Tracy Mumford

The peppy results could be a sign that the labor market is emerging from a period of extremely slow hiring brought on by trade wars, the administration's immigration crackdown, and its firing spree of government workers.

Experts warn, though, that the economy is not growing evenly.

They've called it a K-shaped economy, as in the letter K. Basically, higher-income households keep climbing up, like one branch of the letter, while lower-income households are struggling more and more, their branch angling down.

The chief economist at U.S.

Bank wrote in a report recently that the country has hit a 60-year peak in income inequality, a stat to drive that home.

Last year, one-third of Americans' total net worth was held by the top 1% of households.

This morning, a group of biotech researchers have published a new study that points to a potentially transformative method of fertility treatment.

Many types of those treatments involve retrieving eggs from women, and the more eggs there are, the higher the chances are of getting a viable embryo that could lead to a birth.

The researchers discovered, though, that conventional methods of finding those eggs often miss some, and they've developed a device to collect more of them.

Fertility clinics have traditionally used high-power microscopes to search for eggs in what's known as follicular fluid, then discarded that fluid.

The new method takes the fluid and runs it through a device that's basically like a mini pinball machine with a series of bumpers and lanes that catch eggs that might have otherwise been missed.

Using that technique, the scientists were able to find additional eggs for more than half of patients.

In one case, one of those eggs led to a pregnancy and healthy birth.

A reproductive health expert not involved in the research told The Times that showed that, quote, these extra eggs weren't small, shriveled-up eggs that they didn't want anyway.

These were viable.

That expert and others said the new research is promising, though larger studies are needed to confirm the results.

The company behind the new findings says it's in talks with the FDA to get approval to deploy that pinball-like device more broadly.

In the meantime, it says fertility clinics can use it as part of research efforts.

While many people are cutting back on things like air travel or vacations, the ultra-rich, we're talking 30 million plus, are going big.

And more and more companies want a piece of that.