Month: January 2014

Bert and Ernie jump rope and munch apples and carrots, and Cookie Monster has his namesake treat once a week, not every day. Can a Muppets mini-makeover improve kids' health, too?

The WTA Tour ends in late October, giving the leading women nine weeks off, while the ATP Tour has a seven-week break after the conclusion of the ATP World Tour Finals in London in early November. The spate of retirements in Melbourne have led some to question whether players are not taking advantage of the longer break to rest their bodies but instead over-training in the off-season. Andy Murray, who famously uses the off-season to train hard in Miami, said there could be any number of reasons for a high number of injuries at this time of year. "When your muscles get tired, it puts pressure on other parts of your body." COMPETITION STRESS The injuries continued into the second week in Melbourne as Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova both suffered problems as their title chances bit the dust.

The WTA Tour ends in late October, giving the leading women nine weeks off, while the ATP Tour has a seven-week break after the conclusion of the ATP World Tour Finals in London in early November. The spate of retirements in Melbourne have led some to question whether players are not taking advantage of the longer break to rest their bodies but instead over-training in the off-season. Andy Murray, who famously uses the off-season to train hard in Miami, said there could be any number of reasons for a high number of injuries at this time of year. “When your muscles get tired, it puts pressure on other parts of your body.” COMPETITION STRESS The injuries continued into the second week in Melbourne as Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova both suffered problems as their title chances bit the dust.

The University of Utah on Wednesday said it is providing free paternity testing to women who conceived children at two fertility clinics that employed a lab worker suspected of artificially inseminating a patient with his own sperm. Questions arose about practices at the now-defunct clinics when a woman artificially inseminated at Reproductive Medical Technologies Inc claimed that genetic testing showed that the late lab technician, Tom Lippert, rather than her husband, was the biological father of a daughter born in 1992, university officials said. The mother at the center of the supposed sperm swap has not been identified by the university but told local television station KUTV in an interview earlier this month that she discovered the situation through DNA tests that she had conducted on her family. A probe by the university into operations at the private clinic under contract to the school and its own community lab has unearthed records showing Lippert, who died in 1999, was considered a problem employee by some but a good worker by others, said Chris Nelson, a spokesman for the University of Utah Health Care.