Superbreak, the Yorkshire based short break provider, has reported a surge in demand for its attraction break product as the October half-term holidays approach. This year, Superbreak hopes to offer its customers even more value and choice by securing great availability with both hotel providers and some of the leading UK theme parks and attractions during the half term week. The tour operator's long-standing relationships with the theme parks, has allowed them to create a range of attraction breaks for families, thrill seekers and group travellers alike. Popular ...

Tavaana: E-learning Institute for Iranian Civil Society is proud to announce the successful completion of two pilot e-courses and the graduation of several dozen students from Iran. Prominent Iranian women's rights activists, student leaders, election campaign volunteers, labor organizers and citizen journalists recently completed Tavaana's live instruction Cybersecurity for Activists and Leadership Development courses. Communicating with their instructors safely and securely from Iran, Tavaana students utilized cutting edge electronic classroom technology to pave the ...

DePuy Orthopedics, a division of Johnson & Johnson, recalled two of its metal-on-metal hip replacement systems - the ASR Hip Resurfacing System and the ASR XL Acetabular System - in August 2010 due to high failure rates. If you're one of the 93,000 Americans who received a DePuy hip replacement, it's important to understand what the recall means to you. Why Did DePuy Recall Its ASR Products? The DePuy hip recall occurred on August 26th 2010 after the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) received hundreds of complaints from angry DePuy hip implant patients whose ASR ...

Global Equities Group LLC is seeking an experienced investment banker with institutional experience for in-house management. This is an ideal opportunity for an independently-driven individual with proven communication skills combined with a results-oriented persona. Private equity firm is seeking debt placement experience and syndication person and is offering a comprehensive compensation package. Great deal flow and Manhattan location. Sustainable projects with debt, secured by major European bank for both interest and principal. The projects involve water, ...

The feature film Ashley's Ashes has earned 13 awards, including the recent "Best Narrative Feature Film" at the Landlocked Film Festival and "Best Screenplay" from the Manhattan Film Festival during this year's festival tour. "The response from all of the festival screenings has been amazing. Now, we are extremely honored to wrap up our festival run as an official selection at the Heartland Film Festival," Christopher Hutson, Co-Director and Producer, stated. "In our travels, we somehow missed the submission deadline for the Heartland Festival," Chris Kazmier, Co-Director ...

Jyco Sealing Technologies will soon be expanding its production facility within the Offshore Group's Roca Fuerte Industrial Park located in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. The new 36,480 square foot building that Jyco will occupy represents a doubling the space occupied by their current operations. The company will expand their current employee base of 58 in proportion to its physical expansion. According to Shawn Jyawook, Chief Operating Officer of Jyco, "Guaymas has become our company's showcase facility. Its technology, its superior and dedicated workforce and its professional ...

ifa united i-tech, Inc. announces that the ifa EMR Version 6 software has been tested and certified under Drummond Group's Electronic Health Records ONC-ATCB program (Certification number: ONC-ATCB EHR.09222010-2627-1). "Ophthalmologists and eye care professionals now have a flexible, easy-to-use EMR choice to achieve meaningful use requirements and receive their stimulus funding," says Dale Cook, VP-Sales, ifa united i-tech. "We want to help doctors provide the best care for patients with innovative features and tools to maintain meaningful use. For example, our secure ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) An important step –– one that is essential to the ultimate construction of a quantum computer –– was taken for the first time by physicists at UC Santa Barbara. The discovery is published in the current issue of the journal Nature. The research involves the entanglement of three quantum bits of information, or qubits. Before now, entanglement research in the solid state has only been developed with two qubits. The UCSB finding comes from a collaboration of the research groups of physicists Andrew Cleland and John Martinis. Graduate student Matthew ...

A study by two Florida State University biochemists makes an important contribution to science's understanding of a serious problem causing concern worldwide: the growing resistance of some harmful bacteria to the drugs that were intended to kill them. Investigating exactly how bacteria learn to fend off antibiotics prescribed to treat infections is the subject of new research by Assistant Professor Brian G. Miller of FSU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and one of his graduate research assistants, Kevin K. Desai. They have found that bacteria are remarkably ...

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA: For many blind people, computers are inaccessible. It can cost upwards of AUD$1000 to purchase "screen reader" software, but two blind computer programmers from Australia have solved this problem. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) graduate James Teh and business partner Michael Curran developed a free, open-source program, called NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access), which provides a synthetic voice to read the words on a computer screen as the cursor moves over them. "A sighted person takes for granted that they can sit down at any computer ...

Diamonds adorning tiaras to anklets are treasures but these gemstones inside the body may prove priceless. Two Case Western Reserve University researchers are building implants made of diamond and flexible polymer that are designed to identify chemical and electrical changes in the brain of patients suffering from neural disease, or to stimulate nerves and restore movement in the paralyzed. The work of Heidi Martin, a professor of chemical engineering, and Christian Zorman, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is years from human trials but their ...

Contrary to current thinking, the group of serotypes of Streptococcus pneumoniae responsible for most invasive pneumococcal disease worldwide is conserved across regions. Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading bacterial cause of pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis in children, which together comprise more than 25% of the 10 million deaths estimated to have occurred in 2000 in children under 5 years of age, and preventable by access to appropriate vaccines. The serotypes currently included in existing pneumococcal conjugate vaccine formulations account for 49-88% of deaths ...

This week, in a Health in Action article published in PLoS Medicine, Maria Merritt and colleagues (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) report on a Field Training Guide for Human Subjects Research Ethics that they have developed to help train field workers in research ethics. The Field Training Guide for Human Subjects Research Ethics is freely available to the public. In this article the authors address how to identify field training needs and meet high standards of research ethics at every level of human subject interaction. INFORMATION: Funding: ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Gabriel Leung from the Government of the Hong Kong SAR and Angus Nicoll from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control offer their reflections on the international response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, including what went well and what changes need to be made on the part of global and national authorities in anticipation of future flu pandemics. INFORMATION: Funding: No specific funding was received for this article. Competing Interests: The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those ...

Evidence reported in the October issue of Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication, offers a completely new explanation for why people with diabetes account for more than half of all patients requiring dialysis or kidney transplantation. It appears that insulin has a significant influence on the structure and proper function of a particular group of very specialized cells, known as podocytes, that are integral to the kidney's ability to do its job filtering blood. "We've found that when you lose insulin signaling in the podocytes, the filter is not maintained," said ...

When mice are given drinking water laced with a special concoction of amino acids, they live longer than your average mouse, according to a new report in the October issue of Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication. The key ingredients in the supplemental mixture are so-called branched-chain amino acids, which account for 3 of the 20 amino acids (specifically leucine, isoleucine, and valine) that are the building blocks of proteins. "This is the first demonstration that an amino acid mixture can increase survival in mice," said Enzo Nisoli of Milan University in Italy, ...

By reconstructing an ancient protein and tracing how it subtly changed over vast periods of time to produce scores of modern-day descendants, scientists have shown how evolution tinkers with early forms and leaves the impression that complexity evolved many times. Human and other animal cells contain thousands of proteins with functions so diverse and complex that it is often difficult to see how they could have evolved from a few ancestral proteins, said biologist Joseph W. Thornton of the University of Oregon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who led the research. ...

In an unprecedented international project, researchers have found multiple genetic mutations that play a role in heart attack or coronary artery disease (CAD) risk. The Coronary ARtery DIsease Genome-wide Replication And Meta-Analysis (CARDIoGRAM) — published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, an American Heart Association journal — consists of data from every published whole-genome study on genetic mutations in heart attack or CAD risk. Researchers are also pooling data from several unpublished genome-wide association studies to see if any new mutations can be uncovered. The ...

In a comparison of outcomes in Arizona for out-of-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for cardiac arrest performed by bystanders, patients who received compression-only CPR were more likely to survive to hospital discharge than patients who received conventional CPR or no CPR, according to a study in the October 6 issue of JAMA. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a major public health problem, affecting approximately 300,000 individuals in the United States annually. Although survival rates vary considerably, outcomes can be improved with bystander CPR. In 2005, ...

Placing speed cameras on roads reduces the number of road traffic injuries and deaths, concludes a team of researchers from The University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. Their findings are published this month in The Cochrane Library. Preventing road traffic injuries is of global public health importance. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020 road traffic crashes will have moved from ninth to third in the rank of causes of poor health. Speed cameras are one of the measures that authorities can use to reduce traffic speed in the hope of preventing ...

From 1998 to 2007, the use of CT or MRI scans in emergency departments for injury-related conditions increased about 3-fold without a similar increase in the prevalence of the diagnosis of certain life-threatening trauma-related conditions, according to a study in the October 6 issue of JAMA. Injury-related conditions are among the most common reasons for visits to emergency departments in the United States. "The widespread availability of advanced radiology (computed tomography [CT] and magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]) and the associated diagnostic superiority in identifying ...

Patients with a severe traumatic brain injury (and not in shock because of blood loss) who received out-of-hospital administration of hypertonic fluids (a solution with increased concentration of certain electrolytes and thought to help reduce intracranial pressure) as initial resuscitation did not experience better 6-month neurologic outcomes or survival compared to patients who received a normal saline solution, according to a study in the October 6 issue of JAMA. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of death following blunt trauma, and survivors often ...

Giving vitamin D supplements to healthy children with normal vitamin D levels does not improve bone density at the hip, lumbar spine, forearm or in the body as a whole, according to a new Cochrane Systematic Review. Building bone density in children helps protect against osteoporosis in later life. Osteoporosis is a condition where bones are weak, brittle and break easily. Vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium from food, reduces losses of calcium from the body and encourages calcium deposition into bone. Bone density is a major measure of bone strength and measures ...

When compared with placebo and other drugs, long-term use of finasteride improves urinary tract symptoms associated with benign prostatic hyperplasia, and reduces disease progression. This conclusion comes from combining the findings of 23 randomized clinical trials that evaluated almost 21,000 men, and is published this month in The Cochrane Library. Finasteride is frequently given to men who have lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) such as frequent voiding at night (nocturia), incomplete emptying, hesitancy, weak stream, and frequent and urgent urination. The symptoms ...

There is no evidence that increasing the dose of inhaled corticosteroids at the onset of an asthma exacerbation, as part of a patient-initiated action plan, reduces the need for rescue oral corticosteroids. This is the conclusion of work published in The Cochrane Library this month. There are two mechanisms acting in the lungs of people with asthma. The first is called bronchoconstriction, which is when people's airways constrict during an asthma attack, making it much harder for them to move air in and out of their lungs. The first line treatment for this sort of acute ...