Though the great recession officially ended more than a year ago, far too many individuals and families continue to experience the long-lasting effects of a difficult economy. National unemployment rates remain near 10 percent, and even those who are able to find jobs are often overqualified and underpaid for their work. According to the Chicago Tribune, one in four homeowners owes more on a mortgage than their homes are worth. These challenges have left numerous people unable to meet their existing financial obligations and looking for alternatives. In many cases, those ...

Lottery.co.uk has launched a redesigned version of its website in order to provide a better user experience for visitors. The site was first launched in 1996 and has since grown to include a lot more content and functionality which could not have been foreseen last Millennium, leading to the decision for a complete overhaul. The redesign has focused on user experience, with a completely new navigation to make everything easier to find for lottery players. Features on the site such as the lottery results, the lottery numbers generator and the news section are all ...

Cruise Amour has announced the launch of its new technology, Search Your Way, which will be available on its website. The technology is designed to make searching for a holiday easier by allowing customers to search for their next holidays the way they want to rather than forcing them to go through the process of researching every cruise line available. Cruise Amour has created two new search criteria Cruise Type and Formality. These options means customers can pick from cruise options such as Friends & Family, Couples Getaway and Adults only, with Formality Options ...

Littlewoods Europe has launched its new season collection for Spring 2011, including their own brand Savoir range which has been restyled to suit the modern mature woman. The Savoir range features 400 ladies fashion lines, available in sizes 10 to 32, including petite and standard fit options. Following extensive research and consultation with customers aged 50 and over, Littlewoods Europe has changed the blocks and patterns used to create the Savoir range. The hem lengths, cut of the waist and the width of the shoulders in the garments have been adjusted to better suit ...

Bupa Care Homes in Yorkshire are preparing to enjoy a number of storytelling events in support of National Storytelling Week (29 January to 5 February 2011). This year, Bupa has teamed up with charity The Reader Organisation, which has been working with care homes since 2006, promoting the links between reading and wellbeing. Members of the local community and local school children have been invited to take part in the events, which are also designed to celebrate the art and value of story telling. Residents in Bupa's care homes will be reading and will be read ...

Valued Opinions has revealed the latest views on the willingness of the UK public to upgrade to 3D technology. Since the release of James Cameron's Avatar in late 2009 the 3D concept has boomed. In the last year 3D movies have been rolled out on a regular basis and nearly all cinemas now show at least one 3D movie at a time. The next stage in 3D technology was released in September, roughly a year to date since the release of Avatar; it is of course 3D TV. Since then, paid subscription TV services have been battling it out to be the one to raise the stakes by releasing ...

Lottery.co.uk has announced the launch of its mobile website. The mobile version will reside on the same URL as the main site and will automatically detect when a mobile user connects to the site and display the pages specially formatted for the device. The new mobile site has been fully optimized for mobile users with completely redesigned pages making it easier to use on a mobile phone. The launch of the mobile site marks Lottery.co.uk as the first big lottery site to launch a dedicated mobile site. The Lottery.co.uk mobile site is more convenient for users who ...

UK Gear Limited are set to steal a march on their competitors with the launch of the new PT-1000 - an ultra durable road and trail running shoe that promises to redefine the athletic shoe market. The first shoe in the world designed to last 1,000 running miles, the PT-1000 features UK Gear's classified Force Dynamic System technology which has taken over 8 years to develop with the Royal Army Physical Training Corps (RAPTC). This, combined with an extensive durability test programme at SATRA laboratories, underpins the company's confidence in its 1,000 mile claim. Comments ...

Compliance Safety Systems is pleased to announce a new service relationship with Fikes Truck Line, a coast-to-coast transportation service company specializing in flatbed, heavy haul and van. Compliance Safety Systems is providing Fikes Truck Line of Hope, AR an innovative roadside inspection and monitoring program to manage compliance with the new CSA 2010 mandates. Through this new program, Fikes will be able to access real-time contract driver and safety information, giving them the ability to respond to issues as they arise in a timely manner. The new program is ...

Credit card provider, MBNA Ireland, has revamped its online card management area, offering easier navigation and improved services. The new facility is called Online Card Services and features new and improved account management options. The new-look section of the website has been developed with the help of feedback from customers and includes a new step-by-step guide on how to get the most from online card services. As well as improved services, MBNA Ireland, which is owned by the Bank of America, has also worked hard to make card information clearer and on-site content ...

The UK's largest credit card provider, MBNA, has announced the start of its two-year programme that will see its 6 million customer base moved over to contactless cards by January 1st 2012. To achieve this, MBNA will issue a new contactless credit card each time a new or replacement card request is made by a customer, the lender estimates that most of its card-holders will have the ability to pay without a PIN by the start of 2012. Contactless payment is a relatively new option at the checkout and is currently limited to GBP15 per transaction, but the card provider can ...

Married people may think they communicate well with their partners, but psychologists have found that they don't always convey messages to their loved ones as well as they think — and in some cases, the spouses communicate no better than strangers. The same communication problem also is true with close friends, a recent study has found. "People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the 'closeness-communication bias,'" said Boaz ...

NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 20, 2011 – Results from the PROSPECT clinical trial shed new light on the types of vulnerable plaque that are most likely to cause sudden, unexpected adverse cardiac events, and on the ability to identify them through imaging techniques before they occur. The trial, Providing Regional Observations to Study Predictors of Events in the Coronary Tree (PROSPECT), is the first prospective natural history study of atherosclerosis using multi-modality imaging to characterize the coronary tree. The study findings were published in the January 20, 2011 ...

Just over a year after the earthquake in Haiti killed 222,000 people there's a new problem that is killing Haitians. A cholera outbreak has doctors in the area scrambling and the water-borne illness has already claimed 3600 lives according to officials with Médicin Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). Stefan Pukatzki, a bacteriologist in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta, is hoping that down the road he can help prevent deadly cholera outbreaks. His lab studies Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that makes up the disease, and he has discovered ...

Mutations in a gene called INF2 are by far the most common cause of a dominantly inherited condition that leads to kidney failure, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The results may help with screening, prevention, and therapy. Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) attacks the kidney's filtering system and causes serious scarring. Approximately 20,000 persons are currently living with kidney failure due to FSGS in the United States, with an associated annual cost of more than $3 billion. In ...

Routine mammograms performed for breast cancer screening could serve another purpose as well: detecting calcifications in the blood vessels of patients with advanced kidney disease, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). Mammograms show calcium deposits in the breast arteries in nearly two-thirds of women with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), according to the study by W. Charles O'Neill, MD (Emory University, Atlanta). "Breast arterial calcification is a specific and useful marker of medial ...

Athens, Ga. – It's a common assumption that animal migration, like human travel across the globe, can transport pathogens long distances, in some cases increasing disease risks to humans. West Nile Virus, for example, spread rapidly along the East coast of the U.S., most likely due to the movements of migratory birds. But in a paper just published in the journal Science, researchers in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology report that in some cases, animal migrations could actually help reduce the spread and prevalence of disease and may even promote the evolution ...

In a new paper published Jan. 21 in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by Microbiology and Immunology professor Blossom Damania, PhD, has shown for the first time that the Kaposi sarcoma virus has a decoy protein that impedes a key molecule involved in the human immune response. The work was performed in collaboration with W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Jenny Ting, PhD. First author, Sean Gregory, MS, a graduate student in UNC's Department of Microbiology and Immunology played a critical role in this work. The virus-produced protein, called ...

VIDEO: This video shows the micropipette adhesion frequency assay used to study the mechanical interactions between a T cell and an antigen presented on a red blood cell. Click here for more information. Researchers have for the first time mapped the complex choreography used by the immune system's T cells to recognize pathogens while avoiding attacks on the body's own cells. The researchers found that T cell receptors – molecules located on the surface of the T cell ...

The discovery of an ancient fossil, nicknamed 'Mrs T', has allowed scientists for the first time to sex pterodactyls – flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs between 220-65 million years ago. Pterodactyls featured prominently in Spielberg's Jurassic Park III and are a classic feature of many dinosaur movies where they are often depicted as giant flying reptiles with a crest. The discovery of a flying reptile fossilised together with an egg in Jurassic rocks (about 160 million years old) in China provides the first direct evidence for gender in these extinct ...

In 2008, an international team of scientists studying an exotic new superconductor based on the element ytterbium reported that it displays unusual properties that could change how scientists understand and create materials for superconductors and the electronics used in computing and data storage. But a key characteristic that explains the material's unusual properties remained tantalizingly out of reach in spite of the scientists' rigorous battery of experiments and exacting measurements. So members of that team from the University of Tokyo reached out to theoretical ...

Scientists from the University of Leeds have made a fundamental step in the search for therapies for amyloid-related diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes mellitus. By pin-pointing the reaction that kick-starts the formation of amyloid fibres, scientists can now seek to further understand how these fibrils develop and cause disease. Amyloid fibres, which are implicated in a wide range of diseases, form when proteins misfold and stick together in long, rope-like structures. Until now the nature of the first misfold, which then causes a chain reaction of ...

The anti-diuretic hormone "vasopressin" is released from the brain, and known to work in the kidney, suppressing the diuresis. Here, the Japanese research team led by Professor Yasunobu OKADA, Director-General of National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), and Ms. Kaori SATO, a graduate student of The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, clarified the novel function of "vasopressin" that works in the brain, as well as in the kidney via the same type of the vasopressin receptor, to maintain the size of the vasopressin neurons. It might be a useful result for ...

Humans use their senses to help keep track of short intervals of time according to new research, which suggests that our perception of time is not maintained by an internal body clock alone. Scientists from UCL (University College London) set out to answer the question "Where does our sense of time come from?" Their results show that it comes partly from observing how much the world changes, as we have learnt to expect our sensory inputs to change at a particular 'average' rate. Comparing the change we see to this average value helps us judge how much time has passed, ...

For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math. On Friday, Emory mathematician Ken Ono will unveil new theories that answer these famous old questions. Ono and his research team have discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals. They have unlocked the divisibility properties of ...