The number of people without health insurance fell in 2007 for the first time since President Bush took office in large part due to expanded government coverage for children, the U.S. Census Bureau said Tuesday. The number of people without health insurance dropped last year to 45.7 million, from 47 million in 2006, according to the bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance. The rate of people without health insurance also declined to 15.3% in 2007, down from 15.8% a year earlier. Some healthcare experts had expected the number of uninsured to increase as the long-term erosion of private, employment-based coverage continued. Instead, the figures showed a shift toward government coverage that added fuel to the debate over how to best expand access to healthcare. ‘This is good news and is entirely attributable to the availability of government programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP),’ said Lynn Blewett, a health services analyst with the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. ‘Programs like SCHIP and Medicaid are lifelines for providing Americans with the healthcare they need, especially during times when the economy is soft and more […]
Ayurvedic medicines — herbal mixtures dating back thousands of years in India and increasingly popular in the West — are frequently contaminated with lead, mercury or arsenic, according to a study published today. A fifth of the nearly 200 concoctions tested contained levels of the toxic metals that, if taken at the maximum recommended doses, would surpass California’s safety guidelines. Dr. Robert Saper, a Boston University professor of family medicine who led the study, said the findings should spur the Food and Drug Administration to start clamping down on the largely unregulated world of pills, herbs and powders classified as dietary supplements. ‘It shouldn’t be me trying to figure this out,’ Saper said. Ayurveda is a traditional Indian practice that takes a holistic approach to wellness, employing herbal medicine, meditation and exercise to promote good health. It exists alongside modern medicine in India, with its own network of clinics, hospitals and colleges serving hundreds of millions of patients. It has spread to the U.S. and Europe with the migration of South Asians around the world and been popularized by figures such as Deepak Chopra. There are about two dozen ayurvedic training programs in the […]
Though my farm-raised father insists differently, there’s something a bit spooky about cows standing in a field. They’re just a bit too placid; I’ve always suspected that those limpid eyes hide strange secrets. And what do you know — I was right! German and Czech biologists have shown that cattle, along with deer, instinctively stand in a north-south direction. They appear to possess a sixth sense of magnetism. After studying Google Earth satellite images of cattle herds, along with their own observations of roe deer, the researchers realized that the animals routinely stood along a north-south axis. ‘The magnetic field is the only common and most likely factor responsible for the observed alignment,’ write the researchers in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ‘Our analysis … clearly provides the crucial proof in favor of the Earth’s magnetic field being the responsive cue.’ They think the ability evolved to help guide the animals’ ancestors during migrations (which could explain why the results are stronger in deer than cattle, which having been domesticated and restrained no longer migrate.) What’s the physiological mechanism? That’s not yet known. ‘Our findings … challenge […]
Researchers have shown that the animals can add small numbers of apples to get their trunks on a bigger food prize Elephants are famous for their supposedly superb memory. Now it seems that they are good at simple maths too. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have found an Asian elephant named Ashya can add small quantities together and correctly identify which is larger. For example, when researcher Naoko Irie-Sugimoto dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples into the first and five into the second, Ashya correctly identified that the first bucket contained more apples and began munching on her tasty prize. Ashya and her companions chose the correct bucket 74% of the time. ‘I even get confused when I’m dropping the bait,’ Irie told New Scientist magazine. The elephants’ counting abilities are far from unique. Chimps, salamanders and pigeons have shown numerical abilities in lab tests, but what is more impressive for the elephants is that their ability to distinguish between two figures does not get worse when those numbers are more similar. The elephants that Irie-Sugimoto tested were as good at telling the […]
KABUL — Russia played a trump card in its strategic poker game with the West yesterday by threatening to suspend an agreement allowing Nato to take supplies and equipment to Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia. The agreement was struck at a Nato summit in April to provide an alternative supply route to the road between the Afghan capital and the Pakistani border, which has come under attack from militants on both sides of the frontier this year. Zamir Kabulov, the Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, told The Times in an interview that he believed the deal was no longer valid because Russia suspended military cooperation with Nato last week over its support for Georgia. Asked if the move by Russia invalidated the agreement, he said: ‘Of course. Why not? If there is a suspension of military cooperation, this is military cooperation.’ Mr Kabulov also suggested that the stand-off over Georgia could lead Russia to review agreements allowing Nato members to use Russian airspace and to maintain bases in the former Soviet Central Asian states of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. ‘No one with common sense can expect to cooperate with Russia in one part of the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
