Headlines of the day
Being daddy's girl is a good thing for baboons (MSNBC)
Oh yeah, we’re different.
A work wife: Good for business? (CNN)
The vice squad has another name for that kind of relationship.
I so love nature, without the icky bits.
Communing without nature
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.
Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts," wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic. "We think it probable that any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation."
"The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children," Pergams said in a statement. "Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance."
By studying visits to national and state parks and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.
The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.
For example, fishing peaked in 1981 and had declined 25 percent by 2005, the researchers found. Visits to national parks peaked in 1987 and dropped 23 percent by 2006, while hiking on the Appalachian Trial peaked in 2000 and was down 18 percent by 2005.
Japan suffered similar declines, the researchers found, as visits to national parks there dropped by 18 percent between 1991 and 2005.
There was a small growth in backpacking, but that may reflect day trips by some people who previously were campers, wrote Pergams and Zaradic. Pergams is a visiting research assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while Zaradic is a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Delaware Valley, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market, they found.
"This may be related to various overfishing and pollution issues decreasing access to fish populations, contrasted with exploding deer populations," they said.
The research was funded by The Nature Conservancy. E-mail to a friend E-mail to a friend
“God, I feel so alive, sitting here, warmed by the glow of the screen.”
This sounds like a psychotherapist’s wet dream
Three-parent embryo formed in lab
Scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in IVF treatment by creating a human embryo with three separate parents.
The Newcastle University team believes the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy.
The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests.
It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children.
The technique is intended to help women with diseases of the mitochondria - mini-organs that are found within individual cells.
They are sometimes described as "cellular power plants" because they generate most of the cell's energy.
Faults in the mitochondrial DNA can cause around 50 known diseases some which lead to disability and death.
About one in every 6,500 people is affected by such conditions, which include fatal liver failure, stroke-like episodes, blindness, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and deafness.
At present, no treatment for mitochondrial diseases exists.
The Newcastle team have effectively given the embryos a mitochondria transplant.
They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.
Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.
The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria - around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed with six days.
Appearance
Experiments using mice have shown that the offspring with the new mitochondria carry no information that defines any human attributes.
So while any baby born through this method would have genetic elements from three people, the nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg.
However, the team only have permission to carry out the lab experiments and as yet this would not be allowed to be offered as a treatment.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team, said: "We believe that from this work, and work we have done on other animals that in principle we could develop this technique and offer treatment in the forseeable future that will give families some hope of avoiding passing these diseases to their children."
Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, which has funded the Newcastle research, was confident it would lead to a badly needed breakthrough in treatment.
"Mitochondrial myopathies are a group of complex and severe diseases," she said.
"This can make it very difficult for clinicians to provide genetic counselling and give patients an accurate prognosis."
However, but the Newcastle work has attracted opposition.
Josephine Quintavalle, of the pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said it was "risky, dangerous" and a step towards "designer babies"
"It is human beings they are experimenting with," she said.
"We should not be messing around with the building blocks of life."
Mrs Quintavalle said embryo research in the US using DNA from one man and two women was discontinued because of the "huge abnormalities" in some cases.
Fortunately, finding an obese person in Mississippi is a bit like unicorn hunting
Miss. Law Would Ban Serving Obese Diners
By Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A state lawmaker wants to ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers — but please, don't be offended. He says he never even expected his plan to become law.
"I was trying to shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi,'' said Republican Rep. John Read of Gautier, who acknowledges that at 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, he'd probably have a tough time under his own bill.
More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi are considered it obese, according to a 2007 study by the Trust for America's Health, a research group that focuses on disease prevention.
The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland of Plantersville, said he is going to "shred'' the bill.
"It is too oppressive for government to require a restaurant owner to police another human being from their own indiscretions,'' Holland said Monday.
The bill had no specifics about how obesity would be defined, or how restaurants were supposed to determine if a customer was obese.
Al Stamps, who owns a restaurant in Jackson, said it is "absurd'' for the state to consider telling him which customers he can't serve. He and his wife, Kim, do a bustling lunch business at Cool Al's, which serves big burgers — beef or veggie — and specialty foods like "Sassy Momma Sweet Potato Fries.''
"There is a better way to deal with health issues than to impose those kind of regulations,'' Al Stamps said. "I'm sorry — you can't do it by treating adults like children and telling them what they can and cannot eat.''
The Dutch, they know so much. Welcome to the world of unintended consequences
Actually, it's a long, healthy life that costs more
Treating obesity and smoking is cheaper than keeping folks fit, study says
LONDON - Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn’t save money, researchers reported Monday.
It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.
“It was a small surprise,” said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. “But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more.”
In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.
Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the “healthy-living” group (thin and non-smoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on “cost of illness” data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.
The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.
Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of
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