What's in a name? Letters. And psychologists have posited that the letters—particularly the first letter of our names—can influence decisions, including whom we marry and where we move. The effect is called "implicit egotism." In 2008, two Belgian researchers found that workers in their country were more likely to choose a workplace if the first letter of its name matched their own. A commentary published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, revisited the study with similar U.S. data and found that the ...

Rockville, MD — It is no surprise to scientists that the largest social network on the web is called Facebook. Identifying people by their face is fundamental to our social interactions, one of the primary reasons vision researchers are trying to find out how our brain processes facial identity. In a study recently published in the Journal of Vision, scientists used an original approach — a method that "shakes" the brain gently and repeatedly by making an image appear and disappear at a constant rate — to evaluate its sensitivity to perceiving facial identity. The technique ...

Typical clovers have three leaves, unless you happen to be lucky, and NASA's Aqua satellite has provided three different views of Ireland to mark Saint Patrick's Day on March 17, 2011. With the luck o' the Irish, NASA's Aqua satellite was fortunate to capturemostly clear views of the Emerald Isle in these near-infrared/visible, infrared and microwave light views acquired by Aqua's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on March 3, 2011, at 13:11 UTC. Ireland, located in the Atlantic Ocean, is the third-largest island in Europe, and originated the St. Patrick's ...

Salman Rushdie will appear at the Bilbao international literature festival Gutun Zuria next month to kick off proceedings and lead a discussion. The author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses will help to inaugurate this year's edition of the event alongside Slovaj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist. Gutun Zuria will take place from April 7th to 10th at the Alhondiga Bilbao and feature a varied programme of music, film and debate, all relating to literature. One of the highlights of the festival looks set to be a talk by Rushdie, who ...

BINGHAMTON, NY -- Vishal Gupta believes the way that entrepreneurship is presented, discussed and taught must change — especially for women. "Where are the role models for women?" asks Gupta, an assistant professor of strategy at Binghamton University. "Pick up any book on entrepreneurship: It's all about men. Switch on the TV, and when it comes to entrepreneurs, it is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Where are the women entrepreneurs? They're not being talked about." Of course, there have been many high-profile female entrepreneurs over the past half-century. The accomplishments ...

Travellers and tourists can enjoy the best value for money Barbados car hire when holidaying on the tropical island thanks to new deals from award-winning online hire comparator Carrentals.co.uk. The website helps travellers save on car rental in more than 10,000 places around the world. The Carrentals.co.uk service compares deals from all over the web to help tourists save, and offers the best deals from providers like Thrifty, Sixt, Budget, Enterprise and Hertz. So if the traveller wants to source and secure the best value car hire Barbados deals around, whether on ...

VIDEO: Physicist Guannan Zhao, Ph.D. student at the University of Miami, and his collaborators have developed a mathematical model to describe the timing of price changes of currencies and the overall... Click here for more information. Physicist Guannan Zhao, Ph.D. student at the University of Miami, and his collaborators have developed a mathematical model to describe the timing of price changes of currencies and the overall dynamics of the Foreign Exchange (FX) market. Zhao ...

Washington, DC – Stephen J. Teach, MD, MPH, Medical Director and Principal Investigator of IMPACT DC, a program of pediatric asthma care and research at Children's National Medical Center, served as the Site Principal Investigator for a new study that may advance asthma treatment and outcomes, specifically for inner-city children and teens. Findings from a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were published and released in the March 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. As noted in the NIH announcement, the investigational use ...

Nurses are the front-line caregivers to hospital patients, coordinating and providing direct care and delivering it safely and reliably. The goal for any hospital is to ensure that each of its patient-care units has an adequate number of nurses during every shift. Ideally, the proper number of hours nurses work — known as the "target level" — should be adjusted each shift, depending on the ebb and flow of patients and their need for care. Too many nurses can be costly for hospitals; too few can put patients' health in danger. In a new study, a team of researchers ...

A new exhibition has recently opened at the Diocese Museum in Milan entitled The Eyes of Caravaggio, which explores the famous Italian painter's formative years. The show runs until July 3rd 2011 and gives an idea of how Caravaggio - real name Michelangelo Merisi - formulated his distinctive style. By exploring the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, as well as his own pieces, the organisers demonstrate his progression into one of the most talked-about artists of all time. More than 60 paintings are being showcased and a host of contextual information ...

A dendritic cell vaccine personalized for each individual based on the patient's own tumor may increase median survival time in those with a deadly form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, an early phase study at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found. Published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Cancer Research, the study also identified a subset of patients more likely to respond to the vaccine, those with a subtype of glioblastoma known as mesenchymal, which accounts for about one-third of all cases. This is the first time in brain ...

Researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a way to produce normal butanol — often proposed as a "greener" fuel alternative to diesel and gasoline — from bacteria at rates significantly higher than those achieved using current production methods. The findings, reported online in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, mark an important advance in the production of normal butanol, or n-butanol, a four-carbon chain alcohol that has been shown to work well with existing energy infrastructure, including in vehicles ...

Los Angeles, CA (March 16, 2011) Many Baby Boomers will experience a bone fracture as they age, and the current US healthcare system is not prepared to provide the necessary care required, according to a special monograph released in the January 2011 issue of Geriatric Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation (GOS), published by SAGE. The first members of the post World War II Baby Boom generation will reach 65 years old this year. The Baby Boomers encompass an estimated 78 million Americans and are expected to live longer and healthier than preceding generations, however, ...

For dialysis patients, performing daily dialysis at home can help alleviate sleep problems related to restless legs syndrome (RLS), according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). RLS, a common and troublesome problem for dialysis patients, affects hemodialysis patients about four times as often as people in the general population. These results, from a study by lead author Bertrand L. Jaber, MD (St Elizabeth's Medical Center, Boston) and colleagues, add to the growing list of quality-of-life benefits ...

An international investigation has uncovered the genetics of the Shar-Pei dog's characteristic wrinkled skin. The researchers, led by scientists at Uppsala University and the Broad Institute, have connected this mutation to a periodic fever disorder and they propose that the findings could have important human health implications. Details appear on March 17 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. Purebred dogs are selected for defined physical features, and the inadvertent enrichment for disease-risk genes may have unexpected health consequences. The thickened and wrinkled ...

Cranach in His Time is now open at the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris and aims to increase awareness of a fascinating artist. German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder was famous for creating portraits of important political figures and nudes of mythological and religious characters, such as Eve and Venus. Within the latter category, he garnered a reputation for painting images that showed strong females looking sensuous yet unusual. The installation explores the Renaissance artist's unique style and his equally interesting life. It will remain on display until May ...

Although it has been known for some time that vitamin A deficiency is linked with an impaired ability to resist infections, exactly how vitamin A and its metabolites contribute to the immune response is not well understood. Somewhat paradoxically, research has indicated that vitamin A can also act as an immunosuppressive agent. Now, a study published by Cell Press in the March issue of the journal Immunity sheds light on how this critical vitamin integrates into both pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory immune responses in the gastrointestinal tract. The vitamin A ...

VIDEO: During the growth of the pollen tube (in this case of Arabidopsis), the concentration of calcium within varies from higher concentration (red signal) to lower concentrations (blue signal). Click here for more information. A team of researchers at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), Portugal, discovered that pollen, the organ that contains the plant male gametes, communicate with the pistil, their female counterpart, using a mechanism commonly observed in ...

This Spring Break, students from Douglass Residential College (http://douglass.rutgers.edu) have left campus--not for vacation, but to "try a career on for size." More than 200 sophomores and juniors are participating in this, the 36th annual externship program, a mandatory, one- to two-week-long experience of in-depth mentoring that matches a student with a Douglass alumna whose work most closely mirrors her career aspirations. Students have a choice of three externship segments. For 2011, two segments began in early January; the final 2011 segment kicked off on Monday. ...

Biochemist Leor Weinberger and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego and UCLA have proposed a fundamentally new intervention for the HIV/AIDS epidemic based on engineered, virus-like particles that could subdue HIV infection within individual patients and spread to high-risk populations that are difficult for public health workers to reach. With a model that considers the effects of the proposed treatment on several scales, from interference with HIV in infected cells to viral loads in individual patients to the prevalence of HIV in large populations, ...

South San Francisco, CA, March 18, 2011 – Cytokinetics, Incorporated (Nasdaq: CYTK) announced today the publication of preclinical research in the March 18, 2011 issue of the journal Science regarding the activation of cardiac myosin by an investigational drug candidate, omecamtiv mecarbil, and the potential therapeutic role that this novel mechanism may play for patients with systolic heart failure. This publication reveals, for the first time in a peer reviewed journal, the mechanism of action for omecamtiv mecarbil and the scientific rationale for directly modulating ...

A robust new phylogenetic tree resolves many long-standing issues in primate taxonomy. The genomes of living primates harbor remarkable differences in diversity and provide an intriguing context for interpreting human evolution. The phylogenetic analysis was conducted by international researchers to determine the origin, evolution, patterns of speciation, and unique features in genome divergence among primate lineages. This evolutionary history will be published on March 17 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. The authors sequenced 54 gene regions from 186 species ...

A new study published on bmj.com today adds to mounting evidence that rosiglitazone - a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes - is associated with an increased risk of major heart problems. It finds that rosiglitazone is associated with significantly higher odds of congestive heart failure, heart attack and death compared with a similar drug (pioglitazone). Rosiglitazone and pioglitazone belong to a class of drugs called thiazolidinediones that help to control blood sugar levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. Both drugs are known to increase the risk of heart failure, ...

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A new University of Florida study shows when two flowering plants are crossed to produce a new hybrid, the new species' genes are reset, allowing for greater genetic variation. Researchers say the study, to be published March 17 in Current Biology, could lead to a better understanding of how to best grow more stable and higher yielding agricultural crops. "We caught evolution in the act," said Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor in UF's biology department and study co-author. "New and diverse patterns of gene expression may allow the new species ...