Body

More than three million children have been born as a result of assisted reproductive technologies since the birth of the first "test tube baby" in 1978. While the majority of these children are healthy and normal, as a group they are at greater risk of certain kinds of birth defects and being low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes later in life.

DURHAM, NC – Cultural views of evolution can have important ethical implications, says a Duke University expert on theological and biomedical ethics. Because the popular imagination filters science through cultural assumptions about race, cultural history should be an essential part of biomedical conversations.

Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke University, argues that many popularized ideas about evolution assume that some human groups are more evolved than other human groups.

Once described by Jacques Cousteau as the "world's aquarium," the marine ecosystems of the Gulf of California are under threat. Destructive new fishing methods are depleting the sea's habitats, creating areas that are ghosts of their former existences (see Scripps explorations story "Threatened Gulf".

SAN DIEGO - Some say the world's population will swell to 9 billion people by 2030 and that will present significant challenges for agriculture to provide enough food to meet demand, says University of Idaho animal scientist Rod Hill.

Hill and Larry Branen, a University of Idaho food scientist, organized a symposium during the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting Sunday to explore ways biotechnology could provide healthy and plentiful animal-based foods to meet future demands.

Researchers have a new tool to understand how cancers grow -- and with it a new opportunity to identify novel cancer drugs. They've been able to break apart human prostate tissue, extract the stem cells in that tissue, and alter those cells genetically so that they spur cancer.

Owen Witte, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present the findings on February 20, 2010, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The United States government's decision last year to lift restrictions on federally-funded stem cell research has helped the nation's stem-cell researchers concentrate on science, but limitations remain – even under the new policy, according to George Daley, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Children's Hospital Boston.

Working with worms may not be your average person’s idea of a good time, but for University of Toronto researcher Dr. Andrew Fraser, they are fascinating.

“I think worms are totally cool, like humans only simpler and easier,” writes Dr. Fraser on his website.

In fact, working with the invertebrates is what will bring Dr. Fraser to the upcoming AAAS conference in San Diego, California where he will present some of his research findings in a symposium called “The Impact of Genomics.”

DURHAM, N.C. – The old balkanized approach to ocean management, in which different resources and activities are governed by different laws and administered by different agencies, has failed to protect ocean ecosystems or reduce conflicts between ocean users, a panel of international scientists says, and should be replaced with a more balanced approach using marine spatial planning.

The guidance document is the result of several years of negotiation by a high-level collaboration of experts from regulatory agencies representing Canada, USA, Australia, Japan, the European Union, academic research institutions, and food allergen test-kit manufacturers, under the auspices of the AOAC (Association of Analytical Communities) Presidential Taskforce on Food Allergens.

While in the US the Obama administration has said it will abandon the nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain and has set up a "blue-ribbon" commission on America's future management of nuclear waste, in Europe, two countries (Sweden and Finland) have already selected a disposal site for nuclear waste and France will specify a location by 2013. In a number of other European countries (e.g. Switzerland and UK), geological disposal is the reference management option and things are moving forward to the site selection stage.

DURHAM, NC – Tiny bits of molecular "trash" found in circulating blood appear to be good predictors of cardiovascular disease and untimely death, say researchers at Duke University Medical Center.

The discovery, published online in the April issue of the journal Circulation Genetics, comes from the largest study of its kind for cardiovascular disease, and is the first to identify specific metabolic profiles associated with coronary artery disease, heart attacks and death among patients who have undergone coronary catheterization.

URBANA -- Farmers' markets are not created equal. Some sell only fresh produce while others offer entertainment and a wide variety of vendors. And each market's unique personality attracts some people while repelling others. A University of Illinois study revealed that based on what they offer, farmers' markets self-select people who are on a specific mission -- and visiting other retail stores isn't one of them.

As biologists and ecologists propose ever-larger conservation areas in the tropics, ones that encompass multiple countries, social scientists say it's local people banding together with their community leaders who ultimately determine the success or failure of such efforts in many parts of the world.

"When people sacrifice to conserve, they want to benefit from that sacrifice," says Patrick Christie, University of Washington associate professor of marine affairs and a Pew fellow in marine conservation. "People expect direct economic and social benefits from conservation."

An incentive system for shippers could help push some of the costs and responsibilities of port security from the federal government to private industry, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

"Securing the Containerized Supply Chain: Analysis of Government Incentives for Private Investment" is by Nitin Bakshi of the London Business School and Noah Gans of the Wharton School.

Pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are payment models that reward workers for meeting certain performance measures for quality and efficiency. In the healthcare setting, P4P programs use a variety of methods to reward physicians financially for achieving targets, including fee differentials and bonuses.

A new study in the Journal for Healthcare Quality reveals that P4P programs appear to be effective in incentivizing low performing physicians. The article is part of the January/February 2010 special issue on pay-for-performance in the health care system.