CHICAGO (Reuters) – By 2034, nearly twice as many Americans will have diabetes and spending on the disease will triple, further straining the U.S. health system and testing the viability of Medicare and other government health insurance programs, U.S. researchers said on Friday. ‘We forecast that in the next 25 years, the population size of people with diabetes — both diagnosed and undiagnosed — will rise from approximately 24 million people to 44 million people by the year 2034,’ said Dr. Elbert Huang of the University of Chicago, whose study appears in the journal Diabetes Care. ‘We anticipate that the cost of taking care of those people — and these are direct medical costs — will triple over the same period of time, going from $113 billion today to $336 billion (per year),’ Huang said in a telephone interview. Huang said the burden of treating so many people with diabetes will strain the viability of Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. Huang projects that the number of people covered by Medicare will rise from 8.2 million to 14.6 million, and annual Medicare spending on diabetes will jump from $45 billion to […]
Last year, the United States overtook Germany to become the largest producer of wind energy in the world. This capped a five year expansion of U.S. wind power during which capacity increased by about a third every year. Robert Whittlesey and John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology have developed a potentially more efficient wind farm design that maximizes the efficiency of land usage. They based their approach on the way that fish school, which they will present later this month at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics will take place from November 22-24 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. ‘When fish swim, they shed tiny vortices in their wake,’ says Dabiri. ‘By schooling together, they can potentially help each other swim by transferring energy between one another through these vortices.’ Applying these same principles, Whittlesey and Dabiri have designed a wind farm of closely-spaced vertical-axis turbines (a design different from the more familiar propeller-type horizontal axis wind turbines). Their farm is arranged with the turbines closely spaced, so that as each is turned by the wind, it both extracts energy for itself and also helps to direct the […]
The United States is the most religious of the advanced industrial democracies. At the same time, American scientists are recognized to be leaders in many areas of scientific research and application. This combination of widespread religious commitment and leadership in science and technology greatly enlarges the potential for conflict between faith and science in the United States. And indeed, a close reading of survey data shows that while large majorities of Americans respect science and scientists, they are not always willing to accept scientific findings that squarely contradict their religious beliefs. Furthermore, where scientific evidence and long-held religious belief come into direct conflict, many Americans reject science in favor of the teachings of their faith tradition. At the same time, such conflicts — where scientists and people of faith explicitly disagree on concrete facts — are not common in the United States today. Indeed, the theory of evolution as a means to explain the origins and development of life remains the only truly concrete example of such a conflict. To a lesser extent, faith also plays a role in shaping views about the nature of homosexuality and, to a much smaller degree, global warming. Evolution In the […]
Muslims in many countries are increasingly rejecting Darwin’s theory of evolution, under the influence of conservative elements in Islam, a science conference was told yesterday. Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, told the conference, being held in Egypt by the British Council, that in too many places students and academics believed they had to make a ‘binary choice between evolution and creationism, rather than understanding that one could believe both in God and in Darwin’s theory. Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin’s theory to be ‘true or ‘probably true. This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies. A survey of 100 academics and 100 students that he conducted at his own university showed that 62 per cent of Muslim professors and students believed evolution to be an ‘unproven theory, compared with 10 per cent of non-Muslim professors. […]
World stock markets tumbled Thursday after the Dubai government’s flagship investment company sought a six-month reprieve on its debt payments and the U.S. dollar continued its slide against other global currencies. Wall Street was closed for the Thanksgiving holiday and most markets in the Middle East were silent because of a major Islamic feast. But in Europe, the FTSE 100, Germany’s DAX and the CAC-40 in France all tumbled more than 3 percent. Earlier in Asia, the Shanghai index sank 3.6 percent, in its biggest one-day fall since August. The slide spread to Asia on Friday, as Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index fell more than 2 percent in early trading. Investors were rattled by a statement Wednesday from Dubai World that it would ask creditors for a ‘standstill’ on paying back its $60 billion debt until at least May, a move that raised question’s about the Persian Gulf state’s reputation as a magnet for international investment. The company’s real estate arm, Nakheel shoulders the bulk of money due to banks, investment houses and outside development contractors. Dubai became the Gulf’s biggest credit crunch victim a year ago. But its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, had continually […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
