RTW Family World Travel Road Trip Begins, Wild Gerbils Around 47 seconds Carrentals co uk – Video

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RTW Family World Travel Road Trip Begins, Wild Gerbils Around 47 seconds Carrentals co uk - Video

RTW Family World Travel One High Class, Sweet Ferry Ride out of Istanbul, Turkey Carrentals co uk – Video

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Travelers Inspired to Do Good While Seeing the World

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A number of travel companies are offering globetrotters increasingly innovative ways to support a charitable cause while seeing the world.

Last month, United Airlines announced that MileagePlus members will be able to redeem miles for offsets to cover carbon emissions associated with their air travel, a first among U.S. airlines, the carrier said. And Room Key, a hotel search engine created by six major hotel companies, launched a Stay the Night, Join the Fight campaign with Stand Up To Cancer to raise a minimum of $3 million. For every hotel stay reserved through Roomkey.com, $1 will be donated to cancer research.

What we now know as cause marketing has bloomed, said Henry H. Harteveldt, travel industry analyst and founder of the Atmosphere Research Group, a market research company. The merging of travel and philanthropy began to take off in the 1980s, and today many companies hotels, airlines, cruise lines, tour operators do a very good job, he said, from sponsoring high-profile fundraisers to engaging staff and customers in efforts to support charitable causes.

Airlines and hotels can mobilize quickly in areas where tragedies strike like after hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and in Japan after the tsunami by flying in supplies, relief workers and volunteers or providing emergency housing. And traveling offers some unique opportunities to do good. Travel technology company Sabre Holdings, for example, advises travelers to be on the lookout for human trafficking activity through its Passport to Freedom program.

Other philanthropic trends have recently emerged, like "volunteer tourism" or "voluntourism."

Many travelers want to understand a destination in a deeper way, and volunteering is an opportunity to connect in a substantive manner. Its not just about having a great meal or taking a great picture, Harteveldt said. Travelers also want to have an opportunity to give back and create a meaningful, more authentic experience.

Some are frequent volunteers, like Karin Fetherston, a 67-year-old retired medical investigator from Piedmont, California. Its really nice to have a reason to visit a place, said Fetherston, who has participated in 18 programs since 2009, mostly organized by Road Scholar, a nonprofit group formerly known as Elderhostel and Earthwatch. I love to learn things. You generally do something much more intensely when you do service learning, and your experience is more in-depth."

Fetherstons experiences have ranged from teaching English to children in Cambodia and delivering over-the-counter medical supplies in Cuba to digging for mammoth bones in South Dakota. At the end of May, Fetherston will head to San Remo, Italy, to assist with a scientific whale survey. Everything Ive done has been fascinating, she said.

An online survey of 5,000 U.S. leisure travelers conducted in the first quarter of 2014 by Harteveldts firm, not yet released, indicated that nearly 9 percent said they engaged in some volunteer community service work while on a trip within the past 12 months.

"Many travelers want to understand a destination in a deeper way, and volunteering is an opportunity to connect in a substantive manner. Its not just about having a great meal or taking a great picture."

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Travelers Inspired to Do Good While Seeing the World

Acute torn meniscus; 5 months after stem cell therapy by Dr Harry Adelson – Video

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Acute torn meniscus; 5 months after stem cell therapy by Dr Harry Adelson
At Docere Clinics, the vast majority of cases we see are for chronic pain. Occasionally, we get acute injuries and do very well with them. Here, Bryan describes his experience 5 months after...

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Acute torn meniscus; 5 months after stem cell therapy by Dr Harry Adelson - Video

Scientists decode epigenetic mechanisms distinguishing stem cell function and blood cancer

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

9-May-2014

Contact: Donna Dubuc Donna.M.Dubuc@Dartmouth.edu 603-653-3615 The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

Researchers at Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center have published results from a study in Cell Reports that discovers a new mechanism that distinguishes normal blood stem cells from blood cancers.

"These findings constitute a significant advance toward the goal of killing leukemia cells without harming the body's normal blood stem cells which are often damaged by chemotherapy," said Patricia Ernst, PhD, co-director of the Cancer Mechanisms Program of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and an associate professor in Genetics at the Geisel School of Medicine.

The study focused on a pathway regulated by a gene called MLL1 (for Mixed Lineage Leukemia). Ernst served as principal investigator; Bibhu Mishra, PhD, as lead author.

When the MLL1 gene is damaged, it can cause leukemia, which is a cancer of the blood, often occurring in very young patients. Researchers found that the normal version of the gene controls many other genes in a manner that maintains the production of blood cells.

"This control becomes chaotic when the gene is damaged or 'broken' and that causes the normal blood cells to turn into leukemia," said Ernst.

The researchers showed that the normal gene acts with a partner gene called MOF that adds small "acetyl" chemical modification around the genes that it controls. The acetyl modification acts as a switch to turn genes on. When this function is disrupted, MLL1 cannot maintain normal blood stem cells.

The researchers also found that a gene called Sirtuin1 (more commonly known for controlling longevity) works against MLL1 to keep the proper amount of "acetyl" modifications on important stem cell genes. Blood cancers involving MLL1, in contrast, do not have this MOF-Sirtuin balance and place a different chemical modification on genes that result in leukemia.

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Scientists decode epigenetic mechanisms distinguishing stem cell function and blood cancer

First stem cell trial for stroke shows lasting benefits

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People who received the world's first stem cell treatment for strokes have shown measurable reductions in disability and handicap a year after the injection into their damaged brains.

Some can move limbs and manage everyday tasks that were impossible before they received an injection of neural progenitor stem cells, which were clones of cells originally taken from the cortex of a donated fetus.

Apart from physical rehabilitation, there are few treatments for people left severely disabled by a stroke. Demand for more options is high, with 800,000 new cases each year in the US and 150,000 in the UK.

"We're encouraged, and it's a nice progressive piece of news," says Michael Hunt, the chief executive officer of ReNeuron, the company in Guildford, UK, that developed the treatment. "We must be circumspect, but we are seeing what seems to be a general trend towards improvement in a disparate group of patients," he says.

ReNeuron presented its latest results on the first 11 patients on 7 May in Nice, France, at the 23rd European Stroke Conference. They build on interim findings released last year.

The patients in the PISCES trial (Pilot Investigation of Stem Cells in Stroke) had all suffered their strokes at least six months before treatment and were all chosen because their symptoms had plateaued, making any improvements more likely to be the result of treatment.

There were improvements in median scores on all five scales used to measure the patients' recovery.

On a score that measures quality of life from 0 to 100, patients began with a median score of 45, but within a year this had risen by 18 points, a 40 per cent improvement.

Rankin Scores, which grade disability and handicap from healthy (0) to dead (6) improved from a median of 3 at the start to 2 for four of the patients, although the rest remained the same. "That's equivalent to taking a patient down a whole level of dependency, and equates to a 20 per cent improvement," says Hunt. Scores on all the other three scales were higher at 12 than at three months, suggesting the improvements were continuing.

The company is now actively recruiting for a second, larger trial in 41 people. They will be recruited sooner after their strokes within two to three months in the hope that earlier treatment will prevent some of the irreversible scarring. It will also deploy a harder but more objective measure of improvement in which patients have to try lifting a wooden block onto a platform. Hunt expects full results by the end of 2015.

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First stem cell trial for stroke shows lasting benefits

First-Ever HD Live Stream From Space Is Your New Favorite Time Suck

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By Chris Taylor2014-05-07 23:52:39 UTC

As astronauts who've spent time aboard the International Space Station have noted, there is nothing more beautiful than watching 16 sunrises a day.

Now you can see them all from your desk, thanks to four HD cameras NASA has installed aboard the ISS and Ustream, which is transmitting the results live, and for free, to the whole Internet.

The view is such stunning high quality, it's hard to believe this is just an experiment. The cameras are being exposed to the harsh radiation of space so that engineers can figure out how to build better, more radiation-resistant cameras in the future, according to the space agency. Another hard-to-believe fact: These cameras were constructed and are maintained with the help of high school kids across the U.S.

The best part? This NASA note on the feed: "There is no audio on purpose. Add your own soundtrack."

The experimental feed was meant to launch a couple of days ago, but last-minute glitches held it back. It seems to have been worth the wait, however. Just under 7 million viewers have been watching the feed at any one time, a large enough number that we're wondering what kind of impact this glorious view is having on the economy.

The link to the feed has been tweeted more than 11,000 times Wednesday, with some well-known names expressing their delight alongside regular, earthbound Joes:

Image: NASA

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First-Ever HD Live Stream From Space Is Your New Favorite Time Suck

A brief history of space flight – in numbers

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Thirty-one astronauts have made a return-trip to Mars. Well, not quite but they have put in the requisite hours in space. That's just one of the surprising insights to come out of a recent attempt to chart humanity's 52-year history in space.

Gilles Clment and Angelia Bukley of the International Space University in Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France, used publicly available information from the US, Russian and Chinese space programmes. Between 12 April 1961, when Yuri Gagarin took a single orbit around the Earth on board the Soviet Vostok-1 craft and December 2013, they counted the humans who have flown to space, how long they collectively spent there and who they were.

We picked out our favourites six insights, then put them in context with data from elsewhere.

1. Astronauts are as common as Nobel prizewinners

As of 31 December 2013, 539 individuals had been to space, defined as reaching an altitude of 100 kilometres or more. That's a rate of about 10 per year, and roughly equivalent to the 566 people who have ever won a Nobel prize in a science subject (physics, chemistry, or physiology/medicine).

(Note: Clment and Bukley's analysis does not include the two commercial astronauts who piloted the SpaceShipOne test flights in 2004, who were in space for just a few minutes each.)

2. Space trips last days, months but rarely years

Gagarin's single orbit of the Earth lasted just 108 minutes. Clment and Bukley found that of a total of 1211 person-flights, defined as a single crew member flying one mission, most last less than a month. Presumably these short hops were trips to the moon and missions spent inside NASA's now-retired space shuttle, to build and repair the International Space Station. But a significant minority spent five or six months, representing stays on board the ISS.

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A brief history of space flight - in numbers

Oxygen In Exoplanet Atmospheres Could Fool Search For Life

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Oxygen is a signal of life on our own planet, but that's not necessarily the case elsewhere. Particularly when it comes to young planets, signs of oxygen do not necessarily indicate the presence of biological processes, new research argues.

Water vapor in the upper atmosphere of a young planet could break into hydrogen and oxygen by incoming ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet rays from the parent star.

"Atomic hydrogen is so light that it can escape to space and lead to the oxidization of the planet," said Robin Wordsworth, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. "It will just keep continuing and oxidizing the atmosphere. That's what we try and investigate in the paper."

The researchers investigated water photolysis, which happens when a water molecule is torn apart by high-energy photons from the sun. Usually the water (two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom) is broken into two parts, OH and H. The H escapes to space because it is so light. Over time, more oxygen molecules build up until eventually O2 (molecular oxygen) form as well.

"The real novelty of our paper was to study the consequences of hydrogen loss from water photolysis, when molecules break down into smaller units after absorbing light," said Wordsworth.

Wordsworth co-led the research with Raymond Pierrehumbert, who is a geophysicist in his department.

The paper, called "Abiotic oxygen-dominated atmospheres on terrestrial habitable zone planets" is available on the pre-publishing site Arxiv and has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Searches for second Earth picking up Due to their diminutive size, Earth-sized planets are hard to spot in telescopes searching for exoplanets. They don't tug on their parent stars as much as the Jupiter-sized worlds, which induce "wobbles" in a star's movement.

If the terrestrial-sized planets pass across the face of their star, their shadow is also incredibly tiny. Trying to pick out details such as land features or even atmospheres is also difficult because of their small size. For now, astronomers expect better success with bigger worlds, of which there are plenty to choose from.

Most planets found outside the Solar System have been Jupiter's size or larger. However, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has begun spotting more small worlds. A large "planet bonanza" of 715 new worlds was released in February.

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Oxygen In Exoplanet Atmospheres Could Fool Search For Life