Science News

The President's Cancer Panel on Thursday reported that "the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated" and strongly urged action to reduce people's widespread exposure to carcinogens .

Law enforcement was able to thwart an attempt to set off an explosion in the middle of New York City's Times Square on May 1 thanks to the quick thinking of a T-shirt vendor who noticed smoke coming from a parked SUV. Unfortunately, the signs that a bomb is nearby are often more subtle, detectable only at a microscopic level. [More]

An off-kilter body clock can throw off our sleep-wake cycle, eating habits, body temperature and hormones--and mounting evidence suggests a malfunctioning clock may also underlie the mood cycles in bipolar disorder.

In a new study led by psychiatrist Alexander Niculescu of Indiana University, researchers found that children with bipolar disorder were likely to have a mutated RORB gene, which codes for a protein crucial to circadian clock function. The team’s previous work identified alterations to this gene and other clock genes in animal models of the disorder. In the new study, the scientists compared the genomes of 152 bipolar kids with those of 140 typical kids. (Children were studied because their moods cycle more rapidly than the moods of bipolar adults, and a quicker cycle suggests a stronger connection to the circadian clock.) The team found that the bipolar children were more likely to have one of four alterations to RORB , and the investigators suspect the mu­tations prevent the body from producing the correct amount of the pro­tein to support normal clock function. [More]

The long and divisive fight over U.S. health care reform exposed basic weaknesses in the processes of governance. As is so often true in American politics these days, politicians and lobbyists kept complex subjects to themselves, pushing expert discussion and systematic public debate to the sidelines. Although the final legislation expands coverage, and I favor it for that reason, it falls far short of the changes we need to lower costs and improve health outcomes.

During 14 months of debate over health care, the administration did not put forward a clear, analytical policy white paper on the aims, methods and expected results of the proposed reforms. Only the Congressional Budget Office’s budget scoring of legislative proposals was even partly systematic; no comparable independent analysis exists on other substantive issues. The actual health consequences of the legislation were never reviewed or debated coherently.