Nomensa, a leading usability agency, conducted a recent study that assessed the best online UK retailers. Their results, based on various site-specific criteria, revealed New Look to be the highest scoring website, offering the best shopping basket experience. The high street fashion chain, who sell a wide variety of products from must have women's shoes to figure loving black jeans, have invested a lot of time and effort into providing the most efficient checkout service possible in recent times and such awards are certainly testament to what the brand is looking to ...

With the launch of their new live casino platform, gaming software developer Playtech have really managed to blur the line between online and terrestrial casino gaming. Live casinos are a developing online niche combining real dealers and gaming equipment with online playability. The games are conducted in a purpose built dealer studio and video streamed real time to players' computers along with a linked bet interface to allow for remote participation. The playing cards, roulette wheels, roulette balls and the dealers are all real, alleviating the need to rely on ...

1st Class Medical opened the doors to their new showroom in Englewood, Colorado, and it has been busier than ever. 1st Class Medical is an oxygen concentrator division of North Florida Medical a respiratory company in business for over 30 years. Not only do they have brick and mortar pharmacies and service centers but they have become one of the largest online respiratory companies servicing the United States. The new facility has a full showroom with every home and portable oxygen concentrator on the market today. The new showroom is also home for one of the lightest, ...

Today, 3VR Security, Inc., the global leader in Intelligent Video Search and Analytics, announced that it has closed a $17 million round in new financing with a significant increase in valuation, led by Menlo Ventures. The round will fuel 3VR's continued development of its industry-leading intelligent video search and analytics technologies, as well as its expansion into global markets. This funding is the culmination of a record year for the company, in which it also expanded its leadership team with the addition of Aisling MacRunnels as its new chief marketing officer. ...

Most Australians do not approve of IVF or abortion for sex-selection purposes, and most do not think a hypothetical blue or pink pill to select the sex of a child should be legal, a new study has found. The study, led by Dr Rebecca Kippen from the School of Population Health at the University of Melbourne, analysed responses from more than 2,500 people participating in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, combined with a series of in-depth parental interviews. The survey found that 69 per cent of respondents disapproved the use of IVF for sex selection, with ...

On May 25th, 2010, the online arm of Upstream, a newspaper for the international oil and gas industry, reported that British Petroleum had started top-kill procedures on the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. "The company said that the operation, which will pump heavy mud down the wellbore in an attempt to gain control of the oil flow and ultimately kill the well, began at 1 pm CST," Upstream reported. The article continued: "Earlier BP Chief Tony Hayward gave the top-kill procedure a 60 percent to 70 percent chance of success." Physicists watching the situation ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. –People living in the "stroke belt" states eat more fried fish than people living in the rest of the country, which may contribute to the high rate of death from stroke in those states, according to a study published in the December 22, 2010, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Studies have shown that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish, especially fatty fish, may reduce the risk of stroke. Research has shown that frying fish leads to the loss of the natural fatty acids. The study also found that African-Americans ...

STANFORD, Calif. — A study fast-tracked for online publication Dec. 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine has identified an important gene deletion in up to one of every four cases of glioblastoma, the most common adult brain cancer. This deletion contributes to tumor development, promotes resistance to therapy and considerably worsens a patient's survival prospects. The deletion of the gene, known as NFKBIA, triggers biochemical processes similar to those resulting from a better-known aberration common in glioblastomas: alteration of the epidermal growth factor receptor, ...

A new study is unraveling the earliest events associated with neurodegenerative diseases characterized by abnormal accumulation of tau protein. The research, published by Cell Press in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron, reveals how tau disrupts neuronal communication at synapses and may help to guide development of therapeutic strategies that precede irreversible neuronal degeneration. Tau normally contributes to the supportive framework of proteins in the cell. It is well established that abnormal tau sometimes clumps into neuron-damaging filamentous deposits ...

Washington, DC – Researchers at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center, have found that an arsenic-based agent already FDA-approved for a type of leukemia may be helpful in another hard-to-treat cancer, Ewing's Sarcoma (ES). The research, based on animal studies, also suggests the drug might be beneficial in treating medulloblastoma, a highly malignant pediatric brain cancer. In the December 22 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the investigators describe how years of research has uncovered a common ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that many cancer cells carry the seeds of their own destruction — a protein on the cell surface that signals circulating immune cells to engulf and digest them. On cancer cells, this "eat me" signal is counteracted by a separate "don't eat me" signal that was described in an earlier study. The two discoveries may lead to better cancer therapies, and also solve a mystery about why a previously reported cancer therapy is not more toxic. In the study to be published Dec. 22 in Science ...

Sex in mammals is genetically determined. In humans, females have two X chromosomes, while males have one X and one Y chromosome. However, some individuals are born with male genitalia despite having two X chromosomes, a condition known as XX male sex reversal. A team of researchers, led by Paul Thomas, University of Adelaide, Australia, has now determined that overexpression of the Sox3 gene in mice causes frequent XX male sex reversal. The clinical relevance of this was highlighted by the discovery of genomic rearrangements in the regulatory region of the human SOX3 gene ...

The timing of the onset of puberty is linked to levels of nutrition: later onset is associated with malnutrition, while earlier onset is linked to childhood obesity. A team of researchers, led by Carol Elias, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, has now generated data in mice that run counter to current thinking about the molecular pathway by which nutrition status affects the onset of puberty. Further, the team defines a new regulatory pathway for the process, which, if confirmed in humans, could potentially lead to new approaches to treating ...

Arsenic is usually thought of as a poison. Despite this, it has been used in medicine for over 2000 years, and the arsenic compound arsenic trioxide (ATO) is FDA approved for the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia. Now, a team of researchers, led by Aykut Üren, at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, has generated data using human cancer cell lines that suggest that ATO might also be of benefit to individuals with certain brain tumors or connective tissue tumors. Certain cancers, in particular brain tumors known as medulloblastomas and connective tissue ...

A multinational research team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health has found that a genetic variant of a brain receptor molecule may contribute to violently impulsive behavior when people who carry it are under the influence of alcohol. A report of the findings, which include human genetic analyses and gene knockout studies in animals, appears in the Dec. 23 issue of Nature. "Impulsivity, or action without foresight, is a factor in many pathological behaviors including suicide, aggression, and addiction," explains senior author David Goldman, M.D., ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory report for the first time how animals' knowledge obtained through past experiences can subconsciously influence their behavior in new situations. The work, which sheds light on how our past experiences inform our future choices, will be reported on Dec. 22 in an advance online publication of Nature. Previous work has shown that when a mouse explores a new space, neurons in its hippocampus, the center of learning and memory, fire sequentially like gunpowder igniting a makeshift fuse. Individual ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (December 22, 2010) – Whitehead Institute researchers have linked hyperactivity in the mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) cellular pathway, to reduced ketone production, which is a well-defined physiological trait of aging in mice. Their results are reported in the December 23 edition of the journal Nature. "This is the first paper that genetically shows that the mTORC1 pathway in mammals affects an aging phenotype," says Whitehead Institute Member David Sabatini. "It provides us with a molecular framework to study an aging-related process ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A 30,000-year-old finger bone found in a cave in southern Siberia came from a young girl who was neither an early modern human nor a Neanderthal, but belonged to a previously unknown group of human relatives who may have lived throughout much of Asia during the late Pleistocene epoch. Although the fossil evidence consists of just a bone fragment and one tooth, DNA extracted from the bone has yielded a draft genome sequence, enabling scientists to reach some startling conclusions about this extinct branch of the human family tree, called "Denisovans" after ...

EDITOR'S PICK: What sex are you? Sex in mammals is genetically determined. In humans, females have two X chromosomes, while males have one X and one Y chromosome. However, some individuals are born with male genitalia despite having two X chromosomes, a condition known as XX male sex reversal. A team of researchers, led by Paul Thomas, University of Adelaide, Australia, has now determined that overexpression of the Sox3 gene in mice causes frequent XX male sex reversal. The clinical relevance of this was highlighted by the discovery of genomic rearrangements in the regulatory ...

BOSTON (December 22, 2010) -- Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have found wide disparities among four common measures of hospital-wide mortality rates, with competing methods yielding both higher- and lower-than-expected rates for the same Massachusetts hospitals during the same year. The findings, published Dec. 23 in a special article in the New England Journal of Medicine, stoke a simmering debate over the value of hospital-wide mortality rates as a yardstick for health care quality. ...

BOSTON, Mass. (December 22, 2010) — The sequencing of the nuclear genome from an ancient finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows that the cave dwellers were neither Neandertals nor modern humans. An international team of researchers led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) has sequenced the nuclear genome from a finger bone of an extinct hominin that is at least 30,000 years old and was excavated by archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, in 2008. A ...

For most of us, the "placebo effect" is synonymous with the power of positive thinking; it works because you believe you're taking a real drug. But a new study rattles this assumption. Researchers at Harvard Medical School's Osher Research Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have found that placebos work even when administered without the seemingly requisite deception. The study published on December 22 in PLoS ONE. Placebos—or dummy pills—are typically used in clinical trials as controls for potential new medications. Even though they contain ...

Specially designed probiotics can modulate the physiology of host fat cells say scientists writing in Microbiology. The findings could lead to specialised probiotics that have a role in the prevention or treatment of conditions such as obesity. Scientists from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC), Cork, University College Cork and Teagasc, in Ireland engineered a strain of Lactobacillus to produce a version of a molecule called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). When this engineered bacterial strain was fed to mice, the researchers found that the composition of the mice's ...

Scientists today published catalogs of the fruit fly and roundworm's functional genomic elements: DNA sequences in the genome that carry the instructions and determine which genes are turned on and off at various times in different cells. Initially sequenced as part of the Human Genome Project, the genomes of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, are powerful models for understanding human biology and disease, as many functional genomic elements have been conserved across the vast evolutionary distances separating each organism. ...

Penn State researchers have found that native pollinators, like wild bees and wasps, are infected by the same viral diseases as honey bees and that these viruses are transmitted via pollen. Their research published on December 22nd in PLoS ONE, an online open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research. This multi-institutional study provides new insights into viral infections in native pollinators, suggesting that viral diseases may be key factors impacting pollinator populations. According to Diana Cox-Foster, co-author ...