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A vascular catheter assembly includes an over-the-wire stent deployment catheter and a flow-by-channel assembly. The stent deployment catheter is positioned just below the occluded artery in accordance with standard procedures. The flow-by-channel then shunts blood, and thus all friable plaque, from the high pressure carotid occlusion to the negative pressure extremity to effectively reverse the flow of blood through the occluded artery. The stent is then advanced into the narrowed artery and deployed. Thus, the vascular catheter assembly takes advantage of the collateral blood flow to solve the problem of stroke during endovascular procedures.
1. An apparatus for removing plaque from an obstructed vessel, comprising:
a catheter having proximal and distal ends and a lumen extending therethrough, said distal end adapted to be disposed in a patient's carotid artery;
a channel member slidably positionable adjacent said catheter, said channel member having proximal and distal ends and a lumen extending therethrough, siad proximal end adapted to be disposed in a patient's femoral artery;
a first occlusion element disposed proximally adjacent said distal end of said channel member;
a second occlusion element disposed proximally adjacent said proximal end of said channel member; and
said occlusion elements having a contracted state for transluminal insertion and an expanded state wherein the occlusion elements occlude antegrade flow in the vessel.
This is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/501,416, filed Feb. 9, 2000. now U.S. Pat. No. 6,482,172.
The present invention relates generally to a device and method for the treatment of atherosclerotic disease, and more particularly, to a device and method which utilizes the collateral blood flow of the Circle of Willis to aid in the extracting of an obstructed vessel supplying blood to the brain.
Atherosclerotic disease of the internal carotid artery is the most common reason for stroke. Atherosclerotic plaques form on the inner lining of the blood vessels supplying blood to the brain, and over time enlarge and become friable. Typically, a stroke occurs when small flecks of plaque break loose, travel with the blood into the brain, and lodge in an end vessel. By lodging in an end vessel, the clot prevents blood from passing through to the brain tissue supplied by the vessel. Without blood, the brain tissue will die within minutes.
Most flecks of plaque that result in clots spontaneously breakdown and cause only a temporary occlusion of blood, and thus reversible symptoms. This is termed a Transient ischemic Attack (TIA) and is a warning for an impending stroke. Because of the warning provided by a TIA, numerous patients are identified each year prior to a full stroke. Once identified, either because of a TIA or other symptoms, patients typically undergo a traditional surgical removal of the plaque. This procedure is termed a Carotid Endarterectomy (CEA) and basically involves opening the internal carotid artery, removing the plaque, and closing the vessel with suture. In order to open the internal carotid artery without the patient bleeding to death, the internal carotid artery must be clamped. While the vessel is clamped, the patient will be dependant on collateral blood flow from the other three vessels supplying blood to the brain, and an open Circle of Willis, to get blood to the part of the brain usually supplied by the clamped artery.
As with any major surgical procedure, there exists a certain amount of inherent risk to the patient. However, the major risk of a CEA is, ironically, a stroke because of the small microscopic flecks of plaque that remain in the vessel. The problems arising from the surgical intervention of a CEA have created strategies to repair the narrowing of the carotid artery without such surgical intervention. One such strategy involves the use of catheters to deploy stents that open the vessel and plaster the plaque against the vessel wall. Although such a procedure is significant in that the patient does not require surgery or general anesthesia, again the major risk therein is a high stroke rate. This happens due to the catheter and stent breaking off pieces of the friable plaque which are then carried directly into the brain.
In view of the aforementioned needs and the shortcomings of the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system which overcomes the deficiencies of the current practices whereby a device and method is provided for the treatment of atherosclerotic disease.
Accordingly, it is a general object of the present invention to provide a new and improved catheter device and method.
It is a more specific object of the present invention to provide a device and method for the extracting of an obstructed vessel without surgical intervention.
Yet a more specific object of the present invention is to provide a catheter device and method which utilizes the collateral blood flow of the Circle of Willis to aid in the extricating of the obstructed vessel supplying blood to the brain to help prevent stroke.
The invention is directed to a vascular catheter assembly comprising an elongated tubular catheter body having an inner lumen to receive a guide wire and an expandable member near its end. A channel member having expandable members near both ends is slidably engaged to the catheter and includes a passageway defining an inner channel lumen.
The features of the present invention, which are believed to be novel, are set forth with particularity in the appended claims. The invention, together with the further objects and advantages thereof, may best be understood by reference to the following description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in the several figures of which like reference numerals identify like elements, and in which:
FIG. 1 is a front view of the origins of the common carotid and vertebral arteries stemming from the heart.
FIG. 2 is a side view of the cervical carotid and vertebral arteries as they enter the brain.
FIG. 3 is a bottom view of the base of the brain showing the key collateral circulation of the Circle of Willis.
FIG. 4 is a side view cut away section of the internal carotid artery showing stenosis or occlusion thereof.
FIG. 5 is an enlarged view of the inner lining blood vessel showing friable plaque.
FIG. 6 is an enlarged view of a portion of the arterial tree distal to the vessel of FIG. 5.
FIG. 7 is an enlarged view of the clamped vessels during the beginning of a Carotid Endarterectomy procedure.
FIG. 8 is an enlarged view of the clamped vessels during the removal of plaque phase of a Carotid Endarterectomy procedure.
FIG. 9 is an enlarged view of the inner lining of a blood vessel having a plaque buildup during a stent insertion procedure.
FIG. 10 is an enlarged view of the inner lining of the blood vessel of FIG. 9 showing the deployed stent.
FIG. 11 is a side view of the flow-by channel catheter assembly and system constructed in accordance with the principles of the present invention.
FIG. 12 is a side view of the flow-by channel assembly of FIG. 11.
FIG. 13a is a cross-sectioned view of the distal occlusion balloon taken along lines 13 a—13 a of FIG. 12.
FIG. 13b is a cross-sectioned view of the proximal occlusion balloon taken along lines 13 b—13 b of FIG. 12.
FIG. 14 is a side view of the flow-by channel and catheter assembly and system shown during use within the arterial walls.
FIG. 15 is a front view of the systemic arteries of an adult male.
In order to fully appreciate the operation and value of the present invention, a more detailed look at the arterial system, occlusions thereof, and the deficiencies of current practices to remedy these occasions is needed. Referring to the figures, and particularly to FIG. 1, the aortic arch 10 supplies blood to the four major arteries that supply blood to the brain. In particular, there are two in the front of the neck, the right common carotid 12 and the left common carotid 14, and two in the back of the neck, the right vertebral 16 and the left vertebral 18.
At the base of the brain, all four of these arteries are joined through connecting vessels to form a circle termed The Circle of Willis, which is a vascular structure located on the floor of the cranial cavity. The Circle of Willis is the key collateral pathway connecting both carotid arteries with the circulation at the base of the brain. This circle includes the posterior communicating arteries 20, the proximal anterior cerebral 22 and posterior cerebral arteries 24, and the anterior communicating artery 26. Because this loop is supplied by multiple vessels, in an arrangement which provides collateral flow, damage to any one vessel will not compromise the blood supply to the brain.
The right common carotid artery 12 arises from the brachiocephalic trunk 28 which arises from the aortic arch 10. Each common carotid bifurcates into an internal 30 and external 32 component, see FIG. 4. The external carotid 32 supplies blood to the face and does not play a role in stroke, while the internal carotid 30 has no branches and feeds directly into the brain.
Typically, a stroke occurs when the internal carotid artery 30 becomes clogged or ruptures with the formation of atherosclerotic plaque on the inner lining thereof being most common, see FIG. 4. This buildup of plaque 34 most frequently occurs just after the bifurcation point 36 of the common carotid 12 into internal 30 and external 32 carotid. Such a buildup of FIG. 4 is better illustrated by the enlarged view of the inner lining as shown in FIG. 5.
FIG. 5 shows the atherosclerotic plaque 34 buildup at the point 36 of the arterial bifurcation. The initial buildup 34 a is illustrated in a light shade while the more friable buildup 34 b is a darker shade. The plaque may eventually cause total arterial occlusion of the internal carotid, or as depicted in FIGS. 5 and 6, may break loose and occlude blood vessels distally in the arterial tree (FIG. 6). The later, as it will be past the Circle of Willis, causing stroke and irreversible damage to brain cells.
The prior art procedure for removing this buildup is called a Carotid Endarterectomy (CEA) and involves the clamping of the arteries, removing the plaque, and closing the vessel with suture. This CEA procedure is very simplistically illustrated by FIGS. 7 and 8, but in fact is quite complex. In order to clamp the internal carotid artery, you cannot simply put a clamp across the vessel like you could with a water hose. The reason for this is because of the collateral blood flow through the Circle of Willis. If a single clamp were placed across the internal carotid artery, blood traveling up the artery to the brain would be stopped at the level of the clamp while blood traveling up the other three vessels to the brain would continue. Since fluids will travel along the path of least resistance, the blood traveling up the other three vessels would enter the Circle of Willis, notice the low pressure in the clamped vessel and travel back down the empty portion of the clamped vessel. Note that this flow from the Circle of Willis would only occur if the vessel were opened.
Because of this collateral blood flow, surgeons need three clamps to occlude blood flow through the internal carotid artery 30. A clamp 38 is placed across the carotid artery 12 before it divides into the internal 30 and external 32 carotid artery. This clamp 38 will prevent blood flow up towards the brain. Another clamp 40 is placed on the internal carotid artery 30 above the plaque. This clamp 40 prevents flow back down from the brain. Yet another clamp 42 is placed on the external carotid artery 32. This clamp 42 prevents blood from flowing down the external carotid from the face.
An elegant surgical strategy that takes advantage of collateral blood flow through the Circle of Willis has been developed to keep the risk of a stroke during a CEA low. During the CEA procedure, when the artery is clamped and the plaque removed (44, FIG. 8), small microscopic flecks of plaque inevitably remain in the vessel. These flecks cannot be manually removed by the surgeon, yet they could cause vessel obstruction and subsequent stroke if they were allowed to enter the circulation. To prevent this, surgeons remove the clamps in a precise order, and under tight control, while the artery is still open. The clamp 40 on the internal carotid artery 30 is removed first. This enables blood coming through the Circle of Willis to rush down the internal carotid artery and out of the opened blood vessel. This effectively washes any small flecks of plaque out of the artery. The clamp 40 is then reapplied after a few seconds. This is then repeated with the external carotid artery and clamp 42. Once all the flecks have been washed out, the vessel is closed with suture and all clamps removed to allow blood to once again flow forward into the brain.
A more recent prior art procedure repairs the narrowing of the internal carotid artery without surgical intervention. The main strategy of this procedure involves the use of catheters and is illustrated in FIGS. 9 and 10. The catheters 46 are inserted into an easily accessible blood vessel in the arm or groin and then steered into the internal carotid artery 30 where they are utilized to deploy stents 48 that open the vessel and plaster the plaque 34 against the vessel wall. However, the major problem with this endovascular technique is, once again, a stroke. This is due to the catheter causing pieces of the friable plaque to break off as it is passed through the narrowed portion of the vessel caused by the plaque. Since there are no clamps, the blood carries the flecks of plaque directly into the brain. Additionally, when the stent is deployed to plaster the plaque up against the vessel wall, more pieces of the plaque are broken off.
The present invention is both a combination of these two prior art procedures as well as a novel approach to solve the atherosclerotic disease problem. More particularly, the present invention takes advantage of the collateral blood flow to completely solve the problem of stroke during endovascular procedures. Referring to FIG. 11, the preferred embodiment of the catheter assembly 50 is shown. This system basically consists of an over-the-wire stent deployment catheter assembly 52 and a flow-by-channel assembly 54. The design and structure of the over-the-wire stent deployment catheter assembly 52 to be used with the present invention may be better described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,782,855, incorporated herein by reference. However, for illustration purposes a simplified description of the over-the-wire stent deployment catheter assembly 52 includes a guide wire 56 and catheter 58 having proximal 60 and distal 62 ends defining an inner lumen extending therebetween and providing respective guide wire openings. Attached near the distal end of the catheter 58 is a stent deployment balloon 64 used to deploy a stent 48 as shown in the prior art FIGS. 9 and 10. This deployment balloon 64 is inflated and deflated through the use of an air syringe 66 or the like via the deployment balloon port 68.
The preferred embodiment of the flow-by-channel assembly 54 is attached to the catheter assembly 52 as shown in FIG. 11, but is better illustrated by the enlarged view of FIGS. 12 and 13. The flow-by-channel is attached via a sheath 69 around the over-the-wire catheter such that the over-the-wire catheter with the loaded stent can be adjusted for stent positioning without moving the flow-by-channel occlusion balloons which must remain stationary once inflated. This flow-by-channel assembly 54 includes a flow-by-channel 70 having a distal end 72 and a proximal end 74 defining an inner lumen therebetween. The assembly further includes a distal occlusion balloon 76 and a proximal occlusion balloon 78, and an air channel tube 80. The air channel tube 80 provides air to the distal occlusion balloon 76 and the flow-by-channel 70. Thus, via tube port 84, the distal occlusion balloon 76 and the flow-by-channel 70 are inflated and deflated through the use of an air syringe 66 or the like. Similarly, occlusion tube 82 provides air to the proximal occlusion balloon 78 via occlusion port 83 and, as discussed, is inflated and deflated through the use of an air syringe or the like.
FIGS. 13 and 14 are shown to better illustrate the procedure utilizing the preferred embodiment of the present invention. The catheter assembly 50 is inserted into the femoral artery 86 in accordance with standard procedures. This includes placing of the guide wire 56 and inserting the catheter by placing it over the guide wire 56 with the stent preloaded. The catheter 50 is then steered up into the internal carotid artery 30. Once in position, the distal balloon 76 is expanded in the carotid artery 12 before it divides into the internal 30 and external 32 carotid arteries. This, in effect, blocks blood flow up the carotid artery 12 to the brain just like the clamp 38 during a CEA. Again, because of the Circle of Willis, blood will want to flow down the occluded vessel in a reverse direction. This works well during a CEA when the clamps are removed because the vessel is open and there is a strong negative pressure (least resistance) pulling the blood down from the Circle of Willis. In the endovascular case a negative pressure has to be created.
As the catheter 50 travels from the femoral artery 86 in the groin up to the carotid 12, it passes through the common iliac artery 88 in the lower abdomen. There are two common iliac arteries, a right and a left, and they are the sole suppliers of blood to their respective lower extremity. When the distal balloon 76 in the carotid artery 12 is expanded, the proximal balloon 78 in the common iliac 88 is also expanded. The expansion of proximal balloon 78 blocks blood flow to the leg (the leg can survive for hours without blood, so this is not critical) and subsequently creates a large negative pressure within the arterial vasculature of the leg.
Inflation of the balloons (76,78) needs to be variable and controlled by how much air is inserted. This variability is important because complete occlusion of the common iliac artery 88 in some patients may produce too much of a negative pressure resulting in blood being "stolen" from the brain to the leg. In these instances, the leg occlusion may only need to be 75% or the like. If this is the case, an alternate embodiment of the present invention may include separate air channels and thus separate deployment balloon parts. Also, as each patient and thus each procedure is different, an additional occlusion balloon may be necessary in the external carotid artery 32 (not shown). This additional external carotid artery balloon occlusion would keep the blood flow from being "stolen" or alternately an excessiveness of blood being supplied to the face.
In any event, the flow-by-channel 70 of the catheter then shunts blood from the high pressure carotid occlusion to the negative pressure leg. This effectively reverses the flow of blood through the internal carotid artery 30. Once blood flow is reversed (indicated by dashed arrows 90 rather than the solid arrows 92 representing normal blood flow) the stent is advanced into the narrowed internal carotid artery 30 and deployed via balloon 64. Any flecks of plaque that are broken off are washed through the flow-by-channel 70 where they are filtered out of circulation. After deployment of the stent and clearing of all plaque debris, the balloons are deflated and the catheter removed.
Thus, through the utilization of the present invention, an obstructed vessel leading to the brain is extracted without fear of a procedurally caused stroke. More particularly, the loose plaque that flows to the brain during a CEA and/or the common stent deploying catheter procedure is eliminated. Through the collateral blood flow of the Circle of Willis, this loose plaque is "reverse-flowed", by the present invention, into the leg. As this blood carrying any plaque is recirculated throughout the body, the plaque will break down before reaching the brain. Once again, as each patient requires a slightly different procedure, it may become necessary to aid in this filtration process. More particularly, an alternate embodiment of the present invention may include a flow-by-channel heaving an internal filtration process to ensure proper filtration. In any event, the present invention keeps this loose plaque from returning to the brain.
While particular embodiments of the invention have been shown and described, it will be obvious to those skilled in the art that changes and modifications may be made therein without departing from the invention in its broader aspects and, therefore, the aim in the appended claim is to cover all such changes and modifications as fall within the true spirit and scope of the invention.
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Costa Cruises Review
- Overall Rating: 3.4 3.4
- Expert Rating: 3.3
- Traveler Rating: 3.2
- Couples: 3.1
- Families w/ young children: 3.1
- Families w/ older children: 3.2
- Singles/Friends: 3.0
- Groups: 2.7
Health Rating:
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- See Costa Ship Rankings »
Costa Cruises Overview
How it Ranks: Costa has been ranked based on an expert evaluation of the line's level of luxury, as well as an assessment of user reviews and health ratings. Costa Cruises appears on the following ranking lists:
- #7 in Best Cruise Lines for the Money
- #8 in Best Cruise Lines for Families
- #13 in Best Cruise Lines in the Caribbean
- #15 in Best Cruise Lines for Romance
Costa Cruises distinguishes itself from other European cruise lines with its Italian-inspired design, festive atmosphere and wide roster of onboard activities. Costa's ships sail around the world, touring the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Middle East, Asia, Europe, South America and the Pacific, with itineraries lasting anywhere from three to 115 nights. For an extra fee, Costa offers excursions that organize activities like religious site tours in Mumbai and scuba diving in Cozumel. Costa's shipboard experiences are just as varied as its shore excursions. Some ships offer an intimate ambiance and relaxed pace while others are crowded and action-packed. But with roughly one crew member for every three passengers, Costa aims to satisfy cruisers with quality service. And affordable cabins are easy to find within Costa's fleet, a main draw according to recent cruisers. While at sea, casinos, arcades, fitness facilities and multiple pools will keep you entertained along with cooking demonstrations, dance classes or card games. Once you've worked up an appetite, have a seat in one of the ship's restaurants or stay up late to enjoy the midnight buffet. And if you're looking for a more memorable culinary experience, consider splurging for a meal at one of the specialty Club Restaurants.
Pros & Cons
- Many ships to pick from
- After one Costa cruise, you'll be eligible to join CostaClub, which offers discounts on select cruises and other privileges
- Onboard activities cater to families, couples and spa enthusiasts
- Meals at Club Restaurants are not included in cruise rate
- Beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) are not covered in cruise fare
- The brand's reputation is still recovering after the January 2012 Costa Concordia accident
On Board
Costa attracts European couples ages 35 to 55, as well as retirees and families, though you are more likely to encounter younger cruisers on July and August voyages. Generally, Costa's European itineraries draw a European clientele, while Caribbean and South American cruises draw a North American crowd.More about the onboard experience»
On Shore
With more than 2,000 shore excursions to choose from, Costa offers a broad range of shoreside pursuits catering to a variety of traveler interests. Excursions vary by itinerary and include everything from a walking tour of Dubrovnik's Old City to a snorkeling expedition in Belize. You can find ...More about the on shore experience»
Before You Book
- All cruise fares are per person, based on double occupancy and include onboard dining at non-specialty restaurants, 24-hour room service, nightly shows and entertainment and Costa Kids programs. Cruise fares do not include government taxes and fees.
- Cruisers younger than 21 must be traveling with a parent or guardian and on some seasonal voyages, guests 21 to 24 years old must stay in a stateroom with someone at least 25 years old.
- Shore excursions, specialty dining, Internet access, gratuities, spa treatments and beverages are not included in the price of your cruise.
- To reserve most Costa voyages, a $400 per person deposit fee is required; a $250 per person deposit is required for Caribbean cruises; and a 15 percent deposit is required for World/Grand cruises.
- The cost of your cruise must be paid 90 days prior to departure. (Note: Caribbean cruises that are not booked online require final payment 70 days prior to sailing).
- All cancellations and refund requests must be submitted in writing. You will receive a full refund if you cancel your reservation 90 days or more before departure. If you cancel your reservation 57 to 89 days prior to your scheduled departure date, you will forfeit your deposit fee; if you notify Costa 30 to 56 days prior to departure, you will receive a 50 percent refund of your cruise payment; if you cancel your reservation 15 to 29 days prior to departure, you will receive a 25 percent refund of your total cruise fare. If you miss those deadlines and cancel your cruise within 14 days prior to departure, you will receive no refund. (Note: Caribbean cruises and World/Grand cruises are subject to different cancellation rules and restrictions. Consult the Costa Cruises website for more information.)
- You can book excursions online up to five days prior to departure using Costa's excursion booking tool.
- Children younger than 6 months are not permitted on Costa cruises. Trans-oceanic crossings, World cruises and cruises lasting 15 days or longer require passengers to be over the age of 1.
- Costa offers both one-way and round-trip voyages; popular ports of call include destinations across Europe, the Caribbean, Asia and South America.
Before You Board
- You may receive priority check-in if you submit a booking form online on Costa Cruises' website at least one day prior to departure.
- You must check in at the terminal 90 minutes before the ship's scheduled departure time.
- Costa requires passengers to present a passport that is valid for a minimum of six months after the cruise ends. Depending on the cruise itinerary, other identification documents, including a valid photo ID are acceptable. Certain countries require that cruisers obtain visas; more information about visa requirements can be found here.
- While at sea, a physician and nurse are available 24 hours a day; however, when docked at port, medical facility hours vary. If you have an existing medical condition or a disability that requires assistance, you are encouraged to call Costa's special needs phone number and submit your medical requirements in writing upon making your reservation. Costa also encourages you to contact your personal physicians for information regarding vaccinations.
- If you require dietary accommodations, you must submit a form (obtained from a Costa reservations agent) at least four weeks prior to departure.
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Despite its name, Royal Caribbean International offers voyages to 235 destinations across 69 countries on six continents. While you can certainly sail to Bermuda and the Bahamas, you can also board a ship to Alaska ... Read More»
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In 2007, WSKG Radio aired a series of reports on genetic science research in our region.
Crystal Sarakas spoke with Dr. David Davies about his research into colonies of bacteria, called biofilms, and what effect that research may have in the future.
We've all heard of bacteria, single-cell micro-organisms that are found just about everywhere on earth and play a number of roles, both good and bad. But few of us have heard of biofilms, and just like regular bacteria, biofilms are everywhere.
"Wherever you see slime in the movies dripping from the walls or in the shower dripping from your curtain - that's a biofilm."
That's Dr. David Davies, a microbiologist at Binghamton University. He studies these slimy colonies of bacteria known as biofilms. But, what exactly are biofilms?
Biofilms are colonies of bacteria that attach to a surface and then excrete a protective and adhesive matrix that allows them to stay put. You've probably encountered them hundreds of times in your life. Those slippery, slime-covered rocks on the bottom of a stream-bed or the film that forms on standing water. The plaque that forms on your teeth. Those are all biofilms. Just like planktonic -or free-floating bacteria - biofilms have their good side and their bad side. It's the bad side of these biofilm colonies that Dr. Davies is concerned with, namely infections.
"Biofilms cause infections that can be problems. Inner ear infections or bladder infections, prostate infection, etc. Acne is a biofilm infection. There are a number of instances of biofilm infections, but all of them share the commonality that they don't respond well to treatment with antibiotics. Generally it's considered that a biofilm infection requires a 100 to1000 times greater concentration of antibiotics to treat compared to a systemic planktonic infection. Biofilms do not respond well to therapy. So, typically a biofilm infection either has to resolve itself as a consequence of the immune system clearing it or it has to be removed surgically."
The current treatment for biofilm infections, particularly skin infections that are common in advanced-stage diabetes, range from mass doses of antibiotics that may or may not work to wound debridement.
"Typically a dremel-type tool is taken - like a dentist's drill - and is used on 40,000 or so rpm to scoop away, to carve out the tissue around the infection and to get to fresh, uninfected tissue. Then, basically at that point both patient and physician pray that the fresh tissue will not become infected with the organism and that the wound will resolve itself. Unfortunately, in many cases that doesn't occur. Particularly in advanced stages of diabetes one of the outcomes is amputation. This is one of the things that we are really trying hard to combat."
"What we really need to do is, for instance in the case of a diabetic patient, is to reach the tipping point where the outcome of an infection favors the patient's survival rather than the survival of the microorganism. In doing that - what kinds of strategies might be available? Well, in thinking about these infections as biofilm infections which is becoming more and more apparent, there's a requirement for a new kind of thinking about how to reach that tipping point. Antibiotics just don't do it by themselves. So we have to figure out a novel strategy to manage the bacteria so that either antibiotic treatment or the immune system or both in combination can tip the balance in favor of the patient's recovery."
Scientists have been searching for years for a way to combat these infectious biofilm colonies. The slime that surrounds the biofilms protects them, preventing both the body's own immune system and antibiotics from coming into contact with the bacteria that make up the colonies. But recent research by Dr. Davies may change that. He's discovered a molecule that, when introduced to these biofilm colonies, provokes certain genetic and physiological changes in the bacteria which causes them to disperse and return to their ndividual state where the bacteria is much more susceptible to treatment.
" What we've done is look at the behavior of biofilms as they develop in nature and noticed that one of the common features of all biofilms is that as they get older the bacteria from these dense cell clusters get up and disperse. They leave the biofilm as it becomes overcrowded. It turns out that they leave in response to signals that are produced by the bacteria in the biofilms. These signals build up as the cell density in the biofilm gets higher and higher. So it makes sense for a bacterium to leave because as the biofilm becomes more and more dense it becomes less probable that a bacterium in the center of a cell cluster will survive, lacking food and suffering from an accumulation of waste products. So here we are looking at a natural process thinking to ourselves - how can we subvert this process or take advantage of this process and use it to help tip the balance in an infection? We spent a long time in trying to recover and then identify and characterize this agent that is responsible for inducing discursion in bacteria. Over the past year we actually completed our work on the molecular characterization of this compound."
The molecule that Dr. Davies has isolated has been tested against a number of biofilm infections and has proven to be effective in dispersing biofilms containing the bacteria that cause strep, E. coli, and staph infections.
"We now know that we have a chemical that we can add to essentially any biofilm. It works not just on the organism we isolated it from, but all bacteria we've tested it against. It induces these bacteria, regardless of their stage of biofilm development, to disperse from the biofilms. So the idea is that we could take this chemical and then apply it to an infection and induce the bacteria to transition from a biofilm mode of growth to a planktonic mode of growth. These planktonic bacteria are fairly easily taken care of by antibiotics and or the immune system."
There are many possible medical applications for this new method of dispersing biofilm colonies, but one that Dr. Davies is particularly interested in is the treatment of non-healing wounds.
"Non-healing wounds might not be life-threatening to a patient in many cases, but what they do to the quality of life is profound. People losing mobility, being unable to or embarrassed to leave their homes, unable to go out and go on a hike, a walk, a bike ride really enjoy themselves because they are bedridden or restricted to a wheelchair. There's no reason an 80-year-old person with diabetes shouldn't be out playing soccer. This is what we should be working on and this is what we are working on. We want to be able to go in and instead of practicing wound debridement, we want to go in and treat these non-healing wound infections infected with biofilms, successfully have them heal and have these people get up and walk again. Don't amputate their feet, heal them so that they can walk around and have a good quality of life."
Dr. David Davies


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After playing a bit with a Windows 7 slate I decided to create a project, just for fun, to test a few ideas on it.
Basically what I'm trying to create is a companion kind of tool that assists with common tasks related to using applications that are not built to be used in a touch screen, without mouse or keyboard.
I didn't spend much time on it yet but I decided to show what I've got so far. So please be nice and consider this is just a test I've created for fun, nothing more.
If your attention span only goes this far, just look at what I've built here:
Keep in mind this is a WPF, 32bit application written in C#, running on an Intel Atom slate with 2 GB Ram. I did not disable any visual feature, nor did any optimization on windows itself.
So basically this tools docks into the screen and reads the start menu, offering a Windows Phone 7 style of navigation into the items. It's quite handy because you can do the whole navigation with your thumb as you hold the device. Now here's the trick: The start menu items aren't stored in a single folder but basically in two different places: One is your specific Star Menu Items list and the other is the all users list. You basically have to merge both so a good place to start in .Net is looking at these two places:
These will help you to get the list as it appears in your start menu.
Ah, but not so fast! You will notice that most of the items in these folders are .lnk files, not the actual programs. What's the challenge with that? None really, unless you want to show the real icons from the each executable these applications correspond to. In which case you will have to decode the .lnk file, find the target executable it links to, and use a few APIs to get the corresponding icon so you can bind it to the WPF list. Piece of cake! :)
Next you can see I added a few buttons for typical things you want to do with windows: Maximize, minimize, etc. How we do that? Basically we have to hook into the foremost open window using a few APIs so we can get the window handler, also known as hWnd. Doing so we can then send commands such as minimize, maximize, close and etc.
But we can do far more than that. Assuming the application running uses old style menus, we can also hook into them, showing an easier to access list to the user without having to even touch the application:
Keep in mind this works with legacy apps. The new ribbon and other styles of menus aren't that simple to hook into. And that's why I created another tab, with common tasks we are likely going to execute in most applications:
For these, I simply send the corresponding key combination to the open window so it responds accordingly. Ctrl+S for save, Ctrl+V for paste and so on.
I've also been working on a magnifier using the magnifier APIs, but since they aren't touch compatible I decided for simply opening the windows magnifier instead. I actually managed to make part of the magnifier API work with touch but that was pretty much a hack so never mind about that…
That's pretty much it. Hope you have as much fun watching it as I had building it :)


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Huggies TweetPee Tweets You When Baby Pees
Friday, May 10th, 2013
Want to know the instant your baby pees? There's an app for that. No, really. There is an app for that — in Brazil.
Huggies Brazil recently announced Huggies TweetPee, a small humidity-detecting sensor that looks like an owl and clips onto Baby's diaper. Once your baby pees, the sensor will send you a tweet telling you it's time to change your little guy's diaper.
The accompanying TweetPee iPhone app uses the sensor to help you keep track of how quickly your babe goes through diapers and lets you order Huggies diapers when your supply runs low.
Check out the Huggies TweetPee video (in Portugese):
Huggies is only testing the product with four parents and will expand that number to 10 in July, ABCNews says. The company hasn't announced plans to release this product in North America, but if it were available here, would you use it? Tell us in the comments below.
Image: Mother changing little girl's diaper, via ShutterstockAdd a Comment


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Restraining order for voyeur who used a smartphone, a stick and mirror to spy on naked woman
Posted: February 12, 2014|
A mirror and a smartphone were dangled in front of a naked woman in bed by a voyeur trying to get his kicks.
Magistrates heard how Andrew Mark Stoodley pointed a mirror on a stick, then a mobile phone with a camera into the woman's bedroom.
Peter Ashby, prosecuting, said it was the latest in a series of events which worried the woman so much that she was about to move out.
"She noticed him over several years on a number of occasions watching her, including her sunbathing in the garden," said Mr Ashby.
"That made her feel 'freaked out' in her words and she started to move out.
"On July 25, 2013 at 10pm she went to her bedroom - there were no curtains in her windows because she was packing to move.
"She got undressed and was no wearing clothes, before getting in to bed, and went under the duvet.
"At 10.30pm she noticed something dangling down outside her window. It was a mirror, about the size of an A4 piece of paper.
"It was being moved up and down like a yo yo for 20 minutes.
"She stayed under the duvet, the mirror went and a mobile telephone was dangled down.
"That was lit up, as if it was working. She believed she was being recorded. It was hoisted out of view.
"She got out of bed and hung coats outside her bedroom window.
"She looked up and saw him standing nearby with a mobile telephone in his hand. She moved out of sight."
Shortly after, Stoodley was arrested and in interview he said over a period of three years he took 100 pictures of her while sunbathing in the garden, said Mr Ashby.
"He described it as a game," he said. "He felt like he was being invited to look.
"In police interview he said 'She is a very beautiful woman and I enjoy looking at her'.
Mr Ashby asked the bench for a restraining order to be imposed.
Stoodley, 56, of Stonehouse, pleaded guilty to observing a person doing a private act for the purpose obtaining sexual gratification, knowing that person did not consent to being observed, on January 22.
He appeared before Stroud Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, February 12 for sentencing.
Nicola Colwill, defending, said a very thorough report on Stoodley had been prepared by the probation service.
"He is a man of previous good character," she said. "There is no suggestion he is of concern. There is no suggestion of predatory behaviour and there are no aggravating factors."
The bench followed the recommendations of the probation report and imposed an 18 month conditional discharge.
A restraining order for the same period was imposed. He was ordered to pay £85 towards prosecution costs and a £15 victim surcharge.
Warned about the consequences of breaking the restraining order by the bench, Stoodley replied: "Please be assured I have no intention of contacting her at all in any way whatsoever."


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1968 Oldsmobile Toronado, Runs and drives, but needs work. Two-owner car. Working power windows, power seats, original AM radio. Rim-blow horn and headlight doors... More
1950 Oldsmobile 98 "Futuramic" four door sedan,just awakened from a lengthy sleep,but it is all original,generally solid,and it starts,runs,and drives-an economical,entry level candidate,for the... More
Here's a pretty original California black plated bubbletop. This one is equipped with Premium Rocket 394 V-8, Hydra-Matic transmission, power windows, wonder-bar radio, power... More
1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, Green, Green interior, Auto, Front Wheel Drive, Engine runs well, Needs restoring, has new brake lines, needs front brakes, Needs fuel... More


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Poor Rihanna. Putting out an album every year seems like it's taking a toll on the singer's health. Entertainment Tonight reports she was rushed to a New York City hospital after her fabulous attendance at the Met Gala Monday night. One of her followers asked her why she had been quiet all day when Rihanna replied by tweeting a photo of an IV in her arm. She didn't give a reason why she was in the hospital, but according to Entertainment Tonight a source tells them she "had a fever and flu since last week and needed an IV but is fine now."
We're glad our favorite wild woman is out of the hospital and back home in L.A. Questions of whether or not Rihanna's party hard lifestyle is catching up to her quickly surfaced after the she tweeted the picture. Perhaps it's not the partying, but the fact that she's, I don't know, HUMAN. And you know, gets sick too. In addition to being human (I know it's hard to believe because she's so out of this world amazing), she works non-stop. Since her debut album in 2005, the only year she hasn't released a record is 2008. There's studio time, tours, interviews, red carpets, movie filming and of course, her rockstar lifestyle. Last October she was hospitalized with the flu while in Sweden and tweeted a similar photo, but got right back to the grind shortly after. We're exhausted thinking about how much she works. Now that we know she had a justifiable reason for missing her SNL dress rehearsal (hear that SNL producers?), we're wishing her a speedy recovery.
[Photo: Getty Images]
[Photo: Rihanna's Twitter]


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Global Economic Analysis - Currency Appreciation and Depreciation
Current and Financial Account Surpluses and Deficits
Current account deficits (or surpluses) and financial deficits (or surpluses) do not directly affect an economy. In fact, these deficits (surpluses) are actually the result of what is occurring in an economy, instead of being the cause. Trade deficits often occur when a nation's economy is growing faster than the economies of its trading partners. Rapid domestic growth increases the demand for imports, while slow or no growth with foreign economies can cause a decline in demand for the country's exports.
Trade balances are also affected by capital flows. If a nation's economy offers investment opportunities that are relatively better than other nations, then capital will flow into the country. With flexible exchange rates, this capital inflow will tend to increase the value of the nation's currency.
Economic statistics support the hypothesis that trade deficits are associated with investment opportunities and economic growth. Between 1973 and 1982, which was a time of stagnant economic growth for the
Budget deficits and trade deficits tend to be linked
An increase in the
Causes of a Nation's Currency Appreciation or Depreciation
Factors that can cause a nation's currency to appreciate or depreciate include:
·Relative Product Prices - If a country's goods are relatively cheap, foreigners will want to buy those goods. In order to buy those goods, they will need to buy the nation's currency. Countries with the lowest price levels will tend to have the strongest currencies (those currencies will be appreciating).
·Monetary Policy - Countries with expansionary (easy) monetary policies will be increasing the supply of their currencies, which will cause the currency to depreciate. Those countries with restrictive (hard) monetary policies will be decreasing the supply of their currency and the currency should appreciate. Note that exchange rates involve the currencies of two countries. If a nation's central bank is pursuing an expansionary monetary policy while its trading partners are pursuing monetary policies that are even more expansionary, the currency of that nation is expected to appreciate relative to the currencies of its trading partners.
·Inflation Rate Differences - Inflation (deflation) is associated with currency depreciation (appreciation). Suppose the price level increases by 40% in the
·Income Changes - Suppose that the income of a major trading partner with the


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Here are teen board games and card games that we've reviewed that we've found are enjoyed by older kids and teenagers.
What games do your teenagers enjoy playing?
We'd love to hear about the games they enjoy. Also feel free to send us suggestions on games that you'd like to see us review.


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Friday, August 2, 2013
Members of the First Baptist Church dedicated their time to travel to Romania to teach people about the gospel, but they also had a chance to learn from the experience as well.
The team worked with one church in the East and one in the West, held services went door-to-door to talk to the people. They led children ministries and had evening worship services for some who had never heard the gospel before.
Patrick Harmon works alongside the youth of the church, and the experience was a chance for him to create memories that could stay with him for years to come.
"As a youth pastor, it was a joyous occasion," Harmon said. "It was a great pleasure to see my students grow in boldness and conviction and love for people they had never met."
This was a first-time experience for North Augusta High School senior Drew Huskey, and he said it was great to be able to share his faith to the people in Romania.
"We would go in groups of two people and a translator, and go door-to-door to talk to people and ask if we could share our beliefs," Huskey said. "Many would talk to us for hours."
According to Huskey, there were about 15 people who were converted over the course of the experience, and 30 people came out to the church service.
He said he took away a greater knowledge of his own faith and that it is not difficult to spread the gospel to others.
"It's a lot easier than we think to share the gospel," Huskey said. "All it takes is a knowledge of the gospel and a willingness to walk up to someone's door."
Harmon said that he hopes they left a lasting impact on the area and that programs like this can continue to happen so that people can receive this message.
"The churches in the area gained a greater presence in the community they reside in," Harmon said. "I hope to see this continue in North Augusta. I'd like to thank the community for taking part in our fundraisers. We appreciate the prayers and support to help get us to Romania."
Heather Wright is a reporter for the North Augusta Star. She is a North Augusta resident, and earned a degree in communications from USC Aiken.
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Matt Garvin - Hall Director
(440) 826-2447
(440) 826-2447
Ernsthausen Hall
Ernsthausen Hall is located on East Center Street on South Campus. The building was the first residence hall in Ohio with geothermal heating and cooling, and remains one of the few in existence today. Ernsthausen houses nearly 200 students in double and single rooms, is co-educational by room and features new furniture, air-conditioning, a laundry area per floor, two vending areas and an elevator. The main lounge features a two story cathedral ceiling with a gas fireplace. There are also two more lounges on the upper floor, as well as lounges at the end of each of the eight hallways.
2 Person Room
1 Person Rooms
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An 18-year-old Shreveport software developer is launching a summer business program for teenage entrepreneurs who want to learn how to start and grow a business.
Justin Martin says he'll pair each student with a mentor who will assist the teens as they progress through various stages of business development. Martin says this new program, called the 20/20 Challenge, is to get teens to act on ideas that have been percolating in their head.


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Zygor Guides - World Of Warcraft In-game Strategy Guides
ask your self what do you get from this guide well thats simple they offer in-game World of Warcraft guides that dynamically tell you everything you need to do to power level your characters, complete dailies, make gold, unlock rare items, earn achievements, and much more
so what you get from this gold is
The Gathering Module will give you a list of the most profitable items. You'll discover lower level items that make more gold than even the max level mats everyone assumes are the best to sell. Often times these lower level items have no competition, and that means you can charge much higher prices.
Choose the highest profit items from the list and we'll show you highly optimized gathering routes that lead you over the densest node locations.
The Farming Module will give you a list of the most profitable items to farm.
You'll discover new items to farm that you never knew would make you so much gold. You'll also learn the popular items that have been proven to always sell well.
Tycoon will show you great grind spots that are virtually free from competition and are packed full of squishy mobs with high drop rates!
x-elerated guides shows you everything step by step the fastest way possible here are some
Easy To Follow Optimized Leveling Path
The guides practically hold your hand and takes you step by step though each quest.
Each step is generated by the X-Elerated in-game addon using there formula to find the quests that are the most experience-rich in the game. Bad junk quests that are a waste of time are removed from the guide completely so you level the fastest possible way.
Multiple Quest Objective Tracking
X-Elerated Guides supports multiple quest objective tracking by integrating with Blizzards built in quest tracking system.
there easy to follow guides will automatically detect what quest objectives you need to do next and will automatically check off each objective as you complete them moving you though the guide steps quickly and efficiently.
are you interested
get the fastes and easest guides to run you threw every possible thing about world of warcraft imaginable


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Urbis Protector
Creature - Human Cleric (Uncommon)
When Urbis Protector enters the battleflied, put a 4/4 white Angel creature token with flying onto the battlefield.
"I hear that Boros is losing its angels to the Gateless Movement. I'm sure this comes as no suprise to you." - Teysa, to Lazav
Interesting flavor text.


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What a great pleasure it is to be here today to share this very special ceremony.
... As Adm. [Navy Rear Adm. Joseph C.] Strasser [president of the Naval War College] mentioned, 25 years ago I was sitting where you are today, waiting to graduate from the College of Naval Command and Staff. It was a different era then, but there were some very striking similarities to what you face today. It was 1970. The Vietnam War was just winding down. As a matter of fact, I and most of my fellow students had come here straight from that war.
During the time we had been absorbed in that war, the Soviets had spent the decade very energetically rebuilding their armed forces. Their army, a force that had entered the '60s as mostly an infantry force, had by the 1970s been transformed into a heavy, fast-paced, nearly fully mechanized force, one we believed was far more capable of rapidly overrunning Europe.
And while the bulk of our surface ships and carriers were of World War II vintage, the Soviets were still laying the keels of a shiny new and very modern blue-water fleet.
While Vietnam had monopolized our resources and our focus, the Soviets had greatly expanded their ability to challenge us in more vital areas -- in Europe and on the high seas.
So as we sat in these chairs, my class saw what we believed were very considerable challenges ahead. We needed to refocus our efforts -- and our thinking and our training and preparations -- away from Vietnam and back to other missions.
And in that sense, I think there is a resemblance between that era and today. Yes, the challenges are very different and the adjustments are certainly different, but you also face the need to guide our forces toward new tasks and new missions.
And as I thought about how I would try to step up here and talk to you about your challenges, I thought back to my own graduation 25 years ago. By that time of the school year I had heard more about challenges than I cared to remember. And as I tried to recall what our graduation speaker had to say -- while I am sure that he was very eloquent and wise -- I can't remember a single word that he said. And of course, I guess that's a warning to me, for undoubtedly my own thoughts will prove equally perishable and fleeting!
But if I had to gather all of these challenges that I wish to discuss with you under one single heading, it would be to turn your focus to the future.
For 50 years, all of us have been accustomed to a great strategic consistency. Although the cause of the consistency was deplorable, the fact of the consistency was reassuring and oddly comfortable to us all.
We lived in the era of containment, and it was thoroughly understood; it was uniformly accepted; and it was as unchanging as the environment that dictated that strategy. Ironically, for although it proved to be perhaps the most strikingly successful strategy of its kind in history, we never once envisioned what would happen if it succeeded. For as long as it lasted, you would expect that we would have given some thought to what its success would create. But we didn't.
The lesson that I hope we have learned is that our strategies must extend beyond their own successes -- or their failures -- to envision and prepare for the consequences that could be created.
For when in 1991 our strategy did succeed, the result was surprise and an absence of thinking and preparation for the very conditions and consequences we had struggled for so long to create. As we should have anticipated, the culmination of containment caused us a great deal of motion in a global environment that had been unused to much motion for many, many decades. An empire ended, the bipolar global order collapsed and more new nations were born -- and more borders changed -- than we witnessed even after the Second World War. Any one of these three events would shake the world. All three combined have been like putting an eggbeater into a pool of still water.
During the year that you have been here, there have been, continuously, six to seven joint task forces in the field in real-life operations. Twice we have deployed forces to fight: once to Haiti, and then only a few weeks after our peaceful entry there, we went to the gulf to prevent another Iraqi attack against Kuwait.
We went to Rwanda, and we had a tough, but very well-run operation that safely withdrew the last of the U.N. forces from Somalia, and, of course, there's the no-fly zone over Bosnia. Our aviators have been involved there, as you well know, in several skirmishes. All of this in only one year. And of course, we are even now in the midst of yet another crisis in Bosnia. Some suggest that our world has become like a football game with no halftimes and no end in sight. But very clearly, let me remind you, our forces have performed magnificently. They have risen to every challenge with toughness, with skill and with great determination.
And this was certainly on display in last week's daring rescue of [Air Force Capt.] Scott O'Grady [shot down over Bosnia June 2, rescued June 8]. Whether it was O'Grady's inspiring heroism or the courage and commitment of those who desperately searched for him or the skill and daring of those who went in to get him, America saw once again the spirit and the remarkable qualities of the men and women in our armed forces.
But these kinds of challenges that we have experienced this past year are going to remain with us. For you here, this is, in all likelihood, the nature of the world you will be contending with for much of the rest of your careers.
Many of you are going to find yourselves either as commanders or as staff officers on joint task forces, even as I am sure that many of you have already participated in such operations.
And this is true not only for the American officers here today, but it is equally true for the international officers as well. For if you look back on the operations of the past several years, they have nearly all been multilateral, coalition operations. In nearly every operation that I just mentioned -- including the search for and rescue of Scott O'Grady -- it was not just American forces, but the forces of many nations that were or are still involved, and many of you are sitting here today.
And you are going to have to be able to explain to your people and to your families the grander, overarching purpose of what you are doing. For it is one thing to say that you are going to enforce a no-fly zone over Bosnia or Iraq; it is quite another to explain why. It is one thing to say that you are going to bring democracy to Haiti or to enforce nonproliferation in North Korea, but another to explain why.
One administration called it shaping a new world order, even as this administration refers to it as engagement. The fact is that our engagement does have a very real and a very vital purpose. Our underlying, but clearly our manifest, purpose in the Cold War, as should be true of any conflict, was to create new possibilities and new opportunities.
And the end of the Cold War created opportunities of a far grander scale than any other in history.
In Europe, for 45 years, even as we were engaging in containment, we were just as engaged building a new order in Western Europe, where so many of Europe's past wars emanated. The vision we helped to sow was of an integrated Europe, a condominium of nations whose security, whose economics and whose political systems were so intertwined that conflict between them grew more and more unthinkable.
It was the work of generations, but it has succeeded. And now we must protect that order, even as we spread this same vision and reality of constructive integration to those in the eastern half of Europe.
We must draw these nations into the same webs because it is the surest manner of limiting conflicts on that continent that has fostered two world wars and a global cold war in this century. That is the cycle we must ensure is not repeated again.
And today this means that two challenges must be met: The first is to help ensure the success and stabilization of reforms under way in Russia and Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. While much of that challenge rests on the shoulders of the people in these nations themselves, we can and we must offer them political and economic support along the way. We must never forget that their success is critical to our interests as well as theirs.
But the second, and equally critical, challenge is to reduce the fears and insecurities and instabilities in Central Europe. That region, after all, was precisely where both world wars and the Cold War of this century began, and an even longer litany of wars in the centuries before. The best and probably the only approach to this is to expand NATO in Central Europe, bringing in new members that are committed to democracy and committed to becoming members of a defensive alliance. Most nations of Central Europe believe this is essential, and the members of the alliance are convinced of this as well.
But today there are some in Russia who oppose this expansion. They argue that if NATO were to take this step, it would represent a threat to Russian security and that it could unhinge Russia's reforms by exciting a nationalist backlash from its people.
Yet both NATO members and the Central Europeans find such arguments ill founded, in fact, contrary to what they perceive as being Russia's own security interests. Other than the Central European nations themselves, no nation has suffered more perilously than Russia from Central Europe's volatility or its dreadful flair for igniting larger European wars.
It is very strongly in Russia's favor to see Central Europe made more stable by a regional security structure, one that reduces insecurities and instabilities and the chances of conflict either from within or from without. Expansion will clearly improve Central European stability. Opposing views find their roots in a fear that Russia would find itself isolated and encircled by a threatening alliance.
Yet these fears are founded on a misperception of NATO and the interests of its members. Very clearly, the trans-Atlantic partners want Russia to constructively engage in Europe in every sense: politically, economically and militarily. It is a great power that has so much to offer the rest of Europe. And as we and our European friends have discovered since the Second World War, the path to peace and prosperity lies in an integrated continent, including all. We all want Russia and the other former Soviet states as peaceful and contented members of this community. And both an expanded NATO and a democratic Russia in partnership with NATO are the surest way to fulfill that dream.
And there are opportunities in Asia that are equally great. No region of the world was more violent or more scarred by the bipolar confrontation of the past. But unlike Europe -- where the Cold War brought even the staunchest of traditional enemies together in a common camp -- Asia's historical distrusts remained entrenched and palpable.
Now, as this entire region is pulsing with economic growth, it is being propelled towards a different and a far more hopeful future, a future where Asia's economies are becoming more and more integrated; where Asia's factories and markets seem poised to become the most powerful engines of global economic growth in the next century. But here also progress depends on a stable security structure, one that preserves the security of our allies, but also one that integrates China's growing power as a constructive force, and that integrates Russia's power and influence equally constructively.
And just as we are looking for ways to keep Europe from splitting into camps, we must work toward the integration of Asian security, creating an order built on trust and cooperation -- and mutual interests and interdependencies -- rather than on ancient competitions and old scars.
Here in this hemisphere, every nation save one is now a democracy practicing free market economics. And that is an extraordinary evolution, one that opens up a commonality of interests that has never existed in the past.
A new world is shaping to our south, and we must all understand that this will dramatically transform this hemisphere in the next century. The nation with the fastest growing economy in the world is in Latin America. And there are several others not far behind it, even as there are others joining the queue.
Or you can look to the Middle East, where for 40 years we expended enormous diplomatic capital in an effort to negotiate a regionwide peace, but with only very limited success. In the past few years, we have helped achieve a stream of successes, and the last few steps to a broader, more enduring solution seem realizable, perhaps even near at hand. We must sustain this commitment. We must never forget that peace in the Middle East is of vital importance to our nation, and it could become a landmark of the next century.
Finally, there is one other critical region -- and that is the troubled gulf -- that will remain the oil reservoir needed to lubricate the economies of the industrialized nations for the foreseeable future. While the situation in that region remains divided and tense today, we must sustain the long-term commitment that convinces those who would wish to destabilize the gulf that this is both a self-defeating and, ultimately, a hopeless quest.
Now, none of these are short-term propositions. Some of them may require decades. And they will require imagination in addition to perseverance. Nor do they come without risk. But these are the opportunities we struggled to create through the long years of the Cold War. It is a more complex purpose than containment ever was. It is more ambitious. But it is just as necessary and vital to our nation.
And of course, none of this will come to fruition without American commitment and leadership.
Our purpose, therefore, is the creation of a much more peaceful and stable world order than the one we have known in this century. And that will be determined by how successful we are in Europe, in Asia, in this hemisphere, in the Middle East and in Southwest Asia. For in these regions lie the powerful economies that are the engines of global prosperity. And in these regions lie much of the material and human resources upon which these engines depend. Our purpose is, as well, to reintegrate those nations that for nearly half a century were so successfully contained, for the world will be safer and more prosperous if they are engaged constructively. We do not want to return to the past.
So I am very envious of you sitting here today. And I say this from the bottom of my heart. When I was sitting in your seats 25 years ago, our challenge was to protect the status quo, to ensure containment, to restore a military balance that we felt was eroding, for a struggle that we were convinced was going to last beyond our lifetimes. Your generation, on the other hand, confronts an extraordinary array of opportunities that are much more tangible and so much bolder. Your accomplishments will be measured in much grander terms than ours.
If we can safely usher in the dozens of nations and the billions of producers and consumers who are trying to convert to democracy and free markets, we will be creating the conditions that will lead to what may be the greatest explosion of prosperity the world has ever witnessed.
If we can create the stable regional security orders that I spoke of, we will make the world much safer than it has been in our lifetimes. While the accomplishments of this century have been measured by wars won, yours will be measured in wars averted and nuclear stockpiles diminished.
But for this to come to pass, our military must remain the finest in the world, for ultimately our nation's influence and our leadership rest on our military excellence. Nor should there ever be any doubt that the most vital purpose of our forces will remain, even in this new world, that of fighting and winning our nation's wars. The security of our most vital interests -- and of our allies' -- depends on this.
As I close, I must tell you that I feel very confident that we will realize the opportunities that I have spoken of. I am confident that the American people have the wisdom and the will to sustain the commitment that is needed. And I am confident in our allies, that they also have the wisdom and the commitment.
But I am most confident in our armed forces, in the men and women who wear our nation's uniform. When I look back on all that our armed forces have accomplished since the Cold War ended: from the Gulf War to Haiti, from Somalia to Rwanda, from Korea to last week's rescue of Scott O'Grady, it is simply impossible not to be confident.
And I also know that you are part of the finest, the best trained and the most experienced corps of military leaders who ever wore America's uniforms. I know that you are up to the challenges of this era and of keeping our forces the very finest. Although I know that Narragansett Bay behind me is a grand sight, I must tell you that the sight from this stage, looking towards you, is much grander and much more inspiring. In hands such as yours, it is impossible not to be optimistic about the future. And so, once again, I want to congratulate each of you and wish you luck in your next assignments. I know you will do them superbly. And so, God bless you all and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.
Published for internal information use by the American Forces Information Service, a field activity of the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), Washington, D.C. Parenthetical entries are speaker/author notes; bracketed entries are editorial notes. This material is in the public domain and may be reprinted without permission. Defense Issues is available on the Internet via the World Wide Web at http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/index.html


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Vinapha hotel is located right in the city centre, Han market and the Han River is about 50m far away, situated on the main streets with shopping malls, dining and just a few minutes walk to Trung Vuong Theatre.
Vinapha hotel has 7 floors, offers 17 well-appointed rooms with full of modern facilities and massage service. Designed in harmony between the beauty of Eastern and Western modernity, all rooms are equipped with modern equipment you have in mind. Especially, you can reach the river bank and enjoy the full charm of the Han River - the pride of the people of Danang just in walking distance. We also serve breakfast - lunch - dinner on request.
With the staff of dedicated, friendly and enthusiastic, surely you will have the moments of rest with fun and comfortable while staying with us.


text: I've been to Disneyland more than 100 times, Disneyland Paris, and Walt Disney World touring each resort/park with a slow moderate pace. How many days would you recommend for a first time visitor to Tokyo to fully experience Tokyo Disney Resort? How long is the perfect stay to you? Thanks.


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OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA — She arrives at 9:00am sharp once a week.
Staff at the Urban Mission calls them Ruby Tuesdays, a name that hung on the day at some point after Ruby Petty started volunteering about 13 years ago.
"Well, I just felt like it was a good cause," says Petty. "And it was something that I could do."
She stocks shelves during her three-hour shift.
On this day it's donated food items from a food drive.
The Urban Mission sees about 20,000 people a year.
Many of them are hungry.
Volunteers under Director Peggy Garrett set up a storefront so the needy would feel like they have more of a choice when they come.
"That just gives them a little dignity back, a little control," says Garrett.
So Ruby spends her morning sorting through the good and the bad.
At one point she's a little confused by a computer ink cartridge that found its way into a paper bag.
Peggy steps in and puts that aside.
She performs the rest of her tasks like an unseen angel who the people she helps might never see.
She turned 91 in October, 2013.
Her hip bothers her.
She gets a little tired after a shift.
But again and again, lining shelf after shelf, rests the continuing theme of her life, the idea of 'doing something'.
"It's something I can do," she says of her efforts on behalf of the needy. "I enjoy it. I just wish I could do more."
Director Garrett says, "She's there to give back to other people when she could be just sitting and home taking it easy."
Ruby grew up on a farm near Mangum, OK.
She raised a family.
By all rights she should be someone who is the recipient of a charitable act or two, but here she is.
Ruby Tuesdays are precious gems.
If only we had more.
For more information about the Urban Mission, located at 3737 North Portland Ave, go to their website at http://www.urbanmissionokc.org


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Welcome to the IDUG Support Center
In order to streamline support requests and professionally serve you, we utilize a support ticket system. Every support request is assigned a unique ticket number which you can use to track the progress and responses online. For your reference we provide complete archives and history of all your support requests.
Please use one of the email addresses assigned to your IDUG member profile!


text:
This separate counter location allows you to sample some of the ice cream offernigs from Plaza Restaurant without having to wait for a seat.
Ice cream flavors: Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Mint Chocolate Chip, Cookies 'n Cream, Birthday Cake, No Sugar Added Raspberry Sorbet, No Sugar Added Butter Pecan, Fat-free Chocolate / Vanilla Swirl. Tofutti and Rice Dream available.
The "Plaza" Ice Cream Sundae - Hot fudge, whipped cream and a cherry served in a freshly-made waffle bowl with your choice of two hand-scoops of ice cream. $5.39
All-American Sundae - Old-fashioned vanilla and chocolate ice cream with hot fudge, peanut butter drizzle, whipped cream and a cherry. $5.39
Ice Cream Cookie Sundae - Two freshly-made chocolate-chip cookies served with your choice of hand-scooped ice cream. $5.29
Double-scooped Ice Cream Cone - with your choice of two flavors of hand-scooped ice cream. $4.49
Mickey Mouse Kid's Cone - One scoop of vanilla ice cream. $2.99
Ice Cream Float - served with Coca-Cola or Barq's Root Beer and your choice of hand-scooped ice cream. $4.69
Bottled water - $2.50
If a menu is presented here it is for guidance purposes only. Menus can change without notice and at some restaurants daily. If you have specific dietary needs or questions it is best to contact the restaurant directly for information. If you'd like to notify us that a menu has changed, or you can provide the complete information, please let us know through our email form.
The following are recent reviews for Plaza Ice Cream Parlor from our Reader Review system. Click the Show All Reviews link to see every review for this location. To browse all reviews in the system, please see this page.
|Average Reviewer Rating:
|Number of The Plaza Ice Cream Parlor Reviews: 1
Offsite Links (we can not vouch for their accuracy or timeliness)
You can help us keep these guides current. If you see anything incorrect on this page, or if you have additional information that should be added, please fill out our form.


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Westfalen Hunting Safaris
|Farm Westfalen No.245 District Outjo, Namibia
Situated in North Western Namibia, WESTFALEN HUNTING SAFARIS covers a private hunting area of more than 37 000 acres. As part of the Loxodonta Africana Conservancy, covering over 650 000 acres.
We hunt on the trail and sometimes from hides. The terrain is mainly Mopane woodland with granite "koppies". Some areas are quite rugged and can only be explored on foot. These are also the areas where the Mountain Zebra can be found. On average we have about 300 sunny days per year. February and March is in our rainy season. From April to August it can be colder in the mornings and evenings. September to November can be quite warm, but since water resources are limited, conditions are ideal for hunting, especially bow hunting. Accommodations are most comfortable with guests staying in private quarters with en-suite bathrooms, consisting of a shower, basin and flush toilet, with running hot and cold water. Electricity is generated by solar power. Delectable home cooked meals are served in the dining area - what goes into the pot, the hunter has shot! The newly established Elephant camp is quite an attraction since the Desert Elephant move into the area occasionally.


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Star Gazing at Gokarna
January 14 – Goa to Gokarna
Room fare (for checking out after 10 am) – Rs 100
Breakfast at a shack in Anjuna – Rs 200
Bus to Mapusa – Rs 20
Rickshaw to Panjim – Rs 120
Bus from Panjim to Karwar – Rs 92
Snacks – Rs 49
Rickshaw from Karwar to Gokarna – Rs 550
Gokarna to Om Beach – Rs 150
Stayed overnight on the beach for free…haha
The next morning we checked out at 12, the check out was 11. The guy who was at the counter at that point of time asked us to pay for another day as we were checking out late. He settled for Rs.100 extra, and we were off from there, we needed to hurry a bit cause we had to travel and did not know the exact way to get to Gokarna. We stopped on the beach to have Breakfast, which would be our last meal in Goa, so a tad bit off disappointment for me.
Not knowing what lies ahead, as I have never been to Gokarna and Bhavika has, she has mentioned about it in her previous post on Gokarna. That's the breakfast we had in the picture below, the flat round bread is, Poie, its the local bread very famous in Goa.
We were on our way out and as usual the taxi guys come chasing you, its pissing off when they hound you all the time. They quoted Rs 2600, we had not planned to take one anyway. Further down the road we were asked by a guy if we were going to Mapusa, he had a bus that took us to Mapusa for 20 bucks after waiting for around 20 minutes for it to leave. That's the picture of the mini bus we were in, the driver had convinced us that we would get a bus from Mapusa to Gokarna. When we got off the bus at Mapusa it felt like the bus driver had vanished into the air. Questions like what do we do know? Where do we get the bus from? Is it the local Kadamba bus service or a Paulo?
So we asked around the local bus station (Kadamba) where we were dropped and they told us to go to the Paulo stand. We walked there and they told us to go back to Kadamba. Bhavika then asked how do we get to Karwar which is close to Gokarna, we found out that we would get a local bus from Panjim that goes to Karwar. So we took a rickshaw instead to Panjim for Rs 120. We came across this school bus and when the kids realised I was taking a picture of them they were bubbling with happiness waving their hands wildly at us. A military truck, used by the Indian Army used as a school bus in Goa?
We reached Panjim Bus stand, at the ticket counter there was no mention of any stop called Karwar, so we inquired and a driver led us to a bus that was leaving for Karwar in 5 minutes. The ride to Karwar was around four hours long, and included a police check at the Karnataka border. The police came in and they shook the luggages, not opening it to check what's inside. I think they were looking for alcohol. The bus ride was nice and cool as the sun had set a while ago, the roads were green with trees around us, fresh clean cool air blowing in.
I had this young guy continuously dozing off on my shoulder, he was young but looked like a tired boy coming back from a hard days work. Bhavika couldn't stop laughing at the site, so to add to her excitement I took a picture of the boy. We reached Karwar around 8.30 – 9 pm, only to find out that the same bus that we came in goes to Ankola, which is the next stop and much closer to Gokarna. But by the time we got that bit of information, it was already too late, the bus had left.
Our only choice was to rick it up to Gokarna, as that was the last bus. Walking around the bus stop, with everyone ogling at us, wondering who are these two people roaming around with their backpacks. The rickshaw guys asked us for Rs 600 to drop us to Gokarna, Om beach is a couple of kilometers away from Gokarna. Walking down the road we managed to get a rickshaw guy to take us till Gokarna for Rs 550. This was a good distance of 63 Kilometers according to the rickshaw guy it was marked around 50 something on the first board we saw on the way though.
It was a long ride and since it was a rickshaw which is generally open it was pretty cold and we cuddled up together for the lovely warmth. We stopped at Ankola to get some water and some snacks to consume on the way. It was getting late, it was around 10.20 when we managed to get the below picture of a signboard and zoomed into it to find out where we were. As you can see it was pitch black around we were relieved to see that we were close.
Gokarna was dead when we reached there, could hardly spot a person on the road, except two tourists probably staying there. We took a look around nothing, not a single rickshaw to take us to Om Beach. So the rickshaw guy took us to a Hotel and asked if there was a room, or if he knew any rickshaw guy. The guy at the counter said there there was no room but he could call a rick for us that would take us up to Om Beach, but it would cost us Rs 200.
We agreed, we just wanted to get to Om beach and drop our bags. He had a conversation with the rickshaw driver on the phone and then told us that the police are not allowing anybody to go to Om Beach because of some problem. He adviced us saying that we should leave in the morning to Om beach and should stay in a small little place across the road that looked quite bad. We told him is there another place, he said everything in this side will be full, your best option is to stay in that place.
We said thank you, walked out, just as we walked out a rickshaw went by us and then stopped. Our rickshaw guy asked him if he would go to Om Beach, he agreed for Rs.150, after paying and thanking the rickshaw guy we were finally on our way to Om Beach.
January 15 – Gokarna to Hampi
Breakfast at Nirvana – Rs 200
Bus tickets to Hampi (Paulo Travels seater) – Rs 1000
Stay at Moksha lodge on Om Beach – Rs 300
Lunch at a shack on Paradise Beach – Rs 170
Boat ride back to Om Beach – Rs 100
2 bottles of water – Rs 30
Rickshaw from Om Beach to Gokarna bus station – Rs 120
Bus to Ankola – Rs 24
Dinner at Ankola – Rs 230
We were looking at the stars on our way to Om beach, the sky was studded with diamonds, lots of them could be seen. The rick ride was not too long around twenty minutes and we were getting anxious to know what our fate was, to our relief the rickshaw stopped at a place called Namaste Cafe, that had a small watchmans cabin besides the gate with the light on. We knocked, we yelled, we screamed, we banged on the door, but nothing. The Rickshaw guy took his money and left.
Darkness enclosed us as we walked away from Namaste cafe, but I was speechless looking at the stars, it was mind boggling, the stars formed a dome in front of us as we walked towards the beach. We heard voices, I got out my little torch that is built in with my cellphone and we walked down the steps that go to the beach. The voices were of a couple of guys who were sitting at a gazebo close to where the steps were.
The beach was isolated as we walked by it, the shadows formed shapes and played with our minds. We passed by an empty boat with Namaste written on we continued walking, not a light on the beach just the spotted sky looking so lovely, the moon had not risen as yet, the stars were shining bright.
As we took the first curve that forms the Om on the beach we see a couple of bonfires with people sitting around them, some playing the Guitar while we could also hear drums/tablas in the distance. We were relived to see people friendly happy people. There were lights on in a couple of guest houses, we felt unburdened.
Unfortunately none of the guest houses had rooms, we asked two more apart from the racket we created at Namaste. We put our bags down in the sand close to a shack that had a couple of people laughing and talking and sipping on beer. I told Bhavika to go in cause I really had enough at that point of time and just wanted to sit on the sand.
I am on the sand, Bhavika comes back, "They have no room so I got you a beer!," she said. What do we do now? She said. I said we have no choice but to sleep on the beach. So I asked her to get out the bed sheet and we covered ourselves after a bit. We made pillows out of our bags and I found out its just lovely to sleep on the sand when it takes the shape of your body it gets really comfortable.
We laid down there, besides a group of buffaloes, around 1/6th of the beer canned, I just couldn't get myself to drink it, we were fatigued with the days travel. I held Bhavika who was a little worried about sleeping on the beach like that. We star gazed for a while saw a couple of shooting stars and satellites, and then both of us were off into deep slumber, occasionally waking up because the bed sheet was off or the buffaloes mooed.
We woke up with a start with the buffaloes getting up and leaving at the break of dawn. It was freezing, I was shivering,I managed to get one of the bonfires going, that was used in the night and warmed up a little. The morning rays were beginning to come over the hills of Gokarna and we watched the colors take over the sky, light shying away in the dark.
Thats a picture of where we slept on Om Beach and the bed sheet that kept us warm. We then went for a walk down the beach in search of some breakfast, everything was closed. Then at the last corner of the stretch we came across Nirvana Cafe, we asked a grouchy guy who looked like he had just woken up if it was open.
After he acknowledged that they were open, we instantly dumped our bags in and sat at a table, half an hour later we got our menu and an hour later we were eating like pigs, both of us were starving. After a sumptuous and reasonable breakfast we decided to buy our tickets to go to Hampi, we walked back to back to the start of Om beach to get our tickets, the second shack the one after Namaste when you are on the beach had a travel agency as well. So we picked up tickets for Hampi from Pushpa travels at a rate of Rs.500 each. The bus was at 11.30 in the night from Ankola and the last bus from Gokarna Bust Stand to Ankola Station was at 7.30 in the evening, we had a good 7 hours to kill.
So we took a look around for some shacks, we checked into Moksha Cafe a place that had a decent room. He quoted Rs.600 for a day, we told him we just need it until evening and we would be checking out by 6 in the evening. We managed to get him down to Rs.300 for the day, we dumped our luggage, freshened up and were our ready to climb the cliff adjoining Om beach and Half moon beach.
The Climb up the cliff was child's play, once on top the view is quite delightful, you can see the Om shape of the beach. Far into the distance on the side away from Om beach, you can see Long beach.
Half Moon, Paradise and Sangam beach are not visible from this point. We sat under a tree and enjoyed the breeze cooling us down. We then proceeded towards half moon beach the walk was still pretty easy with a clear cut out route along the end of the cliff.
There was a lot of greenery during the walk, this time it was getting tougher as the sun was coming out and it was more uphill.
Along the way there always was a good view of the sea on the right hand side.
After a while we could see the shacks that can be seen in the picture below, a sign the Half Moon Beach is just around the corner. With new vigor we went around the corner and then downhill to the shores of half moon beach.
Half moon beach is the smallest of all the beaches in Gokarna, it may be less than half a kilo meter in long. Clean sand and clear waters a combination that got both of us in the water in less than 5 minutes. The boat that can be seen in the picture below, coincidently got freed and came towards us, not fast but it was scary. One push set it right.
We got out of the water in twenty minutes and bought a couple of bananas from a woman who was selling fruit from a basket on her head. We then decided to move on to paradise beach, the walk out of full moon beach to the path where we could walk to paradise beach was vibrant green.
We then reached this path that had all these white trees that looked beautiful.
A little further down you had to walk on a patch of rocks, some of them were pretty colorful with stripes and patches.
The walk started to get tougher much tougher than the walk from Om Beach to full moon beach, but the view was getting better.
When we got a glimpse of Paradise beach we were glad that we had reached but disappointed as the way it looked did not by any means suit its name.
We walked on, till we were seated in Paradise cafe, we had lunch there, chicken chopsuey and cheese kofta. It was different, not bad, but different the style of cooking.
We ordered for a chocolate pudding for dessert it was delicious.
We decided to take a boat back to Om Beach, we were ruining out of time, it was nearly 5 in the evening and we had to check out at 6. We hooked up a ride for both of us for Rs.100 to Om beach, with a boat man we had met on Half Moon beach. The boat was taking off from the opposite side of where we entered. While walking there both of us saw a part of the beach that was not visible from the cafe or the cliffs we climbed, the name seemed fit at that point of time.
The boat was quite full and shook quite a bit with the waves crashing on its side. We took a couple of pictures from the boat, it was nice to see the entire stretch we had trekked and reminiscent those moments.
We reached Om beach, in ten minutes, I had a short conversation with the boat man about their daily life and we were then rushing to check out on time.
We caught the sunset as we were walking towards Namaste to get a rickshaw to take us to the Gokarna bus stand, where we would get a local to Ankola.
There were quite a few people watching the sun set, some taking pictures and some meditating.
It was a serene sunset at Gokarna, we got to the see the colors post sunset from the Rickshaw that charged us Rs.120 to take us from Om beach to Gokarna bus stand.
We reached Gokarna bus stand around 6.45 PM the bus came in at around 7.20 PM, the moment the announcment was made that the bus was going to Ankola, every local sitting at the bus station jumped up and ran towards it. We covered 90% of our journey to Ankola standing in the bus. The bus reached Ankola bus stand in a little more than half an hour.
From Ankola bus stand we had to take a rickshaw to the bus stand where the Paulo bus to Hampi would stop, I think the pick up was from Hotel Bharadwaj. The rickshaw fare for both of us was Rs 50. We then ate a light meal and I had a beer, and then waited for three long hours for the bus to come.
Next Stop was Hampi…


text: There is a change being proposed by the Obama administration that deals with a government program where full control of the means of production is already in government hands. That's right. In at least one instance, Barack Obama wants to put America on the road to capitalism. The program in question is called Constellation.


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McCONNELL — McConnell Tabernacle hosted a Valentine Luncheon February 17, 2013, following the morning worship service by Keith McClung.
His message was taken from John 6:5-13, entitled "A Basket of Loaves and Fishes."
The fellowship hall was decorated with red, pink, white heart embellished tablecloths. Arrangements were heart and floral baskets designed by Dr. Charles Wood. Tea lights added to create a soft warm glow for the luncheon.
Those attending were Eugene and Rose Hensley, Steve and Charlotte Chapman, Keith and Anita McClung, Clara Maynard, Barbara Harrison, Merl, Tammy and Hannah Thompson, Ardith Epperhart, Josie Curry, Nathan and Preston Adams, Phyllis Henderson, Kathy Keyser, Richard Clevenger, Charles Murphy, Phyllis Sadler, Bobbie Robinette, Carolyn Kelly, Larry and Shelia Bledsoe, Kayla Maynard, Zachary and Kaylin Marcum, Bobbie Stambaugh, Rema Butcher, Donna Vaughn and Cindy McClung.
Anita McClung was honored for her birthday with a cake and gift. Door prizes were awarded to Kayla Maynard and Kaylin Marcum.


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DURHAM, N.H.- Kevin Decker (Armonk, N.Y.) passed for a career-high 395 yards, threw three touchdown passes and rushed for another to lead the sixth-ranked University of New Hampshire football team to a 47-17 victory over Villanova before a crowd of 5,760 on Saturday afternoon at Cowell Stadium.
UNH earned its fourth consecutive win to up its record to 4-1, 1-0 in the Colonial Athletic Association. Villanova dropped to 1-5 overall, 0-3 in the CAA.
Decker went 23 of 32, matching a career high for completions by spreading the ball to nine different receivers. The senior signal caller recorded TD passes to R.J. Harris (Odenton, Md.), Justin Mello (Dartmouth, Mass.) and Jimmy Giansante (Jefferson Hills, Pa.), helping UNH compile a season-best 401 passing yards and 557 total yards.
Harris notched his third 100-yard receiving day of the season, accumulating a career-high 190 yards, just 23 shy of the CAA freshman record, on a team-leading seven receptions. His team-best fourth scoring catch came on the longest pass play of the season, a 66-yard heave from Decker on a post pattern with 3:27 left in the first quarter to help the home Wildcats build a 15-0 lead.
Mello made his one catch of the day count, corralling a 35-yard touchdown reception with 6:11 left in the second quarter to push UNH's lead to 24-3.
Giansante (three catches-58 yards, TD) snared a 16-yard scoring strike early in the fourth quarter, increasing the Wildcats' lead to 44-10 with 13:42 remaining in the contest.
Decker (six rushes-46 yards, TD) got the scoring started by rushing for a three-yard touchdown, his sixth, just 2:45 into the opening stanza, putting the finishing touches on an eight-play, 80-yard drive. He then kept it himself for the successful two-point conversion and an 8-0 UNH lead.
Brian McNally (Cornwall, N.Y./four tackles) spearheaded New Hampshire's best defensive showing of the season, racking up a career-high 3.5 sacks as the 'Cats held 'Nova to 277 yards of offense and forced three turnovers.
Chris Houston (Harrisburg, Pa.) made six tackles, forced a fumble and notched his first career interception.
Rod Walker (Portsmouth, N.H) also picked off the first pass of his career, returning the INT 42 yards to the Villanova 6. That set the stage for Dontra Peters (Annapolis, Md./nine rushes-30 yards, TD), who scampered in for a six-yard score with 12:31 left in the third period, staking UNH to a commanding 34-10 following the PAT.
New Hampshire forced its other turnover on the first play of the fourth quarter when Jared Smith (Greencastle, Pa./two tackles) forced a fumble that was recovered by James Jenkins (Paterson, N.J./three tackles).
Mike MacArthur (North Hampton, N.H.) improved to 7-for-7 in field-goal attempts this season by connecting on all three of his attempts: a 24-yarder in the second quarter, giving UNH an 18-0 lead; a 27-yard kick on the last play of the first half for a 27-10 lead and a 23-yarder with 5:14 left in the third quarter for a 37-10 advantage. But the sophomore kicker did miss the first extra point of his career following Giansante's second-period TD catch, snapping a streak of 43 in a row successfully converted.
Villanova quarterback Chris Polony, who replaced ineffective starter Chris Cullicerto (2-for-7, seven yards), went 15 of 19 for 120 yards with two interceptions and a nine-yard TD pass to Dorian Wells (five catches-36 yards, TD). Kevin Monangai rushed 18 times for 57 yards and a touchdown.
New Hampshire hits the road to square off with No. 9 William & Mary at Zable Stadium next Saturday, Oct. 15, at 12 p.m. For more information, visit www.unhwildcats.com.