BEIJING: Chinese authorities are investigating eggs which bounce after being boiled and may make men sterile, state media reported Friday, in the latest food safety scare to hit the country. The eggs, being referred to in Chinese media and on the Internet as "rubber eggs" or "ping pong eggs," are too hard to eat, raising suspicion they are fake, after appearing in "small numbers" in markets nationwide, Xinhua news agency said.
HOUSTON: A woman whose firing from her job over a request to pump breast milk was supported by a Texas judge said on Thursday the decision was unfair and discriminatory, and her lawyer said an appeal was under consideration. Donnicia Venters, who worked at a debt collection agency called Houston Funding, gave birth to a daughter in December 2008. When she told a vice president of the company on Feb 17, 2009 that she wanted to make arrangements for a private place to pump breast milk she was told her position had been filled.
NEW YORK: A synthetic version of the "hunger hormone" ghrelin might help limit the loss of appetite that can come with cancer chemotherapy, a small study from Japan suggests. Ghrelin is a hormone secreted by the gut to boost appetite. Because of that, scientists have been studying it as a target in the obesity war, which has included work on an anti-obesity "vaccine" that inhibits ghrelin. But the research has met with little success so far.
NEW YORK: Recreational runners who undergo hip resurfacing, an alternative to a total hip replacement, may be able to return to the sport after surgery, according to a recent study from France. Researchers found that more than 90 percent of hip resurfacing patients who ran before surgery resumed running afterwards.
LONDON: Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes — may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.
In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and other experts said new categories of mental illness identified in the book were at best "silly" and at worst "worrying and dangerous."
