Hot Dawgz & Hand Rails (HD&HR), the official kickoff to the 2010-2011 So. Cal ski and snowboard season, returns to Bear Mountain Saturday, September 18. The free event features some of the world's best pro snowboarders competing on 110 tons of snow for a shot at the $14,000 cash purse in the Pro Invitational Rail Jam. The Red Bull Best Trick Contest will offer up an additional $5,000 for the men's winner and $1,000 for ladies, bringing the total contest purse to $20,000. The event also includes a vendor booth city offering autograph signings and product giveaways, live ...

If you have partitions on your computer's hard drive, then it is not exactly the same but serves same purpose as having different hard drives. According to Aomei Technology, one of the primary objectives to have a partition in your hard drive is to distinguish an operating system from user work and data files. By doing this the user's files remain intact even if you have to reinstall the operating system files. Also, if you are preparing a single disk as a multi-boot set up, then you must have different partitions for every system. Many users might opt for Windows built-in ...

Leading rakeback affiliate, RakeTheRake, today announced it will have shared out $80 million dollars in rakeback to its online poker players by the end of the month. This astounding figure demonstrates the growth in popularity of online poker and the active nature of its players. By way of a bonus, RakeTheRake is holding a Rush Poker tournament for its players on Sunday 11 September with an $800 prize pool. Another method to gain some extra cash is to follow in the footsteps of Van Halen legend Sammy Hagar who sold 80% of his tequila brand, Cabo Wabo, netting him ...

LV= Asset Management (LVAM), the fund management arm of insurance, investment and pensions group LV=, is enhancing its LV= European ex-UK Growth Fund with the addition of a Sterling hedged share class, in response to growing demand from institutional and discretionary clients. The new Institutional Income GBP Hedged Share Class is a further designation of the Institutional Income Share Class launched last month. It allows clients to mitigate currency risk on their investments but also to express any strong currency views by providing for free switching between hedged ...

Debenhams has reported that sales of swimsuit styles which are traditionally associated with the under 30s are soaring thanks to role model glamour-grannies like Helen Mirren and Goldie Hawn taking the plunge. So strong is the trend that swimwear buyers have dubbed the skimpy beachwear the 'grankini'. Sales of bikinis at fashion retailer Debenhams have risen by 118% driven by women who were ironically born around the time of the two-piece's invention in 1946. When Debenhams customers between the ages of 50 and 65 were asked what style of swimwear they take on holiday, ...

The arrival of A Level results marks the scramble to fill university places across the UK. While most first year students get ready to settle into halls, some freshers will join their second or third year counterparts in opting for privately owned housing, boosting the local market, according to new analysis from Lloyds TSB. More than half (60%) of university towns across the UK have seen house price growth outperform the region in the past 5 years, with the biggest increases appearing in towns that have seen a real uplift in the number of students over the same time. - ...

"gwiggle", the baby book iPhone app, makes parenting all the more fun and easy to capture and maintain records of those precious moments with your little darling. Traditionally, baby books have been extremely popular among parents as they help them record those special moments with their children - gwiggle, now adds the interactivity to your baby book and brings it to your iPhone. "There are some parenting apps in the app store but hardly any baby book apps and we thought it would be exciting, fun and easy if we could keep a record of our kids growing up right on ...

Something has been eating Charlie Kerfoot's doughnut, and all fingers point to a European mollusk about the size of a fat lima bean. No one knew about the doughnut in southern Lake Michigan, much less the mollusk, until Michigan Technological University biologist W. Charles Kerfoot and his research team first saw it in 1998. That's because scientists have always been wary of launching their research vessels on any of the shipwreck-studded Great Lakes in winter. But NASA's new Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) Project was giving scientists a safer way to ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – An Oregon State University research program has returned to Collier Glacier for the first time in almost 20 years and found that the glacier has decreased more than 20 percent from its size in the late 1980s. The findings are consistent with glacial retreat all over the world and provide some of the critical data needed to help quantify the effects of global change on glacier retreat and associated sea level rise. Flowing down the flanks of the Three Sisters in the central Oregon Cascade Range, Collier Glacier is at an elevation of more than 7,000 ...

LOS ANGELES (Sept. 6, 2010) – In the first human study of its kind to be published in more than 35 years, researchers found psilocybin, an hallucinogen which occurs naturally in "magic mushrooms," can safely improve the moods of patients with advanced-stage cancer and anxiety, according to an article published online today in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Patients enrolled in the study at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) demonstrated improvement of mood and reduction of anxiety up to six months after undergoing ...

Cancer is a difficult disease to treat because it's a personal disease. Each case is unique and based on a combination of environmental and genetic factors. Conventional chemotherapy employs treatment with one or more drugs, assuming that these medicines are able to both "diagnose" and "treat" the affected cells. Many of the side effects experienced by chemotherapy patients are due to the fact that the drugs they are taking aren't selective enough. For instance, taking a drug that targets fast-growing tumor cells frequently results in hair loss, because cells in the ...

Patients with early-stage schizophrenia who receive a combination of medication and a psychosocial intervention appear less likely to discontinue treatment or relapse—and may have improved insight, quality of life and social functioning—than those taking medication alone, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Antipsychotic drugs are the mainstay of therapy for patients with schizophrenia, but long-term therapy is associated with adverse effects and poor adherence, according to background information ...

Children and teens with higher blood levels of chemicals used in the production of non-stick cookware and waterproof fabrics appear more likely to have elevated total and LDL cholesterol levels, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Humans are exposed to the man-made compounds known as perfluoroalkyl acids—including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS)—through drinking water, dust, food packaging, breast milk, cord blood, microwave popcorn, air and occupational ...

More than one-third of mothers and about one-fifth of fathers in the United Kingdom appear to experience an episode of depression between their child's birth and 12th year of age, with the highest rates in the first year after birth, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the November print issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Depression in parents is associated with adverse behavioral, developmental and cognitive outcomes in their children," the authors write as background information in the ...

Gland, Switzerland - Russian oil and gas company Rosneft is conducting oil and gas exploration work that may have caused the critically endangered western gray whale to flee its main feeding ground. Tests and offshore installment of equipment by Rosneft for a major seismic survey began in late August, despite repeated calls from 12 governments, NGOs, scientists and the public to postpone the survey because of potential risks to the whales. Rosneft started preparations for the survey last month near Sakhalin Island even though a small number of western gray whales ...

A mathematical tool known as a Monte Carlo analysis could help improve the way X-rays are used for mammography and reduce the number of breast cancers missed by the technique as well as avoiding false positives, according to research published this month in the International Journal of Low Radiation. Worldwide, breast cancer represents one in ten of all cancers among women, with the exception of skin cancer, making it the most common form of non-skin cancer. It is the fifth most common cause of cancer death accounting for more than half a million deaths worldwide. The ...

Even though organic methods may increase farm biodiversity, a combination of conventional farming and protected areas could sometimes be a better way to maintain food production and protect wildlife. The findings come from a study of butterfly populations in UK landscapes by scientists at the Universities of Leeds and York. They found that organic farms have more butterflies than conventional farms, but that a conventional farm plus an area specifically managed for wildlife could support more butterflies, and produce the same amount of food, from the same area of land. ...

Cockroaches could be more of a health benefit than a health hazard according to scientists from The University of Nottingham. Experts from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science have discovered powerful antibiotic properties in the brains of cockroaches and locusts which could lead to novel treatments for multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. They found that the tissues of the brain and nervous system of the insects were able to kill more than 90 per cent of MRSA and pathogenic Escherichia coli, without harming human cells. Simon Lee, a postgraduate researcher ...

In 2009, newly installed photovoltaic (PV) cells world-wide produced a peak amount of electricity estimated at 7.4 GW, out of which 5.8 GW was located in Europe. Similarly to previous years, this shows the EU's dominance, where more than three quarters of the world's new solar systems were installed. By the end of 2009, Europe's cumulative installed PV electricity generation capacity (existing and newly installed) was 16 GW, which is about 70% of the world's total (22GW). These are just some of the findings of the ninth annual Photovoltaics Status Report published today ...

Stockholm, 6 September, 2010 - Inflammation is associated with lower intelligence and premature death, according to Swedish scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. "Those with low-grade inflammation performed more poorly on standardised intelligence tests, even after excluding those with signs of current illness. Inflammation also predicted an increased risk of premature death," said lead researcher Dr Hakan Karlsson. The research, recently published in Brain, Behavior and Immunity (August, 24:868-873), used large population-based registers containing ...

London, UK (September 6th, 2010) – Discussions about end of life practices in Germany have been almost taboo for over half a century, but now intense debate is underway as professional bodies review their guidelines to physicians caring for the dying. A new study out today in Palliative Medicine, published by SAGE, reveals that German physicians do hasten death in some cases, against current ethical guidelines - sometimes without sufficient patient involvement. In light of the recent publication of a survey on German physicians attitudes towards end of life practices ...

Jerusalem – September 6, 2010 – A researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, together with Israeli and foreign collaborators, has revealed how physical qualities -- and not only chemical ones – may have an influence in determining how adult stem cells from the bone marrow develop into differentiated ones. This represents an important step in understanding the mechanisms that direct and regulate the specialization of stem cells from their undefined state. Scientists around the world are involved in studying, describing and even manipulating the development of ...

GRACE The melting of the ice caps has been charted since 2002 using the measurements produced by the two GRACE satellites. From space they detect small changes in the Earth's gravitational field. These changes are related to the exact distribution of mass on Earth, including ice and water. When ice melts and lands in the sea, this therefore has an effect on the gravitational field. Gigatonnes Based on this principle, previous estimates for the Greenland ice cap calculated that the ice was melting at a rate of 230 gigatonnes a year (i.e. 230,000 billion kg). That would ...

Employees who have control over the design and layout of their workspace are not only happier and healthier — they're also up to 32% more productive, according to new research from the University of Exeter in the UK. Studies by the University's School of Psychology have revealed the potential for remarkable improvements in workers' attitudes to their jobs by allowing them to personalise their offices. The findings challenge the conventional approach taken by most companies, where managers often create a 'lean' working environment that reflects a standardized corporate ...

Children as young as four weeks old are being fed a poor diet of biscuits, ice-cream and soft drinks, according to new Australian research. A study published in the journal Nutrition & Dietetics found some month-old babies had been introduced to high fat, salt and sugar foods, despite health authorities recommending exclusive breastfeeding to six months of age. Researcher Jane Scott and colleagues tracked 587 women from two Perth maternity hospitals through regular phone interviews for 12 months to understand how the new mothers fed their babies. "Almost one in ...