Empire Life Introduces First-Of-Its-Kind Permanent Hybrid Life Insurance

The Empire Life Insurance Company (Empire Life) today introduced an innovative permanent life insurance product that combines guaranteed and adjustable features and can allow customers to benefit from lower insurance premiums should long-term interest rates rise.

"Hybrid Solution 100 is the first of its kind in Canada and a timely addition to the permanent insurance marketplace. Canadian consumers and their advisors have dealt with multiple price increases and more limited permanent insurance product choices over the past two years due to prolonged low interest rates," said Sean Kilburn, Senior Vice-President, Life Insurance.

"We keep hearing that interest rates are going to rise and mortgages and other costs will go up," he added, "The beauty of Hybrid Solution 100 is that it could help offset these increasing costs with lower insurance premiums. It truly offers downside protection with upside potential to those who believe long-term interest rates will rise."

Coverage amounts are guaranteed and the product offers maximum and minimum price and value limits. Premiums can move up or down only as a result of changes in an interest rate range that is determined annually using a Government of Canada long-term bond yield benchmark. No other factors influence any premium increase or decrease. Customers and their advisors have the transparency and security of knowing when and how insurance premiums change every year.

"Empire Life is committed to working with advisors to help protect Canadians and their families with life insurance that is simple, responsive and cost-effective," said Kilburn.

Protective Life Insurance Company Introduces Protective Indexed Annuity

Protective Life Insurance Company today announced the release of the Protective Indexed Annuity. The annuity includes a range of withdrawal charge schedules and three interest crediting strategies to help customers grow contract value over time. It also has available principal protection.

“Less-than-favorable market conditions have consumers looking for low risk investment options which offer better returns than are available in some financial products,” said Carolyn Johnson, chief operating officer for Protective Life. “With its collection of unique features, the Protective Indexed Annuity fills that need.”

Along with a fixed interest crediting strategy, the Protective Indexed Annuity offers two indexed interest crediting strategies, annual point-to-point and annual tiered rate. The latter credits an industry-unique interest rate enhancement when index performance meets or exceeds a pre-determined performance tier.
The product also offers the flexibility to access contract value for unforeseen circumstances, such as unemployment, terminal illness and nursing home confinement.

“Consumers know they need to invest their money to protect their financial tomorrow, but the low interest rate environment combined with the risk associated with stock market investment have led them to reconsider their choices,” Johnson said. “The Protective Indexed Annuity provides customers comfort by knowing that they are protected from the downside, but given the opportunity for a higher rate of return, all with an optional return of premium benefit.”

Life Fitness Unveils New Color Options for Cardio Equipment, Allowing Facilities to Visually Differentiate Exercise Spaces

Life Fitness, the global leader in commercial fitness equipment manufacturing, introduces new colors for the next generation of the Elevation™ Series Treadmills, Cross-Trainers and Lifecyle™ Exercise Bikes with Discover™ Tablet Consoles. As demand for customization within the industry grows, these new color choices allow facilities to further differentiate themselves and offer exercisers a unique experience. The Elevation Series colors, which now include Arctic Silver, Titanium Storm, Black Onyx and Diamond White, can complement the tone of a facility and provide a fresh feel.

The new Discover SE and Discover SI Tablet Consoles are the first to sync with the Android mobile devices, in addition to Apple iOS, and feature an ultra-responsive touch screen with Swipe™ Technology for superior navigation and a more personalized experience.

Discover cardio products integrate with Life Fitness' new LFconnect™ technology, a cloud-based solution that allows facility owners and managers to customize available content to exercisers and enables free asset management. LFconnect also gives exercisers log-in capabilities, personalization options and workout recommendations, made popular by the original Life Fitness Virtual Trainer website. With LFconnect, exercisers will be able to access personal online content and navigate the web directly from the equipment, as well as create their own workout programs and set content preferences.

"Our research indicates that more than 95 percent of exercisers desire access to online content on equipment," said Dan Wille, vice president of global marketing and product development for Life Fitness. "This new line of Discover open platform products gives exercisers unprecedented access to not just online content like YouTube and Facebook, but the latest fitness applications and custom entertainment. At the same time, these products offer expanded personalization options for facilities, allowing them to customize the products and enhance the exercise space."

Life Science Research Tools Market Size, Growth and Trends 2006-2016

This report provides an overview of the life sciences research tools market from 2006 to 2016. Life sciences research tools companies offer instruments, reagents and services to scientists in academic, BioPharma and applied market laboratories. Top vendors include Agilent, Bio-Rad, EMD Millipore, Life Technologies (Invitrogen / Applied Biosystems), Roche, Sigma-Aldrich and Thermo Fisher; smaller emerging players are highlighted as well (e.g., genomics players [Fluidigm, Raindance, Oxford Nanopore, NABSys, GnuBio]). Segmenting the market by technology, we estimate that the life science research tools market reached $37.4B in 2011, and is expected to grow -4% p.a. in the next 5 years.

Many reports on individual technologies report bullish growth rates of 5%-20% for Academic, BioPharma and Applied market customers (and excluding in vitro diagnostics). While our analysis confirms that applied market might experience double digit growth for many technologies, current market size estimates for these customers do not support an overall market growth of 10% for the overall life science research tools sector. This is especially true in light of the current global economic slowdown (including in India and China) and continued sovereign-debt crisis in Europe. A review of public fillings and guidance from the top players in this space -as well as an analysis of the funding reality in Academia and BioPharma- confirms this outlook.

This report evaluates which technologies are expected to capture and loose market share in this mid-single digit growth rate market. In this second edition, we updated our analysis to reflect the most current market sales and trends in 5 broad segments:

1) Pure genomics technologies: qPCR, next generation sequencing (NGS) / third generation sequencing (3GS), microarrays, PCR, CE sequencing, molecular biology tools, digital PCR;

2) Pure proteomics technologies: protein isolation and analysis, ELISA, protein production, western blots and protein microarrays;

3) Cell biology technologies: discovery services, basic cell biology reagents, flow cytometry, transfection and electroporation, media and sera, microscopy, cell culture equipment, whole cell analysis, cells and tissues, high content imaging;

4) Other analytical technologies: liquid chromatography, mass spectroscopy, structural analysis methods, in vivo study, spectroscopy, multiplex technologies, label free technologies;

5) Other supplies and technologies: lab supplies and disposables, glassware, automation, sample preparation, LIMS, magnetic beads. For each of these 35 subsegments, we present an analysis detailing sales of instruments and reagents for 2006, 2011 and 2016.

In addition, we detail market drivers and moderators, market trends, a high level end-customer breakdown (Academic, BioPharma and Applied markets customers) and key competitors. Many of these technologies are increasingly used for clinical diagnostics purposes. Therefore, we briefly cover the size, growth and trends of the in vitro diagnostics and molecular diagnostics markets. All data are based on manufacturer sales as publically reported and interviews with life sciences experts in academic, BioPharma and applied market laboratories.

Mars Announcement Raises Question: What Is Life?

NASA officials announced March 12 that ancient Mars could have supported primitive life. But this begs the question: What exactly constitutes life?

Merriam-Webster.com defines life as "an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli and reproduction." But there's no single satisfactory definition of life.

"I think it is a mistake to try to define life, because we have only one example of life, familiar life on Earth, and we have reason to believe that this example may be unrepresentative of life in general," Carol Cleland, a philosopher of science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told LiveScience in an email.

Defining life
Aristotle made the first attempt at a definition, describing life as something that grows, maintains itself and reproduces. But this definition would exclude mules, which are sterile, while including things like fire.
Calling life something that has a metabolism, the ability to take in energy to grow or move and excrete waste, is no good either; cars do this, for example.

In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger gave life a definition based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or disorder, of a closed system increases over time. Schrödinger defined life as something that decreases or maintains its entropy. Yet this definition fails because it includes crystals, which resist entropy by forming highly structured lattices.

Trying to define life by its qualities is the wrong approach, Cleland said. As an example, she cites scientists' early attempts to define water in terms of properties like being wet, transparent and a good solvent. "We didn't 'define' water as H2O, but rather discovered, in the context of molecular theory, that it is a chemical substance composed mostly of H2O molecules," Cleland said.

Life on Earth is typically divided into two main groups: the cellular life forms, which include archaea, bacteria and eukarya (all the plants and animals), and non-cellular life forms, like viruses. Whether viruses, which can replicate only inside the cells of a host organism, count as "life" is debated.

Life in the universe
Finding an airtight definition for life may not be so important, astrobiologist Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in California wrote in an email to LiveScience. It's "much better to have an idea of what life is built of," McKay said. "Life is built of complex, organic molecules."

Characterizing life is vital for identifying it elsewhere in the universe, a possibility now beyond the realm of science fiction. McKay said that if life exists somewhere else, it would be a material system evolving through reproduction, mutation and natural selection.

Beyond Earth, one of the first places humans have sought to find life is Mars. The Viking Mission in the 1970s looked for evidence of life in the Martian soil. One experiment appeared to find evidence of metabolic reactions, but these were dismissed as coming from a non-living source (though some still debate those results).

With the announcement that NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence that life could have once existed on Mars, Curiosity has answered the question it set out to study in November 2011. The finding comes just seven months after the rover landed on the Red Planet on Aug. 5, 2012.
Given that Mars could have supported life, McKay said, "Now we need to look for it."

Alien Life May Be Rare Across the Universe

When it comes to life across the cosmos, the universe might just be an "awful waste of space" after all.

A new theory presented at a conference this week would confirm the worry of Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster's character in the film "Contact," that life might not exist on other worlds.

Some scientists think that just because exoplanets could have habitable environments, that does not mean that life evolved there.

"The pervasive nature of life on Earth is leading us to make this assumption," Charles Cockell, the director of the U.K. Center for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement."On our planet, carbon leaches into most habitat space and provides energy for microorganisms to live. There are only a few vacant habitats that may persist for any length of time on Earth, but we cannot assume that this is the case on other planets."

Cockell's hypothesis states that, although habitable alien planets might abound in solar systems around the universe, it does not mean these locales harbor extraterrestrial life.

"It is dangerous to assume life is common across the universe. It encourages people to think that not finding signs of life is a 'failure,' when in fact it would tell us a lot about the origins of life," added Cockell.
It is also possible that scientists will not be able to detect alien signs of life, even if it exists, Cockell said. Life might be markedly dissimilar from planet to planet, making it unlikely that astronomers on Earth will see recognizable signatures of life. But not all hope is lost.

"Professor Cockell explains that in coming decades, increasingly powerful telescopes and developments in spectroscopy may allow us to look for the signals of life on planets beyond our solar system," officials from the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, said in a statement."However, regardless of this, our view is still going to be heavily influenced by our knowledge of life on Earth."

Life Insurance Brokerage Trusted Quote Commemorates International Women’s Day

Trusted Quote, a top national brokerage of insurance products for life, long-term care, vision, and dental, will commemorate International Women’s Day on Friday, March 8th. This holiday, celebrated worldwide since 1911, raises awareness for women’s issues across the globe.

In the U.S., International Women’s Day often raises issues of economic insecurity. According to the Department of Labor, women account for 47% of the total U.S. workforce, but many of those women undervalue their contributions to their families, both in money and time spent as a caretaker, which can have disastrous consequences for the family should something happen to her.

Life insurance protects the financial contributions a woman makes to her family, yet few women have it. According to LIMRA, a leading financial research institution, 70% of women agree that life insurance is a necessity, yet 43% have no coverage at all. The statistics are worse for married women. LIMRA notes that 33% of wives have no life insurance, despite the fact that 70% of households are dual-income and 30% of wives earn more than their husbands.

Nancy Pinney, Chief Operations Officer for Trusted Quote, urges families to consider women’s contributions to their homes, especially in light of International Women’s Day. “It’s a tragedy when a family member dies, but especially so when their death means that the temporal needs of the family will be left unmet. Life insurance can meet those needs and provide the resources to pay for a home and caretaker for the family. Unfortunately, many families fail to consider the financial and other contributions of women,” says Pinney.

To commemorate International Women’s Day, Trusted Quote will release social media & blog posts focused on women and their achievements. The company’s goal is to educate the public on the importance of life insurance for women. By providing tools to help compare and select affordable life insurance policies, Trusted Quote hopes to increase the number of women who have protected their families against future economic uncertainty.