A year and a half after President Obama loosened restrictions on government funding of human-embryonic-stem-cell research, a federal judge on Monday, Aug. 23, declared all such studies temporarily off-limits for taxpayer dollars, on the grounds that they violate a 1996 law. The decision could be a devastating step backward for a promising new science that has the potential to generate new treatments and possibly even cures for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's — and the reaction ...

CHEST DISEASES Long extolled as a tonic for lazy muscles, bicycling is now being boosted as a treatment for a far more serious disability. Using a rigid cycling regimen, says Boston's Dr. Harry Bass, he has been able to help patients afflicted with emphysema, a respiratory ailment that gradually impairs breathing and kills as many as 20,000 Americans a year.Bike therapy totally reverses the traditional rest-and-medication treatment for emphysema. "I tell patients to do more, not less," reports Dr. Bass in Medical World News. Using $20 stationary ...

Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today?Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't conduct its own interviews. You can imagine giving it information so it could answer [impromptu] questions, but it would still be responding only from content it's been given and analyzed. What about aspirational questions? Could Watson respond if it was asked, "What do you want to be doing in five years?"It would have to be ...

A powerful preventive against pneumonia, influenza and other respiratory diseases may be promised by a brilliant series of experiments conducted during the last three years at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital. Dr. Oswald Hope Robertson last week was making final tests with a new germicidal vapor—propylene glycol—to sterilize air. If the results so far obtained are confirmed, one of the age-old searches of man will finally achieve its goal. The idea of sterilizing the air is not new —London's ...

The nervous system is somehow involved in so many diseases and disorders, from fleeting, no-account headaches to crippling paralyses, that doctors are often at a loss to know what part of the patient to treat first. Some forms of liver disease, for example, cause emotional disturbances that can be mistaken for mental illness or signs of brain damage. Merely to diagnose many cases in which the nervous system is involved takes an almost infinite variety of sensitive electronic devices. Treatment ...

The symptoms seemed to extend from coast to coast—sore throat, a cough, runny nose, varying degrees of fever—and there were sensationalized press reports of a "deadly threat to the elderly'' and a "nationwide epidemic." Thousands of Americans, mostly in the Eastern states, were down last week with something loosely described as flu. The U.S. Public Health Service, on guard against a new epidemic of the Asian flu, which first appeared in 1957, renewed its standard warning to groups of vulnerable ...

Doctors used to have poetic names for diseases. A physician would speak of consumption because the illness seemed to eat you from within. Now we just use the name of the bacterium that causes the illness: tuberculosis. Psychology, though, remains a profession practiced partly as science and partly as linguistic art. Because our knowledge of the mind's afflictions remains so limited, psychologists — even when writing in academic publications — still deploy metaphors to understand difficult disorders. And possibly the ...

At first it sounded like science fiction, curing genetic diseases by giving people new genes. Then it seemed like simple fiction: while theoretically possible, gene therapy appeared unlikely to become a true therapeutic option, the field having suffered years of complications and high-profile setbacks. But over the past year, a series of small but intriguing advances has suggested that the technique may hold real future potential. In September, researchers at the University of Washington reported in the journal ...

Driving along a pockmarked road amid rocks and Joshua trees in a lonely southern California desert, religious controversy might be the last thing you'd expect to encounter. And if you don't look too closely, you're likely to zip right past the focus of a hotly contested Supreme Court battle. A federal judge has ordered the Mojave Cross, a war memorial erected by a veterans group 75 years ago, to be covered. It's boxed in plywood. The issue is less about ...

Americans appear to actually thrive on adversity, according to a study published this week that reached the conclusion after researching the nation's biggest economic downturn. Life expectancy during the peak years of the Great Depression increased 6.2 years -- from 57.1 years in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1933 -- according to University of Michigan researchers Jose A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase applied to men and women, whites and non-whites. The team crunched data from the ...