-16 in Honolulu. In a study titled "Evaluation of Progressive Relapsing MS Patients in the PROMISE Trial," Fred Lublin, MD, Saunders Family Professor of Neurology and the Director of the Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis ...

An International team of scientists in the XENON collaboration, including several from the Weizmann Institute, announced on Thursday the results of their search for the elusive component of our universe known as dark matter. This search was conducted with greater sensitivity than ever before. After one hundred days of data collection in the XENON100 experiment, carried out deep underground at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the INFN, in Italy, they found no evidence for the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles – or WIMPs – the leading candidates for the ...

Desktop virtualization offers significantly better security in comparison to regular PCs. Regular user PCs suffer from a number of security risks, and security plays an important role in the activities of the stock exchange operator. Employees who process stock exchange data need to be equipped with ever more sophisticated means of data protection. „Legacy PC suffers number of security threats in our processing and dealing environment as national stock exchange data provider. We have chosen Stickfish as a VDI solution supplier for very high level of desktop security ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. - A Mayo Clinic case study finds Botox may offer new hope to patients suffering disabling low cerebrospinal fluid headaches. The successful treatment also offers new insight into Botox and headache treatment generally. The case study was presented March 13th, 2011 at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Hawaii. Low CSF pressure headaches are caused by an internal spinal fluid leak. The pain can range from slight to disabling. The headaches are most commonly triggered by a lumbar puncture. The pain is caused as fluid leaks out and the brain ...

Palo Alto, CA—Scientists have known for decades that black carbon aerosols add to global warming. These airborne particles made of sooty carbon are believed to be among the largest man-made contributors to global warming because they absorb solar radiation and heat the atmosphere. New research from Carnegie's Long Cao and Ken Caldeira, along with colleagues George Ban-Weiss and Govindasamy Bala, quantifies how black carbon's impact on climate depends on its altitude in the atmosphere. Their work, published online by the journal Climate Dynamics, could have important implications ...

Some of the Pharmaceuticals intended for the treatment of minor illnesses of astronauts in space may require special packaging and reformulation to remain stable for long periods in the space environment. That's according to Dr. Putcha and her colleagues from NASA, Johnson Space Centre. Their findings, published online in The AAPS Journal suggest that some of the pharmaceuticals stored on space flights may have shorter shelf-life than they do on Earth. Pharmaceuticals used on space flights are packed and dispensed in special flight-certified containers and stored in ...

With obesity rates soaring, the government has been promoting nudge – a strategy that does not tell people how to live but encourages them to make healthy choices in respect of diet and exercise. Experts on bmj.com this week go head to head over whether nudge is an effective way to tackle obesity. Professor Tim Lang and Dr Geof Rayner, both from the Centre for Food Policy at City University in London, say that nudge is not new and that it is "a smokescreen for, at best, inaction and, at worst, publicly endorsed marketing." They argue that the nudging strategy portrays ...

Two small randomised trials published on bmj.com today suggest that closed loop insulin delivery (also known as an artificial pancreas) may improve overnight blood glucose control and reduce the risk of nocturnal hypoglycaemia (a sudden drop in blood glucose levels during the night) in adults with type 1 diabetes. The number of people with type 1 diabetes is increasing at a rate of 3% per year, particularly in white northern European populations. Lifelong insulin therapy is needed to control blood glucose levels, but the risk of hypoglycaemia remains a major challenge, ...

Writing in BioEssays, cancer scientists Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein pit their controversial Tissue Organization Field Theory (TOFT) of the origin of cancer against the widely accepted Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT) in what is believed to be the first time the two theories have formally opposed each other – championed by authors from opposite sides of the debate – in a common forum for discussion. Soto and Sonnenschein, from Tufts University, argue that SMT, which is based on the accumulation of genetic mutations in cells, not only fails to provide an explanation for ...

Scientists have discovered a method to control the gas-phase selective catalytic combustion of methane, so finely that if done at room temperature the reaction produces ethylene, while at lower temperatures it yields formaldehyde. The process involves using gold dimer cations as catalysts — that is, positively charged diatomic gold clusters. Being able to catalyze these reactions, at or below room temperature, may lead to significant cost savings in the synthesis of plastics, synthetic fuels and other materials. The research was conducted by scientists at the Georgia ...

As their development continues, purveyors of top quality photo canvas prints PhotoInCanvas have introduced a unique Canvas Art Shop. This area of the firm's already vibrant website has a range of categories to suit lovers of all types of art. PhotoInCanvas has established a name for itself by taking normal jpeg photographs and transforming them into stunning pieces of photo canvas art but the Canvas Art Shop looks to give clients even more choice and inspiration. As well as the Canvas of the Month, all sorts of designs such as animals, children's art, food and drink ...

Montreal, April 14, 2011 – An international consortium of scientists, including major contributions from the Montreal Heart Institute, demonstrates that the "one-size fits all" strategy of uniformly doubling the dose of an antiplatelet drug, clopidogrel, for patients with high on-treatment platelet reactivity does not reduce the incidence on death, heart attacks and stent thrombosis after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The results of the GRAVITAS trial conducted to determine whether high-dose clopidogrel is superior to standard-dose therapy for the prevention ...

The idea of probing the body's interior with radiation stretches back to experiments with X rays in the 1800s, but more than a century later, images taken with radiological scans still are not considered reliable enough to, for example, serve as the sole indicator of the efficacy of a cancer treatment. Lisa Karam, a biochemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a few dozen of her colleagues across North America have set out to change that. The group of radiology specialists from a number of institutions has recently published* a pair of papers ...

Wolford's new Spring Summer 2011 collection has already been spotted on hot hosiery lover Jessie J as well as Tulisa from N-Dubz. Not only does luxury brand Wolford still cut it in the high fashion stakes, but endorsement from hot urban music stars has meant that fashionable girls are now desperate to copy the looks of their favourite stars. Browse the range of Wolford Tights from MyTights.com to copy the coolest celebrity and high fashion looks. Ever since Cheryl Cole famously wore Wolford's Bondage Tights for her performances of her single "Promise This", Wolford ...

Philadelphia, PA, 14 April 2011 - The judgments we make about the intimacy of other couples' relationships appear to be influenced by the brain chemical serotonin, reports a new study published in Biological Psychiatry. Healthy adult volunteers, whose levels of serotonin activity had been lowered, rated couples in photos as being less intimate and less romantic than volunteers with normal serotonin activity. The approach involved giving amino acid drinks to two groups of volunteers in order to manipulate blood concentrations of the amino acid tryptophan, which is a ...

Business, bunch of economic activities, designed to get monitory benefit, has been evolved since human kind has developed the interest to make a single mode of trading which is by using money, be that material (coins), paper (currency) or plastic money (Cards etc). In the evaluation of business efficiency, the most important fact is what is the extent of satisfaction you provide to a buyer / customer when comes to you to fulfill its needs? Today's modern world has provided the ease to a customer/buyer to just get every thing by just a single click and that was possible ...

ATLANTA –April 14, 2011– A study of more than 100,000 men and women over 14 years finds nonsmokers who followed recommendations for cancer prevention had a lower risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and all-causes. The study appears early online in Cancer Biomarkers, Epidemiology, and Prevention, and was led by American Cancer Society epidemiologists. Few studies have evaluated the combined impact of following recommended lifestyle behaviors on cancer, cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality, and most of those included tobacco avoidance as one of ...

This release is available in French and Spanish. A University of Granada research group composed of professors Antonio Campos and Miguel Alaminos (histologists), María del Mar Pérez, Ana Ionescu and Juan de la Cruz Cardona (opticians) and the ophthalmologist Miguel González Andrades, University Hospital San Cecilio, Granada, have made the first bioartificial organ in Spain Researchers extracted pig corneal cells and replaced them with human stem cells. This method, known as decellularization and recellulation, allows scientists to maintain the basic structure of the ...

Lock is thrilled to announce the new addition to their LockPRO ELITE team. Jose represents the face of the new generation of online poker pros. He is one of the youngest poker players to hit the scene and do the impossible. His story is one of passion, determination and skill. At the young age of 16 he took his first try at the game with a $30 deposit and found himself with over 2 million in earnings. He brings incredible insight, passion and sheer objectivity to the room. "I am determined to be the best player in the world so I wanted to make sure I partnered with ...

In tests of four different types of new refrigerators, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers found that ice makers increased rated energy consumption by 12 to 20 percent. About three-fourths of that additional energy cost is due to the electric heaters used to release the ice bits from the molds. With only one-fourth of the extra energy actually used to cool and freeze water, "there are substantial opportunities for efficiency improvements merely by optimizing the operations of the heaters associated with the ice makers" or by introducing a ...

SplatterMUSIC today announced a pioneering marketing strategy that also becomes a serious opportunity for anyone who owns or works for a company with a website. Not just for well-known brands, this includes bands, musicians, vloggers, bloggers, celebrities, authors, entrepreneurs, or just people who want to see a picture of themselves on the splatterMUSIC website. In other words, everyone. splatterMUSIC has decided to give away its advertising space. For free. The first spot up for grabs is a 300x250 pixel banner ad spot that will show on every main page of splatterMUSIC.com ...

INDIANAPOLIS – With mounting evidence that patient-centered care improves medical outcomes, investigators from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine are providing a call to action for the training of future physicians to master relationship skills as well as the burgeoning scientific knowledge needed to practice 21st Century medicine. "Crossing the Patient-Centered Divide: Transforming Health Care Quality Through Enhanced Faculty Development" appears in the April 2011 issue of the journal Academic Medicine. "Medical education today is ...