Whether for a check-up, injury or major surgery, we expect to leave the hospital in better shape than when we arrived. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, is the latest in a series of reports which clearly demonstrates that efforts to improve the safety of our hospitals are failing, resulting in countless injuries and numerous deaths each year. The problem is not unnecessary and groundless medical malpractice lawsuits, but instead poor medical care that is continuing to needlessly harm a significant number of patients each year. The most recent ...

Furniture Choice has announced that it is to launch a number of new finance options for 2011. Customers can now choose to Buy Now, Pay Later or to spread payments over 24 or even 36 monthly instalments. With consumers all over the country still having to keep a close eye on their finances during the ongoing economic difficulties, the range of new options help customers spread the cost of buying new furniture instead of having to pay a large lump sum up front. Furniture Choice has teamed up with Hitachi Capital to provide the new financial services, meaning that it can ...

Norwegian Cruise Lines have announced their largest European deployment with four Freestyle Cruising ships sailing European waters, two of which will sail for the entire year. Norwegian Spirit will join the Norwegian Jade and Norwegian Sun sailing year-round in Europe beginning April 2012. The company's largest and most innovative ship, Norwegian Epic will continue cruising seasonally from Barcelona and Copenhagen respectively. In a recent interview with Travel weekly, Kevin Sheehan, Norwegian Cruise Lines chief executive officer, said: "Europe is one of the world's ...

Superbreak, the short break specialist, has announced a surge in the number of bookings for its gift voucher product by almost 50% in the run up to the busy festive period. As the festive season approaches, the Yorkshire based tour operator has reported an increase in demand in this area of their business and is looking forward to welcoming many more new and existing clients back in the coming year. Customers can choose from denominations of GBP5, GBP10, GBP25, GBP50 and GBP100 to create a personalised gift this Christmas to suit any budget and vouchers are redeemable ...

Debenhams has released figures which reveal that freezing Brits have sent sales of skimpy swimsuits soaring - during the coldest winter for over 30 years. As the country endures temperatures of up to -27C, department store Debenhams has seen swimsuit sales increase by 20%.   Bosses were left scratching their heads at the unanticipated sales figures at a time when most people are desperately wrapping up to keep warm. And with major problems at airports, it's not as if many people are even getting away. Carie Barkhuizen, spokesperson for Debenhams said: "With ...

If you are thinking of what new years resolutions to make for 2011 why not make a big one! To get all the dental treatments you have put off in 2010 completed, because now is the perfect time to follow the hundreds of people who come to meet our Dentist in Cancun Mexico for a "Dental Vacation". People from all over America and Canada come to receive their much needed work completed by professional and modern clinics while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of a Caribbean paradise and saving up to 70% compared to the prices they get quoted by their dentist back home. The ...

University of Arizona researchers may have found a way to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs to cancer tissues in controlled doses without harming healthy body cells. If successful, the invention of gold-coated liposomes could make chemotherapy more effective to destroy cancer cells and alleviate the harmful side effects that can result from the treatment. The invention by Marek Romanowski, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the UA College of Engineering and a member of the BIO5 Institute and the Arizona Cancer Center, and his lab team doesn't have a silver ...

ST. LOUIS – A compound which acts in the opposite way as growth hormone can reverse some of the signs of aging, a research team that includes a Saint Louis University physician has shown. The finding may be counter-intuitive to some older adults who take growth hormone, thinking it will help revitalize them. Their research was published in the Dec. 6 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings are significant, says John E. Morley, M.D., study co-investigator and director of the divisions of geriatric medicine and endocrinology ...

For the first time, chemists have succeeded in plugging a metal atom into a methane gas molecule, thereby creating a new compound that could be a key in opening up new production processes for the chemical industry, especially for the synthesis of organic compounds, which in turn might have implications for drug development. The UA research group also is the first to determine the precise structure of this "metal-methane hybrid" molecule, predicted by theoretical calculations but until now never observed in the real world. The discovery is published in the Journal of ...

Everyone knows that exercise comes with metabolic and cardiovascular benefits, but scientists understand surprisingly little about how physical activity influences the heart itself. Now, a new study in the December 23rd issue of Cell, a Cell Press publication, offers some of the first molecular-level insights. The studies in mice suggest that exercise turns on a genetic program that leads the heart to grow as heart muscle cells divide. It appears that shift in activity is driven in part by a single transcription factor (a gene that controls other genes). That gene, known ...

We aren't just what we eat; we are what our parents ate too. That's an emerging idea that is bolstered by a new study showing that mice sired by fathers fed on a low-protein diet show distinct and reproducible changes in the activity of key metabolic genes in their livers. Those changes occurred despite the fact that the fathers never saw their offspring and spent minimal time with their mothers, the researchers say, suggesting that the nutritional information is passed on to the next generation via the sperm not through some sort of social influence. The new findings ...

LA JOLLA, Calif., December 23, 2010 – Melanoma is one of the least common types of skin cancer, but it is also the most deadly. Melanocytes (pigment-producing skin cells) lose the genetic regulatory mechanisms that normally limit their number, allowing them to divide and proliferate out of control. One such regulator, called MITF, controls an array of genes that influence melanocyte development, function and survival. Researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) and their collaborators recently used a melanoma mouse model, cell cultures and ...

Tomato plants use similar biochemical mechanisms to reject pollen from their own flowers as well as pollen from foreign but related plant species, thus guarding against both inbreeding and cross-species hybridization, report plant scientists at the University of California, Davis. The researchers identified a tomato pollen gene that encodes a protein that is very similar to a protein thought to function in preventing self-pollination in petunias. The tomato gene also was shown to play a role in blocking cross-species fertilization, suggesting that similar biochemical ...

BOSTON--By tweaking a single gene, scientists have mimicked in sedentary mice the heart-strengthening effects of two weeks of endurance training, according to a report from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). The genetic manipulation spurred the animals' heart muscle cells -- called cardiomyocytes -- to proliferate and grow larger by an amount comparable to normal mice that swam for up to three hours a day, the authors write in the journal Cell. This specific gene manipulation can't be done in humans, they say, but the findings ...

Use of electronic health records by hospitals across the United States has had only a limited effect on improving the quality of medical care, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Studying a wide mix of hospitals nationally, researchers found that hospitals with basic electronic health records demonstrated a significantly higher increase in quality of care for patients being treated for heart failure. However, similar gains were not noted among hospitals that upgraded to advanced electronic health records, and hospitals with electronic health records did not ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered how AMPK, a metabolic master switch that springs into gear when cells run low on energy, revs up a cellular recycling program to free up essential molecular building blocks in times of need. In a paper published in the Dec. 23, 2010 edition of Science Express, a team led by Reuben Shaw, PhD., Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist and Hearst Endowment assistant professor in the Salk's Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory, reports that AMPK activates a cellular recycling ...

Phosphorous levels plummet in kidney disease patients who stick to a vegetarian diet, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). The results suggest that eating vegetables rather than meat can help kidney disease patients avoid accumulating toxic levels of this mineral in their bodies. Individuals with kidney disease cannot adequately rid the body of phosphorus, which is found in dietary proteins and is a common food additive. Kidney disease patients must limit their phosphorous intake, as high ...

WORCESTER, Mass. — Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Texas at Austin have uncovered evidence that environmental influences experienced by a father can be passed down to the next generation, "reprogramming" how genes function in offspring. A new study published this week in Cell shows that environmental cues—in this case, diet—influence genes in mammals from one generation to the next, evidence that until now has been sparse. These insights, coupled with previous human epidemiological studies, suggest that paternal environmental ...

The cell signaling pathway known as Wnt, commonly activated in cancers, causes internal membranes within a healthy cell to imprison an enzyme that is vital in degrading proteins, preventing the enzyme from doing its job and affecting the stability of many proteins within the cell, researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have found. The finding is important because sequestering the enzyme, Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3 (GSK3), results in the stabilization of proteins in the cell, at least one of which is known to be a key player in cancer, said Dr. Edward ...

FINDINGS: Whitehead Institute researchers have determined that heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) can create diverse heritable traits in brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) by affecting a large portion of the yeast genome. The finding has led the researchers to conclude that Hsp90 has played a key role in shaping the evolutionary history of the yeast genome, and likely others as well. RELEVANCE: Over the past several years, Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist has built the case that heat shock proteins (Hsps), which are found across species from bacteria to humans, are ...

When prowling for a hook up, it's not always the good-looker who gets the girl. In fact, in a certain species of South American fish, brawn and stealth beat out colorful and refined almost every time. In a series of published studies of a South American species of fish (Poecilia parae), which are closely related to guppies, Syracuse University scientists have discovered how the interplay between male mating strategies and predator behavior has helped preserve the population's distinctive color diversity over the course of time. The third study in the series was published ...

Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands have succeeded in controlling the building blocks of a future super-fast quantum computer. They are now able to manipulate these building blocks (qubits) with electrical rather than magnetic fields, as has been the common practice up till now. They have also been able to embed these qubits into semiconductor nanowires. The scientists' findings have been published in the current issue of the science journal Nature (23 December). ...

A new study at the University of Haifa reveals: Emotional intelligence empowers positive attitudes and weakens negative behavior in the private sector; but does not have the same effect in the public sector "The results of this study emphasize the existence of significant behavioral differences between the sectors. Executives intending to carry out reforms or implement management plans in the public sector should be well aware of these differences," explains Dr. Galit Meisler who conducted the study. A new study from the University of Haifa shows that within the private ...

They'll drill through four ice ages, epic sandstorms, mankind's migration from Africa to the New World, and the biggest droughts in history. Tel Aviv University is heading an international study that for the first time will dig deep beneath the Dead Sea, 500 meters (about a third of a mile) down under 300 meters (about a fifth of a mile) of water. Drilling with a special rig, the researchers will look back in time to collect a massive amount of information about climate change and earthquake patterns. The study, led by Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham of Tel Aviv University's Minerva ...

A study was carried out to examine the extent to which quercetin and trans-resveratrol (RSV) prevented inflammation or insulin resistance in primary cultures of human adipocytes treated with tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a)—an inflammatory cytokine elevated in the plasma and adipose tissue of obese, diabetic individuals. Cultures of human adipocytes were pretreated with quercetin and trans-RSV followed by treatment with TNF-a. Subsequently, gene and protein markers of inflammation and insulin resistance were measured. The authors report that quercetin, and to a lesser ...