Recent Entries
Mar 12, 2010 Business, Economy
Preserving your priceless memories is really the heart of why most people are looking for the best quality film transfer. Well, with the evolution of 8mm film to DVD you’ll be able to shoot photos of everything from any momentous occasions in your lives to the beauty of the every day. Many of us store old photographs of our ancestors that have been handed down through the generations. They’re fragile, possibly damaged and we may not really know what to do with them, but do know we want to preserve them, and thus our family history.
While probably some people may have difficulty with the decision-making process to choose which memorable photos or clippings they want to store, yet they find their selves not able to get rid of those they didn’t want to. Especially, those long walks along the beach and waves keep on crashing the shore. The clinking of wine glasses as the sun sets, toasting tomorrow or, if you’re lucky, the green flash on the horizon. After all, they’re still precious and so that’s where film to DVD video conversion experts comes into play. They offer restoration services to help people preserve their photos, old 8mm film, and video tape looks like when it was first made.
Towards this process, whether you’re an expert or just starting out, you’ve invested a lot of emotion, not to mention your time, money and effort. So preserve your priceless work by digitally transferring your FILM TO DVD, slides or video tape. Though this may likely be an expensive undertaking, but remember that what we are talking here is about preserving priceless memories that cannot be replaced. Thus, if you are looking for reliable and professional motion picture film scanners, and you want to see what it is capable of then you are at the right place. You can feel confident in giving them a try since they guarantee your 100% satisfaction!.
Mar 12, 2010 Fruits & Vegetables, Health & Fitness
Study: Men with higher intake 25 percent less likely to die over 10 years
Getting a bit more calcium in your diet could help you live longer, new research suggests.
Swedish researchers found that men who consumed the most calcium in food were 25 percent less likely to die over the next decade than their peers who took in the least calcium from food. None of the men took calcium supplements.
The findings are in line with previous research linking higher calcium intake with lower mortality in both men and women, the researchers point out in a report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
While many researchers have looked at calcium and magnesium intake and the risk of chronic disease, less is known about the association between consumption of these nutrients in food and mortality.
To investigate, Dr. Joanna Kaluza of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and her colleagues looked at more than 23,000 Swedish men who were 45 to 79 years old at the study’s outset and were followed for 10 years. All had reported on their diet at the beginning of the study. During follow-up, about 2,358 died.
The top calcium consumers had a 25 percent lower risk of dying from any cause and a 23 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease during follow-up relative to men that had the least amount of calcium in their diet. Calcium intake didn’t significantly influence the risk of dying from cancer.
Men in the top third based on their calcium intake were getting nearly 2,000 milligrams a day, on average, compared to about 1,000 milligrams for men in the bottom third. The US Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for calcium intake is 1,000 milligrams for men 19 to 50 years old and 1,200 milligrams for men 50 and over.
“Intake of calcium above that recommended daily may reduce all-cause mortality,” Kaluza and her colleagues conclude.
Calcium could influence mortality risk in many ways, they note, for example by reducing blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar levels. For the men in the study, the main sources of calcium in the diet were milk and milk products and cereal products.
In contrast to calcium, there was no relationship between magnesium consumption and overall mortality or deaths from cancer or heart disease. Study participants’ intakes ranged from around 400 milligrams per day to around 525 milligrams; the RDA for magnesium is 420 milligrams for men 31 and older.
This analysis, the researchers say, may have found no effect for magnesium because all of the men in the study seemed to be getting enough of the mineral in their diet. “Further studies are needed in other populations with lower dietary magnesium intakes to address this issue,” they say.
Future research should also look into calcium and magnesium intake from drinking water, they add, which can be a significant source of these minerals. MSNBC
Mar 11, 2010 Disease, Medicines
Women’s responsiveness to the second-line breast cancer drug fulvestrant may depend on whether the cancer cells are expressing two key proteins, Indiana University Bloomington scientists report in this month’s Cancer Biology & Therapy.
Fulvestrant appeared to exert maximum anti-cancer effects in vitro when cells produced normal or elevated quantities of the cytokeratins CK8 and CK18, structural proteins that help give the nucleus its shape.
For fulvestrant to work well, the cells must also be responsive to estrogen, and producing the estrogen receptor ER-alpha. ER-alpha’s importance to fulvestrant’s anti-estrogenic action had been established in previous reports. The present study confirms fulvestrant’s binding relationship to ER-alpha, while also showing two other proteins, cytokeratins 8 and 18, can strongly enhance fulvestrant’s anti-estrogenic activity. Testing for the presence of these three proteins, and perhaps many others, could help doctors decide whether fulvestrant should be prescribed to their patients.
“We need an effective panel of markers that inform physicians about what treatment options will be most beneficial to patients,” said Medical Sciences Program Bloomington cancer biologist Kenneth Nephew, who led the study. “These three gene products should be investigated further to determine whether they should be included in that panel.”
Medical Sciences Program Bloomington is a division of the IU School of Medicine. Nephew is a professor of cellular and integrative physiology, and obstetrics and gynecology.
“Normal” breast cancer cells can grow faster in the presence of estrogen, a hormone. Estrogen attaches to receptors embedded in the cancer cell, such as ER-alpha in the cytoplasm and nucleus. The estrogen-ER complex can then act to turn on genes or amplify their expression. Not all cancer cells are responsive to estrogen, however, or to fulvestrant, which counteracts estrogen’s effects.
Although fulvestrant has been used to treat cancer since the late 1980s, and is now commonly prescribed as a second-line defense against metastatic cancer cells, how the drug works is still not completely understood. Nephew said one of the aims of the research is to clarify fulvestrant’s biochemistry, and understand why cancer cells eventually become unresponsive to the drug.
Second-line breast cancer therapies are employed when first-line approaches (tamoxifen, for example) don’t work or stop working.
After conducting analyses of different cell lines and assaying gene and protein activity, Nephew, Xinghua Long (now a faculty member at Jiangnan University), and Meiyun Fan (now an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Memphis) believe they are able to present a compelling model for fulvestrant’s action. The scientists believe that when fulvestrant encounters ER-alpha and binds to the receptor, the receptor forms a two-protein complex either with another ER-alpha — or with ER-beta, a related but different estrogen receptor. The alpha-alpha or alpha-beta “dimer” is then removed to the nuclear matrix, where it binds to CK8 and CK18. It’s the binding of ER-alpha to the nuclear matrix that would seem to signal protein-killing proteases to destroy ER-alpha. As the number of available estrogen receptors plummets, the connection between estrogen and cancer-related gene activity is weakened, and estrogen can no longer contribute to the growth of cancer cells.
Because many drug treatments can have a severely negative impact on quality of life, Nephew said fulvestrant and other cancer drugs should only be prescribed when their use is associated with a reasonable chance of successful outcomes. However, compared to frequently prescribed endocrine treatments for advanced disease like tamoxifen, anastrozole, letrozole and exemestane, fulvestrant is well tolerated. If biopsied cancer cells can be shown beforehand to be resistant or unresponsive to fulvestrant, the doctor may prevent some of the commonly reported side effects seen with the drug.
Nephew said that it wouldn’t be easy for physicians to simply order a separate test that analyzes biopsied tissue for the presence of CK8 and CK18.
“It would require a few things a typical hospital doesn’t have on hand,” Nephew said. “But we’re currently investigating how to do that. We also need to be able to show that the expression of the two cytokeratins can be prognostic of fulvestrant’s effectiveness. To that end we are talking with George Sledge at the Indianapolis campus about the feasibility of clinical studies. That would be the next step.”
George Sledge Jr. is the Ballve-Lantero Professor of Hematology/Oncology at the IU School of Medicine’s Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center.
When the study was conducted, report coauthors Xinghua Long and Meiyun Fan were at IU Bloomington as a Ph.D. student and a postdoctoral fellow, respectively. The research was funded with grants from the National Cancer Institute’s Integrative Cancer Biology Program, the Walther Cancer Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. redOrbit
Mar 10, 2010 Health, Medical Research & Study
An experimental approach that looks for the DNA leaking out from dead and dying cells may provide a route to a blood test for breast cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
An initial study showed the test detected 70 percent of breast cancer cases, and correctly cleared 100 percent of women who did not have breast cancer, the team at Chronix Biomedical, a privately-owned company in San Jose, California, said.
The experimental test is not ready to develop into a product but provides a basis for further research, they wrote in the journal Molecular Cancer Research.
“It is based on finding the unique DNA fingerprints from dead and dying cells,” Chronix CEO Howard Urnovitz said in a telephone interview.
Technological advances in DNA sequencing made the test possible, Urnovitz said. His team sequenced the entire genomes of 26 breast cancer patients and of 67 apparently healthy women.
They were looking for extra DNA in the blood of the breast cancer patients that would come from cells dying because of the tumors.
“If a breast cell is injured, it will over express the genes that make it a breast cell,” Urnovitz said. In theory, if a patient has excess DNA from breast cells that are dying, there is something going on that is killing breast cells.
The search is not easy. “The entire genome can be found in the blood,” Urnovitz said. And billions of cells die every day in the human body.
But eventually the Chronix team found what they believe is tell-tale DNA from dying breast cells.
“This study supports the potential of an entirely new approach to identifying cancer at its earliest stages when therapies may be most effective,” Dr. William Mitchell of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, who worked on the study, said in a statement.
SCREENING AND MONITORING
“Laboratory tests using this approach may have the potential both to screen large populations for cancer before symptoms appear and to monitor patients for the recurrence of cancer once treated,” Mitchell added.
Much more testing needs to be done, Urnovitz said. But so far the test seems to specifically home in on breast cells. Unpublished data shows, for instance, that the DNA signature is not found in men with prostate cancer.
The cost of genetic sequencing will have to come down more before the test would be practical, Urnovitz added.
His team used Roche AG’s 454 sequencer at a cost of thousands of dollars per person, but companies are working to speed up sequencing and get the costs down.
The tests might be used to screen women for breast cancer and to tailor treatments, Urnovitz said.
“Imagine we can come in and say ‘you have damage to the protein kinase gene that would preclude you from these 10 cancer drugs, but here are 20 others that should work’,” he said.
“You would be selecting drug treatment based on each person’s lesions. This would be a really good example of personalized medicine.”
Urnovitz also hopes such a test could monitor patients who have completed treatment for cancer. Instead of coming to a cancer center to undergo a PET scan to check for tumors that may have returned, patients could get a blood test at their convenience and have it sent in for analysis.
“You could have one blood test for everything that is going on,” he said. Fox News
Mar 9, 2010 Business, Economy
Gold prices retreated Monday as the dollar gained against other currencies.
Other commodities were mixed. Crude oil inched up while natural gas fell on concerns about huge supplies and warmer weather in the offing.
The ICE Futures US dollar index, a closely watched gauge of the dollar against other currencies, was at 80.1 in the morning and rose as high as 80.5 during the day.
Commodities tend to move opposite to the dollar. A rising U.S. currency makes dollar-denominated commodity contracts less appealing to foreign investors.
Gold for April delivery fell 1 percent to settle at $1,124 an ounce after hovering in the $1,100-an-ounce range since Feb. 25.
“We’re getting a little bit of profit taking,” Lind-Waldock commodities analyst Rich Ilczyszyn said. “We’ve had quite a rise here in the last two to three weeks.”
Energy prices were mixed. Natural gas fell 6.6 cents to settle at $4.527 per 1,000 cubic feet on the New York Mercantile Exchange after some weather forecasts predicted warmer weather in the next several days, said Richard Feltes, MF Global commodity research director.
In other April contracts, benchmark crude for April delivery rose 37 cents to settle at $81.87 a barrel on the Nymex and heating oil rose 0.81 cent to settle at $2.1055 a gallon.
Silver for May delivery fell 11 cents to $17.272 an ounce while copper fell .007 cent to $3.4105 a pound.
In March contracts, platinum rose $21 to $1,600.10 while palladium fell $5.05 to settle at $470.35 an ounce.
Elsewhere, grains were mixed as traders await a government report due Wednesday that will update supply and demand for grains.
Wheat for May delivery gained 1.50 cents to settle at $4.95 a bushel; soybeans added 5.25 cents to $9.48 a bushel and corn fell 0.5 cent to $3.75 a bushel. By Sandy Shore , Star Tribune
Mar 8, 2010 Art, Games
Knowing where to go for your gaming needs is a key element to a positive gaming experience. If you want an uninterrupted play and unlimited fun, all you have to do is play at the comfort of your home. But first, you have to open an account with any online casinos. Anyway, these gaming sites have put together a customer service team that is available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. They can be reached by phone, email or even live chat to help questions regarding their online casino slot machines.
As you may know, there’s more to gaming than just playing games, like browsing cool websites and reading about games, watching game trailers, talking to other gamers and reading the latest game reviews. The online casino slots are also one of the newest online casinos to be open to all western players as well as players across the globe. And so, if you are looking for a new experience then this casino may just have what you are looking for.
Further, another known casino game that attracts thousands of bettors in playing at different internet casinos throughout the world is the online roulette. And what makes it outstanding and extraordinary is that it adds more pleasure and excitement than the usual roulette being played in real casinos. So, if you really want a cool site where you can create your own game trailers, besides being the best place to download premium games, then everything is within your reach.
Mar 7, 2010 Health & Fitness
Midday naps have long been touted as a good thing, lowering blood pressure and driving down the risk of heart attack. And if you snooze long enough, researchers have now found, they also permit your memory banks to do their filing, leaving your brain cleared and ready to learn in the latter half of the day.
University of California at Berkeley researchers put 39 young adults through a demanding learning task and tested on it at noon. At 2 p.m., they divided the students into two groups and invited half of them to take a siesta for 90 minutes while asking the remainder to stay awake. At 6 p.m., both groups were returned to the day’s learning task and tested again.
The siesta group went into the 6 p.m. task readier to learn and performed 10 percent better on the test than they had earlier. The no-nap group’s performance declined by 10 percent, researchers reported.
Flu shots broadened
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended recently that all Americans over 6 months — except those who are allergic to eggs — should receive a seasonal flu shot every year, beginning this fall. The CDC has been slowly broadening the recommendations for flu shots over the past few years to the point where about 85 percent of the population is now covered. The primary exception now is adults 19 to 49 who do not have underlying medical conditions.
Little on lactose woes
The National Institutes of Health recently convened a panel of experts to reach a consensus on what is known about lactose intolerance. Their consensus: There is no consensus. It is a real condition, but there are no good numbers for its incidence, little is known about its effects on health and even less is known about potential treatments.
Lactose is the primary sugar in all mammalian milk, including human milk. Virtually all babies are born with enzymes, called lactases, in their intestines that digest lactose, turning it into a form that can be used by the body. But beginning at about 5 or 6, many children, particularly those of African and Asian ancestry, begin to lose the ability to digest the sugar. If they continue drinking milk and eating dairy products afterward, bacteria in the gut often ferment the sugar, producing diarrhea, abdominal pain, flatulence and bloating.
Surprisingly, there are no good estimates of how many people have the problem, and the panel didn’t try to make one.
“A lot of people who think they have lactose intolerance don’t,” said Dr. Frederick Suchy of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, chair of the panel. Star Tribune
Mar 6, 2010 Business, Economy, Investments
Almost all consumers around the world today have noticed that prices for goods and services have been skyrocketed. And as such, there is a misconception about it, but the truth of the matter is that prices have remained nearly the same in precious metals terms. It is the value of the dollar in the gold market that has declined and because of such; it now simply takes more dollars to buy the same products as compared before.
Nevertheless, most of us if not all have been experiencing unfortunate condition as the state of the world economy is so uncertain now. Though some people don’t care of what is going on in the market today, but you shouldn’t be one of them. Instead, take a closer look of how much interest does your money earn when switching it with gold money rather than having it deposited in a bank.
In a nutshell, it is on this context that lots of people were now looking forward to assimilate things because of the safety factors with the rarity value of gold ounce that ends up being one of the most important, and becomes even more important. Well after all, anticipating things in a way that would be beneficial to you and your family is an investment-wise. And having such would be favorable on your part in case a monetary breakdown happens. So better act now and got a solid asset that you don’t have in paper. After all, they are a wise purchase.
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An extract from dried papaya slows the growth of cancer cells in the laboratory, researchers report.
