CHICAGO – Fast decisions on life-and-death cases are the bread and butter of hospital emergency rooms. Nowhere do doctors face greater pressures to overtest and overtreat.

The fear of missing something weighs heavily on every doctor’s mind. But the stakes are highest in the ER, and that fear often leads to extra blood tests and imaging scans for what may be harmless chest pains, run-of-the-mill head bumps, and non-threatening stomachaches.

Many ER doctors say the No. 1 reason is fear of malpractice lawsuits. “It has everything to do with it,” said Dr. Angela Gardner, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The fast ER pace plays a role, too: It’s much quicker to order a test than to ask a patient lots of questions to make sure that test is really needed.

“It takes time to explain pros and cons. Doctors like to check a box that orders a CT scan and go on to the next patient,” said Dr. Jeffrey Kline, an emergency physician at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) –
Cheap stocks and robust consumption by its middle class are reason to buy into China now, even though markets have turned cautious on the world’s No.3 economy, a fund manager at BlackRock told Reuters.

“The sentiment (regarding investing in China) is quite different from 6-8 months ago. And we are not immune to these concerns. There is risk, but we do think that it is a good opportunity to invest in the country, due to low valuations and strong consumption,” Jing Ning, portfolio manager at BlackRock, said in an interview on Thursday.

Ning manages the Black Rock China Fund (035920161X.LU), with a size of about $350 million. Since the beginning of the year, the fund has dropped 7.3 percent, outperforming its benchmark, the MSCI China 10/40 (.dMICN0000TNUS), which has fallen 12 percent.

Fears of overheating — China’s economy grew 11.9 percent year-on-year in the first quarter — as well as asset bubbles have added to investor concerns about how sustainable growth in China is while regulators urge the country’s banks to curb lending.

Chinese stock markets have been suffering heavily under the recent sell-off triggered by the government debt crisis in Greece, with the Shanghai Composite Index (.SSEC) down about 19 percent year-to-date, compared with a 4 percent drop in Europe’s benchmark index (.FTEU3) as investors shun high-risk emerging market stocks.

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BERLIN – Hydrogen, one of Earth’s most abundant elements, once was seen as green energy’s answer to the petroleum-driven car: easy to produce, available everywhere and nonpolluting when burned.

Hydrogen energy was defeated by a mountain of obstacles — the fear of explosion by the highly flammable gas, the difficulty of carrying the fuel in large, heavy tanks in the vehicle, and the lack of a refueling network. Automakers turned to biofuels, electricity or the gas-electric hybrid.

But hydrogen, it turns out, never was completely out of the race. Now Israeli scientists and entrepreneurs claim to have brought hydrogen energy a step closer by putting it in much smaller, lighter containers.

Rather than using metal or composite cylinders of compressed gas that look like bulky scuba gear, hydrogen is packed into glass filaments which, once out of the lab, will be only slightly thicker than a human hair.

These 370 glass capillaries are bundled into a glass tube called a capillary array, about the width of a drinking straw. The scientists say 11,000 such arrays will fuel a car for 400 kilometers (240 miles), take less than half the space and weight of tanks currently installed in the few hydrogen cars now available.

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SANTIAGO, Chile – As the Easter earthquake shook Southern California, the state’s disaster management chief was thousands of miles away in Chile, examining what experts say is the best case study yet for how a truly catastrophic earthquake could impact the United States.

Chile and the U.S. Pacific coast have more in common than their geology; they share advanced construction codes, bustling coastal cities, modern skyscrapers and veteran emergency services.

These were all put to the test in Chile, which despite its extensive planning lost 432 lives in the 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami — lessons that California, Oregon and Washington have yet to fully learn despite deep experience with lesser quakes.

They include: Coastal flood maps mean nothing without local enforcement. Hospitals need to not only stay upright but also stay open. Stringent building standards require stringent inspections. And tourists need to be taught about the dangers of tsunamis, which caused the greatest loss of life in Chile, wiping out seaside campgrounds on the last weekend of summer vacation.

“People living there know that when the earth shakes, it’s like an alarm going off: Get out. But visitors aren’t conditioned like that,” said Matthew Bettenhausen, the secretary of California’s Emergency Management Agency.

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