Thistle has announced the appointment of Paul Watson as general manager of its Thistle London Heathrow hotel. Having worked for the company for almost three years, Watson has proved to be a respected and highly capable manager, and has ambitious plans for the Heathrow airport-based hotel. After finishing university, Watson began his hotel career as Food & Beverage manager at Stapleford Park and quickly developed a passion for the hotel industry. Over the proceeding five years, he has worked his way up to take on a number of senior roles, including operations manager ...

Northern Rock has enhanced its interactive new savings website with an animated video guide to help savers steer their way through the ISA maze. To coincide with the beginning of the new tax year, when the individual tax-free* Cash ISA subscription limit increased to GBP5,340 for this tax year, Northern Rock has now added the informative four minute guide to its recently revamped savings and investment website. The guide is designed to help customers make the most of their money in an accessible way, by highlighting the benefits of tax-free* savings accounts and telling ...

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA — Canada needs better regulation and oversight of food safety to protect Canadians as the current system is lax, states an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/doi/10.1503/cmaj.110453. "Canada's public and private sectors are not doing enough to prevent food-borne illnesses," writes Dr. Paul Hébert, Editor-in-Chief with coauthors. "Among the major failings are inadequate active surveillance systems, an inability to trace foods from "farm to fork" and a lack of incentives to keep food safe along the "farm ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- When one cloud of gas meets another, they normally pass right through each other. But now, MIT physicists have created clouds of ultracold gases that bounce off each other like bowling balls, even though they are a million times thinner than air — the first time that such impenetrable gases have been observed. While this experiment involved clouds of lithium atoms, cooled to near absolute zero, the findings could also help explain the behavior of similar systems such as neutron stars, high-temperature superconductors, and quark-gluon plasma, the hot ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- For most of the 20th century, the paradigm of wireless communication was a radio station with a single high-power transmitter. As long as you were within 20 miles or so of the transmitter, you could pick up the station. With the advent of cell phones, however, and even more so with Wi-Fi, the paradigm became a large number of scattered transmitters with limited range. When a user moves out of one transmitter's range and into another's, the network has to perform a "handoff." And as anyone who's lost a cell-phone call in a moving car or lost a Wi-Fi ...

The National Trust has predicted an early and fantastic display of bluebells this year following the mild and dry start to 2011. After an exceptionally cold December, the coldest for more than a century, bluebells are beginning to bloom a couple of weeks earlier than usual following the mildest February in nearly a decade* and the driest March for 40 years that had higher than average sunshine levels**. In 2010 bluebells were emerging up to three weeks late in some parts of the country - the latest for fifteen years - after the coldest winter for more than 30 years. Matthew ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Last year's $2 billion shutdown of European airspace following a volcanic eruption in Iceland alerted everyone to the danger that ash clouds can pose to aircraft engines. Now, researchers have discovered that a new class of ceramic coatings could offer jet engines special protection against volcanic ash damage in the future. For a study published online in the Early View edition of the journal Advanced Materials, the researchers tested two coatings that were originally developed to keep airborne sand from damaging jet engines, and found that the coatings ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers here have created the first electronic circuit to merge traditional inorganic semiconductors with organic "spintronics" – devices that utilize the spin of electrons to read, write and manipulate data. Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin, assistant professor of physics, and his team combined an inorganic semiconductor with a unique plastic material that is under development in colleague Arthur J. Epstein's lab at Ohio State University. Last year, Epstein, Distinguished University Professor of physics and chemistry and director of the Institute for ...

Global Fiberglass Solutions, Inc., Bellevue, WA based company announces that it is now in talks with international fiberglass manufacturers, state governments and national government representatives to build and manage facilities to collect and recycle fiberglass on a national basis, once collected the fiberglass will be used as the base to produce products that will be much stronger than the alternatives and recyclable. The technology and process is proprietary and not being utilized by any other company or government agency, This will change the way fiberglass and ...

An international study published today warns that nitrogen pollution, resulting from industry and agriculture, is putting wildlife in Europe's at risk. More than 60 per cent of the EU's most important wildlife sites receive aerial nitrogen pollution inputs above sustainable levels. There is evidence of impacts on semi-natural grasslands, heathlands and forests across Europe. This threat is set to continue unless there is further action on emissions of polluting nitrogen gases. The study calls for a unified methodology of assessing the impact of aerial nitrogen ...

Researchers are reporting discovery of a scientific basis for extending the shelf life of beer so that it stays fresh and tastes good longer. For the first time, they identified the main substances that cause the bitter, harsh aftertaste of aged beer and suggest that preventing the formation of these substances could help extend its freshness. Their findings appear in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Thomas Hofmann and colleagues point out that beer can develop an unpleasant, bitter aftertaste as it ages. Unlike wine, scotch whiskey, and bourbon, beer ...

JUPITER, FL, April 13, 2011 – Using advanced imaging technology, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have identified a change in chemical influx into a specific set of neurons in the common fruit fly that is fundamental to long-term memory. The study was published in the April 13, 2011 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. "In studying fruit flies' learning and long-term memory storage, we observed an increase in calcium influx into a specific set of brain neurons in normal fruit flies that was absent in 26 different mutants known to ...

After years of neglect, scientists and policy makers are focusing more attention on developing technologies needed to make the so-called "green grid" possible, according to an article in ACS' Chemical Reviews. That's the much-needed future electrical grid, an interconnected network for delivering solar and wind-based electricity from suppliers to consumers. Zhenguo (Gary) Yang and colleagues point out that concerns over the use of coal, oil, and other fuels that contribute to global warming and are in limited supply, have spurred interest in generating electrical energy ...

Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. April 12, 1861. At exactly 4:30AM, with a faint, dim light rising over the horizon, the first muted boom of a cannon sounded from Fort Johnson on the west side of the harbor. What followed was an explosive roar of cannon which rippled like a wave in a counter-clockwise direction - officially declaring the South's independence from the United States. For the last 24 hours, we have received numerous dispatches from Charleston. At precisely 3:20AM, we learned that the Confederates informed Major Anderson that they would open fire in one ...

Textiles and rope fragments found in a Peruvian cave have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, making them the oldest textiles ever found in South America, according to a report in the April issue of Current Anthropology. The items were found 30 years ago in Guitarrero Cave high in the Andes Mountains. Other artifacts found along with the textiles had been dated to 12,000 ago and even older. However, the textiles themselves had never been dated, and whether they too were that old had been controversial, according to Edward Jolie, an archaeologist at Mercyhurst College ...

Frog and toad skins already are renowned as cornucopias of hundreds of germ-fighting substances. Now a new report in ACS's Journal of Proteome Research reveals that the toad brains also may contain an abundance of antibacterial and antiviral substances that could inspire a new generation of medicines. Ren Lai and colleagues point out that scientists know little about the germ-fighting proteins in amphibian brains, despite many studies showing that amphibians synthesize and secrete a remarkably diverse array of antimicrobial substances in their skin. So they decided to ...

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The United States government is expanding a 20-year-old program to secure and help destroy Cold War-era nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to an unlikely area of the world —East Africa, according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS's weekly newsmagazine. In the article, Glenn Hess, C&EN Senior Editor, explains that the focus of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR) does not stem from any new intelligence indicating that Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have secretly developed nuclear weapons. Rather, it ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). 1. Little Ice Age resulted from more than just solar calm Total solar irradiance (TSI), essentially a measure of the amount of light the Sun puts out, varies with the 11-year sunspot cycle and influences Earth's climate, especially when TSI is notably higher or lower than its average values. It had been thought that TSI was especially low during a period known as the Little Ice Age, which began in the late 17th century, coinciding with a period ...

Vegetarians experience a 36 percent lower prevalence of metabolic syndrome than non-vegetarians, suggests new research from Loma Linda University published in the journal Diabetes Care. Because metabolic syndrome can be a precursor to heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, the findings indicate vegetarians may be at lower risk of developing these conditions. Metabolic syndrome is defined as exhibiting at least three out of five total risk factors: high blood pressure, elevated HDL cholesterol, high glucose levels, elevated triglycerides, and an unhealthy waist circumference. ...

RICHLAND, Wash. – High oil prices and environmental and economic security concerns have triggered interest in using algae-derived oils as an alternative to fossil fuels. But growing algae – or any other biofuel source – can require a lot of water. However, a new study shows that being smart about where we grow algae can drastically reduce how much water is needed for algal biofuel. Growing algae for biofuel, while being water-wise, could also help meet congressionally mandated renewable fuel targets by replacing 17 percent of the nation's imported oil for transportation, ...

Novelist Kailin Gow's highly popular young adult series The Frost Series and the PULSE Series again proved to be bestsellers among young adult fiction. The fourth books in each series, Frost Kisses and Blue Blood, were staples on Amazon.com's Top 100 Bestselling Teen Books Overall. The Frost Series Since the publication of Kailin Gow's highly popular Frost Series about dangerous but beautiful warring fairies, with Romeo and Juliet-scaled romance, each book in the Frost Series have become teen bestsellers. The first book, Bitter Frost, with its memorable cover of ...

Patients who receive intensive care services are very different in the United States than in the United Kingdom, according to a new study that compared admission and mortality statistics from ICUs in each country. The study found that U.K. patients are much sicker upon ICU admission, whereas U.S. patients are more likely to require continuing care after discharge and are often sent to skilled care facilities instead of home. "The U.S. has about seven times as many ICU beds available per capita than the U.K. We wanted to compare the two because they represent extremes ...

WHAT: Expanded use of active surveillance for bacteria and of barrier precautions—specifically, gloves and gowns—did not reduce the transmission of two important antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hospital-based settings, according to a prospective, randomized clinical trial conducted in 18 intensive care units in the United States. Incomplete compliance by health care providers with recommended hand hygiene procedures and the use of gloves and gowns, along with time lags in confirming the presence of bacteria in patients, may have contributed to the findings, which ...

Drugs already in development to treat Alzheimer's disease may eventually be tapped for a different purpose altogether: re-growing the ends of injured nerves to relieve pain and paralysis. According to a new Johns Hopkins study, experimental compounds originally designed to combat a protein that builds up in Alzheimer's-addled brains appear to make crushed or cut nerve endings grow back significantly faster, a potential boon for those who suffer from neuropathies or traumatic injuries. The new drugs target a protein known as "-Site amyloid precursor protein cleaving ...