Dashboard

NEW YORK CITY

Designers' spring 2008 collections at Fashion Week

HARARE, ZIMBABWE

Flour shortages leave supermarket shelves bare

KUALA LUMPUR

Malaysia declares itself free of bird flu

MISSION VIEJO, CALIF.

Card sells for $2.8 mil.

JAKARTA Magnitude 7.9 earthquake hits Indonesia

FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y.

Federer wins fourth straight U.S. Open, 12th Grand Slam

SPORTS INJURY

Football Spine Injuries

When Kevin Everett showed movement in his limbs late Sept. 11, his doctor called it "a minor miracle." The Buffalo Bills defender had crumpled after a seemingly routine tackle during a Sunday game. Doctors quickly ran an ice-cold saline solution through his body--a relatively new treatment to prevent spinal swelling. That may have saved him from lifelong paralysis. These types of injuries are much rarer now since high schools and colleges prohibited head-first tackles in 1976. [This article consists of a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Football injuries resulting in quadriplegia- high school, college and professional o '76 -- 34 o '84 -- 5 o '91 -- 1 (Mike Utley, Detroit Lions)

Head-first tackling was banned at all levels in 1976

LEXICON

hemline theory

DEFINITION hem-line the-o-ry n. A hypothesis that the length of hemlines predicts how well the U.S. stock market will do--the shorter hemlines are, the better the economy will be.

CONTEXT Longer hemlines are showing up in fashion designs for spring 2008, indicating that U.S. economic woes could worsen. Nicole Miller and Josh Goot had hemlines at the knee, and Generra and Miss Sixty's hems were mostly midthigh. The fashion houses could just be foreshadowing what will come next year: by 2008, 2 million people could foreclose on their homes as a result of the subprime-mortgage crisis.

USAGE Though it is dismissed by both the economic and the fashion worlds, the hemline theory has proved correct at times. Hemlines were short in the Roaring Twenties but fell before the 1929 stock-market crash. In the '60s miniskirts were en vogue, and stocks rose. In the summer of 2006, designers showed short hems for spring, and in May the Standard & Poor's 500 index hit a seven-year high.

HEALTH NOTE

Popcorn Lung

A NEW AILMENT Doctors say Wayne Watson, who ate two bags of microwave popcorn daily for 10 years, could have "popcorn lung" from inhaling the fumes of diacetyl, which gives the food its buttery taste.

OTHER CASES Before that diagnosis, popcorn-factory workers sued flavoring makers, saying they had suffered similar lung inflammation.

REACTION ConAgra, maker of Act II and Orville Redenbacher popcorn, will phase out diacetyl in favor of another additive yet to be chosen.

CONFLICT

Mexico's Other Combatants

With much of Mexico worried about drug-cartel violence, the explosions that tore apart natural-gas and oil pipelines on Sept. 10 in the state of Veracruz caught many by surprise. The suspects? The leftist Popular Revolutionary Army, a once dormant group that staged a similar attack two months ago in the hopes of securing the freedom of a pair of its captured comrades.

COULD IT ESCALATE? Possibly, says College of William & Mary's George W. Grayson. "The scariest prospect is if they are coordinating with the drug cartels," Grayson says of the guerrillas. "Both could be looking for ways to distract the government."

EXTINCTION

New Look at Dinosaurs' Demise

A recent study pinpointed the interstellar collision that eventually led to the dinosaurs' extinction. The event was so deep in space that the meteorite it created didn't slam into Earth and kill off the dinosaurs until nearly 100 million years later. While the findings, if true, would "link the biological history of the earth to events far from earth," according to William Bottke, who led the study, they would also alter what we know about the history of dinosaurs:

DINOSAUR EMPIRE In the Mesozoic era, about 250 million years ago, dinosaurs started to be the dominant land animals. Scientists say they might exist today if not for the meteorite that wiped them out.

COSMIC COLLISION An asteroid 106 miles in diameter ran into a 37-mile asteroid 160 million years ago at a speed of 1.89 miles per sec., creating an asteroid set called the Baptistina family.

EARTH LANDING A Baptistina meteorite 6 miles across struck Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The resulting dust cloud may have blocked the sun and led to mass extinctions on Earth.

PRESENT DAY Luckily, we have better foreknowledge of what's headed for Earth than the dinosaurs did. "Asteroids won't change much in the next 1,000 years," Bottke says. So we're safe. For now.