Europcar, the leader in car hire services in Europe for leisure and business users, has launched a competition to find the best in-car karaoke singer in the UK. And shoppers visiting Bluewater on the 28th July 2012 will have a chance to record their entry at a special Europcar roadshow. The car is the stage in the latest cutting-edge and engaging social media campaign from Europcar, which plays on the karaoke culture and builds on the huge popularity of talent shows. With so many singers and wannabe performers entering talent shows but failing to hit the big time, Europcar's ...

Malmaison has announced that it is to refurbish the vacant Tay Hotel, a listed city centre landmark constructed in 1889 in the Scottish coastal town of Dundee. Interserve, the international support services and construction group, has been appointed as main contractor on a refurbishment project to create the new Dundee Malmaison hotel. Works commenced in June and completion is scheduled for twelve months later. The project forms part of the GBP1 billion Dundee Central Waterfront Development, an integral phase in the city's multi-billion pound regeneration of its ...

It's all about fund raising while enjoying the fresh air, as the family dog walk of the summer - 'A Grand Day Out' - kicks off again for the second year, raising much needed funds for both children and dogs. The combined forces of the Wallace and Gromit's Children's Foundation, and the Kennel Club Charitable Trust, are hosting the fund raising dog walks again this year. There are three events, starting in Bristol's Tyntesfield Park (29th July), then Essex's Hadleigh Park on the 19th August. The final walk will be at Lincolnshire's Belton House on 15th September. Apart ...

John Symond has come out in agreement with Governor of the RBA, Glenn Stevens', position on the state of the Australian housing market in his Anika Foundation speech at Macquarie Bank on 24 July. Symond, the Chairman and Founder of Australia's largest Mortgage Broker Aussie says: "Repayments are now at their lowest in years on the back low interest rates, income growth and lower house prices and loans sizes." "I particularly endorse the RBA's optimism and agree that arrears have remained low or have even seen some decline in the last year, while house ...

Australia's largest retail mortgage broker, Aussie officially has the most highly qualified team of any large mortgage brokerage in the country. Aussie is recognised by brokers and customers alike for its high level of training and service standards having last month been awarded Best Career Development in the Banking & Finance Awards. All of its brokers have, or are in the final stages, of a Diploma of Financial Services (Mortgage Management), which is an externally credited and nationally recognised qualification, with the entire Aussie Sales leadership team now ...

InternetReputation.com is excited to announce the successes of their Mugshot Removal Service for Mugshotsonline.com. People who find themselves listed on mugshotsonline.com or bustedmugshots.com often want these pages removed quickly and effectively. InternetReputation.com is now offering assistance to individuals with these harmful records, helping them erase embarrassing mugshot pictures, links and information entirely from Google, Yahoo and Bing. Mugshotsonline.com is one of the large mugshot databases which hosts daily arrest records from various counties across ...

Santa Cruz Spine and Sport, known for treatment and rehabilitation services that restore functions, resolve injuries, and improve athletic performance, will be at the COBHA Annual Wellness Fair on Saturday, August 25, 2012 in downtown Santa Cruz. When it comes to chiropractic, physical therapy and massage therapy in Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Spine and Sport is a top choice. Santa Cruz Spine and Sport is devoted to all individuals who treasure their health above all. Santa Cruz Spine and Sport is committed to meeting their clients' individual goals by offering exclusive ...

To celebrate alongside this year's summer games, Winner Casino is announcing their promotion called the "Winner Summer Race". The games offer leaderboard standings that will deliver prizes totaling as much as GBP20,000! New games are also being featured by Winner Casino, including one slot title based on a summer games theme, "Wild Games". Winner Summer Race The events are ready to take place as soon as this year's summer games begin, with the starting gun going off on July 27 at 00:00 and continuing until August 12 23:59pm. The promotion will ...

Forge House Group Limited (Darlington, United Kingdom) today announced the appointment of the new business unit manager for its USA based R&D division. Mike Anderson, experienced bank executive, takes the position of Manager (CEO) of Forge's expanding Material and Electronics Research unit, Vercet LLC, based Dallas, Texas. Justin Farrelly, current Manager moves to the interim role of Manager, Technology (CTO) pending further development of Forge House Group's US operations. Ron Harker, Group Chairman commented "this appointment further strengthens our ...

The Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) will be held July 28 – Aug. 1, 2012, at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Mass. Crystallography is the science devoted to exploring the arrangement of atoms in regular crystalline solids and in complicated molecules. Scientists will present research spanning a diverse array of disciplines, including medicine, genomics, material science, and structural biology. The following summaries link to full news releases and highlight a few of the meeting's many noteworthy talks. Speed and power of X-ray ...

Patients with plantar fasciitis (painful bone heel spur) experience significantly less pain and improved quality of life following a standard dose of external beam radiation therapy, a common cancer treatment similar to receiving an X-ray, according to a randomized, cooperative group study that was published online July 25, 2012, in the International Journal of Radiation, Oncology, Biology, Physics (Red Journal), the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). Approximately 8-10 percent of the population has severe bone heel spurs, ...

FINDINGS: Researchers at UCLA have identified a novel molecule in the brain that, after stroke, blocks the formation of new connections between neurons. As a result, it limits the brain's recovery. In a mouse model, the researchers showed that blocking this molecule—called ephrin-A5--induces axonal sprouting, that is, the growth of new connections between the brain's neurons, or cells, and as a result promotes functional recovery. IMPACT: If duplicated in humans, the identification of this molecule could pave the way for a more rapid recovery from stroke and may ...

Tanzania is one developing country that could actually benefit from climate change by increasing exports of corn to the U.S. and other nations, according to a study by researchers at Stanford University, the World Bank and Purdue University. The study, published in the Review of Development Economics, shows the African country better known for safaris and Mt. Kilimanjaro has the potential to substantially increase its maize exports and take advantage of higher commodity prices with a variety of trading partners due to predicted dry and hot weather that could affect those ...

When the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) 052 investigators released their landmark study results last year showing that treatment can reduce HIV transmission by 96% in serodiscordant couples, questions were raised about the cost of early antiretroviral therapy (ART) and if it should be universally implemented. Data presented today at the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. show that treatment as prevention is "very cost-effective". Using an HIV microsimulation model (CEPAC-International) to further expand analysis of HPTN 052 data, study investigators ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Policymakers struggling to stop the spread of HIV grapple with "what if" questions on the scale of millions of people and decades of time. They need a way to predict the impact of many potential interventions, alone or in combination. In two papers to be presented at the 2012 International AIDS Society Conference in Washington, D.C., Brandon Marshall, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, will unveil a computer program calibrated to model accurately the spread of HIV in New York City over a decade and to make specific ...

July 27, 2012 (Tampa, FL) – Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Nursing have shown that brief treatments with Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) substantially reduce symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) including, depression, anxiety, sleep dysfunction and other physical and psychological symptoms. The findings of this first study of ART appear in an on-line article published June 18, 2012 in the Journal Behavioral Sciences. ART is being studied as an alternative to traditional PTSD treatments that use drugs or ...

Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila made history when he earned a gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. His speed and agility won him the gold, but it was barefoot running that made him a legend. When the shoes Bikila was given for the race didn't fit comfortably, he ditched them for his bare feet. After all, that's the way he had trained for the Olympics in his homeland. Racing shoeless led to success for Bikila, and now, more than 50 years later, runners are continuing to take barefoot strides. Several Olympic runners have followed Bikila and nationally the trend ...

In-utero exposure to relatively high magnetic field levels was associated with a 69 percent increased risk of being obese or overweight during childhood compared to lower in-utero magnetic field levels, according to a Kaiser Permanente study that appears in the current online version of Nature's Scientific Reports. Researchers conducted the prospective cohort study, in which participating women in Kaiser Permanente's Northern California region carried a meter measuring magnetic field levels during pregnancy and 733 of their children were followed up to 13 years, to collect ...

Berkeley — A new analysis gives Californians good reason to be optimistic about the green credentials of the state's proposed high-speed rail project, due to begin construction in 2013 thanks to funding recently approved by state legislators. Arpad Horvath at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mikhail Chester at Arizona State University compared the future sustainability of California high-speed rail with that of competing modes of transportation, namely automobile and air travel. They determined that, in terms of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, ...

Scientists at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developed an innovative way to combat post-surgical scarring for glaucoma patients. A clinical trial has shown that the use of a new drug delivery method has resulted in 40 per cent fewer injections needed by glaucoma patients to prevent scarring after surgery. This also means fewer hospital visits for these patients in future. Glaucoma, a disease characterised by a build-up of pressure in the eye, is a major cause of blindness worldwide. It affects about 3 per ...

London (July 27 2012). The terms of welfare reform and Labor market activation in the UK need to be re-set, according to a senior university policy expert Andrew Jones, director of the Local Economy Policy Unit at London South Bank University, and editor of Local Economy, published by SAGE. He warns that the UK Government's predominant philosophy towards the UK Welfare state accepts and supports social hierarchy and defends privilege. This, he argues, is re-creating and strengthening the conditions that provoked the 2007 economic crisis. "The rapid movement along this ...

An international team of researchers from the USA and Europe including from the University of Bonn under the direction of Dr. Hugues Sana (University of Amsterdam) has discovered that the most massive stars in the universe don't spend their lives in space as singles as was previously thought. More than two-thirds orbit a partner star. "The orbit paths of the stars are very close together so that the region around these stars is turbulent and by far not as calm as previously thought," says Professor Norbert Langer from the University of Bonn. What happens is that one star ...

An ultimate goal in modern chemistry and materials science is the non-invasive chemical mapping of materials with nanometer scale resolution. A variety of high-resolution imaging techniques exist (e.g. electron microscopy or scanning probe microscopy), however, their chemical sensitivity cannot meet the demands of modern chemical nano-analytics. Optical spectroscopy, on the other hand, offers high chemical sensitivity but its resolution is limited by diffraction to about half the wavelength, thus preventing nanoscale resolved chemical mapping. Nanoscale chemical identification ...

On the night of July 20, 2012, the laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), which is nearing completion at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long at a pulse rate of one hertz – one pulse every second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, a quadrillion watts, and a femtosecond is 10-15 second, a quadrillionth of a second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this rapid pulse rate. "This represents a new world record," said Wim Leemans ...

TORONTO, July 27,2012 –Heterosexual men make up a small but growing number of people infected with HIV in Canada. Yet a new study has found that many of them feel existing HIV-related programs and services don't meet their needs and are geared primarily or exclusively toward gay men and heterosexual women who are living with the virus. "Heterosexual men tend to go through HIV alone," said Tony Antoniou, a pharmacist and research scholar in the Department of Family Medicine at St. Michael's Hospital. "They feel very isolated." Antoniou said the study, published in the ...