Some landlords can find it difficult to set a rental amount for their investment properties. Setting the rent too high may mean your property receives limited interest and remains empty for an extended period of time, leaving you out of pocket, while undervaluing the property will limit your rental income potential. Determining a fair rent for you and your tenants involves more than picking a number out of a hat, according to landlord insurance specialist Terri Scheer Insurance. Terri Scheer Insurance Manager, Ms Carolyn Majda, suggested landlords do their research ...

Following a huge success in Europe, Trafalgar's (www.trafalgar.com) At Leisure collection for 2013 is now expanding worldwide with itineraries in South and North America, South Pacific and Asia. Featuring a more relaxed travel style, the At Leisure itineraries let guests experience their destination as a local with Trafalgar, the Insider of guided vacations, and also allow plenty of free time for individual exploration. Guests enjoy stays of 2-3 nights on average in each destination, starts no earlier than 9 a.m. on most travel days, small group sightseeing in select locations ...

Firelight Fusion Electronic Cigarettes has announced an end of September sale where they are offering 20% off of everything in their online store. The blog post announcing the sale states that there are no minimums and no maximum amounts needed to save big. Lower prices should not deter vapors from looking at the Firelight Fusion e cigarette line. The Fusion e cigarette is the KR808D-1 model that has become a sensation and sold by many other top brands across the U.S. over the last few years. The Firelight brand has built a solid reputation online with the total package ...

HOUSTON -- (Sept. 27, 2012) -- Move forward. High-five your neighbor. Turn around. Repeat. That's the winning formula of one of the world's smallest predators, the soil bacteria Myxococcus xanthus, and a new study by scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School shows how Myxococcus xanthus uses the formula to spread, engulf and devour other bacteria. The study, featured on the cover of this month's online issue of the journal PLOS Computational Biology, shows how the simple motions of individual ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– By mimicking nature's own sensing mechanisms, bioengineers at UC Santa Barbara and University of Rome Tor Vergata have designed inexpensive medical diagnostic tests that take only a few minutes to perform. Their findings may aid efforts to build point-of-care devices for quick medical diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), allergies, autoimmune diseases, and a number of other diseases. The new technology could dramatically impact world health, according to the research team. The rapid and easy-to-use diagnostic test consists of a ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – The October GSA TODAY science article, "Open-source archive of active faults for northwest South America," by Gabriel Veloza and colleagues, is now online at www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/22/10/. The article introduces the "Active Tectonics of the Andes Database," which will provide more data to more geoscientists. Understanding important aspects of how the Earth works -- in this case, hazards associated with active seismic fault zones -- is greatly improved by free and open access to the many types of spatial and geological data collected ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- A national study has found that earnings over the course of the careers of primary-care physicians averaged as much as $2.8 million less than the earnings of their specialist colleagues, potentially making primary care a less attractive choice for medical school graduates and exacerbating the already significant shortage of medical generalists. The results, published online in the journal Medical Care, lead the study's authors to recommend reducing disparities in physician pay to ensure adequate access to primary care, which has been shown to improve ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Nearly 20 percent of people who underwent low back fusion surgery developed post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms associated with that surgery, according to a recent Oregon Health & Science University study published in the journal Spine. Past studies have noted PTSD symptoms in some trauma, cancer and organ transplant patients. But this is the first study, its authors believe, to monitor for PTSD symptoms in patients undergoing an elective medical procedure. "It is maybe not surprising that significant surgical interventions have psychological as ...

STANFORD, Calif. — If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford University have given M13 a bit of a makeover. The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13's key attributes — its non-lethality ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Healthy people's lungs are home to a diverse community of microbes that differs markedly from the bacteria found in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. That's the result of new research from Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, which has wide implications for treatment of cystic fibrosis and other lung diseases. "The lung is not a sterile organ," said David Cornfield, MD, an author of the new study, which will be published Sept. 26 in Science Translational Medicine. Although decades of received scientific wisdom said healthy ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new research study led by an Indiana University professor has found that social bullying is just as prevalent in children's television as depictions of physical aggression. The study, "Mean on the Screen: Social Aggression in Programs Popular With Children," which appears in the Journal of Communication, found that 92 percent of the top 50 program for children between the ages of two and 11 showed characters involved in social aggression. On average, there were 14 different incidents of social aggression per hour - or once every four minutes. While ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 28, 2012) – A common herbicide used in the United States may be linked to an increased risk of a congenital abnormality of the nasal cavity known as choanal atresia, say researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and other Texas institutions. The study by Dr. Philip Lupo, assistant professor of pediatrics – hematology/oncology at BCM and Texas Children's Cancer Center, is scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics. Choanal atresia is a disorder where the back of the nasal passage is blocked by tissue formed during fetal development. It is ...

A new study found that patients with gout who consumed cherries over a two-day period showed a 35% lower risk of gout attacks compared to those who did not eat the fruit. Findings from this case-crossover study published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), also suggest that risk of gout flares was 75% lower when cherry intake was combined with the uric-acid reducing drug, allopurinol, than in periods without exposure to cherries or treatment. Previous research reports that 8.3 million adults in the U.S. suffer with gout, ...

September 28, 2012, Hong Kong, China – The international open-access journal GigaScience (a BGI and BioMed Central journal) announces the publication of a unique study providing the genome sequence of the critically endangered Puerto Rican Parrot (Amazona vittata) by Taras Oleksyk and colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. The sequencing and analysis of the genome of the only surviving native parrot in US territory provides numerous benefits for avian genetics, conservation studies, and evolutionary analyses. What is remarkable here, and highlighted in an ...

The critically endangered Puerto Rican Parrot (Amazona vittata) is the only surviving parrot species native to the United States. A genomic sequencing project, funded by community donations, has published today, in BioMed Central and BGI's open access journal GigaScience, the first sequence of A. vittata, the first of the large Neotropical Amazona birds to be studied at the genomic level. The Puerto Rican Parrot was once abundant throughout Puerto Rico but destruction of old forest habitats to make way for farming in the 19th Century resulted in a drastic decline in their ...

A piece of nettle cloth retrieved from Denmark's richest known Bronze Age burial mound Lusehøj may actually derive from Austria, new findings suggest. The cloth thus tells a surprising story about long-distance Bronze Age trade connections around 800 BC. The findings have just been published in Nature's online journal Scientific Reports. 2,800 years ago, one of Denmark's richest and most powerful men died. His body was burned. And the bereaved wrapped his bones in a cloth made from stinging nettle and put them in a stately bronze container, which also functioned as urn. Now ...

Vienna, Austria, 28 September 2012 – New studies that reveal for the first time the real economic and human costs of caring for cancer patients in Europe will be presented during the ESMO 2012 Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology in Vienna. "Here we have two studies of enormous importance," noted Prof Peter Boyle, President of the International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France, Member of the ESMO Faculty group on Cancer Prevention, who was not involved in the studies. "It is essential to have knowledge of the total costs of cancer and Dr ...

Take the time to enjoy a deep breath next weekend when the 405 freeway closes for Carmageddon II. If it's anything like last year, the air quality is about to get amazing. In study findings announced Sept. 28, UCLA researchers report that they measured air pollutants during last year's Carmageddon (July 15) and found that when 10 miles of the 405 closed, air quality near the shuttered portion improved within minutes, reaching levels 83 percent better than on comparable weekends. Because traffic dipped all over Southern California that weekend, air quality also improved ...

Quantum dots are nanostructures of semiconducting materials that behave a lot like single atoms and are very easy to produce. Given their special properties, researchers see huge potential for quantum dots in technological applications. Before this can happen, however, we need a better understanding of how the electrons "trapped" inside them behave. Dresden physicists have recently observed how electrons in individual quantum dots absorb energy and emit it again as light. Their results were recently published in the journal "Nano Letters". Quantum dots look like miniscule ...

In certain toy racecar tracks, sneaky players can flip a switch, trapping their opponents' vehicles in a loop of track. Cells employ a less subtle approach: they change the track's layout. In a study published online today in Science, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Oxford University discovered that, by forming or undoing gene loops, cells manipulate the path of the transcription machinery – which reads out instructions from DNA – controlling whether it moves along the genetic material in one direction or two. "We found that gene loops ...

In order to assemble novel biomolecular machines, individual protein molecules must be installed at their site of operation with nanometer precision. LMU researchers have now found a way to do just that. Green light on protein assembly! The finely honed tip of the atomic force microscope (AFM) allows one to pick up single biomolecules and deposit them elsewhere with nanometer accuracy. The technique is referred to as Single-Molecule Cut & Paste (SMC&P), and was developed by the research group led by LMU physicist Professor Hermann Gaub. In its initial form, it was only ...

TORONTO, Sept. 28, 2012—Lack of control over operating rooms and other resources as well as a lack of work-life balance are among the main reasons general surgeons may be dissatisfied with their jobs, a new study has found. The study was led by Dr. Najma Ahmed, a trauma surgeon at St. Michael's Hospital, at a time when both the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Canadian Medical Association have reported a decline in the number of general surgeons due to low recruitment, poor retention and early retirement. Dr. Ahmed said that since the general surgery ...

Women who experience early menopause are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than women whose menopause occurs at a later age, according to a new study by Melissa Wellons, M.D., assistant professor of Medicine in the Vanderbilt Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism. Wellons conducted the research while working at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and it is published in the current issue of Menopause: The Journal of The North American Menopause Society. She said the study is especially important because cardiovascular disease is the leading cause ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- You've probably never given much thought to the fact that picking up your cup of morning coffee presents your brain with a set of complex decisions. You need to decide how to aim your hand, grasp the handle and raise the cup to your mouth, all without spilling the contents on your lap. A new Northwestern University study shows that, not only does your brain handle such complex decisions for you, it also hides information from you about how those decisions are made. "Our study gives a salient example," said Yangqing 'Lucie' Xu, lead author of the ...

Washington, DC, September 28, 2012 – Screening practices for multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) in intensive care units (ICUs) vary widely from hospital to hospital, according to a new study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). The P-NICE interdisciplinary research team from the Columbia University School of Nursing collected and analyzed survey responses from the infection preventionists (IPs) of 250 hospitals that participated ...