MONTREAL — A unique, all-season study of the effects of global warming in the Arctic Ocean shows that climate change is reducing biodiversity and posing ‘significant challenges to the survival of some of the Arctic’s unique marine species.’

The study also shows that climate change is resulting in the increased distribution through the Arctic food chain of contaminants, such as methylmercury.

The $40-million study, which was conducted by 10 scientific teams from 27 countries, spent 2007-2008 studying open water along what are called flaw leads, or breaks in multi-year ice, where they studied how global warming is changing the entire marine ecosystem in the Arctic.

‘The Arctic Ocean is definitely changing on a whole lot of different fronts,’ said Prof. David Barber, of the University of Manitoba.

The study was released Tuesday at the Polar Year conference in Montreal. The data was gathered aboard the research icebreaker Amundsen in the Amundsen Gulf south of Banks Island in the eastern Beaufort Sea.

Scientists explained that with ice coverage and ice thickness reaching record lows over the last decade, the energy dynamics of the Arctic Ocean are changing with profound effects on weather, ocean currents and plant and animal life.

With more solar energy piercing the open waters, […]

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It could be a pivotal case for prosecutors in the nationwide scandal of child sex-abuse by Roman Catholic priests.

Five weeks of testimony concluded Thursday in the Philadelphia trial of a senior clergyman who allegedly chose to protect the church, instead of the children.

It’s the first time in the U.S. that a senior official with the Catholic Church has faced charges in the church’s child sexual abuse crisis.

CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reports that Monsignor William Lynn is accused of endangering children by helping reassign priests suspected of child sex abuse to jobs where they continued to prey on boys and girls. Lynn was in charge of Philadelphia’s priests from 1992 to 2004.

Jurors have heard graphic testimony from victims recounting how priests under Lynn’s supervision sexually abused them sometimes inside churches. One witness testified he went directly to Monsignor Lynn with his complaints of abuse.

Lynne Abraham, a former Philadelphia district attorney, said: ‘This is the first time in the history of a prosecution in this country where a member of the hierarchy of the church has been put on trial in a public courtroom for covering up sex abuse.’

Abraham spent five years investigating the Philadelphia archdiocese. She found evidence church officials […]

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In 1972, after a month of deliberation, Congress launched the nation’s most ambitious experiment in universal health care: a change to the Social Security Act that granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income.

It was a supremely hopeful moment. Although the technology to keep kidney patients alive through dialysis had arrived, it was still unattainable for all but a lucky few. At one hospital, a death panel — or ‘God committee’ in the parlance of the time — was deciding who got it and who didn’t. The new program would help about 11,000 Americans, just for starters. For a modest initial price tag of $135 million, it would cover not only their dialysis and transplants, but all of their medical needs. Some consider it the closest that the United States has come to socialized medicine.

Now, almost four decades later, a program once envisioned as a model for a national health care system has evolved into a hulking monster. Taxpayers spend more than $20 billion a year to care for those on dialysis — about $77,000 per patient, more, by some accounts, than any other nation. Yet the United States continues to […]

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Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgrade of Spain’s credit rating Thursday for the second time this year highlights the fact that austerity alone is not enough to tackle the euro zone debt problem. Experts tell CNBC that European leaders need to focus on growth now.

‘Clearly, austerity and growth cannot go hand in hand… I think we need to see European leaders break out of this pure austerity mode and try and do something different in terms of pro-growth policies,’ Vasu Menon, Vice President, Group Wealth Management, OCBC Bank, told CNBC Asia’s ‘Cash Flow.’

Spain’s long-term debt was cut to Triple-B plus from A, while its short-term rating was lowered to A-2 from A-1. In January, S&P downgraded Spain along with eight other euro zone countries of their coveted triple-A status.

The latest downgrade was prompted by concerns over growing government debt amid a contracting economy. The Bank of Spain said earlier this week that the economy probably contracted 0.4 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Official figures are due April 30.

Austerity measures are beginning to impact European economies as they slip into recession, according to Menon.

‘We can see that it’s starting to impact the economies in Europe, not just in the […]

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They should be the healthiest people on the planet, the ‘almost grown ups’ still in the bloom of youth and full of dreams for the future. But today’s adolescents are instead a troubled generation, marooned in a no man’s land between childhood and adulthood, prey to forces beyond their control.

Far from being the healthiest time of life, adolescence is instead a period of maximum risk and maximum vulnerability according to scientists, as still-growing bodies and undeveloped minds hurl themselves into experimentation with drink, drugs and sex. They are targeted by the mass marketing of unhealthy products and lifestyles – tobacco, alcohol, junk food – which doctors compare to an infectious disease epidemic. And evidence shows British teenagers are among those exposed to the greatest threats.

In a series of papers on adolescent health published in The Lancet today, scientists describe how new research has changed our understanding of adolescence which was thought to start with the physical changes to the body around puberty and to be completed when growth stopped in the late teens. Now researchers believe the brain goes on maturing and is not fully developed until at least the age of 24.

While puberty catapults adolescents into a period of […]

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