Previously I mentioned India's 10 million missing daughters. From a story by the BBC News:
A doctor in India and his assistant have been sentenced to two years in jail for revealing the sex of a female foetus and then agreeing to abort it. This is the first time medical professionals have been jailed in such a case. Under Indian laws, ultrasound tests on a pregnant woman to determine the gender of the foetus are illegal. It has been estimated that 10m female foetuses may have been terminated in India in the past 20 years. Dr Anil Sabhani and Kartar Singh were caught in a sting operation in the northern state of Haryana. Government officials sent in three pregnant women as decoy patients to find out if the clinic would carry out abortions based on sex selection. Audio and video evidence showed the doctor telling one woman that tests had revealed that she was carrying a "female foetus and it would be taken care of". But convictions are rare due to lax and corrupt officials and the slow judicial system.
The recent case of Mary Winkler in TN who recently shot her husband, a COC preacher, stirred up a bees nest of controversy for the COC when it was called a cult on CNN. Some of the details are documented on Travis Stanley's blog.
From an article on the Science Blog:
The less a child sleeps, the more likely he or she is to become overweight, according to researchers from Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine in an article published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Obesity. The risk of becoming overweight is 3.5 times higher in children who get less sleep than in those who sleep a lot, according to researchers Jean-Philippe Chaput, Marc Brunet, and Angelo Tremblay. These results come from data collected among 422 grade school students aged 5 to 10. The scientists measured the weight, height, and waist size of each participant. Information on the children's lifestyle and socioeconomic status was obtained through phone interviews with their parents. Through body mass index measurement, the researchers determined that 20% of the boys and 24% of the girls were overweight. Children who slept less than 10 hours a night were 3.5 times more at risk of being overweight than those who slept 12 or more hours. No other factor analyzed in the study--parental obesity, parents' level of education, family income, time spent in front of the TV or computer, regular physical activity--had as much of an impact on obesity than time spent sleeping. Hormone production is currently the researchers' prime hypothesis to explain the relationship between sleep and obesity. "Lack of sleep lowers the level of leptin, a hormone that stimulates metabolism and decreases hunger. In addition, short nights of sleep boost the concentration of ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger," explains Professor Angelo Tremblay.
From an AP story on MSNBC.com:
A huge federal study in people - not rats - takes the fizz out of arguments that the diet soda sweetener aspartame might raise the risk of cancer. No increased risk was seen even among people who gulped down many artificially sweetened drinks a day, said researchers who studied the diets of more than half a million older Americans. A consumer group praised the study, done by reputable researchers independent of any funding or ties to industry groups.
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