M&S Money's credit card has come in top in three out of eleven customer satisfaction categories in the most recent uSwitch.com survey. The uSwitch.com survey revealed M&S Money's credit card to be the public's top pick for billing service, payment service and customer support. American Express regained the top spot for overall satisfaction in 2010, satisfying 92% of its customers. M&S took second place, but its overall score increased by 2% compared to 2009. M&S came top for its billing service (up 1% from 2009), payment service (up 4%) and customer support which ...

Hays Senior Finance has announced that finance professionals in the Southern Home Counties are enjoying a rise in demand for their business management skills and commercial know-how, according to the leading recruiting expert. Two-thirds (67 per cent) of employers say retention of qualified accountants will be a key priority in 2011, with four in 10 (40 per cent) worried they won't be able to hold onto their star players. The research suggests that they may have good reason to worry, with two-thirds (67 per cent) of senior finance professionals saying they intend to look ...

Debenhams has launched one of the first UK deals on Facebook, which allows customers to check into Facebook from their mobile and claim special offers, rewards and discounts from top brands. Customers will also have the chance to share these benefits with their Facebook friends so they can take advantage of them too. Part of Facebook Places, Facebook Deals helps users find offers in their local area from their mobile phone or discover money-saving tips from their friends through their News Feed. Many big brands are taking part alongside Debenhams, including Starbucks, ...

For consumers and financial advisors alike, the new tax law changes may significantly impact short and long term tax, investment and retirement planning decisions. The recently passed Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 includes much more than an extension of unemployment benefits and the Bush era tax cuts. ExecPlan Express personal financial planning software's 2011 release incorporates all of these changes to help guide consumers on how to manage their financial goals in this new environment. Unlike simple retirement planning ...

In her first event of the season, Oxygen4Energy athlete, Kellie Wells, tied the American Record in the 55m Hurdles set in 1989 by one of the greatest female track and field athletes of all time, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. This record tying performance was made at the 2011 Jimmy Carnes Indoor Track Meet in Gainesville, Florida, where Wells ran a blistering 7.37 sec final to tie the 12 year standing record. What makes this performance so noteworthy is that it comes so early in the season when most track athletes are not running even close to their peak speeds. According to ...

Cafe Kili, a family-owned cafe featuring specialty African and South American coffee beans roasted in store, opened their online store this week. By bringing the coffee bean sales online the store has made it easier for lovers of great coffee across the nation to order and try authentic African and South American, roasted coffee. The cafe also carries coffee from other regions of the world. The online store features coffee beans in a variety of packs for those desiring to sample various types of their unique freshly roasted coffee. "Opening our online store the week ...

Award-winning historical fiction author Jessica James highlights the beauty of the written word in her book "From the Heart: Love Stories and Letters from the Civil War", which she is giving away in honor of Valentine's Day and the Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. Readers can warm their hearts with these letters from such well-known Civil War heroes as Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, JEB Stuart, and George Pickett, among others. James, who ran across the letters while doing research for her Civil War novel "Shades of Gray", says she wants to bring attention ...

The new firm of David Greenberg Law - Personal Injury Attorneys has opened up two California offices, in an effort to help the victims of car accidents and other personal injury cases. The firm's main office is in Los Angeles, with another, smaller office located in San Francisco. The firm, however, will not limit itself to these two cities. Instead, it will handle personal injury cases throughout the entire state of California. While the firm may be new, the personal injury attorneys working for it are not. With more than 40 years of experience, the lawyers at David ...

RepresentYou.com upsets lawyers and law firms by refusing to allow inexperienced lawyers join their service. State Bar of California Lawyer referral services help serve new lawyers as a place to get new cases however, one RepresentYou.com will not let lawyers join who do not have a minimum of 20 years experience practicing law. Two enterprising young men have decided to confront the need for access to highly qualified and experienced legal representation in an endeavor called http://www.RepresentYou.com. Partners Gabe Dominocielo and Jonathan Kroll understand how large ...

Pat Vitucci, a Bay Area Independent Financial Advisor, was recently named NPC's (National Planning Corporation) #1 producing financial advisor in 2010*. National Planning Corporation is one of the nation's largest broker dealers with over 1600 financial advisors throughout the United States. Pat Vitucci is the President/CEO for Vitucci & Associates, headquartered in Walnut Creek, CA...with 10 other offices in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. "I am very proud to accept this honor," said Vitucci. "It is a pleasure to work with NPC. I owe a lot of credit to them and ...

Job opportunities across the country rose sharply in January, up 9 Index points compared to December according to the report from Britain's largest recruitment website, reed.co.uk. Employer demand rebounded from pre-Christmas lows to give a Reed Job Index reading of 113, the highest since the Index began. Employer demand has risen 13 per cent since December 2009, when the Index's baseline was set at 100. Private sector growth is responsible for this increase, as new public sector jobs remain less than half their level of a year ago. Seventeen different job sectors ...

IntellaCar empowers Sales Consultants with a one-stop source of information using an intuitive interface that is optimized to help them make the sale within their existing sales process. It includes product features/benefits, walkarounds, competitive comparisons, technology demonstrations, third-party reviews and more. The information is prioritized and aggregated using IntellaCar's proprietary Optimized Information Delivery system, based on customer purchase motivations and summarized for a quick read during the sale. The accurate, unbiased information gives customers ...

Beginning February 4th, seven retail locations (4-Colorado, 2 Utah, 1 Washington) will be stocking the new StairSimple Axxys brand of interior stair rail kits from BW Creative Wood Industries. Homeowners and builders in these areas will be first to have access to this true innovation in stair railing. Until now interior stair installation was the sole domain of highly skilled stair installers. StairSimple Axxys changes that by making installation do-it-yourself simple. "Do-It-Yourself nationwide chains have become synonymous with the concept of empowering homeowners ...

Boston, MA - In work that could jumpstart the promising field of cell therapy, in which cells are transplanted into the body to treat a variety of diseases and tissue defects, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have engineered cells that could solve one of the key challenges associated with the procedure: control of the cells and their microenvironment following transplantation. In the work, reported in the journal Biomaterials on January 26, the team reports creating tiny internal depots within human mesenchymal adult stem cells, which among other functions ...

Biologists from the UCLA Division of Life Sciences have reported the first quantitative evidence for an evolutionary link between habitat and body size in turtles and tortoises. The study, whose lead author is a high school student volunteer in the laboratory of UCLA evolutionary biologist Michael Alfaro, is currently available online in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society. It will appear in a print edition later this year. Turtles and tortoises, also called chelonians, represent a diverse group of reptiles that have been present on Earth for more than ...

While policy makers in Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand debate whether alcohol advertising and sponsorship should be banned from sport, new research provides evidence that alcohol industry sponsorship is associated with more hazardous drinking in sportspeople compared to non-alcohol sponsorship. Health scientists from Monash University, the University of Manchester, Deakin University and University of Western Sydney, asked Australian sportspeople about their drinking behaviours, sport participation, and what sorts of sport sponsorship they currently receive. ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Older people with larger waistlines, high blood pressure and other risk factors that make up metabolic syndrome may be at a higher risk for memory loss, according to a study published in the February 2, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Metabolic syndrome was defined as having three or more of the following risk factors: high blood pressure, excess belly fat, higher than normal triglycerides (a type of fat found in the blood), high blood sugar and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, ...

VIDEO: In this newly published research by scientists at Humacyte Inc., Duke, East Carolina and Yale universities, bioengineered veins are generated by culturing human cells in a bioreactor to form a... Click here for more information. The research was conducted by scientists from Duke University, East Carolina University, Yale University, and Humacyte, and was funded by Humacyte, a leader in regenerative medicine. Overseeing the research and senior author of the article ...

Clinical researchers at the National Institutes of Health's Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP) have identified the genetic cause of a rare and debilitating vascular disorder not previously explained in the medical literature. The adult-onset condition is associated with progressive and painful arterial calcification affecting the lower extremities, yet spares patients' coronary arteries. The new disease finding was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The rare arterial condition caused by calcium buildup in arteries below the waist and in the joints ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A remarkable planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler mission has six planets around a Sun-like star, including five small planets in tightly packed orbits. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and their coauthors analyzed the orbital dynamics of the system, determined the sizes and masses of the planets, and figured out their likely compositions--all based on Kepler's measurements of the changing brightness of the host star (called Kepler-11) as the planets passed in front of it. "Not only is this an amazing planetary system, it ...

Boston, MA – Advances in DNA sequencing technology have revolutionized biomedical research and taken us another step forward in personalized medicine. Now, scientists led by Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School (HMS), the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI), the University of Washington, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, have developed a new framework for analyzing key genetic variations that previously were overlooked. The research will be published in the February 3 issue of the prestigious journal Nature. Identifying ...

A detailed analysis of data from 185 human genomes sequenced in the course of the 1000 Genomes Project, by scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, in collaboration with researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, as well as the University of Washington and Harvard Medical School, both in the USA, has identified the genetic sequence of an unprecedented 28 000 structural variants (SVs) – large portions of the human genome which differ from one person to another. The work, published today in Nature, could ...

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Snake). It is comparatively bright and can be seen well in moderate-sized telescopes. This picture was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The data were selected from the ESO archive by Joe DePasquale as part of the Hidden Treasures competition [1]. Joe's picture of NGC 3621 was ranked fourth in the competition. This galaxy has a flat pancake shape, indicating that it hasn't yet come face to face ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- For several decades, researchers have been linking genetic mutations to diseases ranging from cancer to developmental abnormalities. What hasn't been clear, however, is how the body's genome sustains such destructive glitches in the first place. Now a team of Mayo Clinic scientists and collaborators provide an unprecedented glimpse of a little-understood gene, called MMSET, revealing how it enables disease-causing mutations to occur. The findings appear in the current issue of Nature. "MMSET had been known for many years, and had been shown to be mutated ...

Are we on the verge of being able to stimulate the brain to see the world anew - an electric thinking cap? Research by Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney suggests that this could be the case. They found that participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group. The study published on February 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. According to the authors, ...