Month: March 2014

Check in on Sarah Murnaghan nine months after her controversial lung transplant.

Time-pressed fitness fans seeking short, focused workouts are flocking to boutique studios specializing in everything from indoor cycling to boot camp, and the no-frills gyms that burgeoned during the financial recession are still thriving in the recovery. Cedric X. Bryant, chief science officer with the American Council on Exercise, believes fitness has taken a minimalist turn that encourages smaller venues. Nearly one in five Americans is a health club consumer, according to a 2014 report by IHRSA, the International Health and Racquet Club, an industry trade association. While membership has remained more or less steady, IHRSA reports a shift in the past few years from large multipurpose clubs to smaller gyms, boutique or sport-specific studios and fitness-only facilities, many of which are franchised.

By Grace Li HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese authorities have suspended operations at a “baby hatch”, where anonymous mothers can safely abandoned new-born babies, in the city of Guangzhou as a surge in the number of infants has overwhelmed the center which only opened in late January. Many Chinese cities have set up baby hatches, which consist of an incubator and a delayed alarm, to protect unwanted newborns in a country where strict family planning laws have been blamed for the high number of baby girls being abandoned. The baby hatch in Guangzhou which opened on January 28 has so far received 262 abandoned babies, 148 boys and 114 girls, according to the city’s Bureau of Civil Affairs. “Due to an increasing number of abandoned babies at the baby hatch, the orphanage’s ability to receive those babies has reached the limit,” said Xu Jiu, director of Guangzhou Social Welfare Institute, at a briefing.

It won’t be nearly as much fun as eating candy bars, but a big study is being launched to see if pills containing the nutrients in dark chocolate can help prevent heart attacks and strokes.

While other studies have found ties between riding with impaired drivers and teen impaired driving risk, the new study surveyed about 2,500 U.S. students each year between 10th and 12th grades to examine rates over time – not at just one point. “We were interested in both driving while intoxicated and riding with an intoxicated driver, because it’s the combined of the two behaviors that reflects the true risk,” Bruce Simons-Morton, one of the researchers, told Reuters Health. “When you do that, you see a relatively high proportion – about 30 percent in our study – reported either driving while intoxicated or riding with an intoxicated driver within the last three years,” he said.

Jonathan Trott’s assertion that mental and physical fatigue had forced him home from England’s Ashes tour of Australia rather than depression felt like a “con” and would only convince his team mates he had abandoned them, according to former England captain Michael Vaughan. Team officials cited a long-standing “stress-related illness” as the cause. “I feel a little bit conned we were told Jonathan Trott’s problems in Australia were a stress-related illness he had suffered for years,” Vaughan wrote in his column in Monday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. “He was obviously not in a great place but he was struggling for cricketing reasons and not mental, and there is a massive difference.” Vaughan added that depression was a debilitating illness and for Trott to use terms like “crazy” or “nutcase” in his interview only disrespected those who suffered from it.

Shares in Nikon Corp shed 4.2 percent to a five-week low of 1,686 yen on Monday morning after it was criticized by a Chinese consumer show that said the camera maker had sold defective products in China and denied local consumers fair treatment in after-sales service. Nikon, which had sales of 118 billion yen ($1.16 billion) in China in 2013, said on Sunday that it was taking the report "very seriously" and had moved to improve its after-sales network in China, according to its official microblogging sites.

Intercept Pharmaceuticals Inc said on Sunday its experimental liver disease drug was effective in a third late-stage clinical trial and that the results set the stage for the company to file for marketing approval. The drug, obeticholic acid (OCA), is designed to treat primary biliary cirrhosis, a disease in which bile ducts in the liver become damaged, allowing harmful substances to build up and scar liver tissue. The findings come roughly two months after a clinical trial of the drug in patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a disease characterized by a buildup of fat in the liver, was halted early because the drug was working better than expected. The latest trial, known as POISE, indicates “that OCA clearly produced clinically meaningful improvements,” said Professor Frederik Nevens, chairman of the department of hepatology at the University of Leuven in Belgium and the lead investigator on the trial.