As gas prices hit another record last Friday, Jeff Curro couldn’t take it anymore. 84677Gas Prices After owning the Shell gas station at 3075 N. 124th St. in Brookfield for 20 years, Jeff Curro has stopped selling gas. As gas prices rose, his profit margin dropped. He wasn’t a motorist at the pump fed up by the blur of numbers spinning higher as he filled his tank. Curro is a gas station owner who has stopped selling gas to his own customers. After selling gas at N. 124th and W. Burleigh streets for 20 years, Curro turned off his pumps at his Shell station in Brookfield when the price he was being asked to pay was just too much. Including the wholesale cost of gas and other taxes and charges, he was being asked to pay $3.44 a gallon Friday, a day when the competing stations down the street were selling gasoline for $3.47. ‘Three cents a gallon doesn’t cut it,’ Curro said. ‘It doesn’t pay the bills.’ Add to that the money he loses every time a motorist uses a credit card at the pump, and there was no reason to keep […]
WASHINGTON — The beleaguered housing industry is sending mixed signals, with sales of new homes surging in April by the biggest amount in 14 years while prices endured a record plunge. Analysts said the price drop could provide evidence of builders’ desperation. They are looking to reduce a glut of unsold homes in the face of the worst slump in sales in more than a decade. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that sales of new single-family homes jumped by 16.2 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 981,000 units. That was the biggest one-month sales gain since a 16.4 percent surge in April 1993. Even with the increase, however, sales are 10.6 percent below the level of a year ago. The median price of a new home — the midway point between the costliest and cheapest — fell to $229,100, a record 11.1 percent below the March level. The price was 10.9 percent below the level of a year ago, the biggest year-over-year price decline since 1970. On Wall Street, the stock market retreated as hopes faded that the Federal Reserve will have to resort to an interest rate cut to stimulate […]
If you want a taste of the Fountain of Youth, try pumping iron. That’s the message that emerges from a new Canadian study that shows that resistance training actually reverses aging – at least in muscle tissue. ‘With a little weight training we managed, to a certain extent, to turn back the hands of time,’ Mark Tarnopolsky, director of the neuromuscular and neurometabolic clinic at McMaster University in Hamilton and co-author of the study, said in an interview. ‘Resistance training reversed the effects of aging in skeletal muscles,’ he said. Participants in the research project, who lifted light weights for a mere two hours a week, were able to improve their muscle strength by 50 per cent during the six-month study period. Researchers, however, did not merely measure muscle strength in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, they measured the gene expression of muscles – more specifically how many mitochondria they produce. Mitochondria are tiny biochemical power plants in cells that convert food into energy, and tiny changes in mitochondrial DNA have been pegged as the key component of aging. ‘The reason we get weaker, thinner and have less endurance as we […]
Did a comet hit the Great Lakes region and fragment human populations 12,900 years ago? Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago. Driving the theory is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at some 50 Clovis-age sites in North America that date to the onset of a cooling period known as the Younger Dryas Event. The sites include several on the Channel Island off California where UO archaeologists Douglas J. Kennett and Jon M. Erlandson have conducted research. The theory is being discussed publicly, for the first time, Monday in a news conference at the 2007 Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union being held this week in Acapulco, Mexico. Kennett is among the attendees who will be available to discuss the theory with their peers. The British journal Nature addressed the theory in a news-section story in its May 18 issue. Before today, members […]
The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Today, Martin Asser looks at the central issue of water. The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land – and maybe just as crucially the water which flows through that land. The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute – moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel’s main source of drinking water. Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water. A country needs water to survive and develop. In Israel’s history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants. Therefore, on the margins of one of the most arid environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the indigenous population, mainly Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of immigrants. In addition to their sheer numbers, citizens of the new state were intent on conducting water-intensive commercial agricultural such as growing bananas […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
