The truth of the matter is simply this: staged homes tend to sell faster (up to 50 percent faster in some areas) and for more money than non-staged homes. According to real estate experts who participate in Florida Home's "Ask the Real estate Expert" program, this is because a well-staged home dramatically increases the perceived value of a property. A great majority of home buyers make their decision based on emotion. Despite all the criteria they have as they begin their search, they are ultimately drawn to a property that elicits a strong emotional response ...

MediFit Corporate Services, Inc. announces the appointment of Valerie Gordon as West Coast Director of Business Development. Valerie will be working with the business development team in the acquisition of new business and will provide support to the operations team. Valerie comes to MediFit after 22 years with Club One. There she held positions including Group Exercise Director, Program Manager and Regional Director before being named Vice President of Corporate Health Management, responsible for all client services, operations and business development efforts. Valerie ...

Nonprofit organizations have unprecedented, new abilities to search all internal and external data through a contextual data engine offered by NewSci LLC (www.newsci.co). NewSci combines the power of search capabilities provided by the Findability Sciences platform (powered by IBM) and domain expertise in nonprofit fundraising with cognitive computing, which learns and interacts naturally with people to extend beyond what humans or machines could do on their own. NewSci penetrates and sorts the complexity of Big Data, so organizations can pose new, bold questions and ...

Corcentric, a leading provider of accounts payable automation and electronic invoicing solutions, today announced they will be hosting a free 60-minute educational Webinar for AP professionals titled "AP Automation Buyer's Guide." This Webinar, hosted by Rob DeVincent, Corcentric's Vice President of Product Marketing, will take place on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 at 2:00 PM ET/11:00 AM PT. Companies are realizing that when it comes to their financial processes, automation is key to reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and sending more revenue to the bottom ...

The interest of choirs to participate in the upcoming World Choir Games in Riga, Latvia is higher than ever before. After working on all submissions the intermediate state of registrations after the first registration deadline was clear. 490 choirs from a total of 60 nations have registered to date. "This is a great result," said Jelena Dannhauer, project director for INTERKULTUR. "It shows us that choirs are planning their participation very early and that the World Choir Games have become an established biennial festival in their choral calendar." ...

Br8kthroo announces the development of its innovative TechyDogs Collar, a smart collar that takes connectivity to a whole new level for the modern pet owner. As a GPS dog collar equipped with Zigbee wireless technology, the TechyDogs Collar provides greater insight into the pet behavior and gives owners the ability to monitor their pet's health and well being, even when away from them. "We wanted to create a collar that helped bridge the gap between pet and owner," stated Eliud Lamboy, Co-founder of the TechyDogs project. "With the TechyDogs Collar, we ...

"Access to Independence," a free, online magazine for the disability community was recently launched by United Disabilities Services (UDS) which is headquartered in Lancaster, PA. "UDS has so much experience and expertise to share with those who have disabilities and the online magazine format is a way for us to reach more people and help more people across the country," noted William Kepner, president of the non-profit organization. The debut issue of "Access to Independence" is available on the UDS eStore website at https://estore.udservices.org. Tiphany ...

Iron deficiency predicts lower IQ scores and poor higher-order thinking skills in children adopted from institutional settings like orphanages, according to a new longitudinal study. The study analyzed data on 55 children adopted from international institutions, with a focus on nutritional status. Conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota, the research appears in the journal Child Development. Children with more severe iron deficiency when they were adopted and who had spent more time in an institution before they were adopted were more likely to have lower ...

One year of Head Start can make a bigger difference for children from homes where parents provide less early academic stimulation, such as reading to children, helping them recognize and pronounce letters and words, and helping them count. Showing parents how they can help their children with reading and counting may help, too. Those are the conclusions of a new study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. The study appears in the journal Child Development. Head Start is a comprehensive program that provides low-income children with preschool education; ...

Cincinnati, Ohio – Obese adolescents not getting enough sleep? A study in today's The Journal of Pediatrics, shows they could be increasing their risk for developing diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Lack of sleep and obesity have been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in adults and young children. However, the association is not as clear in adolescents, an age group known for lack of adequate sleep, and with an obesity and overweight prevalence of 30 percent in the United States. Researchers at the University of Michigan ...

In many primates, females mate with multiple partners, causing an often-intense competition amongst males to pass along their DNA to be king of the genome as well as the jungle. In the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, author Alex Wong used a published sequence dataset from 55 species of primates to test for a correlation between molecular evolutionary rates across a genome (substitution rates) and testes weights, used in the study as a proxy for increased sperm production and competition. It is widely thought that the production of increased ...

To reconstruct phylogenetic trees from next-generation sequencing data using traditional methods requires a time-consuming combination of bioinformatic procedures including genome assembly, gene prediction, orthology identification and multiple alignment. As a consequence, more recently, scientists have relied on a simpler method where short sequence reads from each species are aligned directly to the genome sequence of a single reference sequence. The authors, Bertels, et. al., in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, not only show that this ...

Drugs used to treat blindness-causing disorders could be successfully administered by eye drops rather than unpleasant and expensive eye injections, according to new research led by UCL scientists that could be a breakthrough for the millions worldwide suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and other eye disorders. 1 in 5 people over 75 have AMD with well-known sufferers including actress Dame Judi Dench and author Stephen King. The research findings are significant due to growing patient numbers and an increasing demand for the eye injections that halt ...

The experiences of doctors, patients and carers of initial cancer consultations have informed new guidelines developed at the University of Leicester, in collaboration with University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and Imperial College London, to help patients better understand their cancer consultations. The research, published today (6 March 2014) in the British Journal of Health Psychology, found patients' experiences of being given their diagnosis differed both between participants and within the same participant. This means a doctor's role in communicating information ...

Working parents are often caught between the needs of their sick child and their job, which can lead to continued day care use even when their child is ill. New research has found children going to nursery when they are unwell with respiratory tract infections (RTIs) may be an important factor in the spread of these illnesses in the community. The findings, to be presented today [Thursday 6 March] at the South West Society for Academic Primary Care (SW SPAC) meeting, explored why parents send their children to nursery when they are unwell. The Parents' Choices About ...

The last decade has seen a remarkable shift in how people use the internet in relation to their health and it is now talked of as a routine feature of being ill. Professor Sue Ziebland, Director of the Health Experiences Research Group, based in the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford, will share these findings with health practitioners and researchers at the South West Society for Academic Primary Care (SW SAPC) meeting hosted by the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol, today [Thursday 6 March]. This study ...

Diets low in saturated fat don't curb heart disease risk or help you live longer, says a leading US cardiovascular research scientist and doctor of pharmacy in an editorial in the open access journal Open Heart. And current dietary advice to replace saturated fats with carbohydrates or omega 6-rich polyunsaturated fats is based on flawed and incomplete data from the 1950s, argues Dr James DiNicolantonio. Dietary guidelines should be urgently reviewed and the vilification of saturated fats stopped to save lives, he insists. DiNicolantonio points out that the demonisation ...

A new criminal offence of "wilful neglect" is needed for individuals and organisations in the healthcare sector, to send out a clear message that appalling care warrants public censure and sanction, say leading lawyers in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Existing regulation is not up to the job, argue Professors Karen Yeung of The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, and Jeremy Horder of the Department of Law at the London School of Economics. Many patients are just as vulnerable as those who are mentally incapacitated, they point out, yet they do not ...

Nurses and patients are struggling to identify qualified doctors or to grade their seniority from their generic name badges, finds a survey of one hospital in England, published online in BMJ Quality & Safety. The findings prompt the researchers to call for a review of currently used terminology, deployed since the Modernisation of Medical Careers initiative in 2009, which revamped the length of training and introduced a range of new job titles. Staff and patients must be able to correctly identify professional status and communicate effectively, if optimal care is ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Women's reproductive health may never be the same, thanks to Northwestern University biomedical engineer Patrick Kiser and his first-of-its-kind intravaginal ring that reliably delivers an antiretroviral drug and a contraceptive for months. Kiser's one ring delivers two drugs that do three important things: the device is designed to protect against HIV and herpes as well as unwanted pregnancy. It will be the first device with the potential to offer this protection to be tested in women. The easy-to-use ring delivers controlled doses of tenofovir (a ...

PHILADELPHIA—University of Pennsylvania researchers have successfully genetically engineered the immune cells of 12 HIV positive patients to resist infection, and decreased the viral loads of some patients taken off antiretroviral drug therapy (ADT) entirely—including one patient whose levels became undetectable. The study, appearing today in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first published report of any gene editing approach in humans. The phase I study was co-authored by researchers at Penn Medicine, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and scientists ...

Human activity influences ocean beach bacterial communities, and bacterial diversity may indicate greater ecological health and resiliency to sewage contamination, according to results published March 5, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Halliday from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues. Beaches all contain bacteria, but some bacteria are usually from sewage and may contaminate the water, posing a public health risk. In this study, scientists studied bacterial community composition at two distant beaches (Avalon, California, and Provincetown, ...

A new dinosaur species found in Portugal may be the largest land predator discovered in Europe, as well as one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic, according to a paper published in PLOS ONE on March 5, 2014 by co-authors Christophe Hendrickx and Octavio Mateus from Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã. Scientists discovered bones belonging to this dinosaur north of Lisbon. They were originally believed to be Torvosaurus tanneri, a dinosaur species from North America. Closer comparison of the shin bone, upper jawbone, teeth, and partial ...

Boston, MA -- More than 230,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year in the United States, but determining their course of treatment remains a source of considerable debate. A new study by researchers from Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and colleagues—which draws from one of the few randomized trials conducted to directly address this issue—finds a substantial long-term reduction in mortality for men with localized cancer who undergo a radical prostatectomy. While the benefit on mortality appears to be limited ...

The results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Human and Molecular Genetics journals, demonstrate for the first time that mutation in STAG3 gene is the major cause of human fertility disorders as it provokes a loss of function of the protein it encodes. STAG3 encodes a meiosis-specific subunit of the cohesin ring, the biological process through which, from a diploid somatic cell, a haploid cell or gamete is produced. Cohesins are protein complexes that bind two straps of DNA and are implicated in its repair, replication and recombination, as well as ...