Word: scans
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Computed tomography (CT or CAT) scans help doctors detect everything from cancer to kidney stones. But some physicians are raising concerns about the safety of such procedures - most notably, an increase in cancer risk. A CT scan packs a mega-dose of radiation - as much as 500 times that of a conventional X-ray. If your doctor orders a CT scan for you or your child, should you think twice...
...Appropriate" is the key word - especially since a review study published last November in the New England Journal of Medicine determined that as many as one-third of all CT scans performed in the United States are unnecessary. The authors take issue with the "perhaps 20 million adults and, crucially, more than 1 million children per year in the United States [who] are being irradiated unnecessarily." Part of the problem, the authors say, is that patients are being prescribed multiple, unneeded CT scans, a predicament that could be avoided with better communication between physicians. "Having the same CT scan twice...
...install it. The most obvious improvement (and by the way, Firefox claims more than 15,000 improvements - bet you can't name 100 of them) is the "awesome bar," its update to the location bar. You can start typing a keyword in the location bar and Firefox will scan the history file of places you've visited for matching keywords. I typed "flight" in my location bar, for instance, and Firefox pulled up a variety of airline sites I've visited during the past month...
...meantime, Von Ahn has figured out a way to take advantage of all the spare brainpower hundreds of millions of people expend deciphering wiggly letters. He has teamed up with the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that uses computers to digitally scan books and put the text online, where it can be accessed for free. When its scanners find a word they can't read, they automatically turn it into a CAPTCHA that gets exported to a website in need of one. A human reads it and transcribes it, and the results get sent back to the scanner...
...still reading this article - and chances are greater if you're older than 34 - you may be wondering whether there's a cure for newstritional disorder. The study's recommendation is, in essence, more of what's causing the problem in the first place: "quick delivery and quick-scan consumption," news that can be taken in at a glance. The new bite-size media model is to reduce the news fat, cut back on content, and create tasty treats that requires fewer mental calories to digest...