Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Researchers Find Brain Receptors Linked to Mother-Infant Bonding: "Morphine acts on a part of the brain known as the opioid system, which is linked to pain, pleasure and addictive behaviors. The results of a mouse study published in today's issue of the journal Science suggest that the same brain circuitry plays a role in mother-infant bonding."

RFID chips on kids makes Legoland safer - silicon.com: "Parents taking their children to Legoland theme parks this summer need not worry about losing little Johnny, Jesper or Johan thanks to advances in RFID technology.
Children entering the parks will be fitted with an RFID bracelet that can be tracked anywhere within its boundaries - meaning that should they run off and find themselves lost, the parks' staff will easily be able to track them down and alert parents via SMS."

The Scientist :: Researchers boycott journal: "Researchers slated to contribute to a November issue of an occupational medicine journal have withdrawn their submissions in a boycott stemming from the publication's refusal to include a study in the same issue claiming that IBM employees at semiconductor plants have higher-than-expected cancer death rates."

Electronic News - Fuel Cell Shrinks to Fit: "Toshiba has developed a tiny prototype of a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) that could eventually be used in consumer products such as digital audio players and even wireless headsets for mobile phone."

New Scientist: "Some dogs can predict when a child will have an epileptic seizure, a new study has revealed. These dogs not only protect their charges from injuries, such as falling, but also seem to help kids deal with the daily struggle of epilepsy.
Nine of the 60 dogs in the study (15 per cent) were able to predict a seizure by licking, whimpering, or standing next to the child. These dogs were remarkably accurate - they predicted 80 per cent of seizures, with no false reports."

New Scientist: "The tooth buds, or primordia, from which teeth grow consist of two cell types, epithelial and mesenchymal cells. As a replacement for the mesenchyme, Sharpe's team used bone marrow stem cells from 6-week-old mice. They combined these with epithelial cells from the mouths of embryonic mice to create 'artificial' tooth primordia. After three days, the team transferred the engineered primordia into the kidneys of other mice, where they grew into intact teeth."

New Scientist: "Smoking wipes 10 years off a person's life on average, according to the longest ever study of smokers, but giving up at any age brings huge benefits.
Quitting at 30 virtually eliminates the risk from dying prematurely, and giving up at 50 halves it. But half of those who fail to kick the habit will die as a result of smoking, and a quarter of all smokers die in middle-age.
The results come from a 50-year update of the landmark 1954 paper which first linked smoking with lung cancer. One author of the update, published in the British Medical Journal, is Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Doll, now 91, who was a co-author of the original paper."

The New York Times > Science > A Very Muscular Baby Offers Hope Against Diseases: "The moment the little boy was born, the hospital staff knew there was something unusual about him. His muscles looked nothing like the soft baby muscles of the other infants in the nursery. They were bulging and well defined, especially in his thighs and upper arms."

New Scientist: "Dirty or unsafe environments are to blame for a third of all child deaths in Europe, says the World Health Organization.
The results come from the world's first 'audit' of environment-related childhood deaths over an entire geographic region. It reveals that 100,000 young Europeans die every year from exposure to pollution or unsafe living conditions."

Hiding Behind Certification - Making I.T. Work - CIO Magazine Jun 15,2004: "Frankly, I'm with the school of economic thought that argues that the real value of credentials and certifications like CMMs and MBAs is not that they indicate greater skill, but they signal to the market that these individuals and organizations will jump through hoops to demonstrate how much they care about being seen as top-notch. "

Hiding Behind Certification - Making I.T. Work - CIO Magazine Jun 15,2004: "Both experiences recalled Bismarck's famous epigram that one should never see either laws or sausage being made. I was shocked. Professional certification and accreditation turned out to be processes as messy, political, misleading and dysfunctional as most enterprise software development and implementation initiatives. The critical difference, of course, is that testing software quality is easier and less ambiguous than testing the quality of a certification."

VOANews.com: "Equally surprising are the comet's internal processes. It is spewing 20 narrow jets of gas and dust from many spots on its surface. Donald Brownlee says the jets form as the comet comes closer to the sun because the sun heats up water, carbon dioxide, and other volatile chemicals in the nucleus, building pressure to eject them. These were a surprising aspect of how a comet creates its long, wispy tail.
'It's telling us something fundamental about the way comets work,' he said. 'People have watched comets for as long as people have lived on the Earth, yet this is the first time we've been able to see how the gas comes off, how the dust comes off, and produces those tails.'"

ic Wales - Surgery'doesn't turn fat into fit': "Research found obese women who dropped up to 10.35 kilograms (23lb) of belly fat by way of liposuction did not appear to lower their risk of diabetes or heart disease, both of which are fat-related."

New Scientist: "Now a company in New York state is planning to tackle the problem by providing patients with an implantable power source that recharges their implant's batteries using electricity generated by the patient's own body heat.
By continuously recharging the batteries, it saves the patient from frequent surgery. In some low power devices, it could even replace the batteries altogether, making such operations unnecessary."

New Scientist: "'We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep,' claims XADS president Peter Bitar.
The gun has been designed for the US Marine Corps to use for crowd control and security purposes and is due out in 2005. It is based on early, unwieldy technology and has a range of only three metres, but an operator can debilitate multiple targets by sweeping it across them for 'as long as there is an input power source,' says Bitar."

New Scientist: "'Where you stand in the social hierarchy - on the social ladder - is intimately related to your chances of getting ill, and the length of your life,' writes Marmot in his book Status Syndrome.
And just a small difference in social status can have a big effect on health, he says. For example, people with doctorates live longer than those with Master's degrees."

North County Times - North San Diego and Southwest Riverside County columnists: "'I guess it boils down to two words,' Duffin said, 'conviction and commitment. My church asked me to go. I guess it's a combination of commitment and obligation.'
Duffin is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a church that is operated almost entirely with volunteer labor. Duffin is about to spend three years as one of the volunteers."

The New York Times > National > American Dreamers | The Waitress: Crossing the Border Into the Middle Class: "She is Graciela Diaz: upwardly mobile waitress, Mexican immigrant soccer mom, middle-class striver, former undocumented sweatshop seamstress and now satisfied suburbanite, living with her husband and daughter in a two-story, four-bedroom stucco house with a two-car garage in a gated community north of town."

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Chocolate Compounds Boost Blood Vessel Function: "Good news for chocoholics: the treat may help your heart. According to a report published in the June issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, small daily doses of dark chocolate are associated with improved blood vessel function in healthy people."

New Scientist: "A human-shaped dummy that irons shirts by pumping itself up with hot air has been created by researchers in Spain. It is the first machine designed for the home that can take on this tedious chore"