attribution: REUTERS

More great Medicare spending news. Medicare spending isn’t just lower than experts predicted a few years ago. On a per-person basis, Medicare spending is actually falling.

This year, Medicare, which covers those 65 and older and people with disabilities, will spend about $ 11,200 on average for every person enrolled in the program. By comparison, it spent $12,000 three years ago, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the number will fall below $11,000 by 2017 and stay below this year’s number until 2020. […]

The recent pattern reflects two main factors. One is that the baby boom generation is entering the program. In the long term, that’s a problem for Medicare’s finances because the number of people it must care for is going to surge. But in the short term, it skews the group enrolled in Medicare toward a younger, healthier population.

The second factor is more surprising and consequential. Over the last few years, Medicare patients have been using fewer expensive medical services, particularly hospital care and prescription drugs. The budget office […]

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PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX MAJOLI/MAGNUM

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses”: ‘Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in ‘Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of […]

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Source: USDA

In 2013, 17.5 million US households were what the US Department of Agriculture calls “food insecure,” according to a new report. That means that at some point last year, a lack of money made it difficult to buy food. Not only that, but 6.8 million households had “very low food security.” In those homes, “the food intake of some household members was reduced and normal eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year due to limited resources.”

“In 3 million households, adults reported losing weight due to lack of money for food”

Keep in mind that’s 6.8 million homes, not 6.8 million people. The number of people affected is even greater.

Of those very-low-food-security households, 97 percent reported that an adult cut down their meals or skipped meals altogether, and 87 percent said this had happened in at least three months of the year. Two-thirds of respondents said they had not eaten despite being hungry, and 45 percent reported losing weight due to lack of money for food. That comes […]

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Good news for people who like oil more than bread: People on a low-carbohydrate diet lowered certain risk factors for cardiovascular disease and lost nearly three times as much weight as those on a low-fat diet, a new study found.

‘This isn’t a license to hit the butter and meat fats,” cautioned Dr. Lydia Bazzano, a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and one of the study’s lead authors. ‘But even very high-fat diets can be healthy.”

The yearlong study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that total and ‘bad” (LDL) cholesterol levels – considered a primary risk factor for heart disease – went down equally for both groups, but ‘good cholesterol [HDL] went up quite a bit more on the low-carb diet than it did on the low-fat diet,” Bazzano said.

At the end of the study period, participants in the low-carb group had lost nearly 12 pounds on average. Those in the low-fat group had lost 4 pounds on average.

The people in the low-carb group were told to have less than […]

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The Laniakea supercluster. Image: SDvision/Guardian

In what amounts to a back-to-school gift for pupils with nerdier leanings, researchers have added a fresh line to the cosmic address of humanity. No longer will a standard home address followed by “the Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe” suffice for aficionados of the extended astronomical location system.

The extra line places the Milky Way in a vast network of neighbouring galaxies or “supercluster” that forms a spectacular web of stars and planets stretching across 520m light years of our local patch of universe. Named Laniakea, meaning “immeasurable heaven” in Hawaiian, the supercluster contains 100,000 large galaxies that together have the mass of 100 million billion suns.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, lies on the far outskirts of Laniakea near the border with another supercluster of galaxies named Perseus-Pisces. “When […]

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