Spend/Thrift stories are part of an occasional series offering everyday ways to cope with the nation's economic slowdown.When finances get tight, luxuries are the easiest and most obvious things to cut.Not always so obvious is how to cut spending on the essentials, such as food. But with the price of what we eat predicted to soar at near historic levels this year, it's well worth looking for ways to cut spending.This year, the overall cost of food is expected to rise between 3 and 4 percent, which is on top of a 4 percent hike last year, the highest jump since 1990, according to federal data. Average years see increases of just 2-1/2 percent.This year's increase could translate into hundreds of dollars for many families. The typical family of four spends more than $8,500 a year on food, according to 2006 data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.Sharp increases in fuel and commodity prices take most of the blame, says Ephraim Leibtag, an economist with the U.S.

Sun's MAJC and Intels's IA-64

Sun's MAJC and Intels's IA-64 by Hannibal Creating and using instruction-level parallelism

Parallelism is simply the practice of doing multiple things at once. Parallelism can happen on multiple levels, from executing multiple instructions at once, to executing multiple threads at once, to executing multiple programs at once. In the previous section, I mentioned on some of the techniques that software and hardware designers use to allow parallelism to happen. Here, I'll go into a bit more detail on those techniques, and how MAJC uses them to increase performance. I'll also cover some techniques that MAJC uses to create parallelism where previously there was none.

Both MAJC and IA-64 use speculation and predication to introduce parallelism into an instruction stream where there was none before. My IA-64 preview has an in-depth discussion and explanation of both predication and speculation, so I won't reproduce that here.

Finding ingenious design in nature

Joanna Aizenberg holds the skeleton of a deep-sea sponge made entirely out of a natural glass. The tube acts as a kind of high-rise apartment building for shrimp that live symbiotically in the sponges tissue. Staff photo Matt Craig/Harvard University .

Targeted Therapies: A New Generation of Cancer Treatments

These drugs are now a component of therapy for many common malignancies, including breast, colorectal, lung, and pancreatic cancers, as well as lymphoma, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. The mechanisms of action and toxicities of targeted therapies differ from those of traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy. Targeted therapies are generally better tolerated than traditional chemotherapy, but they are associated with several adverse effects, such as acneiform rash, cardiac dysfunction, thrombosis, hypertension, and proteinuria. Small molecule inhibitors are metabolized by cytochrome P450 enzymes and are subject to multiple drug interactions. Targeted therapy has raised new questions about the tailoring of cancer treatment to an individual patient's tumor, the assessment of drug effectiveness and toxicity, and the economics of cancer care.

Home of cricket hosts tennis match

Marcos Baghdatis, Ana Ivanovic, Alicia Molik and Brydan Klein played a game on the precariously perched court, but were too dazzled by the view to bother keeping score.

Tortures migrant for five days

The trouble started when the girl, working in the house as domestic help for some time, said she had picked the money after she was shown live wires by the owner of the house on Thursday.

The owner had found Rs 35,000 missing from a wad of notes worth Rs 50,000. The finger of suspicion was pointed at the girl, who was slapped and confined to a room besides being intimidated till her aunt was summoned.

When her aunt arrived on the scene, she was told that the girl had taken away Rs 35,000. They were told to return the money. When the poor family could not do so, the police was informed.

The police then picked up Tikka Ram, who was told to produce the money.

When he was being allegedly tortured, his family sent a message back home in Uttar Pradesh to sell their land to repay the money and get Tikka Ram released.