Chances are very good that if someone wins Saturday’s promised Powerball prize of $1.8 billion, they will cash in their ticket. But it’s not certain.

Not every jackpot-winning ticket sold over the years has been cashed in. And if you totaled up all the missing smaller “winners” who could claim anywhere from a few dollars to millions of dollars, their total-lost winnings likely stretch to the 10-figure range annually.

Prizes worth about 1% of yearly lottery revenue go unclaimed, said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross and an expert on gambling and lotteries, citing an annual report from the New York Lottery Commission.

“The amount of unclaimed prizes are similar nationwide,” said Matheson. And since so many lotto tickets are sold each year, that 1% estimate adds up to more than $1 billion.

One of the unclaimed prizes last year was a winning lottery ticket sold on July 3, 2024, at a Walmart Supercenter in Huber Heights, Ohio. That unclaimed ticket would have paid the holder $138 million spread over 20 years, or $65.8 million as a lump sum.

Eight Mega Millions or Powerball jackpots have gone unclaimed in the last 25 years, according to data on the two lottery sites. Those jackpots have a combined worth of $646 million, or $821 million when adjusted for inflation.

But those eight missed prizes are about 1.5% of all 520 jackpots won during that time. Most of the unclaimed potential winnings come from the smaller prizes, and far more of them don’t ever get cashed.

Many lottery players likely never check their tickets after they hear there was no jackpot winner, or that the winning ticket was sold far from where they bought their ticket, according to Matheson. Most probably are unaware they are leaving potential winnings on the table, or stashed their winning ticket in their pockets or junk drawers.

Some prizes are as low as $4 for those who match only the Powerball number in that game. But it can also be millions for those who get the five regular numbers but not the Powerball or Mega Ball number. Mega Millions pays $2 million for that prize, while Powerball pays either $1 million or $2 million, depending on whether the player paid extra for a “power play option.”

Beyond the million-dollar prizes, there are also modest prizes of between $4 and $500 in Powerball and between $10 and $800 in Mega Millions. And there are also prizes for up to six figures offered in the two games, ranging from $1,000 to as much as $500,000.

Different states have different time limits to turn in a winning ticket. Powerball’s site has a list of prizes of $50,000 or more that have not been claimed, as well as the time remaining for the winner to claim them. One of those listed prizes, a $50,000 winning ticket sold in March in Covington, Louisiana, just expired Friday without being claimed.

Most of the money wagered in lotteries isn’t in these jackpot drawing games, said Matheson. About 70% of the $110 billion in tickets sold are for instant scratch-off games. And while he has no firm data to back it up, he suspects relatively few of those winning tickets end up not being cashed.

“There’s just less time between when the tickets are sold and when the player knows if they won, less time for the ticket to be lost or forgotten,” Matheson said.

The Trump administration is planning to release a report this month that will reportedly link use of the common painkiller acetaminophen (sold under the brand name Tylenol) during pregnancy, as well as certain vitamin deficiencies, to autism spectrum disorder, despite lacking the scientific research to back up such claims.

This is just the latest controversy surrounding the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeated unsupported claims about autism in the past, and promised to “get to the bottom” of its cause.

The agency confirmed it is working on a report, but declined to comment on its conclusions. “Until we release the final report, any claims about its contents are nothing more than speculation,” a spokesperson for HHS emailed in a statement.

There is no credible scientific evidence that acetaminophen causes autism or that leucovorin (a derivative of folic acid) can prevent the disorder, as the HHS report purportedly will suggest, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

In fact, those in the medical community, including the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, said in a statement that acetaminophen is safe and recommended for use in pregnancy, especially to treat fever and pain. “Untreated fever, particularly in the first trimester, increases the risk of miscarriage, birth defects, and premature birth, and untreated pain can lead to maternal depression, anxiety, and high blood pressure,” the society said in its statement.

“It is disingenuous and misleading to boil autism’s causes down to one simple thing,” said Dr. Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, in a statement. There are hundreds of genes that are linked to autism, and while there are also thought to be other complex environmental factors, the foundation says “any association between acetaminophen and autism is based on limited, conflicting, and inconsistent science and is premature given the current science.”

A few small studies have suggested an association between fetal exposure to acetaminophen and the subsequent risk of diagnosis with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But the largest study to date, an NIH-funded collaboration between U.S. and Swedish scientists, found no increased risk.

Even before that study was published in 2024, a U.S. District Court had reached a similar conclusion in a product liability case.

Leucovorin, also known as folinic acid, is a form of vitamin B9 (also known as folate) that is used to treat certain types of vitamin B9 deficiency that are usually caused by cancer chemotherapy. It is sometimes prescribed off-label as a treatment for autism, though the evidence that it works is scant.

The use of leucovorin is based on research suggesting that many people with autism have a metabolic difference that could reduce the amount of folate that reaches the brain. Leucovorin appears to offer a way around that metabolic roadblock.

Folate is important for brain and nervous system development, which is why pregnant women are often prescribed supplements that contain folic acid, a synthetic version of folate. Folate deficiency in a mother increases the risk of neural tube defects including spina bifida, but the link to autism is unclear.

The Autism Science Foundation said in its statement that there are four studies suggesting low folate levels in pregnant women could increase the risk of autism, but it said “this science is still in very early stages, and more studies are necessary before a definitive conclusion can be reached.”

After years of plentiful employment opportunities, healthy pay bumps and pandemic savings-fueled spending sprees, American workers now face a sobering economic reality: It’s getting harder and harder to find work, and more and more industries are shedding jobs.

The latest jobs report, released Friday, indicated that the US economy added about 22,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, the highest it’s been in nearly four years.

The job market is “stalling,” Glassdoor economist Daniel Zhao told CNN on Friday, “it’s slowing to a dangerous speed.”

Job growth is practically nonexistent.

And if the labor market is showing signs of a cold, that doesn’t bode well for the overall health of the economy.

Here’s a rundown of the latest data, and how the situation could turn around or take a turn for the worse:

Job growth hasn’t just been weak, it turned negative recently: During the past three months, the US economy has seen a net gain of roughly 29,000 jobs per month, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.

If that sounds soft, it’s because it is: Excluding the massive employment plunge at the start of the pandemic, that’s the slowest three-month average since the summer of 2010, when the United States was still clawing its way back from the Great Recession.

Bringing that average down was a now-negative report for June. The second revision for that month (which includes more comprehensive dispatches from US businesses) now shows a net loss of 13,000 jobs.

More industries lost jobs in August than added them: The jobs report contains a nerdy little gauge (a diffusion index) that is meant show the breadth of employment changes across 250 private-sector industries.

If it’s above 50, that means more industries added jobs than lost them. It’s been under 50 since April and measured 49.6 in August. Most of those gains, however, were minimal.

And the hardest-hit sectors are those in the goods business: The impact of President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, and the whipsaw manner in which it’s being applied, is having an “undeniable” impact on hiring, RSM US economist Joe Brusuelas wrote in a note to investors Friday.

Goods businesses have posted “four straight months of declines since May,” he wrote. “Manufacturing, which was supposed to benefit from restrictive trade policies, instead slipped into reverse as supply chain uncertainty deepened.”

Opportunities are growing increasingly limited: The health care industry, which has an aging US populus working in its favor, has been a leading driver of employment growth in recent years.

Now it’s practically the only game in town.

Health care businesses added an estimated 46,800 jobs in August. The industry, however, accounts for only 15% of overall US employment, BLS data shows.

“For 85% of workers, they’re not seeing a lot of the jobs added,” Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics Americas, told CNN this week.

The “canary in the coal mine” is chirping: The unemployment rate for Black workers in the United States rose again last month to 7.5%, the highest level since October 2021.

During the past two months, the unemployment rate for Black workers has risen considerably higher, jumping from 6% to 6.8% in June and then to 7.2% in July.

“The unemployment rate for Black workers will usually rise more than for [White workers] when the labor market weakens, but they usually move in the same direction,” economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted on Friday.

By comparison, the unemployment rate for White workers fell by 0.1 percentage point, to 3.7%.

A rise in the Black unemployment rate is often considered the “canary in the coal mine,” foretelling a broader-scale job market slowdown.

Black workers are disproportionately employed in frontline and lower-wage industries as well as the government workforce. Economists warned earlier this year that Trump’s sweeping policy changes related to trade, immigration, federal employment reductions, as well as a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, could reverse some of the historic employment gains made recently by women, Black workers, Latino workers and other underrepresented Americans.

Economic headwinds and uncertainty are putting a drag on hiring: There’s not one single cause for the slowing job market, but uncertainty certainly hasn’t helped, Glassdoor economist Zhao said.

“Even before this year, the job market was on a slowing trend, interest rates have been fairly high, but we do see with the data in the last few months that some of these tariff-sensitive sectors like manufacturing or construction have slowed and in fact, started losing jobs,” he said. “So, there does seem to be some impact from tariffs and the uncertainty associated with them.”

“It’s not just the fact that there are these tariffs being implemented, policy uncertainty makes it very hard for businesses to commit to hiring plans,” he added.

Rising unemployment can get out of hand … quickly: The unemployment rate of 4.3% still lands within that “healthy”/full employment arena, but if it keeps rising, that’s a big problem.

Unemployment has stayed relatively low in part because of dampened demand for workers as well as a depressed supply (people aging out of the workforce as well as reductions in immigrant workers).

“But, as we start to see unemployment rise, that does start to suggest that this is not just because of shifts on the labor supply side,” Zhao said. “When unemployment starts to rise, those impacts can start to stack up very quickly and unpredictably.”

And if the job market cools further, that means less money in the pockets of American households — and less spending to support more hiring.

“That can build into a cycle of a sharper economic slowdown,” he said.

But a recession isn’t necessarily imminent: The current labor market dynamics are a function of cyclical and structural factors driven largely by trade and immigration policy, said Brusuelas. Those dynamics, as well as the effects of “pervasive uncertainty” will play out over the near to medium term, he noted Friday.

“We expect growth and hiring to reaccelerate as the combination of interest rate cuts, tax cuts and full expensing of business investment bolster demand for labor later this year and early next,” he wrote in the note. “Thus, we do not expect the economy to slip into recession in the near term.”

An interest rate cut, even a small one, could unleash pent-up demand: Toward the end of last year, including after the election, hiring and investment picked up and so did sentiment – especially as inflation appeared to be getting tamed, Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist at Lightcast, told CNN.

“Then that got squandered, when we started doing tariffs, and that possibility of inflation got introduced, then the [Federal Reserve] was like, ‘Hey, all that stuff’s off the table now’ — and so, all of this underground fervor was gone,” he said. “When you lower the interest rate, the Fed is signaling, ‘We think it’s time to start this engine again.’”