The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has formally launched MedlinePlus Connect. This free service allows health organizations and health information technology (HIT) providers to link patient portals and electronic health record (EHR) systems to MedlinePlus.gov, a trusted source of authoritative, up-to-date health information for patients, families and health care providers. MedlinePlus brings together information from NIH, other federal agencies, and reputable health information providers. MedlinePlus covers a wide range of health conditions and wellness issues, and includes key resources to inform patients about their health. MedlinePlus Connect does not require registration. You can link your certified EHR to MedlinePlus Connect to help you achieve one of the 10 menu set criteria for Meaningful Use of certified EHR technology. MedlinePlus Connect is not a replacement for MedlinePlus. http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2011pres/06/20110620a.html

Huguette Clark, the Montana copper mining heiress who died in New York May 24 at 104, has left most of her $400 million fortune to the arts -- wealth from the Gilded Age that produced the Rockefellers, Astors and Vanderbilts. According to her will, obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday, Clark gave to Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art a prized Claude Monet water-lily painting not seen by the public since 1925. The Manhattan district attorney's office is looking into how Clark's affairs were managed while she spent the last two decades of her life in a hospital, a virtual recluse, people familiar with the probe have said. Before that, she lived in the largest residence on Fifth Avenue -- 42 rooms. The daughter of one-time U.S. Sen. William A. Clark left instructions for the creation of a foundation "for the primary purpose of fostering and promoting the arts," according to the will prepared and signed in 2005, when she was 98. About $300 million will go for the arts, including the 1907 Monet from his famed "Water Lilies" series, which is worth tens of millions of dollars, said attorney John Dadakis, of the firm Holland & Knight. Artworks by Renoir, John Singer Sargent and other greats that graced Clark's New York home will be moved to her 24-acre oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara, Calif., which will be converted into a museum under the new Bellosguardo ("beautiful view" in Italian) Foundation. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9O19HQ80.htm

Chicken Charlie's is a staple of fried rations at fairs across the country. It sold 400 to 600 orders of deep-fried Kool-Aid per day the first weekend of the San Diego County Fair. That's about double the rate of previous debut items, Boghosian said. "That's because it tastes so darn good," Boghosian said of the Kool-Aid. The deep-fried novelty takes the shape of a doughnut-hole. There are five per order. That breaks down to as much as 9,000 balls of deep-fried Kool-Aid eaten over opening weekend. Boghosian said Chicken Charlie's has already gone through 150 pounds of Kool-Aid powder and 1,500 pounds of flour. Chicken Charlie's debuted deep-fried Klondike Barsthin mints and Pop Tarts in past years. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/jun/14/fried-kool-aid-hit-fair-chicken-charlie-says/

Pienza, a town and comune in the province of Siena, in the Val d'Orcia in Tuscany (central Italy), between the towns of Montepulciano and Montalcino, is the "touchstone of Renaissance urbanism." In 1996, UNESCO declared the town a World Heritage Site, and in 2004 the entire valley, the Val d'Orcia, was included on the list of UNESCO's World Cultural Landscapes. Pienza was rebuilt from a village called Corsignano, which was the birthplace (1405) of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Italian: Enea Silvio Piccolomini), a Renaissance humanist born into an exiled Sienese family, who later became Pope Pius II. Once he became Pope, Piccolomini had the entire village rebuilt as an ideal Renaissance town. Intended as a retreat from Rome, it represents the first application of humanist urban planning concepts, creating an impetus for planning that was adopted in other Italian towns and cities and eventually spread to other European centers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pienza

Pienza is famous not only for its architectures but also for the excellent sheep's milk cheese, or more correctly, ewes' milk cheese, pecorino, produced in the area. The word "formaggio" - generic cows' milk cheese - is rarely used in Tuscany where most of the cheese consumed is pecorino, followed in popularity by mozzarella and then other cheeses that have their own individual names. Even the word "pecorino", alluding to "pecora" - a ewe - is a quite recent invention. Until the end of World War II, Tuscans used the term "cacio", and indeed the cheese rolling competition held in Pienza on the first Sunday of September is know as "cacio al fuso" - literally, the cheese to the spindle. The aim of the participants in this popular festival is to see who can roll the cheese so that it stops closest to the spindle. http://www.pienza.com/pecorino.htm

What is LIBOR? London Inter-Bank Offer Rate. The interest rate that the banks charge each other for loans (usually in Eurodollars). This rate is applicable to the short-term international interbank market, and applies to very large loans borrowed for anywhere from one day to five years. This market allows banks with liquidity requirements to borrow quickly from other banks with surpluses, enabling banks to avoid holding excessively large amounts of their asset base as liquid assets. The LIBOR is officially fixed once a day by a small group of large London banks, but the rate changes throughout the day. I went to http://www.investorwords.com/ and searched for libor.

WHY is nearsightedness so common in the modern world? In the early 1970s, 25 percent of Americans were nearsighted; three decades later, the rate had risen to 42 percent, and similar increases have occurred around the world. There is significant evidence that the trait is inherited, so you might wonder why our myopic ancestors weren’t just removed from the gene pool long ago, when they blundered into a hungry lion or off a cliff. But although genes do influence our fates, they are not the only factors at play. In this case, the rapid increase in nearsightedness appears to be due to a characteristic of modern life: more and more time spent indoors under artificial lights. Our genes were originally selected to succeed in a very different world from the one we live in today. Humans’ brains and eyes originated long ago, when we spent most of our waking hours in the sun. The process of development takes advantage of such reliable features of the environment, which then may become necessary for normal growth. Researchers suspect that bright outdoor light helps children’s developing eyes maintain the correct distance between the lens and the retina — which keeps vision in focus. Dim indoor lighting doesn’t seem to provide the same kind of feedback. As a result, when children spend too many hours inside, their eyes fail to grow correctly and the distance between the lens and retina becomes too long, causing far-away objects to look blurry. One study published in 2008 in the Archives of Ophthalmology compared 6- and 7-year-old children of Chinese ethnicity living in Sydney, Australia, with those living in Singapore. The rate of nearsightedness in Singapore (29 percent) was nearly nine times higher than in Sydney. The rates of nearsightedness among the parents of the two groups of children were similar, but the children in Sydney spent on average nearly 14 hours per week outside, compared with just three hours per week in Singapore. Luckily, there is a simple way to lower the risk of nearsightedness: get children to spend more time outside.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/opinion/21wang.html?_r=1&src=recg

Two massive lions flank the steps of the New York Public Library's flagship building on Fifth Avenue. Crafted out of pink Tennessee marble, Patience and Fortitude, as they became known in the 1930s, are the library's tangible link to the ancient history of libraries. Across the world, sculptures of lions had stood watch over sacred spaces for thousands of years. During the library's construction, people like Teddy Roosevelt suggested using a bison because the new-world animal had "the advantage of being our own." But he and everyone else was rebuffed. These lions, and this library, were part of the long tradition of knowledge, passed down from one elite to the next from Alexandria to Rome to London and finally to New York. Information was not just an idea, but the set of physical objects that contained it. And that stuff had to be protected by the powerful, lest their precious atoms be lost and the wisdom into which they could be distilled lost also. The lions guarded the doors when the main branch of the New York Public Library was dedicated in May of 1911 and they watch over it still, rather haughtily looking over the heads of visitors to one of the world's great libraries. Yet over the last 100 years, and particularly over the last 10, everything about the storage and dissemination of knowledge has changed. T he lions still guard the building, but the information's gone out the back door, metastasizing in the new chemistry of the Internet. With all this change -- not to mention a possible $40 million budget cut looming -- it would be no surprise if the library was floundering like the music industry, newspapers, or travel agents. But that's the wild thing. The library isn't floundering. Rather, it's flourishing, putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country.
Read much more at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/what-big-media-can-learn-from-the-new-york-public-library/240565/