http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129482104&ft=1&f=1019

Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff  is installing electronic scanners outside some large lecture halls to track attendance. NAU may be the first American educational institution to try the technology.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129506748&ft=1&f=1006

 There's an old saying: "Penny wise and Pound Foolish."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-luxury-foreclosures-20100829,0,122103,full.story

The number of homes in the $1-million-and-up slice of the market that have become bank owned has tripled during the last three years in Los Angeles County, and the trend has shown little sign of slowing.

Foreclosure is blind.

After the mortgage meltdown and the plunge in home prices, record numbers of ordinary houses tumbled into foreclosure across Southern California as borrowers became unable or unwilling to pay their mortgages. But the rich aren't so different after all: Million-dollar-plus homes have reverted to lender ownership in increasing numbers — previous sales prices, prime locations and even celebrity pedigrees have provided no immunity. Earlier this year, Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage's English Tudor joined the foreclosure fraternity. The nearly 12,000-square-foot house, once marketed at $35 million, now is listed for $11.8 million; the seller, Citibank.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/unneeded-cts-mris-drive-costs-researchers/story?id=11481808

Expensive MRI and CT Scans Are Overused, Researchers Say.

Initiatives include rewriting the fee-for-service system, curbing physician self-referral practices, and creating appropriateness criteria for imaging, according to William R. Hendee of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and colleagues. They reported their findings online in Radiology.

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-he-brain-20100830,0,5126565,full.story

Recent research suggests that mind-wandering may be important and that knowledge of how it works might help treat such conditions as Alzheimer's disease, autism, depression and schizophrenia.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/marijuana-effective-in-reducing-pain-study-shows/article1689573/

A team of Montreal researchers has lent scientific credibility to the view that smoking marijuana can ease chronic neuropathic pain and help patients sleep better.

People suffering from neuropathic pain often turn to opioids, antidepressants and local anesthetics, but those treatments have limitations and the side effects can be punishing. Many physicians and policy-makers, however, are reluctant to advocate the use of cannabis since there has been little scientific research into its effectiveness, even though patients champion its use.

http://www.torontosun.com/life/healthandfitness/2010/08/29/15177496-reuters.html

Bone marrow stem cells improve heart’s pumping ability.

Patients with chronic heart failure given injections of their own bone marrow stem cells have better heart function and live longer, German researchers said on Sunday.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/38902509//

The American economy is once again tilting toward danger. Despite an aggressive regimen of treatments from the conventional to the exotic — more than $800 billion in federal spending, and trillions of dollars worth of credit from the Federal Reserve — fears of a second recession are growing, along with worries that he country may face several more years of lean prospects.

Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter. The situation has left American fortunes pinned to an uncertain remedy: hoping that things somehow get better. 

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2014101,00.html

The water is blue and warm, the visibility is perfect. There might be no better place in the world to learn to scuba dive than the glassy seas around Key West, at the southernmost tip of the U.S. As I gradually master my buoyancy and hover 15 feet below the surface, I can see schools of small yellow groupers gathered beneath the dive boat, giving wide berth to a blade of a barracuda. A spiny lobster shyly crawls across the seafloor. This colorful diversity of life — like swimming through a tropical aquarium — is all thanks to the shallow coral reefs that exist west of Key West. The world's reefs are the bases for sea life — home to a quarter of all the fish on the planet.

A snorkeler swims past an elkhorn coral on a coral reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary near Key West, Fla. Wilfredo Lee / AP

http://www.cnbc.com//id/38902762

The American economy could experience painfully slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment for a decade or longer as a result of the 2007 collapse of the housing market and the economic turmoil that followed, according to an authority on the history of financial crises.

That finding, contained in a new paper by Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland, generated considerable debate during an annual policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which concluded on Saturday.