Trafalgar (www.trafalgar.com) the Insider of guided vacations is pleased to announce the launch of their 2013 Australia and New Zealand brochure, featuring stopovers in tropical Fiji. With 50 itineraries, this is Trafalgar's biggest South Pacific brochure to date, offering more choice for more value including 14 Regional itineraries, 6 multi-region Discoveries and the At Leisure program has expanded to include New Zealand. Whether guests are looking to visit a certain region or both countries at once, Trafalgar has flexible guided vacations to suit the needs of everyone, ...

Everybody knows all good things come in pairs: shoes, socks, salt and pepper shakers, semi-detached houses, even Jedward. Now we can add the classic casino game Roulette to that list, because online casino giants, Sky Vegas, have announced the launch of Double Action Roulette, a brand new game available inside their casino lobby this July. This superb game conjures up double the excitement and double the fun as players spin for double the winnings! Double Roulette affords more options than traditional Roulette and offers bets with much higher odds too, meaning players, ...

The highly anticipated release of Lamborghini's next supercar - the Aventador - weakened the knees of car critics and auto fanatics last year when it was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show. With all the technological advances inherited from previous vehicle releases, combined with the stealth of a 7-speed automated manual, V12 6.5 litre, 694 horsepower engine, the Italian car giant had already received 18 months worth of car production in the initial phases of vehicle debut. The Motor Report called it a 'hero' car, and it's obvious how it won the title. In July 2012 ...

King Ice, an online hip hop jewelry retailer, launched a street team to promote its brand across the globe. The company has recruited fans and customers to help promote the brand. In exchange for promoting King Ice, members receive points that can be redeemed for store credit. Tasks, or missions as the company calls them, range from posting a comment on social networking sites to putting up stickers locally. The guerilla marketing form of advertising known as street teams was originally developed by urban record labels. Rap labels utilized the marketing tactic to circumvent ...

Trafalgar, the Insider of guided vacations, believes that the world's natural and cultural heritage is what sustains the travel industry, and that its preservation is imperative. This belief has compelled them to continue their support for The National Trust for a second year, this time as their current sole corporate sponsor in the bid to save the world-renowned White Cliffs of Dover. In partnership with The Travel Corporation Conservation Foundation, Trafalgar's donation will aid the National Trust in their bid to purchase a missing 1.35 km stretch of the spectacular ...

Even though it's only July, serious holiday crafters are already making their to-do lists and checking them twice in preparation for their busiest time of the year. To make this holiday season easier, Michaels has launched Make Your Joy, an online holiday planning tool. Users who register for the free application at Michaels.com/holidayplanner can create and manage their to-do lists, sync their calendars to Michaels events and view and share holiday project ideas. Users will receive reminders so they can stay on schedule, plus inspiration, ideas and chances to win prizes ...

Essex, Vermont based Huber + Suhner, Inc. has recently committed to expanding its Mexican manufacturing operations at The Offshore Group's Bella Vista Industrial Park in Empalme, Sonora. The company currently occupies 20,000 square feet of industrial real estate, but will soon bring 82,000 square feet of manufacturing space on-line. This represents an increase in production space of over 60,000 square feet. At present, Huber Suhner's Empalme, Sonora plant employs approximately 275 workers. When the new buildings' production capacity becomes functional, the company's ...

Spring Valley Hospital welcomes Sound Physicians, a leading national hospitalist organization, to provide comprehensive hospitalist services at the 231-bed acute-care hospital. With Sound Physician's unique hospitalist team model, patients at Spring Valley will experience the benefit of around-the-clock, in-house coverage: quicker, smoother and more seamless care for patients needing admission from the hospital's emergency department. "Sound Physicians shares Spring Valley Hospital's goal of delivering quality patient care and increasing patient satisfaction," ...

Consumers change their minds often when making choices that involve conflicting goals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Consumers frequently face situations where they can't get everything they want from the options available to them. As competing goals struggle for dominance, conflicts are likely and consumers tend to flip-flop en route to making a decision," write authors Kurt A. Carlson (Georgetown University), Margaret G. Meloy (Pennsylvania State University), and Elizabeth G. Miller (University of Massachusetts Amherst). Consumers ...

The color red influences consumers to become more aggressive in online auctions and affects how much they are willing to pay for products as varied as video game consoles and Florida vacation packages, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But the color blue can influence consumers to make lower offers when negotiating directly with a seller. "Red background color induces aggression through a feeling of arousal and it increases aggression relative to blue or gray backgrounds. This causes individuals to make higher bids in auctions but lower offers ...

Consumer decision-making is affected by the relationship between time and spatial distance, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "We often think about time in various contexts. But we do not realize how susceptible our judgment of time is to seemingly irrelevant factors like spatial distance," write authors B. Kyu Kim (University of Southern California), Gal Zauberman (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), and James R. Bettman (Duke University). Imagine that you are in New York today and will be in a different city in one month. ...

Melbourne researchers are now simulating in 3D, the motion of the complete human rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the common cold, on Australia's fastest supercomputer, paving the way for new drug development. Rhinovirus infection is linked to about 70 per cent of all asthma exacerbations with more than 50 per cent of these patients requiring hospitalisation. Furthermore, over 35 per cent of patients with acute chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are hospitalised each year due to respiratory viruses including rhinovirus. A new antiviral drug to treat ...

Consumers evaluate services and make decisions based on the level of uncertainty associated with a product—the greater the uncertainty, the more likely it is they will need to have faith in a company and focus on its unique offerings, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Some services can be evaluated with actual experience, whereas other services are difficult to evaluate even with experience—they have to be taken on faith. Services taken on faith are more difficult to evaluate, and are usually perceived to have greater uncertainty and higher ...

Consumers who self-diagnose are more likely to believe they have a serious illness because they focus on their symptoms rather than the likelihood of a particular disease, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. This has significant implications for public health professionals as well as consumers. "In today's wired world, self-diagnosis via internet search is very common. Such symptom-matching exercises may lead consumers to overestimate the likelihood of getting a serious disease because they focus on their symptoms while ignoring the very low ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– You're headed out the door and you realize you don't have your car keys. After a few minutes of rifling through pockets, checking the seat cushions and scanning the coffee table, you find the familiar key ring and off you go. Easy enough, right? What you might not know is that the task that took you a couple seconds to complete is a task that computers –– despite decades of advancement and intricate calculations –– still can't perform as efficiently as humans: the visual search. "Our daily lives are comprised of little searches that are constantly ...

An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has broken off from Greenland's Petermann Glacier, according to researchers at the University of Delaware and the Canadian Ice Service. The Petermann Glacier is one of the two largest glaciers left in Greenland connecting the great Greenland ice sheet with the ocean via a floating ice shelf. Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering in UD's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, reports the calving on July 16, 2012, in his "Icy Seas" blog. Muenchow credits Trudy Wohleben of the Canadian ...

Delivering a high-birth-weight infant more than doubles a woman's breast cancer risk, according to research from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The researchers suggest that having a large infant is associated with a hormonal environment during pregnancy that favors future breast cancer development and progression. Marking the first time that high birth weight was shown to be an independent risk factor, the finding may help improve prediction and prevention of breast cancer decades before its onset. "We also found that women delivering large babies ...

Washington, D.C. — Two powerful brain chemical systems work together to paralyze skeletal muscles during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, according to new research in the July 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The finding may help scientists better understand and treat sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, tooth grinding, and REM sleep behavior disorder. During REM sleep — the deep sleep where most recalled dreams occur — muscles that move the eyes and those involved in breathing continue to move, but the most of the body’s other muscles are stopped, potentially ...

A community-based nursing program delivered in collaboration with existing health care services is more effective in reducing the number of older people dying from chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, than usual care according to a study by US researchers published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The authors led by Kenneth Coburn from Health Quality Partners in Pennsylvania in the US, randomized 1736 eligible patients (aged 65 years and over with heart failure, coronary heart disease, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and/or hyperlipidemia who received ...

A new study published today in PLoS Medicine re-evaluates the role of public reporting of hospital-acquired infection data. The study, conducted by Nick Daneman and colleagues, used data from all 180 acute care hospitals in Ontario, Canada. The investigators compared the rates of infection of Clostridium difficile colitis prior to, and after, the introduction of public reporting of hospital performance; public reporting was associated with a 26% reduction in C. difficile cases. The authors comment "This longitudinal population-based cohort study has confirmed an immense ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Joseph Tucker from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA and colleagues lay out a social entrepreneurship for sexual health (SESH) approach that focuses on decentralized community delivery, multisectoral networks, and horizontal collaboration (business, technology, and academia). They argue that while SESH approaches have yet to be widely implemented, they show great promise: "Social marketing and sales of point-of-care, community-based tests for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, conditional cash transfers ...

A increasingly used type of HIV study which involves switching patients on one type of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to another, to see whether the new drug is as good as the at preventing replication of the HIV virus, may be unethical, according to a new Essay published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The studies, termed non-inferiority trials, are only ethical if participants can meaningfully benefit from the treatment change and are more likely to benefit than suffer harm, according to Andrew Carr from the HIV unit in St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia, Jennifer ...

High consumption of vitamin E either from diet or vitamin supplements may lower the risk of liver cancer, according to a study published July 17 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Liver cancer is the third most common cause of cancer mortality in the world, the fifth most common cancer found in men and the seventh most common in women. Approximately 85% of liver cancers occur in developing nations, with 54% in China alone. Some epidemiological studies have been done to examine the relationship between vitamin E intake and liver cancer; however, the results ...

As part of the Affordable Care Act, hospitals and medical centers are required to report their quality-of-care and risk-standardized outcomes for stroke and other common medical conditions. But reporting models for mortality that don't consider stroke severity may unfairly skew these results. Now, A UCLA-led national study has found that when reporting on 30-day mortality rates for Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized with acute stroke, using a model that adjusts for stroke severity completely alters performance outcomes and rankings for many hospitals. The new findings, ...

CHICAGO – Adding stroke severity to a hospital 30-day mortality model based on claims data for Medicare beneficiaries with acute ischemic stroke was associated with improvement in predicting the risk of death at 30 days and changes in performance ranking regarding mortality for a considerable proportion of hospitals, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA. "Increasing attention has been given to defining the quality and value of health care through reporting of process and outcome measures. National quality profiling efforts have begun to report hospital-level ...