English: NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building as seen on July 6, 2005. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida

(Reuters) – In a scene right out of Star Trek, a Texas company is developing a 3-D food printer for astronauts to create custom meals on the fly.

With support from NASA, the firm, Systems and Materials Research Corp of Austin, intends to design, build and test a food printer that can work in space.

“This project is to demonstrate we can create and change the nutrition of the food and be able to print it in a low-gravity environment,” the company’s research director and lead chemist, David Irvin, told Reuters.

Three-dimensional printers create solid objects by depositing droplets of material one layer at a time.

Systems and Materials intends to create nutritionally rich, aesthetically appealing and tasty synthetic food by combining powdered proteins, starches, fats and flavors with water or oil to produce a wide array of digital recipes.

All the ingredients are designed for extremely long shelf-lives, making them suitable for long stays in space.

“The 3-D printing system will provide hot and quick food in addition to personalized nutrition, flavor and taste,” the company wrote in its proposal to NASA.

“The biggest advantage of 3-D printed food technology will be zero waste, which is essential in long-distance space missions,” it added.

Ultimately, the company sees food printers as a way to help feed a world population that is estimated to reach 12 billion by the end of the century. The technology may also have implications for the military.

“A 3D-printed food system can reduce military logistics, disposal waste, increase operational efficiency and mission effectiveness especially during wartime,” the company said.

“In addition, 3-D printed food can provide optimal nutrient to the soldiers depending on their personal needs and level of physical activities.”

Eventually Irvin sees a day when food printers will play a role in everyday diet and nutrition.

“The initial plan is to work with NASA and the astronauts and then as things become commercially viable, we will definitely consider weight loss and weight gain” applications, Irvin said.

The company’s six-month, Small Business Innovation Research study contract, worth up to $125,000, is pending, said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel.

“These are very early stage concepts that may or may not mature into actual systems. This technology may result in a Phase 2 study, which will still be several years from flight hardware,” Beutel added.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Christopher Wilson)

A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) combination handout photo shows Jason Leon (L), who caught an 18-foot, 8-inch Burmese python in southeast Miami-Dade County May 11, 2013. REUTERS/Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC)/Handout via Reuters

By Barbara Liston
ORLANDO, Florida

(Reuters) – An 18-foot, 8-inch Burmese python set a record for the longest snake ever captured in South Florida, where the exotic species has taken up residence.

College student Jason Leon snared the female python in a rural area southeast of Miami earlier this month, when he saw part of it sticking out from brush along the roadside, said Carli Segelson, a spokeswoman for the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission.

The python broke the previous record set in 2012 by a 17-foot, 7-inch snake caught by researchers studying the impact of the growing population of pythons on the Everglades National Park.

With the help of his friends, Leon wrestled and killed the snake with a knife, Segelson said. He then reported the find through Florida’s “IveGot1″ program, which connects callers to wildlife researchers.

The Burmese python is an invasive species in Florida. Native to the region from India to lower China, the species has been documented to grow as long as 26 feet and weigh 200 pounds.

Florida sponsored a python hunting competition in January to see whether annual hunts might put a dent in the local population, and to provide specimens for further research.

Theories on how the snakes got into the Everglades include dumping by pet owners and the destruction of a nearby exotic pet dealership during the 1992 Hurricane Andrew.

(Editing by David Adams and Leslie Gevirtz)

(Reuters) – Cases of porcine epidemic diarrhea (PEDV), a virus associated with diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration in hogs, has been found in Iowa and possibly beyond, U.S. government and private industry officials said on Friday.

The outbreak, the severity of which is not yet known, is believed to be the first of PEDV in the western hemisphere, although the virus exists in much of the world.

The USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories has detected the virus in the Iowa hog population, a Department of Agriculture spokesman said.

Cindy Cunningham, spokeswoman for the National Pork Board in Des Moines, Iowa, said: “It may be a little bit more widespread than just with Iowa at this point … we’re still trying to understand that and determine where it all is.”

Hog futures in Chicago fell sharply on Friday as rumors swirled the disease had been detected in Iowa, the largest U.S. producing state, and Minnesota.

PEDV is not a food safety concern and does not affect humans, the USDA spokesman said.

Officials with USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) held a call with livestock industry representatives on Friday to discuss the situation. There are currently no interstate trade restrictions related to PEDV for U.S. hogs and pigs.

PEDV has been seen in England, much of Europe, China, Taiwan and South Korea, according to Iowa State University. It closely resembles transmissible gastroenteritis (TGE) in swine.

“We don’t know the orientation of this particular disease (PEDV) and how it first got here to the United States,” Cunningham said.

Tom Burkgren, executive director of the American Association of Swine Veterinarians, said his group was getting “conflicting reports” on how the virus might have arrived.

There is no effective treatment for the virus other than good care and the provision of adequate water to combat dehydration, according to the university. Sanitary and quarantine measures can help to slow the spread of the virus.

“All ages of the swine can be affected. But the most severe clinical signs are seen in the very young and nursing baby pigs, the baby pigs that are still nursing,” said Burkgren.

(Additional reporting by Theopolis Waters and P. J. Huffstutter in Chicago; Editing by Chris Reese and Andre Grenon)

(Reuters) – The long-awaited, controversial new edition of the bible of psychiatry can be characterized by many numbers: its 947 pages, its $199 price tag, its more than 300 maladies (from “dependent personality disorder” and “voyeuristic disorder” to “delayed ejaculation,” “kleptomania” and “intermittent explosive disorder”), each limning the potential woes of being human.

But to the psychiatrist who shepherded the tortuous creation of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” perhaps the single most important number is the “5″ in its title: This is the DSM-5, not the DSM-V.

That may seem like a cosmetic change, but the American Psychiatric Association, which will release the book on Saturday at its annual meeting, decided to use Arabic instead of Roman numerals because “we want it to be a living document,” said Dr David Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, the chairman of the task force that produced the DSM-5. Rather than waiting another generation to revise the manual – the DSM-IV was published in 1994 – psychiatrists will regularly update it with, for example, findings from genetics and neuroscience, labeling the revisions DSM-5.1 and DSM-5.2 and so on.

“We used ’5′ because V.0 and V.1 just don’t look good,” said Kupfer.

The fact that the world’s most powerful psychiatrists (their decisions determine what counts as a mental disorder, and thus what insurers cover and which children receive special services in school) are already building in ways to change the manual is commendable, even its critics say.

But it is also emblematic of the DSM-5′s failures, they argue, which include turning normal human behavior and feelings into mental illnesses, and expanding the criteria for disorders until an astonishing one in four U.S. adults has a diagnosable mental illness every year – and even more do over a lifetime.

The latest revision began in 1999 with high hopes for putting mental illness on a scientific footing, using neuroscience in particular to tell the difference between, say, normal sadness and major depression.

That reflected persistent criticism that “drawing a line between sickness and disease is a special problem in psychiatry,” said psychotherapist Gary Greenberg, who participated in the “field trials” that tested the DSM-5′s proposed diagnostic criteria before they made the final cut. “We don’t have blood tests or other objective criteria to distinguish mental sickness from health. So you have a set of criteria that are very common, which means the potential for many people being diagnosed as mentally ill when they’re not.”

STILL WAITING FOR SCIENCE

The 1,500 experts who contributed to the DSM-5 would have liked nothing better than to base diagnoses on genetics or neuroscience, rather than on subjective judgment and lists of mostly self-reported symptoms such as fear of acting “in a way that will be negatively evaluated” (social anxiety disorder) or approaching and interacting “with unfamiliar adults” (disinhibited social engagement disorder in children).

“It would be great if we had been able to have a paradigmatic shift” by basing the diagnosis of mental illness on biology, as the APA hoped to when it began the DSM-5 process, said Dr Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University and president-elect of the APA.

But the science did not arrive in time. “The DSM can only reflect the research we have,” said Lieberman.” With rare exceptions such as narcolepsy, which can be diagnosed by testing cerebrospinal fluid, there are no objective biological measures for mental illness.

This lack of scientific rigor led the nation’s leading mental health official to attack the DSM-5 for a “lack of validity,” as Dr Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in a blog post late last month.

The manual bases diagnoses on symptoms, he noted, but “symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.” Allergies and flu share some symptoms, for instance, but no doctor would try to treat flu with an antihistamine.

“Patients with mental disorders deserve better,” said Insel, who announced that “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

Pittsburgh’s Kupfer shrugged off this attack. “NIMH expressed that a couple of years ago,” he said. “It would be a mistake to reify the DSM for research purposes.”

“Reification” has become a buzzword among the DSM’s critics. In this context, it means “taking a concept and turning it into a reality,” said Greenberg, whose new book, “The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry” argues that the manual and the process behind it are hopelessly and dangerously flawed. “The categories are not reliable in a biological sense.”

That can cause harm to people who are labeled “mentally ill” when all they have is a variation of normal human behavior, said Greenberg. “The sphere of normality has to have room for some distress, which is part of being human.”

On a practical level, “once you have a diagnosis in your medical record you can have trouble getting insurance or a security clearance, and it changes how you think of yourself,” said Greenberg.

BLACK-BOX WARNING

Changes that make it easier to qualify as mentally ill – fewer symptoms, lasting for a shorter time – have drawn the most impassioned criticism of the DSM-5. Dr Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who led the development of the last DSM and who has emerged as the new one’s fiercest and most eminent critic, warns of a “hyperinflation” of diagnoses and calls for “a black-box warning” in the dozen or so most controversial changes, much like the black-box warning that regulators require on the labels of potentially dangerous drugs.

The black box, he said in a 2012 essay, would indicate the risks of calling people who engage in binge eating, for instance, or who grieve a dead child mentally ill, and would serve as “an admission that the change is a hypothesis,” not a scientific fact.

The new DSM does not include more disorders than its predecessor, said Lieberman, “and it shouldn’t increase the number of people who warrant a diagnosis of mental illness.”

The changes it does make, however, could have far-reaching consequences.

It classifies compulsive gambling as an addiction, the first behavior to be so categorized. That could make it easier for pathological gamblers to get help, said Jeff Beck of the New Jersey Council on Compulsive Gambling and a recovering gambling addict.

The new manual also breaks out compulsive hoarding from obsessive-compulsive disorder and makes it a stand-alone disorder. That should tell clinicians that treatments that work in OCD are not the best way to treat hoarders, said psychologist Randy Frost of Smith College, who has developed a unique therapy for hoarding.

One of the more controversial changes was to eliminate the previous DSM’s “bereavement exclusion” for depression. Now, if a father grieves for a murdered child for more than a couple of weeks, he is mentally ill. A footnote in the DSM-5 explains that “the inability to anticipate happiness or pleasure” in such a situation is a diagnostic criterion for the mental disorder of depression.

To some, this smacks of pathologizing a normal, understandable human reaction. “This completely leaves the person out of the equation and turns people into patients,” said psychotherapist Eric Maisel, a critic of the DSM. “The DSM claims that an unwanted, distressing feeling is a sign of a disorder rather than being just a feeling, and it isn’t at all interested in whether your circumstances could have caused those feelings.”

It is important to consider circumstances, he said, because if someone experiences deep anxiety as a result of losing her job, becoming ill or facing foreclosure, “the remedy shouldn’t be a pill,” the usual outcome of a diagnosis of “generalized anxiety disorder.”

The DSM-5 will likely reduce diagnoses of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It eliminated Asperger’s syndrome and tightened the ASD criteria.

While no one wants to see children incorrectly labeled, said Katie Weisman of the patient advocacy group Safe Minds, “children who were borderline cases under the previous DSM now won’t get a diagnosis, which means they won’t be eligible” for early, intensive behavior therapy – or won’t have it paid for by insurance.
A mother of triplets on the autism spectrum, Weisman says “I’m not sure my boys would be where they are today” – in regular school classrooms, not special education – “without these services.”

Whether the critics’ fears come true will become clear only once psychiatrists, psychologists and even primary-care providers – who write the majority of prescriptions for drugs to treat mental illness – begin using the new DSM. “We’re trying to establish accurate and reliable guidelines, and you can’t completely control how they’re applied,” said Columbia’s Lieberman. “The problem is not with the instrument but with the way it’s used.”

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Douglas Royalty)

(Reuters Health) – Being under stress at work is tied to a higher risk of heart problems, new research confirms – but putting down the beer bottle and going for a walk may help.

Researchers found that job strain – defined as having a lot of demands at work, but little control – was tied at a 25 percent higher chance of having a heart attack or dying of heart problems.

But heart risks were cut in half among people – stressed or not – who maintained a healthy lifestyle compared to those who drank, smoked or were obese.

“For many people avoidance of work stress is unrealistic,” lead researcher Mika Kivimaki, from University College London, told Reuters Health in an email.

“Thus, we wanted to ask the question whether adopting an otherwise healthy lifestyle would reduce heart disease risk among those with job strain,” he said.

Kivimaki and his colleagues combined the results of seven European studies that surveyed 102,000 people about their general lifestyle habits and health, including how much strain they were under at work.

None of those participants had heart disease at the start of the study. Over the next seven years, on average, there were about 1,100 heart attacks or deaths from heart disease across the trials.

About one in six people in the studies initially reported being under job strain.

Rates of heart problems over a decade ranged from 12 cases per 1,000 generally healthy people without job strain to 31 per 1,000 people with job strain and multiple lifestyle risks, such as rarely exercising or having more than three or four alcoholic drinks a day.

Kivimaki’s team calculated that close to 4 percent of all heart attacks and heart disease deaths could be attributed to job strain and about 26 percent to drinking, smoking, obesity and lack of physical activity.

The researchers wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that for people with stressful jobs, adopting a healthier lifestyle may be a strategy to lower heart risks.

“We hope this message reaches those who want to reduce their heart disease risk but feel they cannot avoid work stress,” Kivimaki said.

One researcher who has studied work stress and heart disease separately said the new review may underestimate the link between job strain and heart disease.

OTHER FACTORS?

Paul Landsbergis of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, said other types of job stress that may influence heart risks – such as having low social support and job insecurity – weren’t taken into account.

The new study doesn’t prove pressure at work caused heart problems. But cardiologist Dr. Vincent Figueredo from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia said the results are in line with past studies suggesting that chronic stress, including from job strain, can have negative health effects.

“With chronic stress, there’s activation of these systems that can have long-term effects on things like insulin resistance, central obesity (and) high blood pressure,” Figueredo, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Reuters Health.

What this review adds, he said, is that workers may be able to do something about those extra risks.

“It does offer some hope for those people who do have that job strain they can’t do anything about at work,” Figueredo said.

“If you’re stuck being stressed at work, at least go out and exercise, don’t smoke and eat healthy.”

SOURCE: bit.ly/12bMCYH Canadian Medical Association Journal, online May 13, 2013.

The logo of the United States National Weather Service. The source page states that is not an "official" version but it looks very close to the version used on NWS's website. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Tom Brown
MIAMI

(Reuters) – The U.S. National Weather Service is getting a quantum jump in computing power that will significantly improve its forecasting and storm tracking abilities to better protect the country from severe weather.

“This is a game changer,” Louis Uccellini, who took over as director of the National Weather Service in February, told Reuters in an interview, calling it “the biggest increase in operational capacity that we’ve ever had.”

The Weather Services’ global and national weather prediction efforts have long been hampered by aging technology and a lack of computer power to support day-to-day operations. But Uccellini said that was all due to change through upgrades of its IBM system that will give it more than 25 times the computer power it has today.

Over the next two years, the results should be apparent through enhancements across the whole range of products and services the Weather Service produces, focusing on everything from routine weather to tornadoes and hurricanes to floods, droughts and blizzards.

With the U.S. economy vulnerable to severe weather events that can cost billions of dollars a year, the boost in computing power is sure to come as good news to many, especially given concerns that climate change is fueling more extreme weather.

That includes millions of people living in hurricane danger zones and U.S. oil and gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico, which is frequently threatened by tropical cyclones.

The Gulf accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. oil production. About 30 percent of U.S. natural gas processing plant capacity and 40 percent of the country’s refining capacity is concentrated on the Gulf Coast.

A primary IBM machine in Reston, Virginia, and an auxiliary computer in Orlando, Florida, both will be getting the upgrades, which were largely made possible through $25 million in funding from the “Hurricane Sandy supplemental” bill recently approved by Congress, Uccellini said.

He spoke from the Weather Service’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the eve of a report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Wednesday about its performance up to and during Hurricane Sandy last year.

The Weather Service is a branch of NOAA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

To be sure, meteorologists say the Weather Service and its Miami-based National Hurricane Center did a good job forecasting the onslaught of Sandy, which the NOAA report said had caused more than 200 deaths and more than $50 billion in damages in the United States.

But the report makes no mention of the fact that a European forecast predicted Sandy’s so-called “left hook”, which put it on a track from the east into New Jersey and New York, days ahead of the Weather Service, which initially indicated the storm would remain out at sea.

‘SECOND TO NONE’

That lag, which Uccellini himself has described as “a miss,” raised complaints among many in the meteorological community about the United States having lost its edge in weather forecasting.

The United States was a pioneer in so-called numerical weather prediction, or the science of using computer models and mathematical simulations of the atmosphere for weather forecasting.

But the National Weather Service lost its leadership in computer modeling years ago, especially when it comes to medium-range projections, and Uccellini acknowledged as much in his comments to Reuters.

Performance measures consistently show the United States trailing the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) when it comes to providing the most accurate global forecasting model, he said.

“They are the No. 1 model, there’s no question about that,” Uccellini said.

Computer models, which help meteorologists develop forecasts, simulate how weather conditions might develop based on an initial set of atmospheric and oceanic conditions. The highest resolution models, which can tie up huge amounts of supercomputing resources, pick up on more fine-grain details and tend to produce the most accurate predictions.

“A whole string of model improvements and enhancements” would be made possible through the increase in the Weather Service’s computing power, Uccellini said, adding that the U.S. goal was to catch up with the Reading, England-based ECMWF, and ultimately to surpass it in modeling skill.

“For the first time that I recall, we will actually have computers that are bigger than the European center and we’ll be running our models at higher resolution than they’re running with improved physics packages and improved data assimilation,” he said.

“Our goal is to exceed, to be second to none,” Uccellini said.

He gave no time frame for meeting that goal, but Uccellini knows the challenges ahead. For 13 years he headed the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the Weather Service office responsible for computer models and global forecast guidance, before taking over as head of the whole organization.

Cliff Mass, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a leading critic of NOAA and the Weather Service, was skeptical about surpassing the ECMWF in computer modeling skill anytime soon, at a time of fast-changing technological innovation.

But he said the increase in the Weather Service’s computing power marked “a big advance” nonetheless.

“It’s definitely a big positive. There’s plenty else wrong in the Weather Service and NOAA, don’t get me wrong. But this is certainly going to help a lot,” Mass said.

Many of Mass’s critiques of the Weather Service, which he writes about in closely watched blog postings, were echoed in a report issued on Tuesday by the National Academy of Public Administration, a non-profit group that helps federal, state and local governments grapple with public management challenges.

Titled “Forecast for the Future: Assuring the Capacity of the National Weather Service,” the report to Congress recommends establishing a federal advisory committee to help implement changes aimed at improving operations and services across the agency.

A Weather Service spokesman, citing budget constraints, said creating a formal advisory committee may be difficult but called the report positive overall. “We see the study as reaffirming and supportive of our strategic plan, goals and vision of creating a Weather-Ready Nation,” spokesman Christopher Vaccaro said in an email statement to Reuters.

The National Academy of Sciences highlighted many perceived shortcomings in the Weather Service in a hallmark report last year, which said it had been “lax in implementing changes.”

(Editing by David Adams and Jim Loney)

(Reuters Health) – Music, art and dance therapy may relieve anxiety and similar symptoms among people with cancer, according to a new analysis of past studies.

Researchers who analyzed results from trials conducted between 1989 and 2011 said the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture.

“People with cancer very often feel like their body has been taken over by the cancer. They feel overwhelmed,” said Joke Bradt, a music therapist from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

“To be able to engage in a creative process… that stands in a very stark contrast to sort of passively submitting oneself to cancer treatments,” Bradt, who wrote an editorial published with the new review, told Reuters Health.

The analysis included 27 studies of close to 1,600 people who were randomly assigned to receive some form of creative arts therapy or not, during or after cancer treatment. Patients with breast cancer or blood cancers – such as leukemia and lymphoma – made up the majority of study participants.

Music, art and dance therapy programs varied in how often sessions were conducted and over what time span. More than half of the programs did not involve counseling with trained therapists.

On the whole, people with cancer who were assigned to creative arts treatments reported less depression, anxiety and pain and a better quality of life during the programs than those who were put on a wait list or continued receiving usual care.

For example, in one 2010 study, listening to half an hour of familiar music cut reported pain levels at least in half for 42 percent of hospitalized patients, while just eight percent of those in a comparison group saw relief.

Cancer patients in creative arts therapy did not report being any less tired than those assigned to a control group. And most of the other benefits waned once therapy ended, the researchers reported this week in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The new paper was co-written by Christopher Morley of the ArtReach Foundation in Atlanta, whose goal is to use creative arts therapies to assist people affected by wars, violence and natural disasters.

DISCUSSIONS ON THE TABLE

Lead author Timothy Puetz, from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, said researchers have believed music and art therapy may help cancer patients “for a long time,” although rigorous studies have been lacking.

“People have really broadened their perspectives on what is health and have moved beyond just the physical,” he told Reuters Health.

“More and more clinicians and certified creative arts therapists… they’re actually reaching out to each other now, and discussions are on the table to try to bring this type of therapy to cancer patients.”

The researchers agreed that more studies are needed to determine the most effective ways to integrate creative arts into the care of cancer patients.

Bradt said working directly with an arts therapist may be most helpful for some patients – but isn’t essential. People looking to refocus away from the anxiety of a cancer diagnosis and treatment can join a choir or an art class, for example.

“We all know that music or art or just aesthetic beauty in general makes us feel better,” she said. “I do not want to underestimate the power of just the arts by themselves.”

SOURCE: bit.ly/10yb1W8 JAMA Internal Medicine, online May 13, 2013.

American Journal of Cardiology (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Trevor Stokes
NEW YORK

(Reuters Health) – Bottling up emotions is thought to harm both mind and body, but a new study suggests that the opposite extreme may be no better.

In a study of thousands of heart attack patients, those who recalled having flown into a rage during the previous year were more than twice as likely to have had their heart attack within two hours of that episode, compared to other times during the year.

“There is transiently higher risk of having a heart attack following an outburst of anger,” said study author Elizabeth Mostofsky, postdoctoral fellow with the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The greater the fury – including throwing objects and threatening others – the higher the risk, Mostofsky’s team reports in The American Journal of Cardiology. The most intense outbursts were linked to a more than four-fold higher risk while milder bouts of anger were tied to less than twice the risk.

“The association is consistently stronger with increasing anger intensity; it’s not just that any anger is going to increase your risk,” Mostofsky told Reuters Health

The data came from a group of 3,886 patients who were part of a study between 1989 and 1996 to determine what brought on their heart attacks.

Within four days of having a myocardial infarction – the classic “heart attack” – participants were asked about a range of events in the preceding year, as well as about their diets, lifestyles, exercise habits and medication use.

A total of 1,484 participants reported having outbursts of anger in the previous year, 110 of whom had those episodes within two hours of the onset of their heart attacks.

Participants recalled their anger on a seven-point scale that ranged from irritation to a rage that caused people to lose control.

The researchers found that with each increment of anger intensity, the risk of heart attack in the next two hours rose. That risk was 1.7 times greater after feeling “moderately angry, so hassled it shows in your voice;” and 2.3 times greater after feeling “very tense, body tense, clenching fists or teeth” and 4.5 times greater after feeling “enraged! lost control, throwing objects, hurting yourself or others.”

The most frequent causes of anger outbursts that participants recalled were family issues, conflicts at work and commuting.

Although the research cannot prove that the angry outbursts led to the heart attacks, the results “make sense,” according to Dr. James O’Keefe Jr, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City who wasn’t involved in the research.

Anger is an emotion that releases the fight-or-flight-response chemicals epinephrine and norepinephrine, he said.

Those hormones raise our blood pressure, our pulse, constrict blood vessels, make blood platelets stickier (increasing the risk of blood clots), which O’Keefe says could be one way anger may be associated with increased heart risk.

“Contrary to the urban myth that it’s best to express anger and get it out there, expressing anger takes a toll on your system and there’s nothing really cathartic about it,” O’Keefe told Reuters Health.

“(Anger) serves no purpose other than to corrode the short and long-term health of your heart and blood vessels,” he said.

In the study, patients on blood pressure medications known as beta blockers had a reduced chance of having a heart attack following an angry outburst, Mostofsky’s team notes in their report.

The authors say that finding suggests doctors might consider using those drugs preventively in people at risk of heart attack and prone to anger.

In discussing other possibilities for protecting people at risk, the researchers also write that during the 1990s when the data were collected, not enough study participants were on the newer statin drugs to determine their potential effects on heart attack risk.

Similarly, the number of participants who were on antidepressants was too low to tell whether they would have made a difference.

Regular exercise, Mostofsky and her colleagues write, has been shown to lower overall heart attack risk. Though they found no differences in the link between angry outbursts and short-term heart attack risk among regular exercisers in the study, they conclude that maintaining an active lifestyle couldn’t hurt.

The study is part of a broader field of research looking at managing the effects of emotional states on cardiovascular systems, said Donald Edmondson, assistant professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who studies heart attack survivors but was not involved in the new work.

“People prone to angry outbursts or more broadly, who are prone to anxiety, depression or other intense emotions should be aware that this is something that impacts their cardiovascular system,” Edmondson told Reuters Health.

SOURCE: bit.ly/16wAlns The American Journal of Cardiology, online May 2, 2013.

(Reuters) – Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, is also the capital of sloth, according to Men’s Health magazine which ranked the Southern metropolis as the least active city in the United States.

It was last on the list of 100 cities based on the activity level of its residents, along with Charleston, West Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; Columbia, South Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Lexington, Kentucky, which rounded out the bottom five.

“The South certainly has a cultural reputation for taking it easy and being laid-back,” said Matt Marion, the executive editor of the magazine, adding that the region’s heat and humidity are also a “built-in obstacle to exercise.”

Portland, Oregon was designated the most active city, followed by Boise, Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Many of the most active cities in the ranking were places where outdoor sports such as skiing and mountain biking are popular, according to Marion.

No cities in the Northeast were included among the top ten most active or least active cities.

To compile the ranking the magazine studied local habits and culture, the amount of exercise residents did at home and in health clubs and television viewing. It also looked at city initiatives to encourage exercise and how inactive residents were in the past month.

The rankings were based on statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, data mapping provider Geographic Research, Inc, and media and consumer research firm GfK MRI.

The magazine also included deep-vein thrombosis death rates, money spent on video-game hardware and software and the popularity of video games.

(Reporting by Andrea Burzynski; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Jackie Frank)

Beetles of genus Anthaxia on a dandelion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Catherine Hornby
ROME

(Reuters) – The thought of eating beetles, caterpillars and ants may give you the creeps, but the authors of a U.N. report published on Monday said the health benefits of consuming nutritious insects could help fight obesity.

More than 1,900 species of insects are eaten around the world, mainly in Africa and Asia, but people in the West generally turn their noses up at the likes of grasshoppers, termites and other crunchy fare.

The authors of the study by the Forestry Department, part of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said many insects contained the same amount of protein and minerals as meat and more healthy fats doctors recommend in balanced diets.

“In the West we have a cultural bias, and think that because insects come from developing countries, they cannot be good,” said scientist Arnold van Huis from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one of the authors of the report.

Eva Muller of the FAO said restaurants in Europe were starting to offer insect-based dishes, presenting them to diners as exotic delicacies.

Danish restaurant Noma, for example, crowned the world’s best for three years running in one poll, is renowned for ingredients including ants and fermented grasshoppers.

As well as helping in the costly battle against obesity, which the World Health Organization estimates has nearly doubled since 1980 and affects around 500 million people, the report said insect farming was likely to be less land-dependent than traditional livestock and produce fewer greenhouse gases.

It would also provide business and export opportunities for poor people in developing countries, especially women, who are often responsible for collecting insects in rural communities.

Van Huis said barriers to enjoying dishes such as bee larvae yoghurt were psychological – in a blind test carried out by his team, nine out of 10 people preferred meatballs made from roughly half meat and half mealworms to those made from meat.

(Reporting by Catherine Hornby; Editing by Philip Pullella and Mike Collett-White)

(Reuters) – Anyone wanting to live longer and cut their risk of suffering from heart disease might want to consider getting a pet.

The American Heart Association (AHA) issued a scientific statement on Thursday saying owning a pet may help to decrease a person’s risk of suffering from heart disease and is linked with lower levels of obesity, blood pressure and cholesterol.

“Pet ownership, particularly dog ownership, is probably associated with a decreased risk of heart disease,” Glenn N. Levine, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in a statement.

A study of more than 5,200 adults, cited by the AHA, showed dog owners were more physically active than non-owners because they walk their pets. Other research has revealed the calming effects of pets, which are used in animal-assisted therapy programs.

Levine, the chairman of the committee that wrote the statement published online in the journal Circulation, added that the benefits are clear on cutting the risk factors for heart disease. But the studies are not definitive or prove that owning a pet directly causes a reduction in heart disease risk.

“What’s less clear is whether the act of adopting or acquiring a pet could lead to a reduction in cardiovascular risk in those with pre-existing disease,” he said, adding more research is needed.

About 78.2 million people in the United States own a dog and 86.4 million have a cat, according to figures from the American Pet Product Association 2011-2012 National Pet Owners Survey.

Research has shown that the loyalty and love pets display can reduce stress, anxiety, depression and loneliness in their owners and increase their sense of well-being and self-esteem.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

A typical fish oil softgel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Gene Emery
NEW YORK

(Reuters Health) – Fish oil supplements did not prevent heart problems in people who hadn’t had a heart attack yet, in a large long-term study from Italy.

The study – a gold-standard randomized, controlled trial – tested the effect of omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in oily fish such as tuna or sardines. Patients in the study had risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a history of smoking or narrowed arteries. But patients who had a heart attack in the past weren’t allowed to enroll.

Five years after the study began, 11.7 percent of the 6,244 patients taking a capsule containing one gram of fish oil daily had died or been hospitalized for heart problems, compared to 11.9 percent for the 6,269 volunteers who instead received one gram of olive oil every day as a placebo.

The result, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, is in sharp contrast to other research suggesting that omega-3 fatty acids can help those who have survived a heart attack or suffer from heart failure.

For people who haven’t had a heart attack, though, the new findings “provide no evidence of the usefulness of (omega)-3 fatty acids for preventing cardiovascular death or disease,” according to the research team, led by Dr. Maria Carla Roncaglioni of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan.

She told Reuters Health in an email that the finding argues against the use of fish oil supplements, at least among Italians, who are already exposed to the Mediterranean diet. “There is no reason to prescribe fish oil supplementation unless they have a heart attack,” she said.

The researchers did see a reduction in hospital admissions for heart failure and a preventive effect in women, but “both may be due to chance, although they are consistent with two findings from other studies,” the researchers said.

Alice Lichtenstein, from Tufts University in Boston and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, told Reuters Health the findings from the new study are further evidence that, in general, “just giving a supplement on top of a non-heart-healthy lifestyle doesn’t seem to help.”

“We thought vitamin E pills were going to be the answer and that turned out to be wrong. We though beta carotene as an antioxidant was going to reduce cardiovascular disease . . . and that pill didn’t work,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s the whole package, not just popping one pill.”

The patients in the Italian study were treated by 860 general practitioners throughout the country. Their average age when they enrolled in the study was 64 years old.

Originally, the researchers had thought the main goal of their study would be to see how many people died or had a heart attack or stroke. But those events turned out to be less common than expected, probably because the patients “were rather intensively exposed to recommended preventive treatment (including healthy lifestyle habits) by their family physicians,” Roncaglioni said.

Thus, the goal of the study was modified to count anyone who died or was admitted to the hospital for a heart-related cause.

Certain factors did seem to improve slightly more in the fish oil recipients, such as levels of fat and “good” cholesterol in the blood.

But other measures such as “bad” cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar remained similar in the fish oil and olive oil groups, and there was no difference in the proportion of patients in the two groups who needed heart medications.

Roughly two of every 100 patients died of heart disease, regardless of which group they were in. And roughly 10 of every 100 patients in each group needed to be hospitalized for a heart-related problem.

By the end of the study, 18 percent had stopped taking their fish oil and 19 percent had stopped taking their olive oil. When those volunteers were excluded from the study, there was still no significant difference between the groups in the risk of death or hospitalization for heart problems.

The rates of gastrointestinal side effects, cancer and bleeding were comparable in the two groups.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says olive oil has heart benefits of its own. Is it possible that using olive oil as the placebo in this study skewed the results by protecting the placebo group to some extent? Roncaglioni doesn’t think so.

She said giving olive oil as a placebo probably did not bring down the overall rate of heart problems in that group because “one gram of olive oil corresponds to only 1/30th of the mean amount consumed in the Mediterranean diet,” which would make it of very small benefit.

SOURCE: bit.ly/144dPhF New England Journal of Medicine, online May 8, 2013.

Seal of the United States Department of Justice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

WASHINGTON, May 7 (Reuters) – Gun-related homicides and other crimes involving guns have fallen sharply over the last two decades in the United States, but most Americans believe firearms crime is higher now than 20 years ago, according to an analysis and a separate poll released on Tuesday.

Some 11,101 gun-related homicides were reported in the United States in 2011, a figure that is down 39 percent from the 1993 peak, the Justice Department reported. Nonfatal firearm crimes declined by 69 percent to 467,300 in the same period.

Amid an intense national debate about gun control – which flared anew in the wake of a December shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 people dead – some 56 percent of Americans believe that gun crime is higher now than it was 20 years ago, the Pew Research Center said its poll showed.

Only 12 percent of Americans realize that gun crimes have fallen, the center said in a statement. The Pew survey was based on a March 14-17 survey of 924 adults and had a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.

The drop in gun crime mirrors a general fall in U.S. violent crime. The Justice Department study found that for fatal and nonfatal firearm crimes, most of the decline occurred from 1993 to 2002.

In 2011, about 70 percent of homicides and 8 percent of nonfatal violent crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, were committed with a firearm, mainly a handgun.

From 2007 to 2011, about 1 percent of victims in nonfatal violent crimes reported using a firearm to defend themselves.

The Justice Department findings were based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Scott Malone and Leslie Adler)

Metro, a 10-year-old retired bay thoroughbred horse stands with owners Ron Krajewski and Wendy Krajewski (R) and one of his paintings at Motter's Station Stables in Rocky Ridge, Maryland May 2, 2013. Since giving up the track, Metro has begun a successful painting career that has netted about $20,000 in four months. REUTERS/Jeffrey B. Roth

By Jeffrey B. Roth
ROCKY RIDGE, Maryland

(Reuters) – The horse is an American icon. It races gracefully, performs heavy farm tasks, can do tricks and, if television is to be believed, may even talk. But only one is an accomplished painter.

Metro Meteor, a 10-year-old thoroughbred bay in rural Maryland, is enjoying singular success. Within just months of applying his first brush stroke to paper, he is juggling requests for public appearances, weighing endorsement offers and earning thousands of dollars for his work.

Slowed by bad knees, the racehorse was retired in 2009 and adopted by Ron and Wendy Krajewski. Unable to ride the crippled horse, Ron, a local artist, decided to teach the horse to paint in order to spend more time with him.

Elephants are known to paint with their trunks, he reasoned, and Metro did tend to bob his head a lot while in his stall.

The paintings caught on, and success ensued. Metro is now the best-selling artist at Gallery 30, a small shop in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which started selling his work four months ago.

Metro, a 10-year-old retired bay thoroughbred horse wields a paintbrush as owner Ron Krajewski looks on at Motter's Station Stables. REUTERS/Jeffrey B. Roth

Metro’s paintings feature colorful, sweeping brushstrokes, complete with specks of sawdust – not surprising as the horse paints by swinging his head, a paintbrush clenched in his teeth.

“For his large paintings, there is a waiting list of 120,” said Ron Krajewski in an interview this week.

The larger acrylics, 20 inches by 20 inches (51 x 51 cms), sell for $850 at the gallery, he said, and smaller cut-down versions, 5 inches by 7 inches (12.7 x 17.8 cms), are $80.

One of Metro’s large paintings sold on eBay for more than $2,000, and bidding for another one on Friday was hovering at $800 with only a few hours to go.

In total, about 40 large and 150 small works have sold, adding up to more than $20,000, Krajewski said.

As the owners say on Metro’s website: “Art scholars are not going to have long lengthy discussions trying to decipher the hidden meaning to Metro’s paintings. He is a horse.

“It is what it is. A painting you can hang on your wall and tell all your friends it was painted by a horse,” they said.

Typically, horse and owner paint for an hour or two, maybe four times a week, Ron Krajewski said, adding that Metro never seems to get bored with the task.

Metro lives at Motter’s Station Stables, near Rocky Ridge, a small town in the rolling hills of northern Maryland. An indoor arena doubles as his studio.

One morning this week, the horse demonstrated his technique – interpreted by Wendy Krajewski – to a visitor.

“He’ll roll … he likes to roll,” she said, and within minutes, the horse knelt, lay on his side and began to roll on his back.

Then he got to his feet, walked over to his easel and array of paints and wrapped his muzzle around a paintbrush. Friendly and laid-back, he scarcely fit the stereotype of a high-strung thoroughbred.

A former turf sprinter, considered among the fastest at Saratoga and Belmont Park, Metro won about $300,000 during his racing career, his owners said.

When his knees deteriorated, forcing him off the track, the Krajewskis, who owned a percentage of the horse, adopted Metro with plans to use him for casual trail riding. They also own a quarterhorse and another adopted thoroughbred.

The horse was able to take short trail rides, but eventually his weak knees left him unable to support the weight of a rider, they said.

Metro, a 10-year-old retired bay thoroughbred horse wields a paintbrush as owner Ron Krajewski looks on at Motter's Station Stable. REUTERS/Jeffrey B. Roth

The Krajewskis donate half of Metro’s earnings to New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program, a charity that seeks homes and rehabilitation for retired racehorses. The owner of Gallery 30 donates a portion of Metro’s profits to a local animal shelter.

“We use the rest to pay for his medical bills,” Ron Krajewski said. “The special treatment for his knees is very expensive.”

Metro suffers from arthritis, cartilitis or frozen joints, and rapid bone growth, among other health issues.

At first, his prognosis was bleak and if he continued to deteriorate, he could die within two or three years, his owners said.

But recent X-rays showed that an experimental bone remodeling treatment had improved one knee, they said, and treatment on another knee will begin this month.

Metro’s popularity has gone national. He has appeared on network television and has received endorsement offers, his owners said.

The volume of business offers prompted the Krajewskis to retain an intellectual property attorney.

Their horse, they noted, is oblivious to earnings and acclaim. As long as he has fresh water and hay, some treats and a pasture where he can nibble grass, run and roll in the dirt, Metro is happy, they said.

(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst)

A man dressed as Star Wars character Darth Vader poses for photographers at the "Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination" exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney December 3, 2008. REUTERS/Daniel Munoz

By David Schwartz

PHOENIX (Reuters) – The largest Native American tribe in the United States is seeking to dub the classic 1977 movie “Star Wars” movie in Navajo as a way to help preserve its traditional language.

Fluent Navajo speakers have been invited for a casting call in Window Rock in northern Arizona on Friday and Saturday to dub the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and others, tribal officials said.

Manuelito Wheeler, the director of the Navajo Nation Museum, said he first came up with the idea 13 years ago as a way to preserve the consonant-rich Navajo language, believed to be spoken by about 170,000 people, according to government figures.

“We thought this would be a provocative and effective way to help try to preserve the language and at the same time preserve the culture,” Wheeler told Reuters. “What better movie to do this than ‘Star Wars?’”

Wheeler said he believes the popular science fiction movie will resonate with the Navajo people with its universal theme of good versus evil.

The project was given the go-ahead about 18 months ago.

A team of five Navajos then spent 36 hours translating the original script, hampered by the many words in English that do not translate word for word into Navajo. Instead, several words in Navajo are sometimes needed to convey the proper meaning.

For example, he said there is no direct translation for “May the force be with you,” one of the most recognizable lines in the movie.

Wheeler declined to reveal the Navajo words used for that and other catch-phrases, as a way to “build momentum” leading up to the movie.

“What we want to avoid is like the Kung Fu movies of the past where the lips didn’t match up with the words they were speaking,” he said.

Casting for the voices of the movie’s major roles will be held at the museum in Window Rock. About 75 people have registered to audition.

The finished movie, which will include English subtitles, will be shown during the tribe’s Fourth of July celebration in Window Rock and again in September at the Navajo Nation Fair.

(Editing by Tim Gaynor, Edith Honan and Cynthia Osterman)

Related articles

• Navajo the chosen one for new ‘Star Wars’ dub

A movie with atoms as actors has been named by the Guinness World Records organization, as the “world’s smallest movie.” Called “A Boy and his Atom”, the stop-action film was produced by IBM to introduce students to the world of mathematics and science, while highlighting IBM’s own history of research. Ben Gruber has more.

Orasure oral HIV rapid testing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO

(Reuters) – An influential U.S. panel is calling for HIV screening for all Americans aged 15 to 65, regardless of whether they are considered to be at high risk, a change that may help lift some of the stigma associated with HIV testing.

The new guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a government-backed panel of doctors and scientists, now align with longstanding recommendations by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing of all adults aged 15 to 65, regardless of their risk.

Guidelines issued by the USPSTF in 2005 had recommended HIV screening for high-risk individuals.

Experts said the change, published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, will likely trigger coverage for the tests as a preventive service under the Affordable Care Act. Under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, insurers are required to cover preventive services that are recommended by the task force.

Currently, the healthcare law recommends coverage of HIV testing for adolescents and adults who are at high risk of infection.

“That was based on the 2005 USPSTF recommendations,” Dr. Jeffrey Lennox, a professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and chief of infectious disease at Grady Memorial Hospital, an inner-city hospital in Atlanta.

“Now, hopefully they will go back and recategorize that and recommend that it will be covered for every adult.”

Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force ranks preventive services based on the strength of the scientific evidence documenting their benefits.

“Preventive services with a ‘grade’ of A or B will be covered under these rules. This includes today’s HIV screening recommendations,” Peters said.

For doctors, the new recommendations should help clear up any confusion about testing among some primary-care doctors who have not been offering the test to all their adult patients. “Now, everybody agrees it should be done,” Lennox said.

Task force member Dr. Douglas Owens, a medical professor at Stanford University, said, “We do hope the fact that the guidelines are all very similar will provide an impetus for people to offer screening because it is a very critical public-health problem.”

50,000 NEW INFECTIONS A YEAR

Despite strides in reducing cases of HIV infection in the United States in the past three decades, as many as 50,000 Americans become infected with the virus each year.

The CDC estimates that almost 1.2 million people in the United States are infected with HIV, yet 20 percent to 25 percent of them do not know it.

“The Task Force’s new recommendations will expand the number of Americans who know their HIV status and can take action to protect themselves and their partners,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, said in a statement.

The recommendations are based on evidence showing the benefits and risks of testing and treatment for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Recent studies have shown that HIV treatment can reduce transmission of the virus to an uninfected partner by as much as 96 percent but there is no cure for the disease.

The group also recommends that teens younger than 15 and adults older than 65 should be screened if they are at increased risk for HIV infection. And it recommends that all pregnant women – including those in labor – who do not know their HIV status should be tested.

The guidelines call for screening at least once for all adults, and it recommends periodic screening for individuals at higher risk of infection. But it does not specify how frequently people at high risk for infection should be tested.

High-risk groups include those who have sex with gay or bisexual men, illicit drug users and economically disadvantaged populations in which HIV rates are high.

Owens said testing all adults within a certain age range may help reduce any stigma associated with testing and encourage people to get tested.

According to the CDC, stigma has been a major stumbling block that keeps many from seeking out testing, and the hope is that the change will make HIV testing a common part of medical care.

“CDC believes HIV testing should be as routine as a cholesterol test or a blood pressure check – but so far fewer than half of Americans have ever been tested,” Mermin said.

As with the CDC recommendations, the USPSTF guidelines recommend that all individuals be offered the test as well as a chance to opt out of testing.

Lennox and others said it is too early to say whether the new guidelines will result in a significant increase in the number of tests, but the potential for insurance coverage may help.

Dr. Gerald Schochetman, senior director, infectious diseases and diagnostic research for Abbott Laboratories’ Abbott Diagnostics, which makes an HIV test, said the task force recommendation will put more emphasis on the need for all adults in the United States to be tested and should encourage more doctors to discuss the need for testing with their patients.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Douglas Royalty and Lisa Shumaker)

Chemical structure of Roundup. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – Heavy use of the world’s most popular herbicide, Roundup, could be linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson’s, infertility and cancers, according to a new study.

The peer-reviewed report, published last week in the scientific journal Entropy, said evidence indicates that residues of “glyphosate,” the chief ingredient in Roundup weed killer, which is sprayed over millions of acres of crops, has been found in food.

Those residues enhance the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment to disrupt normal body functions and induce disease, according to the report, authored by Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Anthony Samsel, a retired science consultant from Arthur D. Little, Inc. Samsel is a former private environmental government contractor as well as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body,” the study says.

We “have hit upon something very important that needs to be taken seriously and further investigated,” Seneff said.

Environmentalists, consumer groups and plant scientists from several countries have warned that heavy use of glyphosate is causing problems for plants, people and animals.

The EPA is conducting a standard registration review of glyphosate and has set a deadline of 2015 for determining if glyphosate use should be limited. The study is among many comments submitted to the agency.

Monsanto is the developer of both Roundup herbicide and a suite of crops that are genetically altered to withstand being sprayed with the Roundup weed killer.

These biotech crops, including corn, soybeans, canola and sugarbeets, are planted on millions of acres in the United States annually. Farmers like them because they can spray Roundup weed killer directly on the crops to kill weeds in the fields without harming the crops.

Roundup is also popularly used on lawns, gardens and golf courses.

Monsanto and other leading industry experts have said for years that glyphosate is proven safe, and has a less damaging impact on the environment than other commonly used chemicals.

Jerry Steiner, Monsanto’s executive vice president of sustainability, reiterated that in a recent interview when questioned about the study.

“We are very confident in the long track record that glyphosate has. It has been very, very extensively studied,” he said.

Of the more than two dozen top herbicides on the market, glyphosate is the most popular. In 2007, as much as 185 million pounds of glyphosate was used by U.S. farmers, double the amount used six years ago, according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data.

(Reporting by Carey Gillam; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

(Reuters) – Drinking just one can of sugar-laced soda drink a day increases the risk of developing diabetes by more than a fifth, according to a large European study published on Wednesday.

Using data from 350,000 people in eight European countries, researchers found that every extra 12 fluid ounce (340 ml) serving of sugar-sweetened drink raises the risk of diabetes by 22 percent compared with drinking just one can a month or less.

“Given the increase in sweet beverage consumption in Europe, clear messages on the unhealthy effect of these drinks should be given to the population,” said Dora Romaguera, who led with study with a team at Imperial College London.

A 12-fluid-ounce serving is about equivalent to a normal-sized can of Coca-Cola, Pepsi or other soft drink.

The findings echo similar conclusions from research in the United States, where several studies have shown that intake of sugar-sweetened drinks is strongly linked with higher body weight and conditions like type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes is a long-term condition characterized by insulin resistance that affects around 2.9 million people in Britain and, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than 310 million people worldwide.

Romaguera’s team wanted to establish whether a link between sugary drinks and diabetes risk also existed in Europe.

For their study, they used data from 350,000 people from Britain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Sweden, France, Italy, Netherlands who were questioned about their diet, including how many sugary and artificially sweetened soft drinks and juices they drank each day.

Writing in the journal Diabetologia, the researchers said their study “corroborates the association between increased incidence of Type-2 diabetes and high consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks in European adults”.

Fruit juice consumption was not linked to diabetes incidence.

Patrick Wolfe, a statistics expert from University College London who was not involved in the research, said the message from its results was clear.

“The bottom line is that sugary soft drinks are not good for you – they have no nutritional value and there is evidence that drinking them every day can increase your relative risk for type 2 diabetes,” he said in an emailed comment.

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

Related articles

• One fizzy drink a day may raise diabetes risk by fifth

Ball-and-stick model of the trimethylamine N-oxide molecule, an amine oxide. Colour code (click to show) : Black: Carbon, C : White: Hydrogen, H : Red: Oxygen, O : Blue: Nitrogen, N (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK

(Reuters) – Thousands of heart attack victims every year have none of the notorious risk factors before their crisis – not high cholesterol, not unhealthy triglycerides. Now the search for the mystery culprits has turned up some surprising suspects: the trillions of bacteria and other microbes living in the human gut.

In a study released on Wednesday, scientists discovered that some of the bugs turn lecithin – a nutrient in egg yolks, liver, beef, pork and wheat germ – into an artery-clogging compound called TMAO. They also found that blood levels of TMAO predict heart attack, stroke or death, and do so “independent of other risk factors,” said Dr Stanley Hazen, chairman of cellular and molecular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, who led the study.

That suggests a TMAO test could enter the arsenal of blood tests that signal possible cardiovascular problems ahead. “TMAO might identify people who are at risk (for heart attacks and strokes) despite having no other risk factors,” Hazen said.

The discovery also suggests a new approach to preventing these cardiovascular events: altering gut bacteria so they churn out less TMAO.

The study joins a growing list of findings that link human “microbiota” – microbes in the gut, nose and genital tract, and on the skin – to health and disease. Research has shown that certain species of gut bacteria protect against asthma, for instance, while others affect the risk of obesity. Last week scientists reported that circumcision alters bacteria in the penis, and that this change (not only the anatomical one) helps protect men from HIV/AIDS, probably by reducing the number of bacteria that live in oxygen-free environments such as under the foreskin.

“It’s very strong work,” Dr Martin Blaser of New York University Langone Medical Center, a pioneer in studies of the microbiota, said of the TMAO study. “They show clearly that human microbiota play a key role in producing TMAO, suggesting new approaches to prevention and treatment” of cardiovascular disease.

NORMAL CHOLESTEROL, FATAL HEART ATTACK

The new study builds on a 2011 discovery by the Cleveland Clinic team that, in lab mice, gut bacteria turn lecithin in food into TMAO, or trimethylamine-N-oxide, causing heart disease. In addition, they found, people with high levels of TMAO are more likely to have heart disease.

But that research left two questions hanging: Do human gut bacteria trigger the lecithin-to-TMAO alchemy, like those in mice? And do high levels of TMAO predict heart attacks and stroke in people many years out, not simply mark the presence of cardiovascular disease at the time of the blood test?

To answer the first question, Hazen and his colleagues had 40 healthy adults eat two hard-boiled eggs, which contain lots of lecithin. Just as in lab mice, TMAO levels in the blood rose. After a week of broad-spectrum antibiotics, however, the volunteers’ TMAO levels barely budged after they ate eggs, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“That showed that the intestinal bacteria (which antibiotics kill) are essential for forming TMAO,” said Hazen.

Next, to see whether TMAO predicts cardiovascular events, the researchers measured its levels in 4,007 heart patients. After accounting for such risk factors as age and a past heart attack, they found that high levels of TMAO were predictive of heart attack, stroke and death over the three years that the patients were followed.

Moreover, TMAO predicted risk more accurately than triglyceride or cholesterol levels, Hazen said. And it did so in people without substantial coronary artery disease or dangerous lipid levels as well as in sicker patients.

Specifically, people in the top 25 percent of TMAO levels had 2.5 times the risk of a heart attack or stroke compared to people in the bottom quartile.

The reason TMAO is so potent is that it makes blood cholesterol build up on artery walls, causing atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and, if the buildup ruptures and blocks an artery, stroke or heart attack.

Earlier this month, the Cleveland Clinic researchers reported that gut bugs also transform carnitine, a nutrient found in red meat and dairy products, into TMAO, at least in meat eaters. Vegetarians made much less TMAO even when eating carnitine as part of the study, suggesting that avoiding meat reduces the gut bacteria that turn carnitine into TMAO, while regular helpings of dead animals encourages their growth and thus the production of TMAO.

More studies are needed to show whether TMAO reliably predicts cardiovascular crises, and does so better than other blood tests. Experts disagree on how many people have no other risk factors but would be flagged by TMAO. Dr Gordon Tomaselli, chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and past president of the American Heart Association, guesses it is less than 10 percent or so of the people who eventually have heart crises.

Someone with high levels of TMAO could reduce her cardiovascular risk by eating fewer egg yolks and less beef and pork. But someone with a two-eggs-a-day habit but low TMAO probably has gut microbes that aren’t very adept at converting lecithin to TMAO, meaning she can eat eggs and the like without risking a coronary.

Just as statins control unhealthy cholesterol, prebiotics (compounds that nurture “healthy” gut microbes) or probiotics (the good bugs themselves) might control unhealthy TMAO. For now, however, no one knows which prebiotics or probiotics might do that. In one study, probiotics actually increased TMAO-producing bacteria – “not what you want,” Hazen said.

Neither will popping antibiotics work: bacteria become resistant to the drugs. Developing compounds that crimp the ability of the bacteria to turn lecithin into TMAO, Hazen said, is more likely to succeed.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Michelle Gershberg and Prudence Crowther)

Traditional Samurai swords and fittings (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Jennifer Dobner
SALT LAKE CITY

(Reuters) – A Mormon bishop armed with a Samurai sword came to the defense of his neighbor on Tuesday in a Salt Lake City suburb by helping to chase away a man who had accosted the woman, police said.

The 37-year-old suspect, Grant Eggertsen, later turned himself in to authorities and was booked into jail on suspicion of robbery, burglary, trespassing and stalking, said local police spokesman Lieutenant Justin Hoyal.

The Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop, Kent Hendrix, 47, said his son alerted him on Tuesday morning that a woman neighbor was in trouble outside Hendrix’s home in the Salt Lake City suburb of East Millcreek.

Eggertsen had approached the woman as she exited her home, Hoyal said. He grabbed her house keys and tried to get into the house, police said.

The woman ran away, screaming for help, and several neighbors responded to her plea, Hoyal said.

Hendrix, who teaches martial arts, grabbed the 29-inch (74-cm) carbon steel Samurai sword he keeps next to his bed and ran to the woman’s aid. He said that when he came face to face with the suspect, the man stopped in his tracks.

“He was kind of taken aback to have this sword drawn on him and he jumped back,” said Hendrix, who is a bishop in charge of his local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation.

“He said, ‘I’m leaving,’ and turned and ran, so I ran after him. I didn’t want him to get away anonymously,” Hendrix said.

The man then fled in his car, Hendrix said.

Hoyal confirmed that Hendrix used the Samurai sword to come to the defense of his neighbor.

Eggertsen and the woman, who has not been identified, had previously worked at the same company, Hoyal said. Their professional relationship had turned sour and the woman had obtained a protective order against the man, he said.

The woman suffered only minor injuries, Hoyal said.

Eggertsen was in jail on bail of $555 and could not be reached for comment. It was unclear if he has an attorney.

Hendrix called the incident an “interfaith effort” to apprehend the suspect, saying that Catholic and Protestant neighbors were also involved.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Eric Beech)

A zoomed image of a computer screen showing the Amazon logo is seen in Vienna November 26, 2012. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader

By Alistair Barr and Jennifer Saba

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK, April 24 (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is known in the advertising industry as the “sleeping giant” because the world’s largest Internet retailer harbors a trove of consumer-spending data that many marketers have called an unrealized opportunity.

Now it’s awakening to the potential. After running ads on its own website for years, the company has taken the first steps toward becoming a true Internet advertising network, using the knowledge garnered from its data to place targeted ads for some of the world’s biggest advertisers across thousands of other websites.

An Amazon mobile ad network, launched late last year, is now blasting ads via apps on smartphones and tablets, including Apple Inc iPhones and devices powered by Google Inc’s Android operating system.

For Amazon, an ad business is a new revenue stream with fatter margins than its retail operations. To Google, Facebook Inc and other online ad leaders, Amazon is a threat because it has data they lack.

Google knows what people are searching for. Facebook knows what people like and who their friends are. Amazon knows you searched last week for running shoes, but also that you bought a pair a year ago. That kind of information has advertisers salivating.

“In today’s marketing world, data is gold and Amazon is Fort Knox,” said Jeff Lanctot, chief media officer at digital ad agency Razorfish, which counts Mercedes Benz USA, Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s among its clients.

Lanctot has worked with Amazon for over a decade and says the company’s attitude to advertising used to be “take it or leave it.”

“Now it’s clearly an area they decided to invest in,” he said. “They have made a concerted effort to listen to what advertisers want – the type of data you need, the type of scale you are looking for.”

ANOTHER $1 BLN BUSINESS?

Amazon is getting into hotly contested turf. Google, Yahoo , Microsoft, Facebook and AOL command two-thirds of U.S. online advertising, according to eMarketer.

But its consumer data gives it a unique proposition, industry insiders argue. And though the competition will be stiff, it could be worth it.

Online advertising has 20 to 30 percent profit margins versus less than 5 percent for Amazon’s retail business, according to Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie.

On Thursday, when Amazon reports results, analysts will be looking for signs of growth in higher-margin businesses, such as advertising and cloud-computing, after years of sacrificing short-term profit to grow those divisions.

Amazon does not disclose ad business results and spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer Mariani declined to comment.

But analysts estimate the ad business already generates at least $500 million a year in revenue. David Selinger, a former Amazon executive who runs e-commerce personalization firm RichRelevance, recently predicted that Amazon’s ad business will hit $1 billion in sales this year.

That’s a fraction of Amazon’s revenue, expected to be $75 billion this year. But longer term, the ad business could become substantial if it can grab a bigger slice of a digital ad market that will be worth over $50 billion by 2015 in the United States alone, according to eMarketer data.

“Could it rival something like Yahoo, Facebook or AOL’s ad businesses?” said Macquarie’s Schachter. “Sure.”

ADS ON OTHER WEBSITES

Display ads on Amazon’s own websites have grown fast since 2011 but what really excites Madison Avenue and Wall Street is Amazon’s latest push to create and serve ads on other sites.

“The big opportunity is in having a third-party ad network,” said Schachter. “There are only a few Amazon sites. Expanding beyond that, they can take advantage of millions of other websites out there.”

Amazon quietly started serving ads on other websites in the fourth quarter of 2010. This part of its business remained un-named until about the middle of last year, when the company formally christened it the Amazon Advertising Platform.

It currently serves ads on thousands of websites in the United States, Britain and Germany, according to its website.

Amazon’s Mariani declined to name websites. However, she said Amazon buys ad inventory – or online ad space – from content publishers or through exchanges, which are online markets for buying and selling inventory.

The company’s in-house technology serves the ads to third-party websites in real time. A campaign Amazon ran for Kimberly-Clark’s Huggies diapers, and another for video game designer Ubisoft, included ads served off Amazon websites.

This is where its advantage lies. It has tracked what millions of shoppers browse, search, and buy on Amazon.com for more than 15 years, using that information to recommend related products to customers. Now, it’s using that data to buy ad inventory more efficiently and serve ads to the right consumers, on the right websites, at the right time.

A large entertainment company worked with Amazon to promote one of its movies last year, according to a person at the entertainment company. Data on purchases of related DVDs, books and music on Amazon.com helped identify potential customers who were likely to see the movie at the theater and ads were targeted at this audience. Results were above average, based on the number of impressions served and the number of clicks on the ads, the person said. They did not want to be identified as they were not authorized to speak publicly about the company’s ad spending.

“Amazon spent a lot of time developing algorithms to make recommendations to consumers shopping on Amazon.com,” said an executive who oversees an ad exchange that is a partner of Amazon’s.

“Now they can do this outside of the Amazon world for other companies. It’s really an extension of one of their core competencies,” said the executive, who declined to be identified because Amazon is an important partner.

Armed with consumer information, Amazon can bid more aggressively on exchanges because it is confident that ads created from that inventory will be clicked on more often. The company can also charge advertisers more because its ads are better targeted, according to industry insiders and analysts.

“Amazon is not a retailer anymore, it is the largest behavioral marketing company in the world,” said Yaakov Kimelfeld, chief research officer at Kantar Media Compete, which helps global brands improve their online marketing. “Amazon will be the best positioned to predict whether to buy inventory or not and be the most efficient in this market.”

Amazon’s purchase data helps advertisers spend more efficiently because they only have to buy access to those consumers most likely to respond to their messages, according to Mark Pavia, an executive at media buying firm Starcom USA, which represents clients including Kellogg, Samsung Electronics and Mars.

“I can spend 100 percent of my dollars, if you will, against only the people I want to get because of the purchase data,” Pavia said. “That level of targeting is highly interesting.”

(Reporting by Alistair Barr and Jennifer Saba; Editing by Martin Howell and Tim Dobbyn)

A man uses a cell phone while driving in Burbank, California June 25, 2008. REUTERS/Fred Prouser

By Jim Forsyth
SAN ANTONIO

(Reuters) – Using voice to send text messages while driving is just as dangerous as texting with fingers, with driver response times significantly delayed no matter which method was used, a study released on Tuesday showed.

The study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University was the first to compare voice-to-text and traditional texting on a handheld device in an actual driving environment.

“In each case, drivers took about twice as long to react as they did when they weren’t texting,” Christine Yager, who headed the study, told Reuters. “Eye contact to the roadway also decreased, no matter which texting method was used.”

The research involved 43 participants driving along a test track without any electronic devices present. The same participants then drove while texting and again while using a speech-to-text device.

Yager said speech-to-text actually took longer than traditional texting, due to the need to correct errors in the electronic transcription.

“You’re still using your mind to try to think of what you’re trying to say, and that by proxy causes some driving impairment, and that decreases your response time,” Yager said.

The biggest concern is that the driver felt safer while using voice-to-text applications instead of traditional texting, even though driving performance was equally affected, she said.

This may lead to a false belief that texting while driving using spoken commands is safe when in reality it is not, Yager said.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association says 6.1 billion text messages per day were sent in the United States in 2012. Some 35 percent of drivers admit to reading a text or email while driving in any given month, while 26 percent admitted to typing one, according to data from AAA, a national drivers’ organization.

“Every day, new technologies come out, and it is important to educate the public that even these seemingly new distractions are still distractions, and it will help people be safer when they get into the vehicle,” Yager said.

(Reporting by Jim Forsyth; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)

English: Then President of the United States of America, George W. Bush invited then President-Elect Barack Obama and former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter for a Meeting and Lunch at The White House. Photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009 in the Oval Office at The White House. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON

(Reuters) – Their rivalries have helped to define American politics for more than a quarter-century.

And sometimes the complex relationships among the only five people alive who know what it’s like to be president of the United States have seemed to be straight out of a soap opera. They have called each other names and blamed one another for the nation’s problems.

But when they have a rare meeting in Dallas on Thursday for the opening of former president George W. Bush’s library and museum, there will be smiles for the cameras and friendly chatter by President Barack Obama and former presidents Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.

It will be the first time they have all been together since January 2009, when they met in Washington a few days before George W. Bush left office and Obama was sworn in as president.

The library’s dedication at Southern Methodist University will be something of a re-emergence for George W. Bush, who has preferred to stay out of the spotlight since leaving Washington after eight tumultuous years in office that followed six years as Texas governor.

“Fourteen years was enough for me,” Bush told People Magazine last week. “But I do want to stay engaged in issues that matter to me.”

Having served in a stressful job that always seems to age its occupants, the five men share a “common bond that supersedes any short-term policy or political differences,” said Karen Hughes, a former top aide to George W. Bush.

That said, this isn’t necessarily the friendliest of fraternities.

Obama, a 51-year-old Democrat, twice won election by denouncing Republican George W. Bush’s handling of the presidency, from the struggling U.S. economy to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, also accused fellow Democrat Clinton of injecting race into the 2008 campaign, when Clinton was campaigning in South Carolina for his wife, Hillary, in the Democratic presidential primary.

Republican George W. Bush, 66, criticized Clinton’s handling of the economy in defeating Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, in 2000. Clinton used the same economic argument in 1992 to deny a second term to Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush.

It was George H.W. Bush, now 88, who had perhaps the most colorful putdown of Clinton and Gore in the 1992 presidential campaign when he said, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than those two Bozos.”

‘YOU CANNOT GET MAD AT THE GUY’

It took a while for the edge to wear off from that campaign.

When then-President Clinton attended George H.W. Bush’s presidential library opening in College Station, Texas in 1997, Clinton aides recall that Bush and his wife, Barbara, were particularly gracious.

On the other hand, their sons, George W. and Jeb, were frosty to the Clinton side, former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry said.

Five years after Clinton had denied the elder Bush a second term in the White House by casting the Republican as out of touch on the economy, “things were still a little bit raw,” McCurry said.

Now, Clinton and George H.W. Bush probably have the closest friendship within the group of presidents. They have worked together to raise money to help those stricken by a 2005 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed more than 230,000 people in more than a dozen countries.

“You cannot get mad at the guy,” George H.W. Bush wrote of Clinton after traveling with him in 2005. “I admit to wondering why he can’t stay on time, but when I see him interacting with folks my wonder turns to understanding, with a dollop of angst thrown in.”

The younger Bush now gets along with Clinton, too. They worked together on Haiti earthquake relief in 2010.

“I like him, and I love his father,” Clinton said during an appearance with George W. Bush in Salt Lake City last August.

The relationship between the last two presidents, Obama and George W. Bush, remains something of a work in progress, aides said.

The two rarely speak, although Obama was gracious to his predecessor last year when Bush visited the White House for the formal unveiling of his presidential portrait.

“We may have our differences politically, but the presidency transcends those differences,” Obama said at the ceremony. “We all love this country. We all want America to succeed.”

A senior administration official said that Obama, now in his second term, has not changed his views about what he saw as “poor policy decisions” by Bush on the Iraq war and the U.S. economy. But, the official said, Obama has an appreciation “for the enormity of the decisions that a president has to make and the burden that a president has to bear, especially when Americans lose their lives.”

The Bush side, which was not happy at how Obama bashed him during the 2008 campaign, nevertheless is pleased that Obama is joining the group in Dallas.

If there is a wild card in the group, it is Carter.

Aides to Obama and those close to both Bushes and Clinton say the four of them are all a bit baffled and bemused by Carter, 88, who was president from 1977 to 1981, before the late Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution stormed Washington.

Carter has consistently criticized all of his successors, even when they have been fellow Democrats.

“The odd man out is Carter,” said Ron Kaufman, a former adviser to the elder Bush.

So what do the presidents talk about when they get together? If the past is any guide, they will keep it light.

Dana Perino, who was a press secretary to George W. Bush, said after the presidents were together in 2009 she asked her boss what they had discussed.

Bush’s response: “We mostly talked about our families.”

(Editing by David Lindsey and Vicki Allen)

(Reuters Health) – Pediatricians today cautioned young people against participating in a popular dare known as the cinnamon challenge, which involves trying to swallow a tablespoon of ground cinnamon in a minute without drinking water.

Health risks tied to the game – such as breathing problems, lung inflammation and asthma attacks – are relatively rare, they said, but are “unnecessary and avoidable.”

“What we were discovering was that it wasn’t just that this was a dare prompted by peer pressure, but in fact there were acute health issues associated with it and there might be some real concerns for more chronic health issues,” said Dr. Steven Lipshultz, a co-author on the study from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

When a person tries to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon without water, it almost always results in choking, Lipshultz told Reuters Health. Then, if the user takes another breath in, cinnamon powder can coat the airways and get stuck in the lungs.

Cinnamon powder is mostly cellulose, which doesn’t degrade in the lungs and has been shown to cause permanent tissue changes that can reduce lung function, according to the authors.

They also called the powder caustic and said it “triggers a severe gag reflex” in response to a burning sensation in the mouth and throat.

Attempts at the cinnamon challenge have increased dramatically in recent years, researchers said, in part as a result of popular Internet videos.

U.S. poison control centers received 222 calls relating to abuse or misuse of cinnamon by teens in 2012, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. During the first half of that year, about 30 people required medical attention due to cinnamon inhalation, the study team wrote in Pediatrics.

Symptoms included coughing, nosebleeds, burning in the throat and vomiting.

Lipshultz said those numbers may just be “the tip of the iceberg,” as poison control centers aren’t always called when someone is taken to the emergency room after attempting the dare.

His group said parents and doctors should talk to kids about those potential harms so that they can know the risks of the cinnamon challenge in the face of peer pressure to participate.

“We all were teenagers and college students at one point and did things we later regretted – most of the time there’s not lingering consequences. The concern here is that may not be the case,” Lipshultz said.

Cindy Deutsch, public education coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver, said her own research has suggested that calls to poison control centers and Internet activity related to the cinnamon challenge peaked in early 2012 and have since declined.

“This year… locally here, we’ve only had one call regarding the cinnamon challenge,” she told Reuters Health.

Still, she agreed with the authors that it’s something parents and school nurses, in particular, should be aware of and talking to youth about.

“It’s definitely not worth the risks, because it can cause very serious health consequences, and there’s really no good reason to do this,” Deutsch, who was not involved in the new research, told Reuters Health.

“With people who have asthma is where it can be worse,” added Dr. Alvin Bronstein, the center’s medical director.

“These are mostly young people,” he told Reuters Health. “They’ve got youth on their side, but we wouldn’t recommend it.”

Cinnamon may be deceiving because it’s so commonly used as a cereal topper or gum flavor, Lipshultz said.

But, he added, “Just because it’s on your spice rack, if you take half a bottle of cinnamon at once in your mouth, it may not be so benign.”

SOURCE: bit.ly/jsoh2P Pediatrics, online April 22, 2013.

Related articles

• Docs: Don’t take the cinnamon challenge

The analysis of clinical trial results for assorted drugs, supplements and activities still can’t say, however, whether the brain training programs that do seem to sharpen mental function also improve people’s daily lives or lower their risk of developing dementia.

“All we know is you will do better on certain (cognitive) tests. Whether that delays dementia…remains to be seen,” said Dr. Raza Naqvi, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Toronto.

Mild cognitive impairment may affect as many as a quarter of people over age 70, according to Naqvi and his colleagues. And perhaps 10 percent of those seniors progress to more serious dementia each year, the researchers write in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Numerous products and activity programs claim to be able to slow mental decline, but nothing has proven a surefire way to preserve brainpower.

“Most physicians have a feeling that there isn’t anything out there that has shown strong evidence, otherwise we would all be out there promoting it ourselves,” said Naqvi.

To see whether any approach fits that bill, or at least seems promising, Naqvi and his colleagues gathered results from all the randomized controlled trials – the gold standard for research – they could find comparing the mental functioning of adults given a particular treatment to others who received no intervention.

Participants in all the trials were 65 years or older and had no mental decline at the beginning of the experiment.

Drugs, hormone therapy (in both men and women), vitamins and supplements including gingko and omega 3s mostly showed no benefits. Indeed, most of the trials involving estrogen replacement therapy for women showed greater cognitive decline among women taking the hormones.

One study of the drug donepezil, which goes by the brand name Aricept and is approved for use to slow the progression of dementia, found improvements in users’ ability to recall facts, but experiments with other medications showed no benefits.

“At this time, none of the medications or pharmacologic therapies have any evidence to support their use,” Naqvi told Reuters Health. “I don’t want researchers to give up – I think it’s important to critically look at potential therapies – but I don’t think the evidence is there to recommend a lot of these.”

Studies that involved physical activity yielded mixed results; of the three that Naqvi’s group reviewed, one found no benefit to memory, but an improvement in mental processing known as “executive function.”

Another study found some memory benefits, but no other cognitive improvements, while a third saw no change in the performance on tests given to participants who went through an exercise program.

Only mental training – for which there were three studies – yielded positive results every time.

One large study that included more than 2,800 people offered one of three mental training programs focused on memory, reasoning or processing speed.

The participants randomly assigned to the memory group, for instance, went through 10 hour-long training sessions that taught methods for remembering written material, such as word lists.

Two years after the training programs, people who participated in a mental exercise performed better on related tasks than others who did not participate.

In other words, the memory group did better on memory tests than people who received no special training, while the reasoning group did better on reasoning tests.

The researchers also tested how well people performed on everyday tasks, such as finding a number in a phone book or preparing a meal, and found signs that people performed better if they had been through a mental training program.

“There was some evidence then that…specifically our speed and reasoning interventions had begun to transfer to everyday function,” said Michael Marsiske, an associate professor at the University of Florida who was involved in the mental exercise study.

But he added that although mental exercises help boost performance on cognitive tests, “it’s too early yet to say whether they actually prevent dementia or decline.”

Marsiske said that the new review might overstate the benefits of cognitive training as a result of Naqvi and his colleagues selecting only studies that used the most rigorous experimental methods to include in their analysis.

Naqvi said it’s difficult to compare the mental exercises used in the studies to those that are available to consumers, because each one is designed differently.

“Regardless, I still recommend to my patients to remain mentally and cognitively active as long as possible in whatever way is stimulating to them,” Naqvi said.

SOURCE: bit.ly/11lMrIJ Canadian Medical Association Journal, online April 15, 2013.

A Giant African land snail is seen in this handout picture from the Florida Department of Agriculture Division of Plant Industry taken September 9, 2011. South Florida is fighting a growing infestation of one of the world's most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail, which can grow as big as a rat and gnaw through stucco and plaster. REUTERS/Florida Department of Agriculture Division of Plant Industry/Handout

By Barbara Liston

ORLANDO, Fla., April 14 (Reuters) – South Florida is fighting a growing infestation of one of the world’s most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail, which can grow as big as a rat and gnaw through stucco and plaster.

More than 1,000 of the mollusks are being caught each week in Miami-Dade and 117,000 in total since the first snail was spotted by a homeowner in September 2011, said Denise Feiber, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Residents will soon likely begin encountering them more often, crunching them underfoot as the snails emerge from underground hibernation at the start of the state’s rainy season in just seven weeks, Feiber said.

The snails attack “over 500 known species of plants … pretty much anything that’s in their path and green,” Feiber said.

In some Caribbean countries, such as Barbados, which are overrun with the creatures, the snails’ shells blow out tires on the highway and turn into hurling projectiles from lawnmower blades, while their slime and excrement coat walls and pavement.

“It becomes a slick mess,” Feiber said.

A typical snail can produce about 1,200 eggs a year and the creatures are a particular pest in homes because of their fondness for stucco, devoured for the calcium content they need for their shells.

The snails also carry a parasitic rat lungworm that can cause illness in humans, including a form of meningitis, Feiber said, although no such cases have yet been identified in the United States.

EXOTIC INVASION

The snails’ saga is something of a sequel to the Florida horror show of exotic species invasions, including the well-known infestation of giant Burmese pythons, which became established in the Everglades in 2000. There is a long list of destructive non-native species that thrive in the state’s moist, subtropical climate.

Experts gathered last week in Gainesville, Florida, for a Giant African Land Snail Science Symposium, to seek the best ways to eradicate the mollusks, including use of a stronger bait approved recently by the federal government.

Feiber said investigators were trying to trace the snail infestation source. One possibility being examined is a Miami Santeria group, a religion with West African and Caribbean roots, which was found in 2010 to be using the large snails in its rituals, she said. But many exotic species come into the United States unintentionally in freight or tourists’ baggage.

“If you got a ham sandwich in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, or an orange, and you didn’t eat it all and you bring it back into the States and then you discard it, at some point, things can emerge from those products,” Feiber said.

Authorities are expanding a series of announcements on buses, billboards and in movie theaters urging the public to be on the lookout.

The last known Florida invasion of the giant mollusks occurred in 1966, when a boy returning to Miami from a vacation in Hawaii brought back three of them, possibly in his jacket pockets. His grandmother eventually released the snails into her garden where the population grew in seven years to 17,000 snails. The state spent $1 million and 10 years eradicating them.

Feiber said many people unfamiliar with the danger viewed the snails as cute pets.

“They’re huge, they move around, they look like they’re looking at you … communicating with you, and people enjoy them for that,” Feiber said. “But they don’t realize the devastation they can create if they are released into the environment where they don’t have any natural enemies and they thrive.”

(Editing by David Adams and Peter Cooney)

(Reuters) – Scientists are baffled as to how a group of small fish native to Japan survived a journey across the Pacific after they were found on a boat swept away by the 2011 tsunami and washed up last month on the coast of Washington state.

The batch of striped beak fish – five in all – were discovered submerged in the hold of the 20-foot-long fishing skiff, dubbed the Sai-shou-maru, on Long Beach in southwestern Washington.

The vessel, found beached right-side-up, was confirmed this week to have originated from the region of northern Japan devastated in the immense tidal surge generated by the March 2011 Fukushima earthquake.

Other boats carried away by the tsunami have previously washed up along the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Alaska, as have chunks of piers and large quantities of other debris. But the fish found aboard the Sai-shou-maru are the first vertebrates – animals with backbones – known to have made the voyage.

Marine biologists studying the phenomenon are puzzled over precisely how striped beak fish, natural denizens of warmer, shallow southern Japanese waters, ended up as live stowaways in the well of the boat, and how they endured a two-year journey across the ocean.

“It is quite remarkable,” Curt Hart, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology, told Reuters. “Everyone is very amazed that these fish survived for two years in that hold.”

The fish were apparently swept up with the skiff as it was washed down the coast of Japan and out into the Pacific.

Scientists surmise that the fish made their home beneath the boat for much of the trip as it drifted upside down and partially submerged, feeding on other organisms that became encrusted or otherwise attached to the inverted vessel. Then they might have been scooped up into the skiff’s hold when wind or waves righted the vessel, Hart said.

NOURISHMENT MYSTERY

The middle of the Pacific is far less rich in nutrients than coastal waters, raising questions of how the fish found enough food to survive the trip, said Jeff Adams, an expert at Washington Sea Grant, an agency supporting marine research.

The 6-inch-long striped beak fish, named for their protruding mouths and black-and-white striped markings, were the most surprising of an estimated 30 to 50 species of marine organisms that hitchhiked across the Pacific with the skiff.

Other stowaways included various types of algae, anemones, crabs, marine worms and shellfish.

Many were believed to be non-native species, and all were treated as potentially invasive – capable of displacing native organisms and disrupting the natural ecological balance if allowed to escape into the environment and propagate.

As a precaution, state officials swiftly removed the Sai-shou-maru from the shoreline before samples of organisms were collected for study, and the boat was scraped and steam-cleaned, Hart said.

Four of the fish found alive in the boat on March 22 have since died, and the lone surviving specimen has been moved to an aquarium in Seaside, Oregon.

The Sai-shou-maru is not the only Noah’s ark of potential invasive species carried to the U.S. West Coast by the tsunami. Several more Japanese boats have washed ashore since last year in Washington, Oregon and California, and a fishing vessel found drifting off Alaska was scuttled by the Coast Guard.

Dozens of non-native and potentially invasive species – more than hitched a ride aboard the Sai-shou-maru – were previously found attached to two large hunks of piers that washed up, one in Oregon and one in Washington, Hart said.

(Editing by Steve Gorman, Cynthia Johnston and Patrick Graham)

Related articles

• Fish hitch a ride to US in tsunami boat
• Live Fish Found In Likely Tsunami Debris

A CLARITY scan of an entire intact mouse brain is seen in this undated handout image courtesy of Kwanghun Chung and Karl Deisseroth, of Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University. REUTERS/Kwanghun Chung and Karl Deisseroth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Stanford University/Handout

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK (Reuters) – If Dr Karl Deisseroth were an architect, he might be replacing stone or brick walls with floor-to-ceiling glass to build transparent houses. But since he is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, he has done the biological equivalent: invented a technique to make brains transparent, a breakthrough that should give researchers a truer picture of the pathways underlying both normal mental function and neurological illnesses from autism to Alzheimer’s. In fact, the first human brain the scientists clarified came from someone with autism.

Deisseroth and his colleagues reported in the online edition of the journal Nature on Wednesday that they had developed a way to replace the opaque tissue in brains (harvested from lab mice or donated by people for research) with “hydrogel,” a substance similar to that used for contact lenses.

The result is see-through brains, their innards revealed in a way no current technique can: Large structures such as the hippocampus show up with the clarity of organs in a transparent fish, and even neural circuits and individual cells are visible.

The announcement comes just a week after President Barack Obama announced a $100 million initiative to plumb the mysteries of the brain, and offers hope that at least some of the technological breakthroughs the project envisions are within reach.

Neuroscientist William Newsome, who will co-lead Obama’s initiative, called the hydrogel technique “a major technological innovation” that “will speed our mapping of the brain’s ‘circuit diagram.’” That mapping, he said, is “an essential goal of neuroscience, and will probably be a substantial focus” of Obama’s brain project.

Until now, the only way to trace neural connections was by cutting a brain into ultra-thin slices, examining each slide under a microscope to map the cells and then using a computer to virtually reassemble the slices to reveal the entire circuit.

But slicing the brain like so much salami deforms the tissue and makes it difficult to work out long-range connections, like those between such far-flung regions as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdale.

Neuroscientists have therefore long dreamed of studying intact brains, said Deisseroth: “That would give you a better chance of working out connections over large distances, which would help you determine structure-function relationships.”

CIRCUITRY AND SYNAPSES

Deisseroth’s process, dubbed CLARITY (an anagram for the technique), works by a delicate feat of biochemical engineering. It turns out that what makes the brain opaque are the fatty membranes that surround and support its cells. Removing these layers by brute force, however, would make the brain tissue collapse in a puddle of neuro-glop.

Instead, Deisseroth and his colleagues immersed the brains of three-month-old mice in a vat of soft, jelly-like hydrogel. Molecules of the hydrogel seeped into the brain and took the place of the lipid bilayers, which were then removed through an electro-chemical process.

Once the hydrogel was in place, the scientists heated it to just above body temperature, causing the molecules to connect to one another and form a sturdy mesh that acted like a shell holding in the contents of each brain. After eight days, the scientists had just what they had hoped for: an intact, see-through mouse brain.

CLARITY “is a giant step forward from having to slice the mouse brain into 1,000 pieces and looking at them each individually, then trying to reconstruct the relationships of all those slices,” said neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, also a co-leader of Obama’s brain initiative. Because neural connections can be mapped in an intact brain, she said, “I think it will accelerate research in neuroscience.”

The Stanford scientists could see the thalamus and the brainstem, the cortex and hippocampus with the naked eye. Using a microscope revealed the white matter that serves as a brain’s transmission lines, carrying signals from one neuron to another in far-flung circuits that underlie mental function.

The scientists posted a three-dimensional tour of the transparent mouse brain on YouTube:

Crucially, the hydrogel is not only transparent but also permeable. That allows scientists to infuse into the brain special fluorescent dyes and other molecules that attach to just one of the thousands of different kinds of brain cells, and even to individual proteins and other molecules, turning the circuitry a neuroscientist wants to study into chartreuse and other can’t-miss hues when viewed in special light.

“You can paint different wires different colors,” said Deisseroth, who is one of 15 experts on the team that will map out goals for Obama’s brain initiative. “We could see structures down to paired neurons on each side of a synapse,” the neural version of seeing that the toe bone is connected to the foot bone and the foot bone to the ankle bone.

Perhaps even more remarkably, the process worked on human brains, despite concerns that the use of preservatives like formalin or formaldehyde might block the hydrogel process. (Mouse brains are studied fresh.)

The scientists clarified one healthy human brain and one autistic brain. Even though the latter had been pickled for more than six years, it took to the new method, revealing numerous “dendritic bridges,” ladderlike connections within the brain’s white matter that resemble those in Down syndrome.

“CLARITY has the potential to unmask fine details of brains from people with brain disorders without losing larger-scale circuit perspective,” said Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the research.

Once other scientists begin to clarify brains, it could “transform the way we study the brain’s anatomy and how disease changes it,” said Dr Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “The in-depth study of our most important three-dimensional organ” will no longer be “constrained by two-dimensional methods,” and the black box that is the brain could become downright luminous.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Prudence Crowther)

Mally, the pet monkey of Canadian singer Justin Bieber, is seen at a home for animals in Munich April 2, 2013. The fourteen-week old Capuchin monkey was quarantined last Thursday by German custom officials after Bieber brought the pet to Germany without the necessary documents and a health certificate, Munich airport customs spokesperson said. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

(Reuters) – Teenage pop sensation Justin Bieber has been given a month to provide German authorities with the papers they need to release his pet monkey “Mally”.

Customs officials seized Bieber’s capuchin monkey at Munich Airport last week when the 19-year-old failed to present the health and species protection certificates required to bring the pet into the country.

Bieber was visiting Munich to give a concert and has since continued on his tour.

“If he doesn’t (present the papers), Mally will be taken to a good animal shelter that has experience rearing groups of young capuchin monkeys and can ensure disoriented Mally becomes a healthy little capuchin,” the shelter currently caring for the monkey said.

The shelter said Mally, who is around 14 weeks old, had been taken away from its mother too early and was receiving veterinary care.

A spokesman for Munich’s customs office said it would decide whether to keep the animal at the current shelter or move it elsewhere at the end of the four-week deadline.

He added that Bieber would likely have to pay a fine, but declined to give details of the amount.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin, editing by Paul Casciato)

Map of the territory and area covered by present-day Saudi Arabia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(Reuters) – Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralyzed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which resulted in the victim being confined to a wheelchair.

The London-based human rights group said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be paralyzed surgically unless his family pays one million Saudi riyals ($270,000) to the victim.

The Saudi Gazette newspaper reported last week that Khawaher had stabbed a childhood friend in the spine during a dispute a decade ago, paralyzing him from the waist down.

Saudi Arabia applies Islamic sharia law, which allows eye-for-an-eye punishment for crimes but allows victims to pardon convicts in exchange for so-called blood money.

“Paralyzing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture,” Ann Harrison, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director, said in a statement late on Tuesday.

“That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offences, as happens in Saudi Arabia,” she added.

A government-approved Saudi human rights group did not respond to requests for comment.

The Arabic-language al-Hayat daily quoted Khawaher’s 60-year-old mother as saying her son was a juvenile aged 14 at the time of the offence. She said the victim had demanded 2 million riyals to pardon her son and later reduced this to 1 million. “But we don’t have even a tenth of this sum,” she said.

Al-Hayat said an unnamed philanthropist was trying to raise funds to pay the blood money, but it was not clear how much time remained before Khawaher’s sentence was to be carried out.

Amnesty said the case demonstrated the need for Saudi Arabia to review its laws to “start respecting their international obligations and remove these terrible punishments from the law”.

Saudi judges have in the past ordered sharia punishments that include tooth extraction, flogging, eye gouging and – in murder cases – death.

(Reporting by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

This combination photo shows Bill Maher in Hollywood, California, February 22, 2009 and Donald Trump in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 19, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Blake/Steve Marcus/Files

(Reuters) – Donald Trump is withdrawing his lawsuit against television host and comedian Bill Maher seeking $5 million that Maher said he would give to charity, in a seemingly facetious offer, if Trump could prove he was not the son of an orangutan.

The lawsuit stems from comments Maher made during an appearance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” in January in which he said an orangutan’s fur was the only thing in nature that matches the shade of Trump’s trademark hair.

Records in Los Angeles Superior Court show the real estate mogul requested the lawsuit be dismissed without prejudice on Friday, eight weeks after he filed it. His spokesman, Michael Cohen, said Trump plans to file an amended lawsuit sometime in the future.

Cohen declined to offer further details, including a reason for the withdrawal.

Maher offered a $5 million donation to the charity of Trump’s choice – “Hair Club for Men,” he suggested – if Trump produced a birth certificate that proved he was not half-ape. A Maher spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Last year, during the presidential campaign, Trump offered to give $5 million to charity if Democratic President Barack Obama would release his college records.

Trump, who briefly considered a White House run, had previously questioned Obama’s citizenship and boasted that his skepticism prompted the president to release his so-called “long-form” birth certificate.

In a letter to Maher before filing the lawsuit, Trump’s lawyer wrote, “Attached hereto is a copy of Mr. Trump’s birth certificate, demonstrating that he is the son of Fred Trump, not an orangutan.”

Legal experts said Trump was unlikely to succeed in his lawsuit because Maher’s offer was obviously a joke, and courts rarely enforce verbal contracts that are clearly satirical in nature.

In an appearance on Fox News after the lawsuit was filed, Trump said he was convinced that Maher was not joking.

“That was venom,” he said. “That wasn’t a joke.”

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Tim Dobbyn)

Category:Stub-Class Cheeses articles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CASHTON, Wis. (AP) – An Illinois man accused of stealing 21 tons of Wisconsin cheese has been arrested in New Jersey.

New Jersey authorities say the 34-year-old man from Plainfield, Ill., was arrested Tuesday afternoon.

New Jersey State Police Lt. Stephen Jones said Wednesday the man was driving a refrigerated truck carrying 42,000 pounds of Muenster cheese. Jones says the cheese company, K&K Cheese in Cashton, Wis., valued the cargo at $200,000.

New Jersey Detective Oliver Sissman tells WISC-TV in Wisconsin that the suspect used false paperwork to obtain the cheese.

Company spokesman Kevin Everhart says K&K can’t guarantee the cheese hasn’t been tampered with, so it didn’t ask for the product back.

Jones says if the cheese passes inspections by health authorities it will be donated to charity.

___

Information from: WISC-TV, http://www.channel3000.com

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

A Bpost worker checks a sheet of chocolate stamps in this file photo dated Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013, at the Belgian post office stamp press in Mechelen, Belgium. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)

BRUSSELS (AP) — Feel like having chocolate at Easter in Belgium? Well, send a letter and really lick that chocolate-flavored postal stamp.

The Belgian post office released 538,000 stamps on Monday that have pictures of chocolate on the front but the essence of cacao oil in the glue at the back for taste and in the ink for smell.

Belgian stamp collector Marie-Claire Verstichel said while the taste was a bit disappointing, “they smell good.”

Easter is the season for chocolate in Belgium with Easter eggs and bunnies all over supermarkets and speciality stores.

A set of five stamps costs 6.2 euros ($8) but might leave a customer hungry for more.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

The woman was cleaning the yard outside a home near Texarkana Wednesday night when she spotted a snake. Bowie County Sheriff’s Capt. David Grable says she poured gasoline on the snake to try to kill it. Her son then dropped a lit match on the snake.

The engulfed snake slithered into some brush nearby the home. Grable says the brush ignited and started a fire that destroyed the home and damaged one next door.

Both homes were vacant, and no one was injured.

Grable says most snakes are harmless if left alone.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Related articles

• Police Say Terrified Texas Woman Lit Snake on Fire, Accidentally Burned Down Her Home

Radio station WTOP reports that Dantley started working as a crossing guard in September. He works an hour a day at Eastern Middle School and New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Ths 6-foot-5 (1.96 meter) Dantley grew up in the area and says he took the job for the health care benefits and to have something to do. Montgomery County civil service records show he gets paid $14,685.50 a year. Dantley says he doesn’t need the money.

Dantley is a Basketball Hall of Fame member and former star for the Buffalo Braves, Utah Jazz and Detroit Pistons.

He says he enjoys encouraging the young children.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press

Related articles

• NBA Legend Adrian Dantley Now Works as a Crossing Guard

Biometrics (Photo credit: matsuyuki)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The Brazilian newspaper O Globo is reporting that a doctor in Sao Paulo was arrested after being caught in the act of using fake fingers made of silicone and imprinted with real finger prints to defraud a hospital’s biometric punch-in clock.

The news report says the doctor, Thauane Nunes Ferreira, was detained and released Sunday. Police told the newspaper the suspect confessed to using different fake fingers bearing the prints of 11 fellow doctors and 20 nurses to pretend they were showing up to work five overnight shifts each month instead of just one. She also said the staff at the Ferraz Vasconcelos Hospital paid the director $2,400 per month to participate.

Ferreira will face charges of falsifying a public document and could get two to six years in prison.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Vials of blood (from flickr, not associated with this story)

OSLO, March 8 (Reuters) – A Norwegian kindergarten teacher was fired this week after she brought a vial of her own blood to class and allowed children to touch and taste it, the head teacher of the kindergarten said on Friday.

The teacher in Sola, on Norway’s western coast, brought in a blood sample that was taken earlier in the day and poured it on a plate for the children, aged between 3 and 6, to see.

“The children asked if they could touch it and she allowed them,” Inger Lise Soemme Andersen told Reuters. “Then they asked ‘how do we get it off?’ so she put her finger in her mouth and the children followed suit.

“The parents are mortified, shaken and shocked.”

Soemme Andersen added that the teacher, a temporary employee, had been tested for AIDS and Hepatitis B following the incident. Results of the tests are not yet in, but authorities consider the risk of transmitting any infection very low.

(Reporting by Joachim Dagenborg; editing by Mike Collett-White)

Robert Schiavelli of Rockville Centre was slapped with two summonses for “disturbing the peace.”

Police responded to his home on Feb. 12 and Feb. 13 after receiving complaints from his next-door-neighbor that his loud laughs could be heard across the driveway.

The 42-year-old was charged with acting “in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others.”

At his arraignment Tuesday, a judge declined to dismiss the charges.

Schiavelli told the New York Post his neighbor often taunts him due to his disability. He learned to deal with it by laughing him off.

Schiavelli suffers from seizures and neurological impairments.

The neighbor didn’t respond to requests for comment.

___

Information from: New York Post, http://www.nypost.com

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

West Yorkshire Police said Monday that they do not know the identity of the man who appeared in “a full Batman outfit” and turned in a 27-year-old suspect to police in Bradford, England.

CCTV images released by police show a caped crusader – fully clad with the comic hero’s boots, gloves and logo across his chest – standing alongside a man in a red hooded sweatshirt.

Police said the handover occurred on February 25 and the suspect will appear in court on March 8 charged with handling stolen goods and fraud-related offenses.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.