City councilwoman Letitia James introduced a resolution that would force the MTA to unlock subway car doors. She says it's a question of public safety. With the subway doors locked, passengers have no way to escape a situation in which they feel unsafe, like a fight in a subway car or harassment by another rider. The city, however, believes that locked doors keep the straphangers safer. When the trains are moving, the gap between cars can be dangerously large at times. To the city, the risk involved in allowing individuals to move between cars outweighs the risk ...

M&S Money has revealed that only 10% of the UK's 50 to 70 year olds are actually considering upping and leaving Britain behind for good when they retire, putting to rest the myths of the UK's "globe trotting" older generation. Indeed, contrary to popular belief the majority (61%) of this age group have no desire to move overseas and prefer to holiday close to home or in an English-speaking country. The top five destinations where M&S Credit Card customers use their card are USA, France, Spain, Ireland and Italy. Research conducted by the Institute of Public Policy ...

House of Fraser, the premium department store now offers the new Tommy Hilfiger 2011 collection online at www.houseoffraser.co.uk. Established in 1985, Tommy Hilfiger has successfully created preppy, luxury leisurewear along with fresh fragrances. Tommy Hilfiger clothing and accessories, including men's jeans and men's socks, women's clothing and children's hats and scarves are now all available at houseoffraser.co.uk. The new range includes Tommy Hilfiger's Men's Holiday collection, featuring padded cotton plaid shirts in a variety of festive shades from holly ...

An old dog learns new tricks as an Arlington salon reopens its doors with a new marketing strategy for both customers and tenants. Every specialist who rents a studio at the Salon and Spa Galleria will receive a free page on the salon's search engine-optimized website. "It's more than just a profile page with a picture and contact information," says the owner of the salon. "It's a personal salon blog they can use to connect with their client bases. Every blog posting makes their page that much more optimized for Google, thus getting them that much more exposure on the ...

In their Winter 2010 issue Modern Magazine spotlighted the late post-war British cutlery designer David Mellor. Mellor has been hailed "as Britain's most serious, modest and greatest postwar product designer." Mellor not only devoted his professional life to the design of exceptional contemporary flatware but also created many well-known industrial designs woven in British daily life, such as public trash bins, street lights and the modernized red post box. The full collection of David Mellor flatware is available for purchase in the United States at Didriks, in Cambridge, ...

Didriks, a retailer of outdoor furniture and home furnishings, announced that they will donate five percent of in-store and online sales in February to Cambridge, MA nonprofit Food For Free.  This will be Didriks' third annual campaign to benefit Food For Free, an organization that collects and provides fresh food to the needy. Didriks invites the public to an in-store kickoff party on February 3rd, 2011, from 5-8pm. Catering for the event is provided by Season to Taste catering. Food For Free Director, David Leslie, said: "We're excited and grateful to partner with ...

The Carbon Collection features a matte-black aluminum nanoclipz system and a carbon watchband accented with coloured stitching available in six colours. The Carbon Collection will be available in early February 2011 at over 250 Apple Stores nationwide, Apple.com and www.iwatchz.com at $49.95 USD. The Jelly Collection features a translucent-coloured nanoclipz system and matching vibrant silicon watchbands in pink, orange, red, green, blue, white and grey. The Jelly Collection will be available at retailers nationwide and at www.iwatchz.com in early February 2011 at the ...

A University of Adelaide reproductive biologist has achieved a major breakthrough in IVF technology that is expected to help millions of women around the world who have suffered previous miscarriages after IVF treatment. Professor Sarah Robertson, an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and member of the University's Robinson Institute, has partnered with a Danish company to develop a product which improves IVF embryo implantation rates for some women by up to 40%. In the world's largest clinical trial on IVF media, Professor Robertson and ORIGIO a/s - a European company ...

JUPITER, FL, January 5, 2011 – A scientist from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute has devised a new method of analyzing and quantifying changes in proteins that result from a common chemical process. The new findings could provide new insights into the effects of a highly destructive form of stress on proteins in various disease models, particularly cancer. The study, published January 5, 2011, in the online Early View of the journal Angewandte Chemie, was designated by the journal as a "very important paper," a distinction bestowed on less than five ...

AURORA, Colo. (Jan. 5, 2011) – The number of women who die from complications of anesthesia during childbirth has plummeted 59 percent over the last two decades thanks to improved monitoring and better medical techniques, according to a recent study. The report's lead researcher, Joy Hawkins, MD, professor of anesthesiology and director of Obstetric Anesthesia at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said the risks have been dramatically reduced due to a greater focus on eliminating complications of general anesthesia. Hawkins examined 12 years of anesthesia-related ...

Scientists have discovered direct evidence of the diet of one of the most important group of ammonites, distant relatives of squids, octopuses and cuttlefishes. The discovery may bring a new insight on why they became extinct 65.5 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous. Ammonites are among the world's most well known fossils but until now, there has been no experimental evidence of their place in the food chain. Using synchrotron X-rays, a Franco-American team of scientists led by Isabelle Kruta has discovered exceptionally preserved mouth organs of ammonites, ...

Powerful synchrotron scans of Baculites fossils found on American Museum of Natural History expeditions to the Great Plains suggests that the extinct group of marine invertebrates to which they belong, the ammonites, had jaws and teeth adapted for eating small prey floating in the water. One ammonite also provided direct evidence of a planktonic diet because it died with its last meal in its mouth—tiny larval snails and crustacean bits. The detailed description of internal structure of ammonites, published by a Franco-American research team this week in Science, also provides ...

Nanotechnologists at The University of Texas at Dallas have invented a broadly deployable technology for producing weavable, knittable, sewable, and knottable yarns containing up to 95 weight percent of otherwise unspinnable guest powders and nanofibers. A minute amount of host carbon nanotube web, which can be lighter than air and stronger pound-per-pound than steel, confines guest particulates in the corridors of highly conducting scrolls without interfering with guest functionality for such applications as energy storage, energy conversion, and energy harvesting. Using ...

If you want to be surrounded by females on the prowl, it pays to be cool, at least if you are a male butterfly. In an unusual example of sex role reversals, females actively court males after being exposed to cool, dry temperatures as caterpillars, Yale University researchers report in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal Science. Raised in the moist and warmer season as larvae, males take up the traditional roles of suitor, displaying their wing designs to females who do the choosing. "Behavior in these butterflies is changed by the temperatures experienced during development," ...

Most of the time cancer seems to creep up gradually over time; cells become premalignant, then increasingly abnormal before they become cancerous. But sometimes cancers seem to pop up as if out of nowhere. Now, researchers reporting in the January 7th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, have new evidence to explain how that can happen. Based on the DNA sequences of multiple cancer samples of various types, they show that cancer can arise suddenly in the aftermath of one-off cellular crises involving tens to hundreds of genomic rearrangements. "We think ...

Using a new technology that relies on thousands of synthetic molecules to fish for disease-specific antibodies, researchers have developed a potential method for detecting Alzheimer's disease with a simple blood test. The same methodology might lead to blood tests for many important diseases, according to the report in the January 7th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. "If this works in Alzheimer's disease, it suggests it is a pretty general platform that may work for a lot of different diseases," said Thomas Kodadek of The Scripps Research Institute. ...

Most primary care physicians (PCPs) and kidney specialists favor collaborative care for a patient with progressive chronic kidney disease (CKD), but their preferences on how and when to collaborate differ, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). PCPs and kidney specialists need to partner more effectively to optimize care for patients with CKD. Prompt referral of patients to kidney specialists can slow CKD progression or help patients prepare for dialysis or kidney transplantation in a timely ...

BOULDER—One of the most enduring mysteries in solar physics is why the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. Now scientists believe they have discovered a major source of hot gas that replenishes the corona: narrow jets of plasma, known as spicules, shooting up from just above the Sun's surface. The finding addresses a fundamental question in astrophysics: how energy moves from the Sun's interior to create its hot outer atmosphere. "It's always been quite a puzzle to figure out why the Sun's atmosphere is hotter than its surface," ...

LA JOLLA, CA-In making your pro-longevity resolutions, like drinking more red wine and maintaining a vibrant social network, here's one you likely forgot: dialing down your mitochondria. It turns out that slowing the engines of these tiny cellular factories could extend your life-an observation relevant not only to aging research but to our understanding of how cells communicate with each another. So report researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the Jan. 7, 2011, issue of Cell. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Andrew Dillin, Ph.D., and ...

For the first time, researchers have developed a 3D picture of a herpes virus protein interacting with a key part of the human cellular machinery, enhancing our understanding of how it hijacks human cells to spread infection and opening up new possibilities for stepping in to prevent or treat infection. This discovery uncovers one of the many tactical manoeuvres employed by the virus. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)-funded team, led by The University of Manchester, have used NMR - a technique related to the one used in MRI body scanners ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have identified a key molecule for establishing blood stem cells in their niche within the bone marrow. The findings, reported in the January issue of Cell Stem Cell, may lead to improvements in the safety and efficiency of bone marrow transplants. Bone marrow transplants are a type of stem cell therapy used to treat cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia and other blood-related diseases. In a bone marrow transplant, the "active ingredients" are hematopoietic stem cells, which live in the bone marrow ...

Most cancer tissues are invaded by inflammatory cells that either stimulate or inhibit the growth of the tumor, depending on what immune cells are involved. Now a Swedish-Belgian research team has shown that a protein that naturally occurs in the body, HRG, inhibits tumor growth and metastasis into secondary organs by activating specific immune cells. The study is being published today in the Net edition of the prestigious journal Cancer Cell. - Our study shows that the regulation of tumor-associated inflammation can be utilized to treat cancer and that there is a great ...

Work published today shows that brain cells need to create links early on in their existence, when they are physically close together, to ensure successful connections across the brain throughout life. In people, these long-distance connections enable the left and right side of the brain to communicate and integrate different kinds of information such as sound and vision. A change in the number of these connections has been found in many developmental brain disorders including autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia. The Newcastle University researchers Dr Marcus Kaiser ...

Remarkable new research overthrows the conventional view that cancer always develops in a steady, stepwise progression. It shows that in some cancers, the genome can be shattered into hundreds of fragments in a single cellular catastrophe, wreaking mutation on a massive scale. The scars of this chromosomal crisis are seen in cases from across all the common cancer types, accounting for at least one in forty of all cancers. The phenomenon is particularly common in bone cancers, where the distinctively ravaged genome is seen in up to one in four cases. The team looked ...

Scientists in Connecticut have carried out one of the first psychological studies into eating disorders in Native American (NA) populations. The research, published in The International Journal of Eating Disorders, provides new insights into the extent to which Native American populations experience eating disorders, revealing that women are more likely to report behavioral symptoms then men, while challenging views that NA men and ethnically white men will experience different psychological symptoms. The team, led by Professor Ruth Striegel-Moore from Wesleyan University ...