A vocal and influential constituency of American Catholics disapproves of the University of Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Obama to speak at the Catholic university’s commencement and receive an honorary degree in two weeks, but almost twice as many Catholics approve of the invitation, according to a new poll. Many people are angry at what they see as one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic institutions honoring Obama, who supports abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research. But a poll just released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows 50 percent of Catholics saying they approve of the Notre Dame award to Obama, with 22 percent saying they disapprove. Twenty-two percent said they didn’t know. That’s pretty similar to the views of Americans overall on the issue — 48 percent of the general public said they approved, 25 percent disapproved and 27 percent said they didn’t know. The pollsters note, however, that there is a gap in the Notre Dame controversy between more and less observant Catholics. Among white, non-Hispanic Catholics who attend church weekly or more often, approval of the decision plummets to 37 percent. Forty-five percent said the decision was wrong. Among […]
WASHINGTON — Government health officials warned dieters and body builders yesterday to immediately stop using Hydroxycut, a widely sold supplement linked to cases of serious liver damage and at least one death. The Food and Drug Administration said the company that makes the dietary supplement has agreed to recall 14 Hydroxycut products, including such products as Max Drink Packets, Caffeine-Free Rapid Release Caplets, and Max Aqua Shed. Hydroxycut is advertised as made from natural ingredients. At least 9 million packages were sold last year, the FDA said. FDA officials said they have received 23 reports of liver problems, including the 2007 death of a 19-year-old boy living in the Southwest. Other patients experienced symptoms ranging from jaundice to liver failure. The patients were otherwise healthy and their symptoms began after they started using Hydroxycut. Iovate Health Sciences, which makes the diet pills, said it agreed to the recall out of ‘an abundance of caution.’
To change the bulbs in the 60-foot-high ceiling lights of Buckingham Palace’s grand stairwell, workers had to erect scaffolding and cover precious portraits of royal forebears. So when a lighting designer two years ago proposed installing light emitting diodes or LEDs, an emerging lighting technology, the royal family readily assented. The new lights, the designer said, would last more than 22 years and enormously reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions - a big plus for Prince Charles, an ardent environmentalist. Since then, the palace has installed the lighting in chandeliers and on the exterior, where illuminating the entire facade uses less electricity than running an electric teakettle. In shifting to LED lighting, the palace is part of a small but fast-growing trend that is redefining the century-old conception of lighting, replacing energy-wasting disposable bulbs with efficient fixtures that are often semi-permanent, like those used in plumbing. Studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use. A recent report by McKinsey & […]
As countries and industries grow increasingly overwhelmed by wave after wave of bankruptcies, layoffs, restructurings, botched contracts, and embarrassing bonuses, they might lose sight of a second, much larger set of tsunamis gathering force over the horizon. While the economy is melting down, technology is moving forward at an even faster rate. The ability to adapt to the accelerating pace of change will determine who survives. To use the current bailout jargon, at least three major technologies are shovel-ready: the programming of tissues, the ability to engineer cells, and robots. As these breakthroughs and others converge, we are going to see a massive restructuring of global economic power. *** We can now program life. Several months ago, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics took a mycoplasma cell and inserted long strands of DNA into it, making the cell an entirely different species. In January 2008, the same team built and inserted the world’s largest organic molecule into a cell-this is the equivalent of a complete software package to program cells. One year later they produced thousands of these programs in a single day. Taken together, these discoveries mean that one can write […]
For the first time, a detailed portrait of America’s least literate adults is emerging. About 30 million people – 14 percent of the US population 16 and older – have trouble with basic reading and writing. Correlating factors that were explored in a new government report include poverty, ethnicity, native language background, and disabilities. Of these 30 million people, 7 million are considered ‘nonliterate’ in English because their reading abilities are so low. When shown the label for an over-the-counter drug, for instance, many in this subgroup cannot read the word ‘adult’ or a sentence explaining what to do in the event of an overdose. Adult literacy ‘is a core social issue that if we could fix as a nation, we would make inroads into fixing many other social problems,’ says David Harvey, president and CEO of ProLiteracy, an advocacy group based in Syracuse, N.Y. ‘Low literacy levels are correlated with higher rates of crime, problems with navigating the healthcare system, problems with financial literacy. We know that some of the folks who signed subprime mortgages didn’t understand what they were signing.’ In the coming months, Congress is expected to retool and reauthorize the Workforce Investment […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
