The Change Mariner

Even more than income, education, gender or ethnicity, the effect of time spent behind the wheel can be seen on the scale, says the study.

Based on a survey of 10,500 residents of Atlanta, Georgia, the study tracked participants' travel patterns over a two-year period, after measuring their height and weight.

Researchers found that for every 30 minutes added to their daily commute, drivers had a three per cent greater chance of being obese than those who drove less.

The quick solution is to move into town. The study found that people who live in walkable neighbourhoods lower their risk of obesity by 35 per cent.

The study, "Obesity Relationships with Community Design, Physical Activity and Time Spent in Cars," also concluded that people who live within walking distance of shops were seven per cent less likely to be obese than their counterparts who had to drive to get their groceries.

So now spring mixes and bags of chopped romaine are not the only greens found in handy bags. Though frothing foodies would correctly argue nothing beats a fresh bunch of greens from the garden or local produce stand, which may taste better and cost a lot less, consumers benefit from exposure to different vitamin-rich leafy greens without having to look too hard to find them.

A line of trucks moves forward to a gantry crane that lifts a 4,000-kilogram container off a truck every two minutes and glides it onto the deck of the OOCL Osaka. After the Hong Kong-owned ship calls at Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka, it heads to China, loaded with up to 2,700 containers - 11,000 metric tons of cargo.

All over the Pacific, thousands of other ships are sailing heavily loaded with everything from apples to toys. As the world's economy grows, the shipping industry is racing to keep up with demand, especially in Asia, where most economies rely on exports. Cargo is beginning to back up because of a shortage of containers and ships - some Japanese exporters wait three months to get a container on a ship.

The number of containers moving from the United States to Asia during the first quarter rose nine percent compared with a year ago. Sam Saeki, general manager of Kawasaki Kisen's container ships group, says much of that was fueled by China, where a booming economy is not only pumping out exports, but also pulling in imports. "They are importing a lot of the raw materials for energy such as crude oil, coals. They used to be exporting or they were supposed to have enough resources themselves," says Mr. Saeki. "This is giving a very much dynamic change to world shipping."

The plan follows a scathing report on the obesity epidemic in Britain by the Commons Select Committee on Health, which gives warning of a doomsday scenario where thousands lose limbs and sight from fat-related illnesses.

It cites the recent case of a three-year-old child whose death was blamed partly on extreme obesity. Doctors described the incident as one of several cases of children "choking on their own fat."

Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a greatly feared bacterial infection, because it is resistant to most known antibiotics - including vancomycin. Researchers in Italy now show that vancomycin can still be effective against MRSA, however, if it is applied in a new way.

They have learned that MRSA is present first in the throat before going on to infect the lungs. While vancomycin injections can treat the lungs successfully, they do not touch MRSA in the throat because levels of the antibiotic in saliva are too low.

The team applied a paste of vancomycin to the lower cheeks to expose MRSA in the throat to more effective treatment.

The message, prompted by the heated national debate over gay marriage, underscored a growing phenomenon -- lesbian couples having babies and raising families.

According to the Family Pride Coalition, a national advocacy group for gay and lesbian families, some 9 million children in America have at least one gay parent and one in five lesbian coupled households include a child under 18.

"I wouldn't call it a baby boom exactly. It has been steadily growing all along," said Aimee Gelnaw, a lesbian mother of two and executive director of the coalition.

Using artificial insemination to get pregnant, lesbians are four times more likely to have children than gay men.

"Same-sex couples and single women are 40 percent of our business, and it is the fastest-growing segment," said Marla Eby, vice president of marketing at California Cryobank Inc., Los Angeles, which ships semen nationwide.

Rose breeders and growers said that blue roses would be hugely popular and estimated that they would win five per cent - 35 million [pounds] - of the 700 million [pound] international market for cut roses.

Roses come in many colours - from pink to yellow, peach and red - but, until now, no one has found a way to create a natural blue rose and the quest has acquired an almost mystical significance among breeders.

Researchers at OSU have tuned in to a hot new innovation in food preparation by using radio frequencies to quickly and precisely heat food.

A research team found that by wedging packages of food between electrodes and tuning radio waves to various frequencies, food molecules would vibrate and heat up.

By varying the frequency of the radio waves and apparent resistance to the electric current, the researchers can tune the flow of energy to precisely the amount needed to heat various ingredients in the food.

This allows rapid and uniform heating.

For example, a 25-pound Thanksgiving turkey would normally take about six hours to thaw at room temperature and a further four hours to cook in a traditional oven.

With variable radio frequency heating, it is possible to thaw and cook that turkey in less than two hours.

Qingyue Ling, a part of the research team and a development engineer with OSU's Food Innovation Center in Portland, believes the new cooking innovation could have a major bearing on food preparation for the future.

Roughly one of every seven high school diplomas granted in the United States in recent years has gone to someone who has passed the tests, known as the G.E.D. And the proportion of school-age students taking that route has risen sharply.

Nationally, teenagers accounted for 49 percent of those earning G.E.D.'s in 2002, up from 33 percent a decade earlier. Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York were among the states where teenagers accounted for more than half of those earning G.E.D.'s. in 2002.

"The proportion of teenagers getting G.E.D.'s has doubled since 1989, while overall high school graduation rates have declined slightly," said Duncan Chaplin, an economist at the Urban Institute in Washington.

The growth has been especially pronounced in New York City. Last year, more than 37,000 school-age students were in G.E.D. programs run by the school system, up from 25,500 two years earlier.

Most educators view the G.E.D. as a valuable option for people who do not make it through high school, but they do not consider it equivalent.

European farmers will still be prohibited from growing the Bt11 insect-resistant corn, however. And companies trying to import such foods face an uphill battle in convincing European shoppers that the products are safe.

Under new EU rules that took effect last month, "any import of canned vegetables will have to show clearly on the label in the list of ingredients that the corn has been harvested from a genetically modified plant,'' European Commission spokesman Reijo Kemppinen said.

That would likely be the kiss of death for any company that tried to sell it in Europe, where genetically modified foods are widely mistrusted and avoided. Many supermarket chains require suppliers to guarantee their products are biotech-free.

June light, sweet crude oil futures settled at $41.08, up 31 cents from Wednesday, after touching an intraday high of $41.10.

The previous high was $41.07 on October 11, 1990, in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War (news - web sites). That day, Brent blend crude oil futures settled at $41.15 on London's International Petroleum Exchange.

On Thursday, June Brent gained 54 cents to settle at $38.49 a barrel on the IPE.

If the publishing industry is any indication, the self-help gaming market has significant sales potential. Self-help books, which went mainstream in 1936 with Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, raked in sales of $650 million in 2003, and the segment is growing faster than the overall consumer-books market, according to Simba Information, a publishing-research firm in Stamford, Conn. According to Marc Prensky, a New York City gaming consultant, a groundbreaking gaming title would have much the same potential to jumpstart an equally vibrant self-help gaming industry.

Eventually, all games and gaming devices will offer health or educational features, predicts Alan Pope, an engineer and psychologist at NASA's Langley Research Center. "I really see this as a missed opportunity, so far," he says. After all, 4% to 6% of the U.S. population suffers from ADD, according to the Attention Deficit Disorder Assocation.

Oil prices hit 13- year highs of almost $39 per barrel on May 4 as traders panicked about the possibility of disruptions of shipments from the world's largest exporter. With only 2 million to 3 million barrels per day of spare capacity in the world, any disruption of Saudi crude flows would send prices into the stratosphere. A mass exodus of Western oil technicians could also have a long-term impact on the Saudis' ability to manage their industry.

Saudi oil officials say the worries about supply outages are exaggerated and that their facilities can function in the toughest environments. "It's going to take a lot more than people running around shooting AK-47s to disrupt our operations," says Sadad Husseini, who recently retired as executive vice-president for exploration and production at Saudi Aramco. But traders aren't listening. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia, the futures markets are going to react swiftly and upward," says Adam Sieminski, an oil analyst at Deutsche Bank in London.

The wireless broadband technology he's investing in has the potential to be one of the most disruptive forces in the communications industry in years. Cable and phone companies have dominated the broadband business so far because offering speedy Net access has required multibillion-dollar investments in a sophisticated communications network. Now, however, the economics of wireless broadband could shatter that duopoly. For less than $10,000, an entrepreneur can start offering broadband within a limited area, typically an eight- to 10-mile radius. Already, that has made the technology attractive in lightly populated regions, where it can cost phone and cable rivals four times as much to offer service. Over the next two years, the costs of wireless broadband are expected to drop to the point where it can be competitive with traditional wired service anyplace in the country. "We think this is a tremendous opportunity for the telecom industry to change the paradigm," says John Marinho, a vice-president at equipment maker Lucent Technologies Inc.

Regeneration is biotech's Holy Grail -- and the ultimate scientific conundrum. Most living creatures are hard-wired for healing. But when it comes to regrowing entire body parts, humans are curiously deficient. Sure, if we scrape a knee, we sprout new skin. Our livers also can regenerate to some degree. Even a severed fingertip will grow back under the right circumstances. But that pales in comparison to, say, a lowly newt, which can regrow a leg, tail, jaw, intestine, spine -- even parts of an eye. Scientists wish humans could do the same.

Many researchers, as well as patients and their relatives, are certain that stem cells offer one route to regeneration. That's why so many are coming forward to protest tough funding restrictions that the Bush Administration has slapped on research into stem cells derived from embryos. "I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this," said Nancy Reagan at a gala event on May 8 to raise money for stem-cell research. "We've lost so much time already, and I can't bear to lose any more."

Originally mentioned in the Shijing, China's first collection of poems, the term was used by Chinese philosophers to refer to a comfortable, orderly society that honors ceremony and propriety. Deng Xiaoping went on to develop an economic xiaokang strategy that became the basis of his famous "three-step development strategy" for building a middle class society in China.

Weeks later, the decision filtered back here that Beijing would allow Chinese group tourism to Micronesia. But it was Saipan, a tourism rival to Guam 130 miles north of here, that got China Southern Airlines' twice-weekly charter flights from Shanghai, starting last month.

"We have seen them moving very aggressively," Governor Camacho said glumly of his competitors. Referring to Beijing's plan to give "approved destination status" to Saipan this summer, he added, "We are moving as quickly and aggressively to get it for ourselves, too."

Development will be done by combining partnerships, researchers, new buildings and equipment. The blend of these different components is referred to as the National Leadership Computing Facility (NLCF). The five-year plan will pool computational resources for a sustained capacity of 50 teraflops (50 trillion calculations per second), with a peak capacity of more than 250 teraflops.
ORNL expects to reach the 45-teraflop mark by late this year or early 2005, according to Thomas Zacharia, ORNL associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences. He told the E-Commerce Times that the plan also includes hitting the 100-teraflop level in 2006.

The new name has already helped boost business by about 10 percent for Dalponte Farms, which for several years has supplied Bacardi with mint for special events. Mint is Dalponte's largest crop and sold under the Mr. Mint brand name.

"I never expected this to go over as big as it did," said Denny Dalponte, whose family has owned the farm for 80 years but switched to herb farming about 20 years ago.

The boom comes as mojitos have become the latest pop-culture craze, showing up everywhere from HBO's "Sex and the City" to "Bad Boys II." More restaurants have also added mojitos to the menu and some have opened mojito bars.

Anything that sells more mojitos is good news for Bacardi. Given the success of the naming efforts, they don't rule out the possibility it could happen again.
"Maybe, instead of advertising we'll look into buying cities," Gomez joked. "It may be more effective."

"I definitely see that happening," said Shea. "There is nothing in the law that says (same -sex) sibling marriage can't happen. The marriage application form says party A and party B. It also asks, 'are you related to party A?' There is nothing that says a (same- sex)sibling can't get married to another sibling."
Gay couples will be allowed to request marriage intention forms at the town clerk's office Monday. Shea said he will seek a legal clarification on the marriage laws during a clerk's training session later this week.

"The subject of gay marriage is one thing," said Shea. "But the whole sibling issue will open a new Pandora's box."

Shea said same - sex siblings might request marriage intention forms to receive an income tax break. "The head of the household gets the best tax break," said Shea. "Married couples can also have their spouse covered under their health insurance plan. I can see that, (sibling marriage) happening. I don't think anybody, (lawmakers, Supreme Judicial Court) even thought of this one."

Marc Lattin of Lattin Photography says, "keeping up with the changes in what's involved in technology and what the students and kids want is really exciting."
Lattin is a professional photographer. Over the last six years, he's seen a major change in technology and customer demand. People want perfection. And with a team of digital artists and a million dollars worth of equipment, perfection is possible.

Lattin says, "we can whiten teeth, straighten teeth, we can take braces off and we can highlight or change eye color. We can completely clone skin. We can take good skin and we can move it over bad skin and completely clean up a complexion."

And the trend is getting more popular. More than ninety-seven percent of high school seniors used digital enhancement in their pictures. Lattin says, "most of the seniors do that, and if they don't, it's more of a situation that we didn't do our job and let them know what's available."

Sales fell to 2.222 billion books, down from 2.245 billion in 2002. The [1%] decline was in both hardcovers and paperbacks, in children's books and general trade releases. Even sales of religious titles, often cited as a growing part of the publishing industry, were flat.

"We believe this is due to a variety of factors, the biggest being the used book market," said Albert N. Greco, an industry consultant and a professor of business at the graduate school of Fordham University.

"People are looking for bargains, especially in college textbooks, where we believe millions of used books are being bought. Also, books are competing with magazines, cable, radio, music and movies."

The internet also played a role in the distribution of the photographs, highlighting the ease with which troops serving in Iraq can now send pictures to friends and relatives back home.

Many of these are quite innocuous, the equivalent of the snaps taken by tourists abroad. But whatever the content, the images are not subject to any kind of military censorship and are transmitted freely back to the US.

In his testimony to congressional committees, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indicated that the flood of pictures was now beyond the US authorities' control.

Generals here at the United States European Command, which oversees the area, say the vast, arid region is a new Afghanistan, with well-financed bands of Islamic militants recruiting, training and arming themselves. Terrorist attacks like the one on March 11 in Madrid that killed 191 people seem to have a North African link, investigators say, and may presage others in Europe.

Having learned from missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American officers are pursuing this battle with a new approach. Instead of planning on a heavy American military presence, they are dispatching Special Operations forces to countries like Mali and Mauritania in West Africa to train soldiers and outfit them with pickup trucks, radios and global-positioning equipment.

"We want to be preventative, so that we don't have to put boots on the ground here in North Africa as we did in Afghanistan," said the European Command's chief of counter-terrorism, Lt. Col. Powl Smith.

Experts have realized for decades that large people die young, and the explanation long seemed obvious. Carrying around all those extra pounds must put a deadly strain on the heart and other organs.

Obvious but wrong, it turns out. While the physical burden contributes to arthritis and sleep apnea, among other things, it is a minor hazard compared to the complex and insidious damage wrought by the oily, yellowish globs of fat that cover human bodies like never before.

A series of recent discoveries suggests that all fat-storage cells churn out a stew of hormones and other chemical messengers that fine-tune the body's energy balance. But when spewed in vast amounts by cells swollen to capacity with fat, they assault many organs in ways that are bad for health.

The exact details are still being worked out, but scientists say there is no doubt this flux of biological crosstalk hastens death from heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer, diseases that are especially common among the obese.

In Saudi Arabia, authorities weren't so successful. On May 1, militants shot dead two Americans, two Britons and an Australian at an oil company's offices. On Monday, a car bomb exploded in southwestern Pakistan, killing three Chinese engineers who had been building a multimillion-dollar seaport.
In Syria on April 27, a gym teacher died in a cross-fire between militants and police. In Thailand the next day, police killed 108 Muslim militants who had allegedly attacked police stations trying to seize guns, though that incident has overtones of longstanding ethnic strife. In Spain, an indictment issued April 29 alleges that one of the Moroccans accused in connection with the Madrid train bombings is also linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

According to News.com, the drink is supposed to have become a huge hit with "gangsta rappers," a term which has come to be used as a synonym for a mix of black rappers, drugs and violence in America.

However, Cognac producers are not complaining. Instead they are calling it their salvation. "It is great for cognac, and it is great for France where most of the world's cognac is produced," said Claire Coates, of the Cognac National Inter-professional Bureau.

Only a few years ago, the region around the sleepy town of Cognac was in crisis as an economic downturn in Asia, until then the top market for the luxury brandy, sent sales plummeting.

More recently, however, the nightcap has become a favorite in the US market as a trend has been started by rap stars such as Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Snoop Dogg, who refer to it as "yak" and even mention it in their songs.

Their fondness for cognac has started a fashion among young black Americans who mix it with fruit juices to make cocktails.

The I.B.M. formula, according to analysts, could represent a new direction in the software business, but only if the timing is right.

"This has the potential to be a game changer," said Amy Wohl, an independent technology analyst in Narberth, Pa. "But it all depends on how ready the market is for a server-centric product."

The move is the next step in I.B.M.'s software strategy, which has focused on developing middleware, a layer of software that rides on top of the operating system. Middleware undermines the importance of the underlying operating system because software applications are written to run on the middleware instead of written to run on a specific operating system like Microsoft's Windows or Sun Microsystems' Solaris, the leading Unix operating system.

Many power companies and some members of the commission see this as a promising technology that could be especially useful in getting such service to remote rural areas at a reasonable price. But the cost could be high in terms of radio interference.

The promise of Broadband over Power Lines is an effective and relatively inexpensive way of providing high-speed internet service to homes and businesses through the power lines that already exist. Power lines can be viewed as large pipes bringing energy into an area where other lines branch off to buildings and houses. Not all the frequency range in the line - or space in the pipe - is used, thereby leaving open the possibility of sending signals back and forth over the line.

Matt Oja is Director of Emerging Technology for North Carolina-based Progress Energy, which has been trying BPL service in a limited area for about a year. He says his company is closely monitoring the system to see how well it works and what problems need to be addressed.

Within the next several months, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which will spend more than $2.8 billion this year on research and development for the Pentagon, is expected to launch a multimillion-dollar program to kick-start U.S. research in quantum computing, an esoteric area of inquiry under way at government labs, universities, and companies such as AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft. These supercomputers--built according to the strange laws of quantum physics, often operating at temperatures nearing absolute zero, and occupying spaces that can resemble a vial of liquid more than an electronic box--theoretically could perform within seconds calculations that take today's machines hours and solve in hours problems that might require centuries if run on state-of-the-art silicon.

That means exponentially higher performance than an electronic computer: Two atoms can perform four computations at the same time, three atoms eight. A quantum computer of 10 qubits could perform 1,024 simultaneous calculations. Twenty qubits would be able to execute a million simultaneous computations; 40, 10 trillion. Mathematicians have proven that a quantum computer with thousands of atoms could find quickly the factors of numbers hundreds of digits long, a feat that would take conventional supercomputers billions of years.

Quantum computers wouldn't perform all tasks better, but for problems where algorithms can be designed--factoring and database searching, for example--the promise is mind-boggling.

Celebrities such as Madonna, Pamela Anderson and Ashton Kutcher have been recently spotted wearing "Jesus Is My Homeboy" and "Mary Is My Homegirl" clothing from Teenage Millionaire, a company based in Los Angeles.

Although safeguards protecting nuclear weapons and their components have improved, experts said the radioactive materials that wrap around conventional explosives to create a contaminating bomb remained available worldwide -- and were often stored in non-secure locations.

Detonating a dirty bomb would not cause the death and devastation wrought by a nuclear weapon, but officials and counter-terrorism experts predicted that it would result in some fatalities, radiation sickness, mass panic and enormous economic damage.

Somewhere out there on the streets of Greenwich Village, a fellow student was running around in a yellow Pac-Man suit. His four pursuers, code-named Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, aimed to track him down and snuff him out %u2014 the sooner, the better.

"Our strategy is a dragnet to block all the roads Pac-Man might go down," said Michael Olson, a k a Clyde the ghost. "You take that street," he said to Pinky, as he pointed to a map of the Village. "And I'll take this one."

So began a test run for a game of Pac-Manhattan, a real-world version of the 1980's video game played on the streets of New York and the latest example of a so-called "big game": a contest that uses wireless devices like cellphones and global positioning beacons to track players as they move through the urban grid, turning cities into vast game boards. Big games, with some players online and others pounding the pavement, have been staged in the last year in Minneapolis, Las Vegas and London.

"The bottom line is, do you reward teachers for just sitting here and sticking it out, or for doing something?" said Mr. Abshire, who has been teaching for four years. "The free market doesn't handle things that way, so why should it be any different here?"

In March, Denver's teachers became the first in a major city to approve, by a 59 percent majority, a full-scale overhaul of the salary structure to allow "pay for performance," a controversial approach that rewards teachers for the progress of their students.

At a time when more and more superintendents are supporting moves away from the traditional salary structure for teachers, and finding their efforts stymied in an atmosphere of suspicion and financial austerity, Denver teachers' vote is a major breakthrough.

Under the city's plan, teachers and other school employees would earn raises if students meet academic targets. The system would also reward teachers for getting advanced certification, working in high-poverty schools or teaching subjects like math and science ...

Now a new enemy is emerging in the 21st century - our appetite. Around the globe, about 1.7 billion people should lose weight, according to the International Obesity Task Force. Of those who are overweight, about 312 million are obese - at least 30 pounds over their top recommended weight.

Already, a third of all deaths globally are from ailments linked to weight, lack of exercise and smoking. And perhaps most worrisome is obesity's spread beyond wealthy western nations.

From the glaciers of Iceland to the palm-fringed beaches of the Philippines, there are now more fat people in the world than hungry people. And in extreme cases, people who are heavy since childhood could die as much as five to 10 years early.

"The developing world in particular is going to bear the enormous brunt of this weight gain," said Neville Rigby, policy director of the IOTF.

"We're even seeing obesity in adolescents in India now. It's universal. It has become a fully global epidemic - indeed, a pandemic."

After all, the size of a speaker is a major factor in sound quality, and LCDs dwarf the itty-bitty speakers in laptops. So the audio improvement is dramatic -- as Andrew Williams will eagerly demonstrate. He's the marketing director at NXT, the British company that developed the audio-video technology, and he lugs around a small Acer laptop that has a switch so the sound can be flipped between the usual speakers and the display. The contrast is like listening to a transistor radio vs. a home stereo system.

There's also an economic benefit that may surprise most people: Punching the speaker-grille holes in a laptop's case is one of the more expensive manufacturing operations. Eliminating that and the usual speakers can nearly offset the cost of the fancy new technology.

These measures of America's success and decline were laid out in articles this week by William J. Broad of The Times and in a voluminous report by the National Science Foundation. The United States still spends far more on research and development than any other nation. That has enabled this country to dominate high-technology exports, publish more scientific papers and win more Nobel Prizes than other nations, but they are closing the gap.

The number of articles published in scientific and technical journals by American authors has flattened out for the past decade after three previous decades of growth. Western Europeans now publish substantially more papers than Americans do. The American researchers' share of Nobel Prizes has fallen to about half.

This follows the major breakthrough two years ago when members of the Australian National University (ANU) Quantum Optics Group demonstrated teleportation of a laser beam between two points.

In a new world first for the rarefied field of quantum physics, they have now proven they can teleport a laser to three recipients.

But the information is only recoverable if any two of the recipients collaborate, in what's called quantum secret sharing.

Group leader Dr Ping Koy Lam said it would be expected that each of three recipients would gain one third of the information. But in quantum physics, that's not what happens.

Rather, each has nothing. But by combining their efforts - in this case their laser beams - any two can recover all the information.

"That's the magic of it," he said. "If any two get together, you get back 100 per cent of the information."

The Winston-Salem-based doughnut maker said Friday that it is cutting its profit projection for this year by 10 percent because of lower demand for its high-calorie treats -- which the company attributes in part to the low-carb diet phenomenon.

The announcement drove its stock price down 23 percent in early trading.

"The popularity of low-carb diets has captured the consumer's attention," said Scott Livengood, chief executive and chairman of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. "It's impossible to predict if low-carb is a passing fad or will have a lasting impact.

"For several months, there has been increasing consumer interest in low-carbohydrate diets, which has adversely impacted several flour-based food categories, including bread, cereal and pasta," he said.

Until recently, Livengood said, the consumer change had "little discernible effect on our business." However, he said, recent market data suggests consumer interest in reduced carbohydrate consumption has heightened.

He said the development is most evident in sales of packaged doughnuts to grocery store customers.

In March, Krispy Kreme unveiled plans to offer a low-sugar doughnut.

Some of the most shocking or memorable photos from the Iraq war were almost certainly taken by soldiers or government contractors - and zipped around the world with an ease that never existed in the days of film.

"With the technology now, the amateur photographer is as capable as a professional journalist and is operating with the same tools: Digital camera, laptop and an Internet connection," said Keith W. Jenkins, photo editor of the Washington Post Magazine.

"The embedded process was supposed to give government a better handle on what journalists were doing, but now you have this whole rogue operation of civilians with digital cameras who have access to things the media don't," he said.

Photos from Abu Ghraib prison of hooded, naked Iraqi men piled in a pyramid near a grinning American captor and a hooded man standing with wires running from his outstretched arms have caused an international uproar since they first appeared on CBS last week.

Adidas, the 83-year-old German sporting-goods maker, is about to turn that fantasy into biomechanical reality in the form of a running shoe for men and women. Sleek and lightweight despite its battery-powered sensor, microprocessor and electric motor, the shoe, named 1, is expected to be in stores by December and will cost $250.

Adidas executives say the shoe is no gadget-dependent gimmick. Instead, its designers say it represents a leap forward in wearable technology. Each second, a sensor in the heel can take up to 20,000 readings and the embedded electronic brain can make 10,000 calculations, directing a tiny electric motor to change the shoe. The goal is to make the shoe adjust to changing conditions and the runner's particular style while in use.

"What we have, basically, is the first footwear product that can change its characteristics in real time," said Mr. DiBenedetto, who led the group that created the shoe, of its ability to adapt its cushioning as the wearer runs.

The monitors now in use give patients a snapshot of blood-sugar levels at a given moment. But a device from Abbott Laboratories that is awaiting marketing approval would provide continuous readings, and not require multiple daily pinpricks. That kind of continuous monitoring could transform the way many diabetics manage their disease. "Continuous monitors are the future of diabetes care," said Martin J. Abrahamson of the Joslin Clinic in Boston.

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The FDA is now reviewing Abbott's device, called the Freestyle Navigator, and the company has applied for it to be used instead of finger-stick tests. Abbott is hoping it can get on the market in 12 to 18 months.

The device consists of a small, paper-thin probe that constantly takes blood-sugar readings from the fluid under the skin, transmitting them wirelessly to a gadget the size of a pager. The user, who would insert a new probe every three days, gets a new blood-sugar reading every 60 seconds. An arrow also indicates whether blood sugar is rising, holding steady, or falling, and how quickly.

Last year, the state's medical bill topped $40 billion, paid by a combination of federal, state and local taxes. By most accounts, it is the fastest-growing segment of public spending and there is no end in sight.

Medical care for the needy -- including pharmaceuticals, preventive care and hospitalization -- accounts for the biggest part of the spending. But growing even faster are the billions spent on insurance premiums for state employees and retirees as well as for the hundreds of thousands of teachers employed by local school districts whose money also comes through the state.

Like the rest of America, the state's dependents are aging and demanding more care -- especially for the newest, most expensive drugs and procedures. The combination -- complicated by the state's ongoing budget problems -- has some experts warning of a fast-approaching breaking point.

"We are on the edge of a very significant jump off the cliff,'' said Stephen Levy, director for the Center of Continuing Study of the California Economy.

In the May issue of Nature Cell Biology, Tao Cheng, M.D., assistant professor, department of radiation oncology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and colleagues report the discovery of a molecular mechanism in the cell cycle that appears to impact the replicating ability of stem cells from bone marrow and blood to fight disease.

They found that blood stem cells from mice missing a gene called p18 were much better able to multiply and grow. p18 is a molecule in a class of so-called "cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors" that are critical inhibitors of cell cycle control.

These are the first signs of what many experts say may become yet another uncomfortable transformation in Eastern Europe: immigration.

Soon some of the nations of Eastern Europe may become magnets for immigration, both legal and illegal, in a marked shift for societies shut off for 40 years under communism and, for nearly a century before, much more likely to export cheap labor than to let it in.

The immediate lure is the expansion of the European Union on May 1, which will slowly break down the borders of its 10 new member countries, among them the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.

But most of these countries also face the same kind of demographic crisis as their European Union counterparts in the West, with aging and declining populations as people have fewer babies.

The crisis can be offset to some extent by immigration, though there is little support for that.

In her white chef's uniform, Dennis, a culinary consultant to Del Monte, was handing slices to passers-by. On the pita bread, she spread a corporate-brand pizza sauce, added flavored tuna that Del Monte sells in a pouch for the quick-lunch crowd, and threw on olives and capers.

And as long as the cook uses pita instead of standard pizza dough, the result will be a thin-crust product with 12 grams of carbohydrate per slice, roughly half the carbs of regular Mediterranean-style pizza, Dennis said.

Odontis plans to research on humans in two years time. Its scientists have managed to grow new teeth in mice.

In this technique, if you lose a tooth, stem cells would be programmed to develop into teeth. They would then be transplanted into your jaw, where you lost tooth was (in the gap). Two months later you would have a brand new fully-developed tooth that you created yourself.

The scientists believe that if everything goes well, this technology could become available to the general public in about five years' time.

Humans have 32 teeth. In the UK most people over 50 have lost, on average, twelve teeth.

Professor Paul Sharpe, King's College London, said "A key advantage of our technology is that a living tooth can preserve the health of the surrounding tissues much better than artificial prosthesis. Teeth are living, and they are able to respond to a person's bite. They move and in doing so they maintain the health of the surrounding gums and teeth."