Older women, don't take vitamin D for bones: Panel

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older women shouldn't take vitamin D and calcium supplements to prevent broken bones, and there's not enough evidence to say whether it would help anyone else either, says a U.S. government-backed panel.

Based on two reviews of past research, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force waded into the debate over the two vitamins that are thought to strengthen bones to prevent against breaks.

"Calcium and vitamin D are important in general health and bone health. For this recommendation, we review data on whether supplements of vitamin D and calcium can prevent fractures in addition to dietary intake," said Dr. Jessica Herzstein, a member of the Task Force.

Approximately 1.5 million Americans suffer from breaks that are tied to brittle bones each year. And about half of all women over 50 years old will end up with a break that's linked to the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis.

That's a major concern, according to the Task Force, because broken bones are linked to chronic pain, disability and increased risk of sickness and early death.

Based on the reviews, the panel found there were no benefits but some risk for post-menopausal women taking low-dose vitamin D and calcium supplements - below 400 international units and 1,000 milligrams, respectively.

Specifically, taking low-dose supplements didn't change the older women's risk for broken bones, but was tied to a small increase in the risk of kidney stones (see Reuters Health article of June 12, 2012 here: http://reut.rs/W760bF

They also found that there is not enough evidence to suggest higher doses of the vitamins would be effective or safer in older women, or that taking any dose of the supplements would help men or younger women.

For men and younger women, "We're not saying don't take it, we're just saying we don't know enough right now," said Herzstein, who is in charge of employee health at Air Products in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

She added that these recommendations do not apply to people who already have a diagnosis of osteoporosis, a history of fractures or are living in an assisted-living community.

TALK WITH YOUR DOCTOR

Herzstein said it's important for people to talk with their doctors about the supplements.

Cara Welch, senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Natural Product Association in Washington, D.C., told Reuters Health she agreed that people should talk to their doctors, but said the group disagrees with the new recommendation.

"We believe this recommendation is out of step with current research, and it really should not affect consumers who are trying to supplement their calcium and vitamin D intake with supplements," Welch said.

According to the most recent data from a national survey of Americans, 56 percent of women over 60 years old take vitamin D supplements, and 60 percent take calcium supplements.

The two vitamins are often sold together and are relatively inexpensive.

The Task Force already recommends women older than 65 years old be screened for the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis, and younger women who have a higher risk of broken bones.

The panel also recommends senior citizens with a history of falls and vitamin D deficiency take supplements to help strengthen muscles and help with balance (see Reuters Health article of May 30, 2012 here: http://reut.rs/V1ARom

Vitamin D has also been researched as a preventive measure against dementia, heart disease and cancer, but with mixed results. Herzstein said the panel will soon be issuing recommendations about the vitamin for some of those diseases.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition researcher from New York University who coauthored a commentary published alongside the recommendations in the Annals of Internal Medicine, said that good studies on vitamin D are hard to do, and any end to the debate over whether to take supplements or not is a long way off.

"These studies are so difficult to do and to interpret that scientific consensus seems impossible to achieve, especially in situations where entire organizations are devoted to convincing people to take high-dose vitamin D," she wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Ms1ZbQ Annals of Internal Medicine, online February 25, 2013.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/older-women-dont-vitamin-d-bones-panel-221323175.html

Stephen Covey klimt bastille day breaking bad breaking bad food network star British Open 2012

MasterCard announces MasterPass digital banking service, gives Australia and Canada first dibs

MasterCard's been working on new-era payment systems for sometime, but now the credit corporation looks set to move past its PayPass project and roll out a service that's properly ready for the masses. By way of MasterPass, MasterCard will look to build upon what it gathered from previous efforts and use those learnings in its quest for success, with the firm being quite confident that by securing the right merchants and technology partners, it can turn the "promise of a digital future" into a reality. Furthermore, MasterCard says the MasterPass experience will be a seamless and secure one, making it easy for consumers to initiate transactions "from wherever they are" and with "any device." -- and that includes support for a variety of check-out methods, such as QR codes and, of course, NFC. Those in Australia and Canada can expect MasterPass to debut in their area next month, while US and UK folks will have to wait until later this spring and summer, respectively.

Filed under: Misc, Software, Mobile

Comments

Via: TechCrunch

Source: MasterCard

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/QmWZ16cqusc/

yelp huntsville al channel 2 news adrienne bailon yelp stock honda classic news channel 5

Arkansas governor vetoes 20-week abortion bill

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) ? Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe on Tuesday vetoed a ban on most abortions in Arkansas at 20 weeks into a pregnancy, setting up an override fight with a Republican-controlled Legislature that has been pushing for more restrictions on the procedure.

Beebe said he vetoed the ban, which is based on the disputed belief that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks, because it runs afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion until the point where fetuses can survive outside the womb, usually at 22 to 24 weeks. The Republican sponsor of the measure said he'll seek to override Beebe's veto.

"Because it would impose a ban on a woman's right to choose an elective, nontherapeutic abortion before viability, House Bill 1037, if it became law, would squarely contradict Supreme Court precedent," Beebe said in his veto letter. "When I was sworn in as governor I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend both the Arkansas Constitution and the Constitution of the United States. I take that oath seriously."

Beebe also cited the cost of a potential lawsuit if the state enacted the ban. The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas has said it would likely sue if it went into effect.

Beebe's veto comes as Arkansas lawmakers are weighing stricter legislation that would prohibit abortions at 12 weeks into a pregnancy. Beebe has said he has concerns about that legislation's constitutionality as well. That measure is expected to go before a Senate panel Wednesday.

Rep. Andy Mayberry, who sponsored the 20-week ban, said he was disappointed with Beebe's decision and would ask the House and Senate to override the governor's veto. It takes a simple majority in both chambers to override a governor's veto. Republicans hold 51 of the 100 House seats and 21 of the 35 Senate seats.

Beebe announced the decision shortly after Mayberry, R-Hensley, met with the governor and tried to alleviate his concerns about the bill.

"Apparently he and I have differing opinions on that bill," Mayberry said. "We'll enter into the next phase of the legislative process."

Seven states have enacted similar 20-week restrictions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks laws affecting women's health. A similar law in Arizona has been blocked while a federal appeals court reviews a lawsuit challenging it.

In his letter, Beebe cited concerns about the cost of a similar challenge. He wrote that Arkansas had to pay nearly $148,000 in attorneys' fees to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging a 1997 late-term abortion ban that a federal appeals court overturned.

"Litigation fees and costs have increased extensively since then," Beebe wrote. "The taxpayers' exposure, should HB1037 become law, will be significantly greater."

Mayberry's bill included exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Opponents have criticized it for not including exemptions for fatal fetal conditions.

Mayberry said he was confident he would have the votes to override Beebe's veto. House Speaker Davy Carter and Senate President Michael Lamoureux, both Republicans, said they hadn't polled members but also believed there would likely be enough support for an override.

The House approved Mayberry's bill on an 80-10 vote last week. It had been previously approved by the Senate on a 25-7 vote.

Abortion rights advocates who had gathered at the Capitol cheered when Beebe's decision was announced.

"I am very grateful that the governor understood that it's not reasonable for the government to interfere with these very private and complex medical decisions that a woman needs to make with her doctor and with her faith and with her family," said Jill June, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland. "The decision to end a pregnancy is one of the most complicated decisions a woman will make in her life."

The bill marks the 11th time Beebe has vetoed legislation since taking office in 2007.

Beebe, who is serving his second term, has backed some abortion restrictions, including a bill signed earlier this month that bans insurers participating in the exchange created under the federal health care law from covering most abortions. Two years ago, he signed into law a proposal placing new regulations on the clinics that offer the abortion pill and in 2009 he signed legislation that mirrors a federal law banning late-term abortions.

Beebe wouldn't say whether the decision means he'd veto the 12-week ban pending before lawmakers.

"I'm pretty sure I know what I'm going to do on a bill that's even more problematic than the one I already vetoed, but I won't tell you officially until that time," Beebe said.

___

Associated Press Writer Michael Stratford contributed to this report.

___

Andrew DeMillo can be reached at www.twitter.com/ademillo

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/arkansas-governor-vetoes-20-week-abortion-bill-203729791--politics.html

george michael usain bolt Closing Ceremony London 2012 Tom Daley Leryn Franco The Campaign Kinesio tape

Barnes & Noble dispatches Nook Bluetooth speaker through FCC

Barnes & Noble and its Nook may be the subject of many a rumor of late, but that's not stopping the tablet-maker from its business -- which now includes Bluetooth speakers, apparently. We just spotted this previously unseen bad boy lurking in the FCC's antechambers packing the 2.4GHz Bluetooth bands and a rechargeable battery. That'd give some portable audio accompaniment to your Nook HD or other Bluetooth device (like the iPhone and iPod it was also tested with), though we're not sure how B&N's planning to market it. There's now a listing sans photos or other info parked on its site (see MC link), so you might soon be able to read yourself to sleep with that free book.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Wireless

Comments

Source: FCC

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Lbn03XtZOaQ/

hearts roses flower delivery e cards kate upton sports illustrated outback chaka khan

Frostbite Forces Adventurer to Quit Antarctic Trek

Seasoned adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes has had to quit his attempt to be the first person to cross the South Pole on skis during the brutal Antarctic winter.

Fiennes, who has abundant experience in harsh environments, will be evacuated from the coldest continent after developing a case of frostbite, according to a blog post on the website of the expedition, called The Coldest Journey. Fiennes and his team made the decision to have him evacuated while it was still possible before the beginning of the formidable winter, with its near-permanent darkness and temperatures as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius).

"This decision has not been taken lightly and it is, naturally, a huge disappointment to Fiennes and his colleagues," the post said.

Fiennes will be driven by Ski-Doo, a type of snowmobile, some 40 miles (70 kilometers) from his team's current location to Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Station, located near the coast of East Antarctica, according to the blog post. From there, he will make his way by plane to Cape Town, South Africa.

The evacuation plan is currently being hampered by a blizzard at the team's location.

Once Fiennes is evacuated, the rest of the team has elected to carry on with the journey. They are still slated to begin their crossing on the originally planned date of March 21. The full crossing route will take them from Princess Elisabeth through the interior of the continent to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (named for the two explorers that raced to be the first to the South Pole), then over the Transantarctic Mountains onto the Ross Ice Shelf and to the United States' McMurdo Station, situated on the shore of the Ross Sea. In total, the trek will cover more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) and take six months.

Fiennes has gone on previous Antarctic and Arctic excursions, climbed to the summit of Mount Everest and run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, according to his expedition biography.

Reach Andrea Thompson at athompson@techmedianetwork.com and follow her on Twitter @AndreaTOAP and on Pinterest. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/frostbite-forces-adventurer-quit-antarctic-trek-223244775.html

Rihanna Katy Perry Grammys 2013 justin timberlake taylor swift taylor swift Ed Sheeran Fun

South Korea firm had U.S. contract while investing in Iran gas: GAO

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A South Korean construction company reported to have recently engaged in Iran's energy sector had a contract with the U.S. government even as Tehran came under pressure for its disputed nuclear program, a U.S. government watchdog said on Monday.

Daelim Industrial Co had a nearly $1.5 million U.S. government contract to build family housing at a military base in South Korea at some point between mid-2011 and late 2012, the General Accountability Office said in a report on Monday. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress.

Under U.S. sanctions law, any foreign company that has an investment in Iran's energy sector equal to or greater than $20 million is subject to punishments including being cut off from the U.S. financial system. Such companies should also be denied contracts with the U.S. government, it says. The GAO did not say how much Daelim's investments in Iranian energy were worth.

The U.S. sanctions aim to hinder Tehran's nuclear program, which the West believes is enriching uranium that could be used to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Iran denies.

The sanctions law signed in August gave the Obama administration the authority to punish companies that help Iran develop its energy resources, an important source of revenue for the country.

Daelim was one of at least seven companies from China, India, South Korea and South Africa that continued to have investments in Iran in 2012, the GAO said in December, in a report required by a U.S. sanctions law.

A Daelim spokesman in Seoul said the company was simply completing a construction project in Iran that predated the U.S. sanctions.

He added that the building contract did not constitute an investment in Iran's energy sector, as stipulated in the U.S. sanctions law, and that Daelim had not signed any new contracts in the Islamic Republic since 2010.

Daelim, which the GAO said had helped to develop Iran's South Pars gas fields and a liquefied natural gas project in Tombak, was the only one of the companies found also to hold a contract with the U.S. government, the GAO said on Monday.

The GAO has not determined whether the activities of the companies are sanctionable, a determination that would be made by the State Department and other agencies. The GAO provided a copy of the report to the State Department, which declined to comment.

(Additional reporting by Somang Yang in Seoul; Editing by Leslie Adler and Edmund Klamann)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-korea-firm-had-u-contract-while-investing-024826610--finance.html

Jenni Rivera Funeral aspergers Richard Engel Daniel Inouye steelers scarlett johansson tim tebow

Blueprint for an artificial brain: Scientists experiment with memristors that imitate natural nerves

Feb. 26, 2013 ? Scientists have long been dreaming about building a computer that would work like a brain. This is because a brain is far more energy-saving than a computer, it can learn by itself, and it doesn't need any programming. Privatdozent [senior lecturer] Dr. Andy Thomas from Bielefeld University's Faculty of Physics is experimenting with memristors -- electronic microcomponents that imitate natural nerves. Thomas and his colleagues have demonstrated that they could do this a year ago. They constructed a memristor that is capable of learning. Andy Thomas is now using his memristors as key components in a blueprint for an artificial brain.

He will be presenting his results at the beginning of March in the print edition of the Journal of Physics published by the Institute of Physics in London.

Memristors are made of fine nanolayers and can be used to connect electric circuits. For several years now, the memristor has been considered to be the electronic equivalent of the synapse. Synapses are, so to speak, the bridges across which nerve cells (neurons) contact each other. Their connections increase in strength the more often they are used. Usually, one nerve cell is connected to other nerve cells across thousands of synapses.

Like synapses, memristors learn from earlier impulses. In their case, these are electrical impulses that (as yet) do not come from nerve cells but from the electric circuits to which they are connected. The amount of current a memristor allows to pass depends on how strong the current was that flowed through it in the past and how long it was exposed to it.

Andy Thomas explains that because of their similarity to synapses, memristors are particularly suitable for building an artificial brain -- a new generation of computers. 'They allow us to construct extremely energy-efficient and robust processors that are able to learn by themselves.' Based on his own experiments and research findings from biology and physics, his article is the first to summarize which principles taken from nature need to be transferred to technological systems if such a neuromorphic (nerve like) computer is to function. Such principles are that memristors, just like synapses, have to 'note' earlier impulses, and that neurons react to an impulse only when it passes a certain threshold.

Thanks to these properties, synapses can be used to reconstruct the brain process responsible for learning, says Andy Thomas. He takes the classic psychological experiment with Pavlov's dog as an example. The experiment shows how you can link the natural reaction to a stimulus that elicits a reflex response with what is initially a neutral stimulus -- this is how learning takes place. If the dog sees food, it reacts by salivating. If the dog hears a bell ring every time it sees food, this neutral stimulus will become linked to the stimulus eliciting a reflex response. As a result, the dog will also salivate when it hears only the bell ringing and no food is in sight. The reason for this is that the nerve cells in the brain that transport the stimulus eliciting a reflex response have strong synaptic links with the nerve cells that trigger the reaction.

If the neutral bell-ringing stimulus is introduced at the same time as the food stimulus, the dog will learn. The control mechanism in the brain now assumes that the nerve cells transporting the neutral stimulus (bell ringing) are also responsible for the reaction -- the link between the actually 'neutral' nerve cell and the 'salivation' nerve cell also becomes stronger. This link can be trained by repeatedly bringing together the stimulus eliciting a reflex response and the neutral stimulus. 'You can also construct such a circuit with memristors -- this is a first step towards a neuromorphic processor,' says Andy Thomas.

'This is all possible because a memristor can store information more precisely than the bits on which previous computer processors have been based,' says Thomas. Both a memristor and a bit work with electrical impulses. However, a bit does not allow any fine adjustment -- it can only work with 'on' and 'off'. In contrast, a memristor can raise or lower its resistance continuously. 'This is how memristors deliver a basis for the gradual learning and forgetting of an artificial brain,' explains Thomas.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Universitaet Bielefeld.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Andy Thomas. Memristor-based neural networks. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 2013; 46 (9): 093001 DOI: 10.1088/0022-3727/46/9/093001

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/information_technology/~3/eQVwYoYOj_w/130226101400.htm

Lilit Avagyan Nashville TV Show VP debate drew brees drew brees sandusky Sam Champion