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Baby Bottle Makers Stop Using Bisphenol A in North America

Miranda Hitti
WebMD
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:39 UTC
The top six makers of baby bottles in the U.S. have agreed to stop using the polycarbonate plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in their bottles. Connecticut's Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced that news yesterday.

The six bottle makers who agreed to stop using BPA are Avent, Disney First Years, Gerber, Dr. Brown, Playtex, and Evenflo.

In a news release, Blumenthal says he and the attorneys general of Delaware and New Jersey wrote to those companies last October to ask that they stop using BPA in baby bottles because of concerns about possible health risks.
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Syringe

Thumbs up for 3D bone printer

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:52 UTC
Image
© Image: Gustoimages / SPLExact replicas of a man's thumb bones have been made for the first time using a printer that uses natural materials for ink
Exact replicas of a man's thumb bones have been made for the first time using a 3D printer. The breakthrough paves the way for surgeons to replace damaged or diseased bones with identical copies built from the patients' own cells.

"In theory, you could do any bone," says Christian Weinand of the Insel Hospital in Berne, Switzerland, head of the team that copied his thumb bones. "Now I can put spares in my pocket if I want," he says.

Weinand "grew" his replacement bones on the backs of laboratory mice, in the same way that Jay Vacanti of Massachusetts General Hospital famously grew a human ear from human cartilage cells back in 1997.

However, a surrogate mouse would normally be unnecessary, says Weinand. For example, if someone had lost a thumb, the replacement bones could be grown in situ. For now, the only options are to replace the thumb with the patient's own toe, or with bone fragments from elsewhere.

There are several steps in the new process. Firstly, you need a 3D image of the bone you want to copy. If the bone has been lost or destroyed, you can make a mirror image of its surviving twin.

This image is then fed into a 3D inkjet printer, which deposits thin layers of a pre-selected material on top of one another until a 3D object materialises.
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Family

Children Seriously Affected When Parent Suffers From Depression


Science Daily
Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:12 UTC
Life is hard for the children of a parent suffering from depression. Children take on an enormous amount of responsibility for the ill parent and for other family members. It is therefore important for the health services to be aware of this and have support functions in place for the whole family, and not just for the person who is ill.

This is the conclusion of a thesis from the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Registered Nurse Britt Hedman Ahlström has examined the way in which family life is affected when a parent is suffering from depression. Nine families, including ten children and young adults between the ages of 5 and 26, and eleven parents were included in the study.

The results show how the family's daily life changes and becomes more complicated when a parent is suffering from depression. Uncertainty about what is happening has an effect on the daily life of the entire family. Depression also means that the parent becomes tired and exhausted, which then affects and weighs heavily on the children's daily life. Depression changes the relationship between a parent and his/her children, since they no longer communicate with each other as they used to. Family interplay and reciprocity decrease. The depressed parent withdraws from the family, and the children feel that they have been left to themselves.
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Magnify

Psychologist Explores Perception of Fear in Human Sweat


PhysOrg
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:00 UTC
When threatened, many animals release chemicals as a warning signal to members of their own species, who in turn react to the signals and take action. Research by Rice University psychologist Denise Chen suggests a similar phenomenon occurs in humans. Given that more than one sense is typically involved when humans perceive information, Chen studied whether the smell of fear facilitates humans' other stronger senses.

Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou collected "fearful sweat" samples from male volunteers. The volunteers kept gauze pads in their armpits while they were shown films that dealt with topics known to inspire fear.

Later, female volunteers were exposed to chemicals from the "fearful sweat" when they were fitted with a piece of gauze under their nostrils. They then viewed images of faces that morphed from happy to ambiguous to fearful. They were asked to indicate whether the face was happy or fearful by pressing buttons on a computer.
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Ambulance

Soldier Suicides - Tragedy strikes at home

Phil Aliff
CounterPunch
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:13 UTC
In the early morning hours of October 20, 2008, Pfc. Timothy Alderman took his own life in his barracks at Fort Carson, Colo. He died of an apparent prescription drug overdose.

The 21-year-old had been stationed in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Before his long deployment to the Middle East, he had never suffered from any mental health problems. In fact, according to his medical records, he didn't think he would have difficulty returning home because he "mostly had fun killing people and getting paid for it."

But like hundreds of thousands of other veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, Alderman left the battlefield, but the battlefield didn't leave him.
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Alarm Clock

Monsanto's Bt Cotton Kills Soil As Well As Farmers


Institute of Science in Society
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:46 UTC
Biosafety refers to ensuring that GMO's do not harm the environment or health.

The soil, its fertility, and the organisms which maintain the fertility of soil are a vital aspect of the environment, especially in the context of food and agricultural production.

A recent scientific study carried out by Navdanya, compared the soil of fields where Bt-cotton had been planted for 3 years with adjoining fields with non GMO cotton or other crops. The region covered included Nagpur, Amravati and Wardha of Vidharbha which accounts for highest GMO cotton planting in India, and the highest rate of farmers suicides (4000 per year).
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Roses

Beets in the Hood

Tracie McMillan
Mother Jones
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:36 UTC
Image
© Courtesy Growing Power
Forget organic and locally grown food - in America's poorest urban neighborhoods, it's hard to find any affordable fruits and vegetables at all. Six grocery stores serve South Los Angeles' population of 688,000. West Oakland has no supermarkets, but close to 60 liquor stores. But thanks to former NBA draft pick Will Allen, a couple of American cities are experiencing a produce renaissance.
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Magnify

Seniors Control Emotions More Easily Than Young Adults

Abby Vogel
Medical News Today
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:00 UTC
With age comes the ability to better regulate emotions in order to not disrupt performance on a memory-intensive task, according to a study published in the March issue of the journal Psychology and Aging.

The research study found that regulating emotions - such as reducing negative emotions or inhibiting unwanted thoughts - is a resource-demanding process that disrupts the ability of young adults to simultaneously or subsequently perform tasks.

"This study is among the first to demonstrate that the costs of emotion regulation vary across age groups," said Fredda Blanchard-Fields, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Psychology and the study's lead author.
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Family

Cartoon violence 'makes children more aggressive'

Laura Clark
Daily Mail
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:21 UTC
Image
Cartoons aimed at children, such as Scooby Doo, contain more brutality than programmes meant for general audiences, a study has found
High levels of violence in cartoons such as Scooby-Doo can make children more aggressive, researchers claimed yesterday.

They found that animated shows aimed at youngsters often have more brutality than programmes broadcast for general audiences.

And they said children copied and identified with fantasy characters just as much as they would with screen actors.

Cartoons aimed at children, such as Scooby Doo, contain more brutality than programmes meant for general audiences, a study has found

The study also found that youngsters tended to mimic the negative behaviour they saw on TV such as rumour-spreading, gossiping and eye-rolling.

The U.S. psychologists quizzed 95 girls aged ten and 11 about their favourite TV shows, rating them for violent content and verbal and indirect aggression.

The shows included Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American Idol, Scooby-Doo and Pokemon.

The researchers found that output aimed at children as young as seven, which included a number of cartoons, had the highest levels of violence.
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Bug

Australia - Dengue fever spreads west from Cairns


NineMSN
Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:09 UTC
mossie
© unknownQueensland's dengue fever outbreak has spread to the Atherton Tableland town of Mareeba.
The dengue fever outbreak that has killed a woman in far north Queensland has spread west from Cairns to the Atherton Tableland town of Mareeba.

Queensland Health said one case of locally acquired dengue fever type three has been confirmed in the town.

Mareeba has joined Cairns, Townsville, Port Douglas, Yarrabah, Injinoo and Innisfail in north Queensland's dengue fever outbreaks.
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