While most of us are trying to be more frugal, the loss of a job, a divorce, or a medical emergency can quickly sink us deeply into debt.

Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.

Scientific research involves going beyond the well-trodden and well-tested ideas and theories that form the core of scientific knowledge. During the time scientists are working things out, some results will be right, and others will be wrong. Over time, the right results will emerge.

While it is quite reasonable for scientists to be skeptical of new ideas that do not fit within the accepted realm of scientific knowledge, the best science often emerges from situations where results carefully obtained do not fit within the accepted paradigms.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador attain liberty, and inspired our forefathers to shed their blood for the United States' independence, cannot die. Today, this spirit of solidarity must and will empower all of us to rebuild Haiti.

As we explore ways to bring price relief and bolster our country's energy independence, one significant energy source has emerged as a potential solution, hydrogen fuel cells.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

After spending 460 days as a hostage, I did emerge a fundamentally changed person. But I think, like everyone does as they grow older and probably wiser, I can look back at my earlier life - my history, my mistakes, the joy I felt as a young woman traveling the world - with some objectivity and even some humor.

Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges. Although no one can dare claim that it is now a perfect state, and that no more work is needed, Rwanda has risen from the ashes as a model or truth and reconciliation.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

We live in a world at constant risk of public health emergencies. In our increasingly interconnected world, public health emergencies can affect anyone, anywhere.

Too many Americans who are uninsured or under-insured do not receive regular checkups because they can't afford coverage or their insurance doesn't cover enough of the costs. The lack of preventive care results in countless emergency room visits and health care disasters for families.

Harriet Washington, in 'Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,' documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.

If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.

Look, if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who doesn't have a doctor or dentist, and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem, they go to an emergency room - in general, that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center.

Youth and health are supposed to go hand in hand. And it was only when I got to a point where I was so weak, it was a struggle to walk up and down the stairs that I found myself in an emergency room. And within 24 hours I was on a plane back home to upstate New York, and I got the bone marrow biopsy that led to my actual diagnosis.

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

There are two things that you need to save for. First, you need an emergency cushion of no fewer than six months of living expenses. This needs to be cash in a liquid account where you can get at it in - yes - an emergency if you need it. In other words, money markets, not CDs. You also need to save for your future: that means retirement.

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

I've learned powerful lessons about the nature of forgiveness from human rights defenders. For example, for the greater good of his country, Kofi Woods emerged from a torture chamber in Liberia to later defend the very men who had brutalized him.