Adrienne G. Cannon writes: My eye is a little blurry and aches but I can already detect a change in the perception of my "new" eye. It is a bit disconcerting at first but the colors adjust themselves as the day progresses. And there is a depth of field I perceive when I look at objects. The highlights seem sharper and the shadows are deeper. I know there will be more changes, more adjustments, and more delights as I discover my new 20/20 distance vision and savor the clarity permitted by my new lens.

In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year. Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says.

Val Castronovo writes: Since its founding in 2010, Pinterest, the photo-sharing site that has become the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter, has been enthusiastically embraced by art museums across the country. A virtual bulletin board, Pinterest allows users — more than 70 million now — to set up “boards” to which they “pin” images of favorite things — in this case, artworks and artifacts culled from museum collections and archives.

The creators of Roominate, Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, didn’t grow up playing with traditional girl toys. When Brooks asked for a Barbie her father gave her a mini-saw. Chen adored Legos and built hundreds of extravagant creations with her brothers. Brooks majored in mechanical engineering at MIT, while Bettina studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. When they met as graduate students at Stanford, said Chen, “We thought that there’d be a lot more women in grad school, but there weren’t.”

“Pain is becoming an enormous burden on the public. The US government recently outlined steps to reduce the future burden of pain through broad-ranging efforts, including enhanced research,” said Linda Porter, Ph.D, the pain policy advisor at NINDS and a leader of NIH’s Pain Consortium. “This study is a good example of the kind of innovative research we hope will reduce chronic pain which affects a huge portion of the population.

"Even when they are not killed outright either in the womb or just after birth, this bias against girl children manifests itself in situations where family resources are limited and little food is available, in boys being fed before girls, leading to greater incidents of malnutrition among girls and a mortality rate that is 75 percent higher for girls below age five than for boys."

Authors and poets Margaret Atwood, Marie Arana, Taylor Branch, Don DeLillo, Khaled Hosseini, Barbara Kingsolver, Brad Meltzer, Joyce Carol Oates, Katherine Paterson and Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be among writers speaking. New Library of Congress exhibits celebrate opera, the majestic art form that has transfixed audiences for more than 400 years, and the other exhibit celebrates what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history."

"Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. We challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a 'cheater’s high.' We find that even though individuals predict they will feel guilty and have increased levels of negative affect after engaging in unethical behavior individuals who cheat on different problem-solving tasks consistently experience more positive affect than those who do not."

Some of these tests — particularly tests involving plutonium — did not vaporize the material in a nuclear blast. It remained in tunnels and containers, in forms that could be recovered and recycled into a bomb. In addition, the Soviet Union discarded equipment that included high-purity plutonium that would have provided materials and information that could lead to a relatively sophisticated nuclear device if it had been found.

Joan L. Cannon writes: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Elliot, Middlemarch. Are we in a time when we forget that the silence at the end of a disaster of whatever kind hides a roar that only saints and philosophers have the stomach for?

“We can make ourselves happy through simple pleasures, but those ‘empty calories’ don’t help us broaden our awareness or build our capacity in ways that benefit us physically,” she said. “At the cellular level, our bodies appear to respond better to a different kind of well-being, one based on a sense of connectedness and purpose.”

Why did I resign? I was one of only seventeen Democrats in the 50 member North Carolina State Senate. After this discouraging and disheartening session, I realized I could contribute more to turning this tide by leaving the North Carolina Senate and starting a voter ID project to make sure that every voter has the proper ID and correct precinct they vote in. To assure that thousands of voters will not have their ballots counted, the types of photo identification required is so narrow that it could prevent 160,000 people from voting.

In an attempt to answer prevailing questions about our moon, NASA plans to launch a probe on Friday, Sept. 6. The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere. While at the NASA site, ask an expert about Climate Change, such as how scientists know changes seen in recent decades are the result of human activities, not natural causes?

Trolls are symbolically linked to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge East Span Replacement Project in many ways. The statue, designed by local blacksmith Bill Roan, was affixed to the upper deck of the old bridge by a team of ironworkers who helped repair the East Span after the Loma Prieta earthquake. The Bay Bridge troll appeared in secret, without Caltrans’ approval but the troll has garnered considerable local popularity. Renowned for their protective powers, longevity and superhuman strength, trolls represent a history and spirit that deserve to be both commemorated and continued.

Oakland Museum of California opened the vaults to showcase the very best in California landscape art from the museum’s holdings, including works by Ansel Adams, Thomas Hill, David Hockney, William Keith, Arthur Mathews, Richard Misrach, Thomas Moran, and more. Peter Stackpole: Bridging the Bay features stunning black-and-white photographs chronicling the original San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge construction in the 1930s by a famed American photographer.

The Textile Museum itself is in transit; it will be joining with the George Washington University to become a cornerstone of a new museum scheduled to open in fall 2014 on GW’s main campus in Foggy Bottom, DC. The shop, however, remains open during the move and scarves and shawls are a dominant shop feature, with Randall Darwall and other artists' examples, always a effective way to update a 'little black dress' or casual outfit.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is supposed to follow specific guidelines when it advises a US President on whether to approve federal disaster aid for a state or individuals. But experts in the field say the disaster standards are unclear — and often ignored. The result is that disaster decisions can seem arbitrary or politically motivated. FEMA’s public explanations typically do not shed much light on its rulings, leaving governors to wonder why they missed out on federal help.

Mary McHugh interviewed the late Ms. Seibert in 2001: She is certainly one of the most powerful women in finance in this country as the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first to head one of its member firms, Muriel Siebert & Co., Inc., but she is also nicknamed Mickie, and is the most unpretentious and generous of women in any field.

Nichola Gutgold writes: Who took over management of Columbia Sportswear Company in the late 1930’s, when it was near bankruptcy, and turned it into the largest American ski apparel company worth $4 billion in 1972? Who ran for US President on Equal Rights Party in 1884 and 1888 and was an American delegate to the first world peace Congress in Paris in 1889? Who is considered the first American woman to be ordained by full denominational authority in 1864, and who also campaigned vigorously for full woman suffrage?

Rose Madeline Mula interviews the late actress in March, 2001: What about the physical demands, I persisted. All of us find as we get older that we're not able to do many of things we did easily in the past. But not true for Harris's acting regime — not yet, at any rate. She still thrives on a busy touring schedule, going from city to city, and performing eight times a week. "You get used to that," she said with her characteristic good nature. If anything, she believes the hectic pace keeps her agile physically, and the effort to remember lines keeps her mind young.

When he moved in with me, just a few months after the chicken and squash dinner, I took Tommy by hand to my washer and drier. “No more laundromats,” I said. I was happy to declare this. “Terrific,” he said as he put his arm around my waist and kissed my cheek. So, why am I stressing? My husband can no longer speak, but he can certainly cook a frozen pizza and place an Amy’s fake meatloaf dinner in the microwave.

Since the beginning of 2013, and as of August 6, 2013, restrictive voting bills have been introduced in more than half the states: At least 82 restrictive bills were introduced in 31 states. Of those, 7 restrictive bills are still pending in 4 states. Eight states have already passed nine restrictive bills this session. Just recently, North Carolina passed a law that mandates a Photo ID is required to vote, eliminates same-day registration, eliminates pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-old citizens, and reduces the early voting period.

58% of all teens have downloaded apps to their cell phone or tablet computer. 26% of teen apps users have uninstalled an app because it was collecting personal information that they didn’t wish to share. 46% of teen apps users have turned off location tracking features because they were worried about the privacy of their information. Girls are considerably more likely than boys to say they have disabled location tracking features. 70% of them have sought advice from someone else about how to manage their privacy online.