BAD MEDICINE
If you want a job that rewards you for screwing up, join the health-care profession. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows hospitals actually make more money when surgeries have complications. Hospitals made $39,017 more when a patient with private insurance had complications post-surgery and $1,749 for a Medicare patient, according to researchers. Atul Gawande, author of the study and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, described the numbers as “eye-popping.” The most common complications: surgical site infection, sepsis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, heart attack and pneumonia.
COLLEGE = POVERTY
Higher education is bringing young people down, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For the first time in 10 years, 30-year-olds who did not go to college are more likely to be homeowners than college grads with student loans. Back in the old days (the 1990s), college led to better paying jobs. With the current economy and the rise of education costs, graduates now have far too many student loans to pay off before they can even think about taking out a loan for a house. But don’t fret, college kids—at least you learned how to play beer pong and can teach it to your new roommates (mom and dad).
CINCO DE CHIHUAHUA
Every Cinco de Mayo, residents in Chandler, Ariz., celebrate with a festival and Chihuahua races. The mini Mexican pups compete for the royal crowning of King and Queen and Best Dressed, Best Temperament and Most Fashionable. Winners receive $500 and all money raised goes to the no-kill HALO Animal Rescue.
WEST EGG
Baz Luhrman may have filmed the latest adaptation of The Great Gatsby in his native Australia, but he still turned to Long Island for set design inspiration. He and his wife, designer Catherine Martin, based Gatsby’s mansion on places such as Huntington’s Oheka Castle, Upper Brookville’s La Selva and Sands Point’s Beacon Towers—some of the same Gold Coast mansions that inspired author F. Scott Fitzgerald while writing his classic American novel.
KISSING COUSINS
If you thought dating on Long Island was hard, you’ve never heard about what singles in Iceland go through. With a population of just 320,000, many Icelanders wind up seeing an ex years later—at a family reunion, since everyone’s basically a distant relative. But fear not, kissing cousins. A new smartphone app lets users “bump” phones and sounds an alarm if they’re too closely related. It uses an online database that contains nearly the entire population’s genealogical details stretching back 1,200 years. The slogan for Islendiga-App is: “Bump the app before you bump in bed.” Classy.
NASA recently announced that its Kepler satellite had discovered three Earth-like exoplanets—planets whose main star is not the sun—that could host life. The trio is located within the “habitable zone”—the area around the star where water can exist. It’s referred to as the “Goldilocks Zone” because the planets’ surfaces are not too hot or too cold for living organisms. While scientists can’t tell if there really are aliens living on these planets, they say the discoveries bring us another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, people have only explored 5 percent of the ocean.
BNL’s National Synchrotron Light Source II causes ions to become 250,000 times hotter than the sun.
