JEREMY LAURANCE, Health Editor - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan:
If you are a woman hoping to get pregnant, beware of that morning espresso or lunchtime latte – and maybe hold the Red Bull, too.
Research suggests that caffeine, the world’s most widely consumed stimulant drug, can affect fertility. One study of 9,000 Dutch women found that drinking more than four cups a day cut the chances of conceiving by about a quarter. Now scientists think they have discovered why.
Caffeine reduces muscle activity in the Fallopian tubes that carry eggs from a woman’s ovaries to her womb.
Little is known about how eggs move through the Fallopian tubes. It was generally assumed that the tiny, hair-like projections in the lining of the tubes, called cilia, moved the eggs along with the help of muscle contractions in the tube walls.
In experiments on mice, American researchers have shown that the drug inhibits the muscle contractions necessary to transport the eggs. In the laboratory studies at the University of Nevada, Professor Sean Ward has shown that caffeine stops the action of specialised pacemaker cells in the wall of the tubes.
These cells co-ordinate tube contractions so they occur in waves. When they are inhibited, eggs cannot move down the tubes. The research, published in the British […]
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LEE FANG, - Think Progress
Stephan: I am running two stories today which I hope will make it clear how completely ideological -- and divorced from reality -- the right has become. It is hard and disturbing for me to accept that people such as this have been voted into office and wield real power that can affect the lives of everyone in the U.S.
Last weekend, Rep. Dan Webster (R-FL) appeared on ‘Good Life 45,
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Stephan: Robert Gates probably knows more about American defense than anyone else. I think it is important to take what he says seriously.
Each year we spend more than twice what all the other nations of the world taken together spend. By some estimates the full defense, intelligence, homeland security budget runs to over a trillion dollars a year. I think it is worth asking: why is the world so much scarier for Americans than everyone else, and what did we do to make it that way?
As he prepares to leave the Pentagon after a four-and-a-half-year stint as defense secretary, Robert Gates has been making the rounds to his old stomping grounds, delivering farewell addresses designed to make his audiences squirm.
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He did it again today, before the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank that, as he put it, has been ‘inextricably tied to the war in Iraq, the conflict that pulled me out of private life and back into the public arena’ (a move about which Gates clearly feels both honored and ambivalent).
His message to the assembled neocons was this: Like it or not, the defense budget is going to be cut over the next 10 years; he’s already weeded out the particularly wasteful or redundant weapons systems and bureaucratic structures; so we’re going to have to slice into ‘force structure’-Army divisions, Marine expeditionary units, Air Force wings, Navy ships-the meat and muscle of U.S. fighting power.
Rather than take the easy way out and ‘salami slice’ a certain percentage of all costs off the top, a technique sure to leave a ‘hollowed-out’ force (plenty of troops and weapons but too little money for operations, maintenance, or training), Gates said the Congress, the president, and […]
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ZAID JILANI, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is the truth of the thinking on the right. They do not believe there should be any safety net. Each person -- sink or swim -- is responsible for themselves and should look to no one else for help, or expect it to be forthcoming.
This past January, the House GOP caucus insisted that the session of Congress be launched with a reading of the Constitution. The member of Congress who led this idea into fruition was Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and he was also the first reader.
But at a town hall meeting that took place last week and was captured on YouTube, Goodlatte showed his pre-20th century view of the Constitution. At one point during the town hall presentation, Goodlatte displayed a pie chart to the audience showing the various programs that consume the federal budget, with Social Security and Medicare consuming the biggest sections. One constituent, referencing the pie chart, said that everything on the chart is unconstitutional. Goodlatte responded that he agrees, but that the courts keep ruling the opposite way:
CONSTITUENT: Everything that the federal government does on that pie chart is unconstitutional […] If I violated my marriage contract the way the federal government violates the constitution I’d be in divorce court tomorrow!
GOODLATTE: I hope you’re not. Here’s the deal. You’re absolutely right! But you have one problem, the Supreme Court ruling that these programs are constitutional.
At another point, a different constituent […]
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ROBIN SIDEL and AMIR EFRATI, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
Three of the nation’s largest banks are racing into the growing battle over how consumers move money and make payments, launching a service Wednesday that lets people use their checking accounts to send each other money with an email address or cellphone number.
Three of the nation’s largest banks are launching a service Wednesday that lets people use their checking accounts to send each other money with an email address or cellphone number. Robin Sidel has details.
Banks are looking to hold onto their influence over consumers, who are increasingly shunning checks and cash, turning instead to new nonbank technologies to spend their money. The new service from Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. takes aim at the popular PayPal offering. At stake are billions of dollars in credit-card, overdraft and checking fees each year.
‘Customers want to move payments from paper to electronic methods, so if we can meet our customers’ financial needs, they will be better customers with us,’ said Mike Kennedy, who develops payment strategies at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo and is chairman of the new venture.
Google Inc. has its own designs on the payments business, hoping to facilitate payments as well […]
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