GENEVA For 52 years, Cole Travel Service arranged tours and vacations all over the world, but especially for folks traveling to Norway, Sweden, Denmark and other Scandinavian countries.

We did Scandinavian travel all over the U.S., said Barbara Cox, who managed the travel agency for 28 years. We are the ones to call for Scandinavian travel. We did so good for so many years. But in the last six years, there was a huge slow down. We still did Scandinavia travel, which is what we specialized in, but it was not enough to keep the business going.

Cox said she would retire now that Cole Travel, at 310 W. State St. in Geneva, will close June 1.

The travel agency shares the same space with The Gift Box, specializing in Scandinavian imports, which will stay open.

Gift Box manager Jane Gaffney said the travel agency space likely would be made into the Christmas room to hold specialty holiday items.

We sell Swedish coffee, medium and dark Arvid Nordquist brand and Lofbergs Lila, Gaffney said. We have chocolate, candies, cookies, Bing and Grondahl and Royal Copenhagen Blue plates. We also serve glogg during the Christmas walk, which we make ourselves from a recipe from the 1700s. And we also carry lutefisk once a year at Christmas.

Lutefisk is a traditional Nordic dish of dried salted whitefish saturated with lye.

The travel agencys original owner, Edythe Anderson, opened the business in 1960 as an additional service to customers of the Gift Box, which opened in 1947.

The current owner, Lennart Jonsson, contributed to the success of both businesses because of his extensive knowledge of Scandinavian countries.

An immigrant from Sweden, Lennart, 87, of St. Charles, said it was unfortunate the travel agency could not support itself any longer.

See original here:

Cole Travel in Geneva closes after 52 years

Do you want to travel the world, but are afraid you dont have enough money? Are you nervous about the unknowns of traveling? Sampson California Realty will be hosting a free special event and book signing on Plan Your Escape: How To Travel the World For Less Than the Cost of Living at Home on Thursday, May 31, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Sampson California Realty office at 12702 Via Cortina, Suite 101 in Del Mar. Wayne and Pat Dunlap, a Del Mar couple, rented their home and traveled the world for two years, visiting 51 countries. As a result of their travels, they wrote a book called Plan Your Escape: Secrets of Traveling the World for Less Than the Cost of Living at Home. This step-by-step guide to traveling the world gets people exploring possibilities they never thought of, said Wayne Dunlap. During this fabulous evening, you will learn how to safely realize and afford your travel dreams for trips from a weekend getaway to a month or more.

Wayne Dunlap, a former economics professor and experienced world traveler and his travel partner and wife, Pat Dunlap, will discuss powerful cost-saving tips, including proven secrets the travel industry does not want you to know. Learn how to get the best deals on airfare, hotels, tours, car rentals, restaurants, cruises and more. To register for this event, contact SCR at 858-699-1145 or via email at info@scr-sandiego.com.

Short URL: http://www.ranchosantafereview.com/?p=10079

Read the original here:

Sampson California Realty to host special event on ‘How To Travel The World For Less Than The Cost of Living at Home’

Tourists who want a taste of the Philippines will be spoiled for choice, with tasty dishes from adobo to pinikpikan. But for the busy traveler, perhaps a meal of Chickenjoy or palabok will do just the trick.

The famous Chickenjoy. Laurel Fantauzzo

The list released in May 2012 includes maritime-themed chain Nordsee in Germany, noodle chain Mr. Lee in China, and street snack chain Old Chang Kee in Singapore.

At Jollibee, fast food gets a Filipino twistthe burgers come with a sweet, creamy sauce and the spaghetti comes with hotdogs. But it’s the fried chicken and local noodle dish that star in Travel and Leisure’s list.

“There are more than 700 locations across the country, serving everything from fried chicken and hamburgers to local favorites like palabok, rice noodles with meat sauce, shrimp, and hard-boiled egg,” they say, recommending the Spicy Chickenjoy.

According to Travel and Leisure, “fast-food chains aren’t exactly hidden gems…but they have their own quirky appeal and dish out a quick fix of local culture and cuisine.”

Link:

Travel magazine lists Jollibee among the world's best fast-food chains

Read more:

Online Travel Grows in China: An Interview with Tuniu CEO Donald Yu

(MoneyWatch) Life in the U.S. in the debris of the Great Recession is slowly beginning to improve. Consumer confidence, while still sensitive to trouble signs (Greece, anyone?), is creeping up. One sure sign: More American are taking vacations. According to recent data from the U.S. Office of Travel and Tourism Industries(OTTI), 8.1 million people traveled abroad in the first two months of the year. That’s a six percent increase over the same time period in 2011.

Americans who want to travel internationally but not contend with Europe’s unfavorable exchange rate are turning to less expensive destinations. Through February, travel to Central American had risen 25 percent and was up 11 percent to Asia, according to OTTI. Along with affordability, increased travel to these parts of the world was driven partly by the many tourist-friendly cities in the regions.

Most affordable places to retire

TheUN World Tourism Organization(UNWTO) reports that Thailand is quickly becoming a go-to tourist destination. It’s the most popular country in Southeast Asia for international travelers and last year came in as the No. 11 country in the world as ranked by tourism receipts. Malaysia was No. 14 and Singapore No. 15

According to UNWTO, Thailand was one of five international destinations whose tourism receipts grew by more than $5 billion in 2011. The other four countries who saw a similar jump in tourism were the U.S., Spain, France, and Hong Kong.

Although a growing number of Americans are traveling to Latin America and Asia, Europe remains the most popular destination, with travel to the region up 9 percent in the first two months of the year. It’s not just U.S. tourists flocking to Europe — despite its economic woes, Europe draws the largest share of global tourism, at 45 percent. Tourism brought $463 billion into the European economy in 2011.

If Europe as a whole is the most popular region for travel, the U.S. is easily the world’s most visited country as ranked by how much foreign travelers spend. The U.S. last year brought in more than $116 billion in tourism receipts, nearly double second-place Spain ($59.3 billion), according to UNWTO. France ($53.8 billion), China ($58.5 billion), and Italy ($43 billion round out the top five.

United Nations World Tourism Barometer Top destinations by international tourism receipts (based on 2011 data)

See the original post:

World's top 15 travel destinations

Cell surface protein blows potent cells cover; targeted drug works in preclinical tests

Newswise HOUSTON Breast cancer stem cells wear a cell surface protein that is part nametag and part bulls eye, identifying them as potent tumor-generating cells and flagging their vulnerability to a drug, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report online in Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Weve discovered a single marker for breast cancer stem cells and also found that its targetable with a small molecule drug that inhibits an enzyme crucial to its synthesis, said co-senior author Michael Andreeff, M.D., Ph.D., professor in MD Andersons Departments of Leukemia and Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy.

Andreeff and colleagues are refining the drug as a potential targeted therapy for breast cancer stem cells, which are thought to be crucial to therapy resistance, disease progression and spread to other organs.

Its been difficult to identify cancer stem cells in solid tumors, Andreeff said. And nobody has managed to target these cells very well.

The marker is the cell surface protein ganglioside GD2. The drug is triptolide, an experimental drug that Andreeff has used in preclinical leukemia research. The team found triptolide blocks expression of GD3 synthase, which is essential to GD2production.

Triptolide stymied cancer growth in cell line experiments and resulted in smaller tumors and prolonged survival in mouse experiments. Drug development for human trials probably will take several years.

Cancer stem cells are similar to normal stem cells

Research in several types of cancer has shown cancer stem cells are a small subpopulation of cancer cells that are capable of long-term self-renewal and generation of new tumors. More recent research shows they resist treatment and promote metastasis.

Cancer stem cells are similar to normal stem cells that renew specialized tissues. The breast cancer findings grew out of Andreeffs long-term research in mesenchymal stem cells, which can divide into one copy of themselves and one differentiated copy of a bone, muscle, fat or cartilage cell.

Read more:

Scientists Discover Marker to Identify, Attack Breast Cancer Stem Cells

Read the rest here:

QualityStocks News – International Stem Cell Scientists to Present Pre-Clinical Research Results at Gene and Cell …

Public release date: 15-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Elisa Williams willieli@ohsu.edu 503-494-4530 Oregon Health & Science University

PORTLAND, Ore. Multiple myeloma patients are better equipped to halt progression of this blood cancer if treated with lenalidomide, or Revlimid, following a stem cell transplant, according to a study co-authored by a physician with the Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found a 63 percent reduction in the risk of progressive myeloma or death for the stem cell transplant patients that were treated with lenalidomide maintenance therapy.

“These results add to the evidence that the combination of standard therapies such as stem cell transplantation with the emerging biologic therapies, like lenalidomide, have extended the lives of multiple myeloma patients,” said Richard Maziarz, M.D., of the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute who was one of the study’s co-authors. Maziarz serves as medical director of the Adult Stem Cell Transplantation Program & Center for Hematologic Malignancies at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. “We know that for at least three years following a transplant that maintenance therapy with this drug vastly improves the chances that the cancer won’t come back and worsen.”

These data were supported by similar Phase III studies reported from France and Italy in the same issue of the New England Jounal of Medicine demonstrating that maintenance therapy after stem cell transplantation was associated with improved disease control.

Multiple myeloma is a cancer that affects plasma cells, a type of white blood cell normally responsible for producing antibodies. In patients impacted by multiple myeloma, collections of abnormal plasma cells accumulate in the bone marrow, interfering with the production of normal blood cells. The study focused on patients who received an autologous hematopoietic cell transplant (AHCT). AHCT procedures use patients’ own blood stem cells.

While lenalidomide increased a patient’s ability to stave off progression of the disease, questions remain regarding future approaches recognizing that quality of life measurements were not incorporated within these studies, that long-term safety issues remain unclear as there was a small but discernable risk of second cancers observed in the treated patients. In addition to the need for that cost-benefit analysis, a comparison remains to be performed with other emerging myeloma maintenance therapies.

This Phase III study of lenalidomide was conducted at 47 medical centers and involved 568 patients. It was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Revlimid’s manufacturer, Celgene Corp., provided the NCI with lenalidomide for this research.

###

Continue reading here:

Lenalidomide prolongs disease control for multiple myeloma patients after stem cell transplant

Veterinarians hope a new medical procedure can treat a 25-year-old chimpanzee with a torn ACL, or anterior cruciate ligament, at the “Save the Chimps” in Florida.

The procedure involves injecting the chimp with her own stem cells.

“With chimps we don’t want to do a lot of surgical work, put hardware in their knee, they tend to pull out that sort of thing,” said Veterinarian Linda Gregard, M.D.

Dr. Darrell Nazareth with the Florida Veterinary League has been using stem cells to treat dogs with arthritis for the past two years, but this is his first chimp.

“We’re not using embryonic stem cells, we’re not taking embryos and taking their stem cells from there. We’re just using the patient’s own tissue,” said Dr. Nazareth.

The technology harnesses the bodies own ability to heal itself and doctors hope it could find wider use in humans.

After injecting two billion stem cells into Angie’s knee, doctors will find out in the next two to three weeks if the stem cell therapy treatment was successful.

Continued here:

Stem cell therapy to treat a chimp's torn ACL may prove beneficial for humans

Read more here:

Be Part of a Movement that Is Transforming Medicine, Psychology and Spirituality

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn5l9_HpCj0

See the article here:

#58 2012 Psychic Spiritual Enlightenment – kirk’s channel "Safe" to be "Present" 5/15 – Video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV7pE0w9Isc

More:

Lynne Herod-DeVerges – Beginning the Journey – Video

An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station early Thursday, kicking off a four-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin docked with the space station at 12:36 a.m. ET Thursday as the two spacecraft soared 249 miles above the border between Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

More space news from msnbc.com

Science editor Alan Boyle’s blog: Astronomers are taking a long, deep look at one of the best-known galaxies beyond our own Milky Way, to learn more about what happened when it gobbled up another agglomeration of stars that got too close.

“Everything went very smoothly, very well,” Padalka radioed the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Mission Control Center in Moscow just after docking.

For Acaba, the docking came as a welcome birthday present to mark his 45th birthday, NASA commentator Rob Navias said.

The three spacefliers were due to float into the orbiting lab’s hatch overnight, bringing the station back up to its full crew of six. Their fellow Expedition 31 crew members NASA’s Don Pettit, Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko have had the $100 billion orbiting complex to themselves since April 27.

Acaba, Padalka and Revin launched Monday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They were originally scheduled to blast off on March 29, but a botched pressure test cracked their Soyuz capsule, causing a six-week delay while another spacecraft was readied. [See Spectacular Soyuz Launch Photos]

A four-month space stay The three new arrivals will live and work aboard the space station for four months, returning to Earth in mid-September. All will serve as flight engineers under Kononenko, the commander of the Expedition 31 mission.

Kononenko, Pettit and Kuipers boarded the orbiting lab in late December and are scheduled to depart on July 1.

Original post:

US-Russian crew arrives at space station

View post:

SpaceX's 1st Private Capsule Launch to Space Station: How It Will Work

View post:

New US-Russian Crew Arrives at Space Station

The College of Education at Texas Tech announced a NASA astronaut has been accepted to its doctoral program in education. Joseph Acaba launched May 14 for a four-month tour of duty aboard the Russian Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft as part of the team for Mission 31/32 to the International Space Station.

He also has been accepted to Texas Tech’s new Blended Delivery Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with Specialization in Science Education for the cohort starting this fall.

Follow Acaba’s mission via Twitter and a blog. Texas Tech Provost Bob Smith was delighted to learn that the College of Education has successfully recruited a second U.S. astronaut to be a Red Raider.

“When we hired our first Red Raider astronaut, Dean Al Sacco Jr., we underestimated the benefits his appointment would bring to Texas Tech,” Smith said.

“We understand that Dean Sacco did play a role in recruiting astronaut Acaba to Texas Tech. Also, we know that both astronauts Acaba and Sacco have a passion for education of youth in science, engineering and technology.

“Our collective hope is that our Red Raider astronauts will be reaching greater numbers of young learners as astronaut Acaba joins us and progresses in his program.”

Acaba will take classes online in his own personal time after he returns from the mission, said Walter Smith, Helen DeVitt Jones Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and advisor for the doctoral program. The nature of the online classes allows for flexibility.

“Joe has outstanding experience as a science teacher and seasoned astronaut,” Walter Smith said. “He’s joining a cohort of exceptional educators who already possess exemplary science education credentials and will make a difference in the world as a result of their Texas Tech doctorate.”

Raised in Anaheim, Calif., Acaba earned a bachelor’s in geology from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1990 and a master’s in geology from the University of Arizona in 1992. Acaba was selected as a mission specialist by NASA in 2004 and completed Astronaut Candidate Training in 2006.

Juan Munoz, Texas Tech’s vice provost for Undergraduate Education, vice president for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement has known Acaba for more than 25 years, as a schoolmate, a U.S. Marine, a teacher, and now NASA astronaut.

Read this article:

Astronaut Launches into Texas Tech Doctorate Program

Read the original post:

The Learning Network Blog: Entrepreneurial Space Flight: The Latest Frontier

NOFBX Green Propulsion Demonstration Passes ISS Safety Review

Innovative Space Propulsion Systems (ISPS) has passed another critical milestone in their progress toward the launch of their NOFBX green propulsion demonstration to the International Space Station (ISS). ISPS is working toward demonstrating their high-performance, non-toxic and environmentally-benign propulsion technology on the ISS under an award from the NASA ISS National Laboratory program. In April, ISPS passed NASAs ISS Payload Safety Review Panel phase 1 review.

Satisfying the safety panel is an incredibly high bar for any new technology, said Greg Mungas, President of ISPS. Safety is obviously paramount for the space station and this review panel has been thorough and uncompromising in their scrutiny of every technical aspect of our demonstration.

The ISPS NOFBX Green Propellant Demonstration involves launching a deep-throttling 440 N (100-lbf) engine assembly and associated feed system to the ISS in mid-2013. It will be carried in the unpressurized cargo compartment of SpaceXs Dragon spacecraft on one of its cargo delivery missions. Once Dragon berths with the space station, the robotic arm will extract the NOFBX test pallet from Dragon and place it on the outside of the European Columbus module. It will remain in orbit for one year and undergo a suite of in-space performance validation tests including steady-state, pulses, throttling and long-term storage and re-start demonstrations.

NOFBX is an American, nitrous-oxide-based monopropellant spacecraft technology with performance rivaling state-of-the-art hypergolic propulsion systems, but without many of the hazards and overhead associated with toxic storable propellants. It has many diverse applications including spacecraft, launch vehicles and landers.

We appreciate the opportunity to work with the ISS PSRP, added Mungas. Their input provides benefits to all our customers – even those operating with less stringent safety requirements. Obtaining the go-ahead from this team is a huge step forward for NOFBX.

SOURCE: Innovative Space Propulsion Systems (ISPS)

Read more:

Innovative Space Propulsion Systems Clears Flight Demonstration Hurdle

Continued here:

SpaceX Launching Student Experiments and Emblems on 1st Space Station Flight

Link:

Canadian wave heads to Cannes Film Festival