The Texas Youth Commission, subject of large-scale reforms and restructuring in recent years, has been hit with new allegations of significant problems within the system. A report by four youth advocacy groups detail ongoing problems, such as the lack of adequate medical care, mental health care and educational programs. The report also cites the use of excessive force and improper restraints as a means of control. There also continues to be a significant amount of youth-on-youth assaults at the agency's lockups in Beaumont and Corsicana, which in 2009 had the second-highest ...

Basketball is among the most popular team sports for young people in South Carolina and throughout the U.S. While it doesn't involve the hard bodily contact of football or the deadly projectiles at play in baseball and softball, a recent study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital shows that an average of 375,000 youth basketball players visited an emergency room every year over the past decade for treatment of injuries. The good news is that annual injuries fell 20 percent during the study period. The bad news: traumatic brain injuries ...

The Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta Airport Hotel North offers nearby accommodations to visitors attending the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) Conference at Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta. The NBAA 63rd annual Meeting and Convention will take place October 19 - 21, 2010. The event schedule includes: - Exhibiting companies from around the world - Static display of Aircraft on Peachtree DeKalb Airport - 100 Educational Sessions - NBAA/CAN Charity Benefit featuring the band Chicago - Charity golf tournament Nearly 25,000 business aviation ...

MyJohannesburgInfo.com, part of the MyDestinationInfo.com travel network, has launched a new section dedicated to specific travel routes. This section offers travellers proposed itineraries for an afternoon, a weekend, or an entire week. These suggested trips and routes, dubbed Johannesburg Destinations deal with 10 of Johannesburg's most popular regions, as well as regions often overlooked by tourists. They include comprehensive maps, recommended reading, and brief introductions to the various regions. Routes close to Johannesburg include those of the popular township ...

Europcar, the European leader in car hire, has announced that the first new-generation electric vehicles to hit the European car hire market, the Peugeot iON and Citroen C-Zero, will be introduced in 2011. The new vehicles will allow Europcar customers to drive up to 150km with a fully charged battery. The vehicles will be silent and will not emit any CO2 or other pollutants, further enhancing their ecological benefit. After the introduction of the two new models, Europcar will gradually install the infrastructure needed to recharge the batteries at its 2,500 car hire ...

British Airways has announced the launch of a new route to Haneda in Japan in a push to open up the domestic Japanese market to UK travellers. The five-a-week service from Heathrow to Haneda will begin on February 19, 2011. The flight to Tokyo will be served by a Boeing 777, with a four-class configuration enabling customers to choose from First, Club World (business class), World Traveller Plus (premium economy) or World Traveller (economy). Prices will start from GBP721. Between February 19th and March 26th, the service will operate on Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday ...

In its economic outlook for the fourth quarter of 2010, Saxo Bank recognises growing optimism in recent months due to a strong earnings season but the state of the US economy still overshadows these results. Saxo Bank, the trading and investment specialist, expects final sales to remain weak in the second half of 2010 and into 2011 and the unemployment rate to continue to hover just below 10% in the fourth quarter. Commenting on the outlook, David Karsbol, Saxo Bank's Chief Economist, said: "With the S&P 500 currently trading around the same level as it did at the beginning ...

CentRealTech Inc. announced today that Robert Matanane, President and CEO of CentRealTech, will present a sensational new program entitled "High Performance...Are You There?" to the ALTA delegates at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA on Thursday October 14th 3:30 - 4:30 PM in the Vendor Presentation Session. CentRealTech has smartly invested in and developed a process technology, which truly adds value to the Title Production process and is based on CentRealTech's One Click System. The Title Insurance and Real Estate Industries have been slow to change, and ...

In its fifth year of presenting Hispanic culture to the public, Junta Hispana (http://www.juntahispana.net) will take center stage in S. El Monte as Los Angeles area residents partake of food, fun and performances, with special prize giveaways sponsored by Rite Aid Corporation. During the days leading up to the event, featured international celebrity and La Bella's (http://www.labellabeauty.com) spokesperson Sissi will accompany the Radio Exitos 93.3FM van to four local retail locations to sign autographs and to answer live calls: - Thursday October 7 : 5:00 p.m. ...

McCusker & Company, a national leading provider of service program warranty consulting services, is partnering with Service USA to host strategic product protection partnership meetings for its industry leading consumer electronics extended warranty plan during the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show taking place in January in Las Vegas. "We are looking forward to discussing industry trends and developments in our innovative consumer electronics product protection plans with some new industry partners," said McCusker & Company President Will L. McCusker. "We have some very ...

The offices, which are due to start opening in the next month, will bring the total number of deVere offices in Western Europe to seventeen. deVere's latest operation will be overseen by industry expert, Richard Bayle. Bayle joined the investment and insurance profession in 1971 and worked in senior management positions for large companies such as Prudential and Siddalls. Before joining deVere, Bayle served as a board member at IFG Financial Services. Bayle was asked by deVere to set up offices in France and at the same time, given his experience and knowledge of the ...

New Rochelle's restaurant scene makes way for a fresh addition. Cienega, the second venue from owners Pedro Munoz and Vivian Torres, boasts both visual and tasteful Latin American delights like its predecessor Luz, which is still going strong in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Jorge Adriazola, former executive chef of Sushi Samba, Chicama, Pipa, Calle Ocho and former sous chef of Douglas Rodriguez's phenomenally successful Patria, holds reign over Cienega's kitchen. Capturing flavors from Peru, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Cuba and Venezuela, Adriazola takes you on a first class ticket ...

After a decade of joint work involving 2,700 researchers from 80 countries, the world's scientists – as well as the general public – can now access the Census of Marine Life, which provides the first in-depth look at the more than 120,000 diverse species which inhabit our oceans. The Census of Marine Life initiative, started in 2000, is the result of one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted , the result of more than 540 expeditions and 9,000 days at sea, plus more than 2,600 academic papers published during that period. The just-released census paints ...

HOUSTON - A vaccine that turns the immune system against brain tumor cells bearing a genetic mutation that drives the most aggressive form of glioblastoma multiforme improved survival of patients in a phase II clinical trial, researchers at Duke University and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reported today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Eighteen newly diagnosed patients who were vaccinated after undergoing standard treatment - surgery followed by radiation and chemotherapy - had median overall survival of 26 months compared with 15 months for 17 ...

A research team, co-headed by Dr. Woo Lee and Dr. Hongjun Wang of Stevens Institute of Technology, has published a paper describing a new method that generates three-dimensional (3D) tissue models for studying bacterial infection of orthopedic implants. Dr. Joung-Hyun Lee of Stevens, and Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan of the New Jersey Dental School, are co-authors of the research. Their paper, appearing in the journal Tissue Engineering, demonstrates a physiologically relevant approach for studying infection prevention strategies and emulating antibiotic delivery using 3D bone tissues ...

It just got easier to pinpoint biological hot spots in the world's oceans where some inhabitants are smaller than, well, a pinpoint. Microscopic algae are called phytoplankton and range from one to hundreds of microns in size – the smallest being 1/100th the size of a human hair. But as tiny as they may be, communities of the phytoplankton south of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, are big players when it comes to carbon: They take up 50 percent of the carbon dioxide going from the atmosphere into the oceans there. "We thought that had to be a mistake at first," ...

New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia. The research, led by Liubov Vitaliena Golovanova and Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, is reported in the October issue of Current Anthropology. "[W]e offer the hypothesis that the Neanderthal demise occurred abruptly (on a geological time-scale) … after the most powerful volcanic activity in western Eurasia during the period of ...

Advocates for seeding regions of the ocean with iron to combat global warming should be interested in a new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters. A Canada-US team led by University of Victoria oceanographer Dr. Roberta Hamme describes how the 2008 eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian Islands spewed iron-laden ash over a large swath of the North Pacific. The result, says Hamme, was an "ocean productivity event of unprecedented magnitude"—the largest phytoplankton bloom detected in the region since ocean surface measurements by satellite began ...

New research by a University of Victoria PhD student is challenging popular theory about how part of our solar system formed. At today's meeting of the prestigious Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California, Alex Parker is presenting evidence that, contrary to popular belief, the planet Neptune can't have knocked a collection of planetoids known as the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt to its current location at the edge of the solar system. Parker and his thesis supervisor Dr. J.J. Kavelaars (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics) studied binaries—systems of two objects ...

STANFORD, Calif. — With the help of tiny, see-through fish, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers are homing in on what happens in the brain while you sleep. In a new study, they show how the circadian clock and sleep affect the scope of neuron-to-neuron connections in a particular region of the brain, and they identified a gene that appears to regulate the number of these connections, called synapses. "This is the first time differences in the number of synapses between day and night and between wake and sleep have been shown in a living animal," said Lior ...

A new study reveals that brain signals elicited by the sight of someone suffering pain differ as a function of whether we identify positively or negatively with that person and that these differential brain signals predict a later decision to help or withdraw from helping. The research, published by Cell Press in the October 7th issue of the journal Neuron, provides fascinating insight into the neural mechanisms involved in decisions that benefit others, known as prosocial behavior, and how they are modulated by perceived group membership. Dr. Tania Singer from the University ...

Cells that help to protect the central nervous system may also contribute to pathological changes in the brain. New research, published by Cell Press in the October 7th issue of the journal Neuron, provides mechanistic insight into a link between the immune system and neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease that are associated with abnormal accumulation of tau protein. Tau is a protein found inside of neurons that acts almost like a skeleton, providing a supportive framework for the cell. However, abnormal tau sometimes clumps into filamentous deposits that ...

In a study that sheds new light on the causes of Parkinson's disease, researchers report that brain cells in Parkinson's patients abandon their energy-producing machinery, the mitochondria. A shutdown in fuel can have devastating effects on brain cells, which consume roughly 20 percent of the body's energy despite making up only 2 percent of body weight. The findings indicate that boosting the mitochondria with FDA approved drugs early on may prevent or delay the onset of Parkinson's. The study will be published in the one-year anniversary issue of the journal Science ...

Washington, DC – People who have been blind from birth make use of the visual parts of their brain to refine their sensation of sound and touch, according to an international team of researchers led by neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). Published today in the journal Neuron, the scientists say this finding helps explain why the blind have such advanced perception of these senses – abilities that far exceed people who can see, they say. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that the blind use specialized ...

Bad Hofgastein, 6 October 2010 -- European patients are in many countries, in fact, limited in their individual choice of medically assisted reproduction (MAR) treatment, experts from the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) stressed today at the European Health Forum Gastein (EHFG). The EHFG is the most important conference on health care policy in the EU. This year it has attracted about 600 decision-makers from more than 40 countries in the fields of health care policy, research, science, and business as well as from patients' organizations. ...