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While traditional cigarettes may not become completely extinct during our lifetime, the big tobacco companies now have their biggest competition ever.

E-cigarettes, or “e-cigs”, are electronic alternatives to cigarettes that have become the popular choice for many Americans who enjoy the wide assortment of e-liquid flavors available to them.

According to Health News Florida, one former smoker is echoing these praises and credits them for helping him stop smoking.

“Now that I switched to this, I just can’t stop smoking it,” said South Florida resident Juan Uranga. “It’s really helped with the cigarettes…I don’t even smoke them anymore.”

Health benefits aside, a major reason Juan and many others are switching to e-cigs is the vast array of vaping flavors for sale available to them, from classic tobacco to fruit-flavored options.

“It’s popular because there are millions of flavors,” said Florida smoke shop owner Sadallah Kahuk. “You can go from a cereal to a dessert to caramel to bacon.”

According to the Inlander, some companies are getting especially creative, offering flavors such as guava nectar, bubble gum, and super-menthol flavors that leave your mouth feeling cool and refreshed.

It’s safe to say that it isn’t very hard to find an e-cig flavor that you like, whatever your preference may be. The only real question is what your favorite one will end up being.

Over the last several years the financial market has rebounded, jobs are starting to come back, and overall the U.S. is much more financially secure than in the years directly following the “Great Recession.” Nevertheless, people are showing apprehension when it comes to how and where they choose to invest their savings.

Even with current interest rates low, there is a trend upward in the purchase of annuities. According to the news outlet AZCentral.com, sales of annuities rose 3% in 2014. These type of annuity policies are especially popular with Baby Boomers as more and more rapidly approach retirement age.

As the piece also points out, it is the conservative, fixed-rate annuities that are enjoying the most success, as opposed to volatile versions that rely more on stocks. These safer options, however, only usually yield payments of just 2-3%. When you consider it’s not uncommon for annual annuity fees to reach levels of 3%, it might be time to ask yourself if playing it so close to the chest is really worth it.

While it’s certainly smart to be conservative and risk-averse with the majority of your retirement savings, at some point you need to determine what the net gain will be. You might as well keep your money stashed away in a box under your bed, instead of paying fees that drain your capital, leaving you the same amount you started with.

In other words, it might be time to start looking into slightly more aggressive investment options. If you already spent your retirement investment money on the purchase of an aforementioned annuity, it’s still not too late. There are many reputable companies in the business of buying annuities for cash settlements.

If you go this route, you will then have money on hand to invest in slightly riskier, but potentially more rewarding options. According to a piece in the Chicago Tribune, one-third of Americans think there’s better than a 50% chance they will outlive their savings. Not losing money is great, but not making the money you have work for you isn’t helping you either.

As has been the case throughout history whether in business, love, finances, or life: You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.

We know that a group of early humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia over to the North American continent about 23,000 years ago, but scientists have always assumed that this group spread out across North America before venturing farther South.

Now, it seems that at least two groups of travelers made the perilous journey — leading researchers to state, for the first time, that another “ghost population” managed to cross the Bering bridge and venture down to Central and South America, without leaving any traces of their passing along the way.

A new report published in the online academic journal Nature states that researchers have found DNA evidence linking two Amazonian tribes, the Surui and the Karitiana, to current populations in Papua New Guinea and Aboriginal Australian tribes. This newly discovered genome means that the Surui and the Karitiana are more closely related to populations across the Pacific than to Native Americans in the north.

According to Fox News, lead author and researcher Pontus Skoglund of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School stated that his team made the “unexpected discovery by using statistical methods that test whether a set of populations are equally related to a set of other populations.”

The team expected to find that Amazonian tribes have more in common with descendants of Native American tribes, which would have confirmed that there was just one major voyage of early humans across the Bering bridge.

This new “ghost population,” which appears to have no direct descendants on any continent, is now being called “Population Y” — a term derived from the word “Ypykuera,” which means “ancestor” in the ancient language of the Surui and Karitiana people.

Scientists often refer to “ghost populations” to reference villages or cultures that vanished without explanation; early U.S. history dating back before the Revolutionary War even boasts of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, which vanished into thin air after shipments of supplies from England were delayed for three years.

Similar to the multiple journeys that early American colonists made, scientists now believe that there was a period of mass migration from Siberia over to the Americas, but that several groups made individual journeys and settled in different locations.

There are no confirmed dates when each of these migrations likely occurred, nor do researchers know why each group decided to make the journey.

According to a new study, patients who are undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) might reduce their chances of give birth by freezing their donor eggs.

One in eight couples, or 12% of married women, have trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy. Infertility experts use methods such as IVF as a treatment for couples trying to have a baby. During the IVF process, donated egg and sperm are fertilized in a lab environment, and the egg is placed into the woman’s uterus to carry.

CBS News reports that the new study, published in August’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined over 11,000 IVF procedures that used donor eggs. Twenty percent of the eggs in the study had been frozen.

The results of the study showed that only 47% of the IVF procedures that used frozen eggs resulted in a live birth. When a fresh donor egg was used, 56% of women were able to give birth.

“Our research demonstrated that – contrary to some claims made mostly by commercial interests – frozen eggs offer a lower change of a pregnancy and delivery chance after IVF than fresh eggs,” Says Dr. Norbert Gleicher, co-author of the study and chief scientist with the Center for Human Reproduction in New York City.

So far, it is not clear how the freezing of the eggs results in fewer birth rates. The authors of the study hypothesize that the quality of the egg is lessened during the freezing or thawing processes.

The study had some limitations. Since the statistics were anonymous, researchers were unable to control variables that may have skewed with the results, such as the ages of the donors or patients, or the specific reasons for their issues with infertility. Until more research can be done, doctors recommend that patients discuss all the advantages and disadvantages of their treatment options.

A billboard campaign started by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was launched on August 12. The billboards featured the faces of missing children, such as Sarah and Jacob Hoggle, who have been missing since September 7th, 2014.

The campaign is referred to as the “Summer of Hope,” and was designed to spread the word about young children who have been reported missing. The plan is to distribute these advertisements to the D.C. and Baltimore area, and then spread the campaign to the rest of the country. The ads will be shown in 50 Metro stations in D.C., and 14 shelters and billboards in Baltimore.

Recent research by OTX, a global consumer research and consulting firm, showed that 63% of adults find that advertising on digital signage catches their attention. This is what the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are counting on.

“Now that I’m not capable of being out there on TV every day. I’m back at work. I’m capable of keeping it out there the way that I am, this really helps,” says Troy Turner, the father of Sarah and Jacob Hoggle. Turner expresses how grateful he is for the campaign, “The fact that it’s a national campaign also helps since we have leads all over the place.”

Bethesda Magazine reports that the mother of the children, Catherine Hoggle, has been placed in a mental hospital for schizophrenia. Though she has been charged with abducting the kids, Hoggle has not provided the police with any information on their whereabouts.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that there were over 460,000 missing children claims made to the U.S. police in the last year.

The billboards are expected to stay up throughout all of August. In the coming weeks, the campaigns is expected to spread across other major cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles.

If you’re in need of prescription medication these days, you no longer have to wait in line at your local pharmacy.

Rather, you can be like the millions across the globe flocking to the internet to find cheap generic brand prescription pharmaceuticals.

But due to the increased proliferation of dangerous counterfeit medications on the internet, it isn’t always the safest idea to do so.

That is, until Bing decided to make our lives easier. In early August, the search engine announced that it would be warning users when they come across unsafe online pharmacies via their search engine.

America’s healthcare system is in a strange state these days. While lifespan has increased significantly, more and more individuals are being diagnosed with chronic, life-threatening illnesses, such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.

Because of this, our country is heavily dependent on pharmaceuticals. In fact, almost 50% (48.5%) of Americans have used a minimum of one prescription medication in the past month.

Taking fake medication can be harmful to a person’s health in more ways than one. Not only could their condition could go untreated and get worse, but the fillers used in the counterfeit drugs could put users in serious harm.

It can often be difficult to tell whether drugs are counterfeit or not, particularly if they come in the form of a generic brand. This becomes doubly difficult when purchased on the internet.

But now, when users search for online pharmacies using Bing, the search engine will pre-emptively alert them that the website is illegitimate. According to Search Engine Journal, Bing makes its warnings based off of a list compiled by the FDA.

Search Engine Journal additionally reports that the warnings will function similarly to when a user visits a site containing malware.

While the warning will inevitably pop up, Bing will not definitively prevent the internet user from navigating the site. The choice is ultimately in their own hands.

Even with nearly 81% of retirees citing good health as the most important key to retirement, finding retirement health care is notoriously challenging. According to a recent report from TIME, certain states can promise lower costs than others, depending on circumstances like insurance. A recent analysis by HealthView Services details the differences in out-of-pocket health care costs after retirement from state to state.

The cheapest health care costs for retirees are in Hawaii, with the average patient expected to pay $2,818 after their first year of retirement, and a total of $112,528 over the following 20 years. That being said, Hawaii is also the most expensive state to live in. A close runner-up is Vermont, with first-year expenses totaling $3,074, for a 20-year total of $112,528.

In the most expensive retirement health care states, retirees can expect a different set of costs. In Michigan, first-year costs are around $3,707, with a total of $151,175 over the next 20 years. This creates a cost difference between Michigan and Vermont of around $28,000 in 20-year costs. The costs of retirement living in Michigan also exceeded the costs of more typical high-cost living states like New York and California.

According to a separate HealthView report, a healthy couple of 65 will have lifetime costs totaling $266,589 for Medicare parts B and D, along with supplemental coverage. Including other out-of-pocket costs typical to healthcare, the number grows to $394,954, which leaves three out of every four pre-retirees worried about their costs level. In order to cover 90% of costs, retirees will need at least $271,000 in savings.

Experts suggest the best thing you can do to prepare for retirement health care costs is monitor your health in the years before it. Make choices to keep your body and mind healthy, and you can reduce the inevitable healthcare bill that retirement brings with it.

Oil prices in the U.S. have fallen to a new six-year low as of August 11th, reports the Wall Street Journal. This drop is likely due to a surge in gasoline stockpiling during the summer season. Over the past decade, global provided oil reserves have increased by 27%, or over 350 billion barrels. As summer is reaching an end, the demand for fuel starts to decrease, which is likely to result in a product surplus.

Crude oil fell 2.5%, or $1.07, below the low for this year’s average oil price. At $42.23 a barrel, oil prices dropped below the previous record set in March 3, 2009. Despite the falling prices, many U.S. oil companies refuse to cut back on their oil production.

Since early June, oil prices have fallen by more than 31%. Many analysts are speculating that the fall in prices is not going to end any time soon, and believe that the price could soon go below $40 a barrel.

“We are trading at levels not seen since the depths of the great recession,” says Stephen Schork, president of The Schork Group. “The overall trend in this market is very bearish.”

Other macroeconomic factors may have contributed to the recent drop of oil price. The strengthening of the U.S. dollar makes it more profitable for non-U.S. investors to sell crude oil. In addition, the demand for U.S. oil in China has been slowly decreasing, which has lead to an increase of local supply.

While many U.S. refineries have begun to slow production as the summer season draws to an end, other companies continue to add to stockpiles. Because of this, crude oil prices will continue to fall as demand goes down and supply goes up.