Mortgage payments for a new borrower are at their lowest as a proportion of disposable earnings for 15 years, according to new Halifax research. Typical mortgage payments for new borrowers - both first-time buyers and homemovers - at the long-term average loan to value ratio stood at 26% of disposable earnings in the second quarter of 2012. There has been a continued fall in payments relative to earnings over the past year from 29% in Q2 2011, taking this measure further below the long-term average of 36%. Overall, mortgage payments have nearly halved as a proportion ...

ClickMail Marketing, http://clickmailmarketing.com, the most service-oriented provider of email marketing, implementation, and support, has been named to the Inc. 500/5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, for its third consecutive year. Ranking #1992 (#83 in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley), the company demonstrated a 3-year growth of 135%. ClickMail Marketing affirmed its place in an even more exclusive cadre of enterprises that have appeared on the Inc. 500 / 5000 list multiple times, many of which have grown to become national ...

EE Technologies, Inc. an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider headquartered in Reno, Nevada, has completed installation of Assembleon's iFlex, an intelligent and flexible pick & place solution for every PCB assembly need. EE Technologies is one of the first EMS providers in the United States to purchase the iFlex system and made the capital investment as part of its strategic mission to serve its customers with state of the art technology. EE Technologies has partnered with Assembleon for more than 12 years for pick & place equipment because of ...

On Thursday, August 23, Houston DWI attorney Herman Martinez helped represent a client who had been arrested for their second DWI. During this case, a Harris County Judge had attempted to put a SCRAM device on the client as was his policy. This, however, is not required in the state of Texas and costs about $375 per month for all associated fees. Martinez took on the case and was able to get the Judge's court staff to contact the Judge at home to convince him to impose the Ignition Interlock Device (IID) as opposed to the more costly SCRAM device. This was effective and ...

With well over 300,000 cars offered by dealers on Auto Trader at any one time, the number of cars with delivery mileage (less than 100 miles) accounts for just 2% of the total. This time last year, cars less than one year old accounted for 10.5% of the total stock offered on Auto Trader, while this year that figure is at 9.4 %, the lowest level for the last three years, caused largely by declining new car registrations in the last few years and a shortage of quality young used stock. There was a 'spike' in the proportion of cars less than one year old in September ...

"Fuel instead of food", is currently a common question - although this need not be. The first generation of biofuels is mostly made of corn, wheat or sugarcane. But that's not exactly the ideal solution. Biofuels of the 2nd generation are made of agricultural waste - from wood chips, straw or specially cultivated "energy crops". The Austrian competence centre acib (Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology) has found ways to make these renewable sugar resources available for industry and for the production of biofuels. The enzymes that are used ...

Having designed, manufactured and tested a mid-scale model of wave energy generating unit, Eco Wave Power has successfully proven the concept of producing cheaper electricity from the ocean waves energy. Based on a number of their patented inventions, like "Power Wing" and the "Wave Clapper", their electricity generation unit can transform ocean wave energy into electric current more effectively than competitors' units. Amongst many advantages of system its durability truly stands out - it employs three different storm protection mechanisms, corrosion ...

Summer travel season may be winding down, but the new menu items at Joe's Crab Shack offer a taste of the exotic, transporting guests to locales as far-flung as the North and South Poles and the island nation of New Zealand. Always committed to providing its customers with the highest-quality seafood available, the national seafood restaurant will highlight two new Steampots - Joe's signature menu items - that introduce diners to fresh-caught Antarctic king crab, Alaskan queen crab and green lip mussels from New Zealand. The new Steampots, on the menu today, take advantage ...

One in five children in America can't count on getting enough to eat each day, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To do their part, Bruegger's Bagels will kick off a fundraising campaign on September 4 to support Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign, joining thousands of restaurants nationwide in the fight to end childhood hunger in America. Bruegger's will raise money through its Facebook page and in the company's 300-plus bakeries across the U.S. On Facebook, people can simply "Like" Bruegger's and the bagel leader will donate $1 to ...

Two identical FLOYDS spectrographs, installed in recent weeks at telescopes 6,000 miles apart, robotically acquired a supernovae target this week. Due to the level of precision required and the difficulty involved, few if any, other ground-based spectrographs have ever achieved this milestone. "This is unprecedented," staff astronomer David Sand explained. "In a matter of just a few weeks, Las Cumbres Observatory was able to install the spectrographs, achieve first light, and begin robotic operations. It's unheard of." Sand is already gathering data from the spectrographs ...

On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet." Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ...

The system, known as Kepler-47, harbours the smallest known transiting circumbinary planets -- planets orbiting a pair of stars -- to date. The planets were discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope [1] by monitoring thefaint drop in brightness produced when both planets transit (eclipse) their host stars [2]. "In contrast to a single planet orbiting a single star, planets whirling around a binary system transit a moving target," explains Jerome Orosz (San Diego State University, USA), lead author of the study. "The time intervals between the transits and their duration ...

Life is made up of a series of complex organic molecules, including sugars. A team of astronomers led by researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, have now observed a simple sugar molecule in the gas surrounding a young star and this discovery proves that the building blocks of life were already present during planet formation. The results have been published in the scientific journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. The star was observed with the new large international telescope, Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. The ALMA telescopes are able to ...

A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right time, to be included in planets forming around the star. The astronomers found molecules of glycolaldehyde -- a simple form of sugar [1] -- in the gas surrounding a young binary star, with similar mass to the Sun, called IRAS 16293-2422. Glycolaldehyde ...

University of Adelaide researchers are working with colleagues in Italy to produce better quality pasta that also adds greater value to human health. Two research projects - being conducted by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls at the University's Waite Campus - will start next month in collaboration with researchers from the Italian universities of Bari and Molise. The aim of the ARC Centre of Excellence is to look at the fundamental role of cell walls (biomass) in plants and discover how they can be better utilized. Both of these new projects will investigate ...

A new study by researchers at UT Dallas' Center for Vital Longevity, Duke University, and the University of Michigan has found that the strength of communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain predicts performance on basic arithmetic problems. The findings shed light on the neural basis of human math abilities and suggest a possible route to aiding those who suffer from dyscalculia-- an inability to understand and manipulate numbers. It has been known for some time that the parietal cortex, the top/middle region of the brain, plays a central role ...

A new 'traffic light' test devised by Dr Nick Sheron and colleagues at University of Southampton and Southampton General Hospital could be used in primary care to diagnose liver fibrosis and cirrhosis in high risk populations more easily than at present. Liver disease develops silently without symptoms, and many people have no idea they have liver failure until it is too late – one-third of people admitted to hospital with end-stage liver disease die within the first few months. A simple test available in primary care could diagnose disease much earlier, enabling those ...

"It was shown that Internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination," says the lead author, Privatdozent Dr. Christian Montag from the Department for Differential and Biological Psychology at the University of Bonn. "Researchers and therapists are increasingly closing in on it." Over the past years, the Bonn researchers have interviewed a total of 843 people about their Internet habits. An analysis of the questionnaires shows that 132 men and women in this group exhibit problematic behavior in how they handle the online medium; all their thoughts revolve around the ...

Fabio Ciulla from Northeastern University, Boston, USA, and his colleagues demonstrated that the elimination of contestants in TV talent shows based on public voting, such as American Idol, can be anticipated. They unveiled the predictive power of microblogging Twitter signals--used as a proxy for the general preference of an audience--in a study recently published in EPJ Data Science¹. The authors considered the voting system of these shows as a basic test to assess the predictive power of Twitter signals. They relied on the overlap between Twitter users and show audience ...

Turning the volume up too high on your headphones can damage the coating of nerve cells, leading to temporary deafness; scientists from the University of Leicester have shown for the first time. Earphones or headphones on personal music players can reach noise levels similar to those of jet engines, the researchers said. Noises louder than 110 decibels are known to cause hearing problems such as temporary deafness and tinnitus (ringing in the ears), but the University of Leicester study is the first time the underlying cell damage has been observed. The study has ...

Oxford, August 29, 2012 - The Moon is believed to have formed from a collision, 4.5 billion years ago, between Earth and an impactor the size of Mars, known as "Theia." Over the past decades scientists have simulated this process and reproduced many of the properties of the Earth-Moon system; however, these simulations have also given rise to a problem known as the Lunar Paradox: the Moon appears to be made up of material that would not be expected if the current collision theory is correct. A recent study published in Icarus proposes a new perspective on the theory in ...

Implantable devices for treating cardiac arrhythmias, which include ICDs, are already underused in parts of Eastern and Central Europe and there is a risk that the financial crisis could exacerbate the problem. The European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), a registered branch of the ESC, is tackling this issue through ICD for Life. The initiative aims to raise awareness about the importance of ICDs and sudden cardiac death in countries in Central and Eastern Europe. ICD implantation rates in Europe vary widely, ranging from 1 ICD implantation per million inhabitants in ...

The 2012 expert consensus statement on catheter and surgical ablation of atrial fibrillation was developed by the Heart Rhythm Society (HRS), the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and the European Cardiac Arrhythmia Society (ECAS) and published in their respective journals: Heart Rhythm, EP Europace (1) and the Journal of Interventional Cardiovascular Electrophysiology (JICE). Since the previous consensus document was published in 2007 catheter and surgical ablation of AF have become standard treatments ...

Aplastic anaemia is characterised by a reduction in the number of the bone marrow cells that go on to form the different cell types present in blood (essentially red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets). In most cases, the causes of the disorder are hard to determine, but some patients have been found to have genetic alterations leading to a shortening of their telomeres (the end regions of chromosomes that protect and stabilise DNA). A team at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) led by María Blasco has successfully created a transgenic mouse model ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—As the national waistline expands, so do pools of intra-cellular fat known as lipid droplets. Although most of us wish our lipid droplets would vanish, they represent a cellular paradox: on the one hand droplets play beneficial roles by corralling fat into non-toxic organelles. On the other, oversized lipid droplets are associated with obesity and its associated health hazards. Until recently researchers understood little about factors that regulate lipid droplet size. Now, a study from the Stowers Institute of Medical Research published in an upcoming ...