Teijin Aramid and Avantium announced today that they have entered into an R&D partnership to explore high-performance polymers. The partnership builds on Teijin Aramid's world leading position of polyaramids and Avantium's catalytic technology for producing building blocks for green materials and fuels. Avantium is a research and technology company that is unlocking a new generation of biobased chemical building blocks, under the brand name YXY. The companies will work together to explore the properties and commercial potential of high-performance polymers containing ...

iSCSI SAN expert Qsan will showcase its 10GbE iSCSI storage solutions at VMworld Europe 2010. Qsan P500Q high availability systems are VMware ready and embedded with advanced data protection features including QSnap writeable snapshot, volume cloning, and QReplica remote replication. It is also able to achieve higher IOPS than VMware can support which is great for virtualization and cloud applications; with up to 220K IOPS, IT administrators can install multiple VMware ESX servers in a shared Qsan storage system without performance impact. The VMware ESX servers can ...

After a month-long search and poring over thousands of entries, Whataburger announces the winners in its "Tell Us Why You're Our Biggest Fan" online contest, launched in August in celebration of the Southern burger icon's 60th Anniversary. Carol and Karl Hoepfner of Rockport, Texas, who have been customers since 1963 and enjoy breakfast together daily at their local Whataburger, are the grand prize winners and will receive a prize package worth more than $10,000, including gift cards for "60 Years of Free Whataburger." In their winning entry, the Hoepfners wrote, ...

InfoTech, a leading technology provider in the Government and Financial and Media industries based in New York, New York with offices in Minot, North Dakota, announces the release of its new Mobile Research Library Access for iPad/iPhone software application to the financial industry. The newly released application fully leverages the benefits provided by the iPad/iPhone mobile computing platform including: - Provides a major competitive edge to users of the application over the competition. - Allows fast and convenient access to the clients' latest research data. - ...

Today the National Association of Construction Contractors Cooperation (NACCC), a nonprofit 501-C-3 Corporation headquartered in Kansas City, Mo., launches the nation's first National Registry of HUD Section 3 Certified Business Concerns. The National Registry, accessible online at www.NACCCUSA.org, will enable governmental agencies, housing developers and general contractors constructing HUD Section 3 covered housing projects the ability to easily locate and authenticate business concerns claiming Section 3 Certification. For the first time in the 42-year history of ...

With the worrying rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs like MRSA, scientists from a wide range of disciplines are teaming up to identify alternative therapies to keep them at bay. One long-considered solution is the use of lytic enzymes which attack bacteria by piercing their cell walls. Lytic enzymes are proteins that are naturally present in viruses, bacteria and in body fluids such as tears, saliva and mucus. However, until now, largely ad-hoc methods have been used to calculate the enzymes' killing abilities. New research published tomorrow, Monday 4 October, ...

The exploration vessel Nautilus, with a team of experts of the University of Haifa's Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, headed by Prof. Zvi Ben Avraham, discovered for the first time an area of reefs with deep-sea corals in the Mediterranean, offshore of Israel. This area apparently stretches over a few kilometers, 700 meters under the surface and some 30-40 km off the coast of Tel Aviv. According to the researchers, this southeastern region of the Mediterranean has only sparse sea life and therefore the discovery is in fact parallel to discovering an oasis in ...

Tucked within its double-helix structure, DNA contains the chemical blueprint that guides all the processes that take place within the cell and are essential for life. Therefore, repairing damage and maintaining the integrity of its DNA is one of the cell's highest priorities. Researchers at Vanderbilt University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a fundamentally new way that DNA-repair enzymes detect and fix damage to the chemical bases that form the letters in the genetic code. The discovery is reported in an advanced online ...

SAN FRANCISCO – Interactive gaming devices can cause a broad range of injuries, from abrasions and sprains to shoulder, ankle and foot injuries, according to research presented Monday, Oct. 4, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco. While relatively new, interactive gaming devices, such as Nintendo Wii, are tremendously popular. They differ from traditional video games in that they require participants to physically mime the movements of a particular sport or activity while competing against a real or computer-generated ...

SAN FRANCISCO – Implementing a Medical Home practice model in a health clinic allows physicians and staff to provide comprehensive care to more patients, and to offer preventive programs and services. This can improve patients' compliance with their doctors' recommendations and reduce emergency room visits and hospital admissions, according to research presented Monday, Oct. 4, 2010, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco. The study, "Doing Well by Doing Good," outlines the evolution of a federally qualified health ...

SAN FRANCISCO – New mothers who smoke are less likely to breastfeed. But those who quit smoking during or just prior to becoming pregnant were significantly more likely to remain smoke free and continue breastfeeding if they received support and encouragement during the first eight weeks following child birth, according to a study presented Monday, Oct. 4, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco. Mothers who smoke are more than twice as likely to quit breastfeeding before their child is 10 weeks old, and more than ...

SAN FRANCISCO – While more American mothers are breastfeeding today, non-Hispanic Black/African American women are less likely to initiate and continue breastfeeding, primarily due to a lack of desire and lack of self-efficacy, according to research presented Monday, Oct. 4, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco. Fifty-four percent of black women initiate breastfeeding, compared to the 73 percent national average. In the study, "Barriers to Breastfeeding Reported by Exclusively Formula Feeding Mothers," urban ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – New research shows how old people are when they first develop Parkinson's disease is one of many clues in how long they'll survive with the disease. The research is published in the October 5, 2010, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The 12-year study included 230 people with Parkinson's disease, of whom 211 died by the end of the research. "Remarkably, time to death for these people took anywhere from two to 37 years from diagnosis so it's important we try to identify those risk factors that lead to ...

Cutting back on sleep reduces the benefits of dieting, according to a study published October 5, 2010, in the Annals of Internal Medicine. When dieters in the study got a full night's sleep, they lost the same amount of weight as when they slept less. When dieters got adequate sleep, however, more than half of the weight they lost was fat. When they cut back on their sleep, only one-fourth of their weight loss came from fat. They also felt hungrier. When sleep was restricted, dieters produced higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger and reduces energy ...

Acute herpes zoster, or shingles, interferes with all health areas for people with the condition, including sleep, enjoyment of life and general activities, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj091711.pdf. Herpes zoster is a reactivation of the chicken pox (varicella-zoster) virus which results in pain and a rash with small blisters. It occurs in people who have had chicken pox and is most common in people over the age of 50, although younger people can have the condition. ...

Better psychological and spiritual support, better planning of care and stronger relationships with physicians are necessary to improve end-of-life care in Canada, states a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj100131.pdf. The study, a questionnaire that aimed to measure satisfaction with end-of-life care for patients with advanced diseases and their families, involved 363 patients over 55 years of age and 193 family caregivers. The patients, located in cities in British Columbia, Ontario, ...

It is time to phase out the use of codeine as a pain reliever because of its significant risks and ineffectiveness as an analgesic, states an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj101411.pdf. Although codeine has been used for pain relief for more than 200 years, it has never been subjected to the rigorous regulatory and safety requirements applied to all new drugs and its pharmacokinetics are unpredictable. Genetic variations in patients can mean very different responses to codeine, some with serious ...

A group of researchers at the University of Bristol have sequestered the potentially fatal breath holding episodes associated with the autistic-spectrum disorder Rett syndrome. Rett syndrome is a developmental disorder of the brain that affects around 1 in10,000 young girls. One of the worse clinical disorders is the intermittent episodes of breath holding, putting the patient at risk of asphyxiation and further brain damage. Other disorders include repetitive hand movements, digestive and bowel problems, seizures, learning disability with lack of verbal skills and social ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- In a warming 21st century, tropical forests will be at risk from a variety of threats, especially the conversion to cropland to sustain a growing population. A new report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition shows that crop productivity improvements and carbon emission limits together could prevent widespread tropical deforestation over the next 100 years -- but if relying on either one alone, the world is at risk of losing many of its tropical forests. "We're often concerned with agriculture encroaching on ...

October 5, 2010 – Radiation therapy is used to treat more than half of all cancer cases, but patient response to therapy can vary greatly. Genetics is increasingly being recognized as a significant contributor to inter-individual response to radiation, but the biology underlying response remains poorly understood. In a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), researchers employed a pharmacogenomics approach to find biomarkers associated with radiation response that could help to more effectively tailor individual cancer treatments in the future. Response ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Family-based therapy, in which parents of adolescents with anorexia nervosa are enlisted to interrupt their children's disordered behaviors, is twice as effective as individual psychotherapy at producing full remission of the disease, new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the University of Chicago shows. The study is the first head-to-head comparison of these two common treatment approaches for adolescents suffering from the eating disorder. "This research was desperately needed," said James ...

An anorexia nervosa treatment strategy that promotes parental involvement in restoring an adolescent to healthy weight and eating habits is more effective than traditional individual-based anorexia nervosa therapy, according to new research. The study, published online October 4 in Archives of General Psychiatry, is the first randomized clinical trial to definitively demonstrate that family based treatment, also known as the Maudsley Approach, is the treatment of choice for this patient population. More than 50 percent of patients receiving family based treatment (FBT) ...

Re-opening a blocked heart artery isn't the only procedure that concerns doctors when they thread instruments through an opening in a thigh artery and into a heart artery. Closing up the thigh artery is also a concern. Arteriotomy — the process of creating a hole in an "access artery" through which instruments are inserted — is the first step in procedures like angiography (to visualize blockage in the heart or neck arteries) or percutaneous coronary intervention (to re-open blocked heart arteries). A new statement from the American Heart Association addresses the use ...

According to a consensus statement by the International Society on Hypertension in Blacks (ISHIB), high blood pressure in African-Americans is such a serious health problem that treatment should start sooner and be more aggressive. The ISHIB statement is published in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association. Complications related to high blood pressure such as stroke, heart failure and kidney damage occur much more frequently in African-Americans compared with whites. "Evidence from several recently completed studies converged to convince our committee ...

San Diego, CA, October 5, 2010 – Influenza pandemics often come in multiple waves. As the one wave subsides, public health officials have to decide whether continuing vaccination programs is warranted to prevent or reduce a subsequent wave. In a new study published in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers report on a new computer model that can be used to predict both subsequent-wave mechanisms and vaccination effectiveness. They conclude that additional waves in an epidemic can be mitigated by vaccination even when an epidemic appears ...