Month: March 2014

A Los Angeles couple was sentenced to three years in jail in Qatar on Thursday for causing the death of their adopted African-born daughter, who was found to have died of starvation, in a case that has raised concern in Washington. Matthew and Grace Huang were arrested in January last year after their 8-year-old daughter, Gloria, died unexpectedly. “We have just been wrongfully convicted and we feel as if we are being kidnapped by the Qatar judicial system,” Matthew Huang said. “This verdict is wrong and appears to be nothing more than an effort to save face.” A website created to publicize the case ( http://freemattandgrace.com ) said Matthew, a Stanford-trained engineer, had moved to Qatar with his wife and their three young children in 2012 to help oversee a big infrastructure project related to the 2022 soccer World Cup.

Grandmother says they accused 8-year-old Sunnie of being a lesbian or transgender.

By Nicole Mordant VANCOUVER (Reuters) – Looking for ways to boost their flagging fortunes, a handful of tiny Canadian mining exploration companies are considering swapping their hard hats and shovels for bongs and baggies. In the past couple of months, nearly a dozen of these so-called junior miners, hard hit by a downturn in the mining industry, have announced they might branch out into Canada's budding medical marijuana industry. The announcements from Satori Resources Inc, which owns a moribund gold project in Manitoba, and Victory Ventures Inc, which has staked mineral claims in British Columbia, have propelled these rock-bottom penny stocks upward. Until now, the medical marijuana industry has consisted mostly of small-scale home-grown operations.

By Allison Bond NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women with a sunny disposition may also have an easier time adopting healthy habits, according to a new study. “It’s not just having a sunny outlook – rather, this is a marker of other things people do,” said Melanie Hingle, a dietician at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The study used data collected as part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a study of a national sample of postmenopausal women between the ages of 50 and 79. Hingle and her team found that the most optimistic one third of the women saw the most improvement in their diets, whether or not they had completed the nutrition program.

By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) – Research unveiled on Thursday identifies the brain neurons that cause every behavior fruit fly larvae execute, raising the tantalizing possibility that neuroscientists will be able to construct a similar “atlas” in people. Such a human brain atlas is one goal of the $100 million BRAIN Initiative that President Barack Obama announced a year ago, and the fly research raises hopes that it will be possible to deal with the data deluge that project will generate. For the study, which was published online by the journal Science, scientists led by biologist Marta Zlatic of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm research center in Virginia first activated a few neurons at a time in the larvae of the fruit fly drosophila, using a technique called optogenetics, in which light causes particular neurons to fire. She and her team then compiled thousands of hours of video recordings of how 37,780 fly larvae behaved in response to each neuronal activation.

Grandmother says they accused 8-year-old Sunnie of being a lesbian or transgender.

By Andrew M. Seaman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Keywords related to self-injury were searched more than 42 million times in the past year, according to a new study, but what those searches turned up was mostly myths and misinformation. Researchers cataloged and analyzed websites related to nonsuicidal self-injury – which is physically injuring oneself intentionally without attempting suicide – and found less than 10 percent of the sites were endorsed by health or academic institutions. “For many people it’s a first step and if what they’re getting is poor quality that’s a bit worrisome,” said lead author Stephen Lewis, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Guelph in Canada. He and his colleagues write in JAMA Pediatrics that between 14 and 21 percent of teens and young adults engage in nonsuicidal self-injury.

Young cancer patient wins over heart of MSU player during March Madness.