Going to the dentist may seem like a mundane chore, but it can quickly become an expensive one. Here’s what you need to know to get the most for your money when shopping for dental care. Recently, I addressed the annual convention of the International Association of Comprehensive Aesthetics (IACA), an organization of dentists dedicated to continuing education. It was quite an eye-opener. I realized I knew very little about my dentist. Even worse, I didn’t know how to determine if my dentist had the right qualifications and equipment to provide first-class dental care. There are approximately 165,000 dentists in the U.S., and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the yearly earnings of dentists averaged $147,010 in 2007. There is no doubt we are spending a lot of money on dental care and most people do not have dental insurance. But are we spending our money wisely? This is an area of particular interest to retirees and those planning to retire, because dental health issues tend to become more pressing as we age. Here are the secrets your dentist may not want you to know – but you need to know to get the […]
Engineers at Ohio State University have found a way to double the production of the biofuel butanol, which might someday replace gasoline in automobiles. The process improves on the conventional method for brewing butanol in a bacterial fermentation tank. Normally, bacteria could only produce a certain amount of butanol — perhaps 15 grams of the chemical for every liter of water in the tank — before the tank would become too toxic for the bacteria to survive, explained Shang-Tian Yang, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. Yang and his colleagues developed a mutant strain of the bacterium Clostridium beijerinckii in a bioreactor containing bundles of polyester fibers. In that environment, the mutant bacteria produced up to 30 grams of butanol per liter. The researchers reported their results at the American Chemical Society meeting Wednesday in Washington, DC. Right now, butanol is mainly used as a solvent, or in industrial processes that make other chemicals. But experts believe that this form of alcohol holds potential as a biofuel. Once developed as a fuel, butanol could potentially be used in conventional automobiles in place of gasoline, while producing more energy than another alternative […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Newspapers’ financial woes worsened in the second quarter as advertising sales shrank by 29 percent, leaving publishers with $2.8 billion less revenue than they had at the same time last year. It’s the deepest downturn yet during a three-year free fall in advertising revenue — newspapers’ main source of income. The magnitude of the industry’s advertising losses have intensified in each of the last 12 quarters. The numbers released Thursday by the Newspaper Association of America weren’t a shock, given the dramatic erosion mirrored the advertising losses that the largest U.S. newspaper publishers already had reported for the April-June period. Still, the statistics served as a stark reminder of the crisis facing newspapers as they try to cope with a brutal recession and advertising trends that have shifted more marketing dollars to the Internet. ‘This data represents a rearview-mirror perspective on what we all know was a terrible stretch of bad road,’ said John Sturm, chief executive for the newspaper association that serves as the industry’s largest trade group. The latest turbulence left U.S. newspapers with ad sales of $6.8 billion in this year’s second quarter compared to $9.6 billion last year. […]
Americans love high-tech medical imaging machines. Computed tomography and other complex scanning techniques promise to spot cancer or heart disease early without the need for invasive procedures. And often they do. But as many as 4 million Americans each year may be exposed to relatively high radiation doses from various medical imaging machines that could slightly increase their risk of cancer, a New England Journal of Medicine study finds. The results are worrisome because the use of medical imaging is exploding despite a lack of proof in many cases that the new scans really improve patients’ health. An unanswered question: How many of these scans are truly necessary? By one estimate as many as one-third of CT scans may not really be needed. ‘It is concerning. We are exposing people to significant amounts of radiation and on the other hand we do not have evidence that [the scans lead to] improvement of health,’ says National Heart Lung and Blood Institute cardiologist Michael Lauer, director of the division of prevention and population sciences. Scanning is big business for numerous companies like General Electric, Siemens and Royal Philips Electronics that make the machines, as well as the doctors […]
The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday. ‘If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart. He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did ‘do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,’ the policy-setting body of the central bank. Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent. Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression. Lockhart said the US economy was improving […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
