The Gazette of Colorado Springs reports Academy superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Gould this week dedicated the Cadet Chapel Falcon Circle on a 7,200-foot hill top that overlooks the main cadet chapel.

Religious tolerance at the elite school became a concern in 2004 when a survey found some cadets felt ostracized because they weren't religious.

Gould says the worship space is meant to help people of all religions. Earth-centered religious groups include New Age, paganism, Wicca, and Druids.

Doctors may be more accepting of certain complementary and alternative medicine therapies, such as yoga, meditation and deep breathing, than they have been in the past, a new study suggests.

The results show about 3 percent of Americans use such mind-body therapies because of a referral from a physician.

Evidence is growing to support the use of mind-body therapies as a clinical treatment, said study researcher Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, of Harvard Medical School. "Still, we didn't expect to see provider referral rates that were quite so high."

In 2007, 38 percent of Americans used complementary and alternative medicine (referred to by researchers as CAM). Mind-body therapies, which include things like yoga and tai chi, are a type of CAM. Use of CAM in the United States has increased since 2002, with mind-body therapies comprising 75 percent of the rise, the researchers say.

Nerurkar and colleagues collected information from more than 23,000 U.S. households from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey. They found more than 6.3 million Americans used mind-and-body therapies due to provider referral. That compares with 34.8 million who were self-referred. Those who were referred to mind-body therapies by their doctors tended to be sicker and used the health care system more than people who self-referred.

"What we learned suggests that providers are referring their patients for mind-body therapies as a last resort once conventional therapeutic options have failed," Nerurkar said. "It makes us wonder whether referring patients for these therapies earlier in the treatment process could lead to less use of the health care system, and possibly, better outcomes for these patients," she said.

Pass it on: About one in 30 Americans use mind-body therapies due to a physician's referral. The findings indicate these therapies may be becoming a more mainstream approach to care, researchers say.

Scientists in Canada have found MRSA in bedbugs from three hospital patients who live in a poverty-stricken Vancouver neighborhood.

Although bedbugs are not known to spread disease - they do lead to scratching - which can cause the skin to tear and make people at risk for bacteria, said Dr. Marc Romney, an author on the study. There's no evidence of whether or not the bedbugs actually spread the MRSA bacteria or another less dangerous drug-resistant germ, but the study is "an intriguing finding" that needs to be looked at further, said Romney, a microbiologist at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver.

The hospital is located near the poor downtown neighborhood where the three patients live, and when Romney and his colleagues saw a spike in both bedbugs and MRSA in the area, they decided to see if there was any correlation.

For the study, five bedbugs were crushed and analyzed. MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was found on three bugs. MRSA is resistant to several types of common antibiotics and can become deadly if it gets through the skin and into the bloodstream. Two bugs had VRE, or vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus Faecium, a less dangerous form of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Both germs are often seen in hospitals, and experts have been far more worried about nurses and other health-care workers spreading the bacteria than insects. It's not clear if the bacteria originated with the bedbugs or if the bugs picked it up from already infected people, Romney added.

"We understand the anxiety this study's findings may cause amongst the general public, however, the study only confirms what has long been suspected and more research needs to be conducted to understand the value of this information."

After swamping low-lying neighborhoods in Memphis, Tenn., earlier this week, the rising water is bringing misery to farms and small waterfront communities in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. The Corps of Engineers is considering whether to open the Morganza spillway, which would flood thousands of homes and acres of farmland along a 100-mile stretch in Louisiana but take the pressure off levees and help to protect Baton Rouge, New Orleans and the oil refineries in between. A decision is expected in the next several days.

In Bunche's Bend, in the northeastern corner of Louisiana, there was heartbreak in the voice of farmer Ted Schneider, 50, as he watched the muddy river creep into his 2,800 acres of soybeans. "It's kind of discouraging to look out here and think about all that work and money and know it is all going to be gone in a few days," said Schneider, who has farmed the land since 1984.

Chris Bonura, a spokesman for the Port of New Orleans, said the Coast Guard plans to close a 190-mile stretch of river from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico when the water reaches the 18-foot level at a gauge in Carrollton, which could happen by Monday.

In the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta, meanwhile, people waited uneasily to see how high the water would get. About 600 homes in the Delta have flooded in the past several days as the water has risen toward some of the highest levels on record.

Swollen by weeks of heavy rain and snowmelt, the Mississippi River has been breaking high-water records that have stood since the 1920s and `30s. It is projected to crest at Vicksburg on May 19 and shatter the mark set there during the cataclysmic Great Flood of 1927. The crest is expected to reach New Orleans on May 23.

The Air Force is looking to introduce a tiny drone that surreptitiously 'paints' an individual with some kind of signal-emitting powder or liquid that allows the military to keep tabs on him or her.  They could even use the technology to upload the person's whereabouts to a hellfire missile.

On Tuesday, the Air Force put out a call for proposals for such technology, though it didn't specify exactly what kind of drone might deliver the magic powder, or what the magic powder might be.

Tiny insect drones, while not yet perfected, are gaining popularity in the military labs. From larger hummingbird drones to other tiny ornithopters to DARPA's remote-controlled beetle, the delivery system for such a technology isn't so far away from being a reality. 

What's less clear is how the tracking might go down, though the Pentagon is hard at work on a range of what they call "Clandestine Tagging, Tracking, and Locating" (TTL) technologies.  Some ideas from the Pentagon include marking targets with biological paints or micro-mechanical sensors, Fox News reports.

A private firm in Oregon called Voxtel has already made available a product called NightMarks, a nano-crystal that can be seen through night-vision goggles and can be hidden in anything from glass cleaner to petroleum jelly.

DARPA is even looking into 'smart dust' - a cloud of dust that could be sprayed into the air near a target in hopes that he or she might walk through the cloud and be tagged, meaning the drone or delivery system wouldn't even have to make direct contact with the target.

The ATRIX owner swipes their finger on the touchscreen a number of times when it is fresh out of the box to identify them as the authorised user.  From that point on, every time they touch the power button it will recognise the fingerprint and approve operation.

The ATRIX is marketed as the most powerful smartphone in the world on the basis it can be plugged into a range of docks that convert it into a laptop, personal computer, media centre, or a sat-nav.

Jeremy Marks, of Spymaster, the leading professional suppliers of security equipment, said: 'Biometric fingerprint security is the best way to protect your device.  'This type of technology offers consumers a new level of security surpassing anything we have seen before on a smartphone.'

Owners in the U.S. have been impressed with the ground-breaking security feature. One said: 'All phones should have a fingerprint reader like this - it's the future.

It said: 'It's rather amazing to connect your phone to an HDTV and play music, watch a movie, type up a real document, and even do your online banking with the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse connected, all from a 135-gram phone.'

'With its multimedia accessories and ground-breaking fingerprint swipe access, this is an innovative handset that Orange is proud to be bringing to the UK first.'

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads to Washington at the end of the week, said he ordered the military to act with "maximum restraint" but vowed a tough response to further provocations. "Nobody should be mistaken. We are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty," he declared in a brief address broadcast live on Israeli TV stations.

The violence showed Israel the extent of Arab anger over the Palestinian issue, beyond the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, and came at a critical time for U.S. Mideast policy.

Sunday's unrest -- which came after activists used Facebook and other websites to mobilize Palestinians and their supporters in neighboring countries to march on the border with Israel -- marked the first time the protests that have swept the Arab world in recent months have been directed at Israel.

The events carried a message for Israel: Even as it wrestles with the Palestinian demand for a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem -- areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war -- there is a related problem of neighboring countries that host millions of Palestinians with aspirations to return.

Around midday, thousands of people approached the frontier, hoisting Palestinian flags, shouting slogans and throwing rocks and bottles at Israeli forces. When hundreds of people burst across the border fence into the Israeli-controlled town of Majdal Shams, surprised soldiers opened fire.

Israel's military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, told Channel 2 TV he also saw "fingerprints of Iranian provocation and an attempt to use 'nakba day' to create conflict."

"It's our land," one of the infiltrators, Sufian Abdel Hamid, told Israel's Channel 2 TV. "We won't stop trying to come back."