Month: April 2013

For the football players, it’s less about surviving the stress of the picks and more about saving face, says a sports psychologist.        

(Reuters) – European regulators declined to approve marketing of Pfizer Inc's new rheumatoid arthritis treatment Xeljanz, citing the risks of the drug compared with its potential benefit, the company said on Thursday. Pfizer said it plans to appeal and "immediately seek a re-examination of the opinion" by the European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP). Shares of Pfizer, which rose 1 percent to close at $30.26 on the New York Stock Exchange, were down 2.7 percent at $29.45 after hours. …

WASHINGTON (AP) — The latest bad news in the hunt for an AIDS vaccine: The government halted a large U.S. study on Thursday, saying the experimental shots aren’t preventing HIV infection.

LONDON (Reuters) – Major western clothing retailers squeezing Asian suppliers and a flawed approach to ensuring even basic working standards are fuelling conditions for tragedies like the latest factory collapse in Bangladesh, NGOs said on Thursday. At least 260 people, mainly female workers, were killed and more than 1,000 were injured when the eight-storey Rana Plaza factory building in Savar, 30 km (20 miles) outside the capital Dhaka, collapsed on Wednesday. …

DENVER (AP) — Medical and recreational marijuana may be legal in Colorado, but employers in the state can lawfully fire workers who test positive for the drug, even if it was used off duty, according to a court ruling Thursday.

Researchers who examined data for the period 1999 through 2010 for signs of progress in diabetes care discovered both heartening information about the state of diabetes care and evidence that more progress in such care is yet needed.

Cost of amputating a leg? At least $20,000. Cost of an artificial leg? More than $50,000 for the most high-tech models. Cost of an amputee's rehab? Often tens of thousands of dollars more.

Most parents believe their child is the smartest kid in the class, but when Robert Dorman says this, he’s likely right. His son, 5-year-old Gus Dorman, with an IQ of 147, became one of the youngest members admitted to Mensa, the exclusive high IQ society….        

By Trevor Stokes NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Terminally ill cancer patients who watched either of two videos about the option to forego resuscitation overwhelmingly elected that route for the patient in the video, if not for themselves, according to a new study. But the vignettes – whose only difference was whether fictional patients decided on their own to skip cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or got a recommendation from their doctor – elicited high marks from real patients for the video doctors’ compassion in discussing a difficult subject. …

Cultural transmission is behind the recent spread of a hunting technique called lobtail feeding among humpback whales off New England. Sophie Bushwick reports.