The U.S. Department of Transportation is cracking down on drunk driving this holiday season. Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood announced last week that the DOT was instigating the "Drunk Driving. Over the Limit. Under Arrest" campaign. The campaign is aimed at reducing the number of fatal accidents involving intoxicated drivers. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTHSA) statistics reveal almost 1000 people were killed in auto accidents that involved a drunk or impaired driver (with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .08 or higher) during December 2009 alone. ...

The recent divorce of Al and Tipper Gore seems to be part of a growing trend of couples getting divorced after decades of marriage. So-called "gray divorces" -- adults separating in their senior years -- are becoming more commonplace. According to Census Bureau data, about a quarter of couples who recently divorced were married over 20 years. The trend seemed to begin about 10 years ago and is continuing to grow. For couples who said their "I Dos" between 1955 and 1984, there has been a 20 percent drop in those marriages reaching their 20th anniversary. This has occurred ...

Many drivers do it and do not think twice about it: driving fatigued. What many don't know is that fatigued driving is a safety issue for all on the road, not just those who are tired behind the wheel, and it leads to many accidents, deaths and serious injuries each year. While it is dangerous any time, driver fatigue becomes even more hazardous when the tired driver is behind the wheel of a big rig. In 2004, the driver of a pickup truck suffered severe injuries -- a fractured rib and concussion -- and was left with chronic back pain after being rear-ended by a big ...

Atlanta video production company, Atlanta Business Video (ABV), recently announced that they are now serving video that can be viewed on IPhones, IPads, Blackberries, and Androids without watermarks. In addition, these mobile videos will not link back to the server site, such as YouTube. The mobile videos can be set-up as a clickable link to make it easy to direct the viewers where you want them to go on the site, such as a sign-up page, order form, or contact page. Mobile ad spending is on the rise, so to better serve mobile web users Atlanta Business Video has added ...

"When friend G mentioned what would happen in 2012, I thought it was too early to start worrying. But now I realize that people should start evaluating their lives immediately..." - "Super Life Secret Codes," by Great Sun Many people live their lives a day at a time, with no thought about the future. At the other extreme, some rare individuals are gifted with an uncanny ability to foresee what lies ahead. These people, scattered throughout humanity, act as lamp posts for the rest of us, and they help us prepare and plan for the unexpected. Friend G, a religious and spiritual ...

Automated Dynamics announced today that it is developing an automated fiber placement (AFP) robotic workcell for Concordia University's Concordia Center for Composites (CONCOM). The six-axis robot will fabricate simple to complex geometries, including cones, flat laminates, open and closed sections with convex and/or concave shapes, triangles, box beams, cylinders, ovals and more. "Automated Dynamics' leading-edge processing technology and fiber placement equipment will be the centerpiece of the CONCOM research and development facility," says Dr. S.V. Hoa, director, ...

As people around the world prepare for the New Year, health and weight loss are at the top of everyone's mind. This is the time of year when New Year's resolutions are made. People pledge to improve themselves in a multitude of ways, and countless fads and training routines sprout up to help consumers address their health and fitness needs. Most health and wellness programs come and go quickly, but one weight loss option that's had surprising staying power is the Super Acai supplement. You've no doubt heard about the popularity of Super Acai. Acai berries are a type ...

Honeybees can learn to avoid nectar containing natural plant toxins but will eat it when there is no alternative, scientists at Newcastle University have found. This means that in areas dominated by these so called 'toxic plants' – such as almond or apple orchards –bees struggle to find an alternative food source and so are forced to eat toxic nectar. With honeybee populations already under stress, the Newcastle University team believe these toxin-laden nectars could, in some cases, be a factor affecting colony health. It has long been known that while most plants ...

MERCED, Calif. — The prolonged, extensive emission of greenhouse gases over the next several decades could have significant impacts on ocean life, according to a study by UC Merced marine biologist Michael Beman. Increases in carbon dioxide emissions — exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities — are making ocean water more acidic, and Beman's study shows that the increased acidity will fundamentally alter the way nitrogen cycles throughout the sea. Because nitrogen is an important nutrient for all organisms, this could ultimately have significant ...

Rodents get a bad rap as vermin and pests because they seem to thrive everywhere. They have been one of the most common mammals in Africa for the past 50 million years. From deserts to rainforests, rodents flourished in prehistoric Africa, making them a stable and plentiful source of food, says paleontologist Alisa Winkler, an expert on rodent and rabbit fossils. Now rodent fossils are proving their usefulness to scientists as they help shed light on human evolution. Rodents can corroborate evidence from geology and plant and animal fossils about the ancient environments ...

A new study of local sea-level trends by researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) brings both good and bad news to localities concerned with coastal inundation and flooding along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Dr. John Boon, the study's lead author, says the good news is that "absolute sea level in Chesapeake Bay is rising only about half as fast as the global average rise rate." The bad news, says Boon, is that "local subsidence more than makes up for it." Boon has previously warned of the long-term impacts of sea-level rise in Chesapeake Bay, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The language that doctors use with low-income, rural patients can help determine whether these patients agree to participate in clinical trials testing new cancer treatments, a new study found. Researchers found that the metaphors doctors used to help explain what happens in such trials played a big role in whether patients would agree to participate. "Physicians have to communicate about medicine and science to people who often don't have the education and experience to easily understand what they're being told," said Janice Krieger, lead author of ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Nearly one in five whites could carry a genetic variant that substantially increases their odds of being susceptible to severe cocaine abuse, according to new research. This genetic variant, characterized by one or both of two tiny gene mutations, alters the brain's response to specific chemical signals. In the study, led by Ohio State University researchers, the variant was associated with a more than threefold increase in the odds that carriers will be susceptible to severe cocaine abuse leading to fatal overdosing, compared to non-carriers. Among ...

Contrary to the belief of many scientists (as well as many members of the public), new research confirms that Africa has two—not one—species of elephant. Scientists from Harvard Medical School, the University of Illinois, and the University of York in the United Kingdom used genetic analysis to prove that the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant have been largely separated for several million years. The researchers, whose findings appear online in PLoS Biology, compared the DNA of modern elephants from Africa and Asia to DNA that they extracted ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Leukemia patients whose cancers express higher levels of genes associated with cancer stem cells have a significantly poorer prognosis than patients with lower levels of the genes, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding is among the first to show that the cancer stem cell hypothesis — which posits that some cancers spring from and are replenished by a small, hardy population of self-renewing cells — can be used to predict outcomes in a large group of patients and one day to tailor treatments in the clinic. "The clinical ...

Researchers have identified a new genetic alteration that predisposes individuals to Cowden syndrome, a rare disorder that is characterized by high risks of breast, thyroid and other cancers, according to preliminary research published in the December 22/29 issue of JAMA. A majority of patients with Cowden syndrome, which occurs in approximately 1 in 200,000 live births, and a small minority of patients with Cowden-like syndrome, have mutations in the tumor suppressor PTEN gene. These mutations are associated with increased risk of various malignancies, approximately ...

In an area where iron deficiency is prevalent, children of mothers in rural Nepal who received prenatal iron, folic acid and vitamin A supplementation performed better on measures of intellectual and motor functioning compared to offspring of mothers who received vitamin A alone, according to a study in the December 22/29 issue of JAMA. "Micronutrient inadequacy is a critical concern among pregnant women and young children throughout the world. Gestation and the early postnatal period are considered sensitive periods for brain development, and nutritional deprivation ...

In an examination of leukemic stem cells (LSC), researchers have found that patients with acute myeloid leukemia who had higher activity of certain LSC genes had worse overall, event-free and relapse-free survival, according to a study in the December 22/29 issue of JAMA. "In many cancers, specific subpopulations of cells appear to be uniquely capable of initiating and maintaining tumors. The strongest support for this cancer stem cell model comes from transplantation assays in immunodeficient mice, which indicate that human acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is driven by ...

Stress can enhance ordinary, unrelated memories, a team of neuroscientists has found in a study of laboratory rats. Their results, which appear in the journal PLoS Biology, may bolster our understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and could offer a pathway for addressing PTSD and related afflictions. The study was conducted by researchers at the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences, the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center, and Rockefeller University. "Our results show that stress can activate memory, even if that memory is unrelated ...

CHICAGO --- Busy doctors can miss important details about a patient's care during an office examination. To prevent that, Northwestern Medicine researchers have created a whip-smart assistant for physicians – a new system using electronic health records that alerts doctors during an exam when a patient's care is amiss. After one year, the software program significantly improved primary care physicians' performance and the health care of patients with such chronic conditions as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The program, a new comprehensive approach tied to a doctor's ...

The risk of tuberculosis (TB) and latent TB (in which the bacteria that cause TB lie dormant but can reactivate later to cause active TB disease) is higher in the prison population than in the general population. And importantly, the spread of TB and latent TB within prisons can substantially increase their incidence in the general population. These key findings from a systematic review by Iacopo Baussano from the University "Amedeo Avogadro", Italy, and the Imperial College, London, UK, and colleagues and published in this week's PLoS Medicine, suggest that improvements ...

Earlier initiation of antiretroviral therapy should be the highest priority for global expansion of HIV patient care. This finding, from a paper published in this week's PLoS Medicine, should help resource-limited nations to phase in the implementation of the new 2010 WHO recommendations for HIV treatment. "Immediate scale-up of the entire WHO guideline package may be prohibitively expensive in some settings," said lead author Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA. "In many resource-limited settings, the relevant policy question ...

A study in this week's PLoS Medicine suggests that AIDS patients with cryptococcal meningitis who start HIV therapy are predisposed to immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS) — an exaggerated inflammatory immune response that kills up to one-third of affected people — if they have biomarkers (biochemicals) in their blood showing evidence of a damaged immune system that is not capable of clearing the fungal infection. David Boulware and Paul Bohjanen from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, and their colleagues, David Meya and Andrew Kambugu, at ...

Despite the growing recognition of the importance of strengthening health systems around the world, there is a considerable lack of shared definitions and guiding principles that are threatening the ability to form strategic policy, practice and evaluations. In this week's PLoS Medicine, Robert Chad Swanson from Brigham Young University, USA and colleagues present a set of 10 guiding principles for health systems strengthening to address this problem, developed from a comprehensive review of the literature and consultation with experts. "We invite global health leaders ...

In developing countries where iron deficiency is prevalent, prenatal iron-folic acid supplementation increased offspring intellectual and motor functioning during school age, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They examined the intellectual and motor functioning of children whose mothers received micronutrient supplementation during pregnancy and found that aspects of intellectual functioning including working memory, inhibitory control, and fine motor functioning were positively associated with prenatal iron and folic acid ...