A Fresh Look at Gasoline Prices

The Wall Street Journal
Surging gasoline prices would have to go still higher -- perhaps up to about $5 a gallon -- to repeat the economic turmoil sparked by high prices in the 1970s and early 1980s, according to an analysis by one petroleum expert. Read more...
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Nutrient Is Linked to Healthy Babies

The Wall Street Journal
Scientists who study fetal development are abuzz over a nutrient most people have never heard about. Choline, pronounced KO-leen, is a vitamin B-like compound found in high quantities in eggs, beef and chicken liver, wheat germ and soybeans. The latest studies suggest that in pregnancy it plays a critical role in brain development, and may even lower the risk of neural-tube defects such as spina bifida, in the same way that folic acid does. Read more...
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Catch-Up Care Is Essential for Foreign Adoptees

The Wall Street Journal
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention temporarily suspended adoption processing from an orphanage in China’s Hunan Province, after determining that it was the source of nine measles cases in recently adopted children. Read more...
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In the Hunt for Cheaper Drugs, Bulk Buying Is Good—Usually

The Wall Street Journal
It pays to shop around, even when it comes to prescription drugs. Read more...
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Have A (Pig) Heart

Discover Magazine
In January the team that helped clone Dolly the sheep revealed another distortion in nature: five genetically modified cloned pigs. Read more...
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Maya Up Against a Wall

Discover Magazine
Wiliam Saturno's search was shaping up to be a disaster. What should have been a five-hour trip had become a three-day journey through the rain forest. Read more...
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Copycat

Discover Magazine
In February scientists at Texas A&M reported cloning the first house pet: a gray tabby named CC. Researchers created CC in partnership with a biotech firm called Genetics Savings & Clone, which plans to offer cloning services to pet owners within a year. Read more...
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Eating Is Believing

The Wall Street Journal

Patients suffering from Crohn's disease say diet can help their pain. But doctors ask: Show us the proof

After suffering from stomach cramps and diarrhea for almost two years, Rachel Turet says a diet has solved her health problems. Now her biggest problem has been convincing doctors it works. Read more...
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Politics makes for strange bug-fellows

BioMedNet
Rather than "royally" waste money funding infectious disease research for geopolitical reasons, developed nations must instead establish well-funded, well - connected consortia to help countries with the greatest chance of success, world health experts said today.
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Unmet need in infectious disease research: social science

BioMedNet
Despite nearly a decade's consensus that numerous social factors contribute to the global spread of infectious diseases, the field still suffers from a dearth of important social-science information, according to a researcher speaking at a meeting of the US National Academies of Sciences (NAS) today. Read more...
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Alzheimer's amyloid proponents pinpoint precursors

BioMedNet
After years of arguing that monstrous clumps of misfolded proteins, known as senile amyloid plaques, cause neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's (AD), proponents of the hypothesis now think that smaller, maverick precursors of these proteins may in fact be responsible, according to two papers published today. Read more...
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Blocking kinase shown to limit heart attack damage

BioMedNet
The key to repairing heart tissue damage after a heart attack or cardiac surgery may be to inhibit an enzyme known to play a role in congestive heart failure, says a Duke University researcher. His latest studies, reported this week at the New York Academy of Sciences, show that blocking the enzyme beta-adrenergic receptor kinase (bARK) reduces damage to left ventricular function after heart attack. Read more...
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Smoking gun in nicotine addiction

BioMedNet
The discovery, released today, of a new mechanism by which nicotine increases dopamine levels in the brain even hours after exposure may lead to a clearer picture of addiction and "better medications, with less side effects," according to some addiction experts. Read more...
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Safety assessments at a snail's pace

BioMedNet
After six years of deliberations, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today ended the public comment period on a longawaited cumulative risk assessment methodology for the organophosphate class of pesticides. But six years is far too long, and the whole process highlights inadequacies in the way the agency seeks and utilizes scientific counsel, contend some experts. Read more...
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APOE4 may also detect brain aging

BioMedNet
A Duke University researcher has found signs of accelerated aging in the brains of healthy people who have a well-known genetic marker for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Are they on their way to Alzheimer's, or is this something different? Read more...
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Much DNA really is junk, say drug developers

BioMedNet
Only a minimal number of useful drug targets have emerged since human genome information exploded with new data into the pharmaceutical field, speakers agreed at the BioSilico 2002 conference in New York this week. Read more...
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Drastic weight loss can trigger anorexia in obese

Reuters Health
Severely obese people can potentially develop anorexic and bulimic symptoms after they have lostweight through strict dieting or stomach-reduction surgery, Spanish researchers report. Read more...
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New NIH grant program sends foreign scholars home

BioMedNet
With its newest funding program, the Fogarty International Center (FIC), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), is hoping to stem at least in part the chronic brain drain of scientists that plagues poor and developing nations. Read more...
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Tree genome project should speed ultraslow science

BioMedNet
An international team of researchers led by the US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that it will sequence Populus, the first tree genome, by as early as December 2002. Read more...
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Big Blue

Scatter Magazine
Children's dentist Elvir Dincer recalls the worst case he ever worked on. "A three-year-old who, his school had told me, was not eating properly. He was anemic and his physician had been loading him up with iron supplements." When Dincer examined the child's teeth, he couldn't believe what he saw. Read more...
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Explaining Tip-of-the-Tongue Experiences

Scientific American
You're at a restaurant with a friend, and he's just finished describing a movie he really enjoyed. "That reminds me," you say, "you just have to see, um...." Read more...
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