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Very obese women should be denied fertility treatment, experts say. The British Fertility Society is recommending women with a body mass index of 36 and over should not be allowed access to fertility treatment. Underweight women and those classed just as obese (BMI over 29) should be forced to address their weight before starting treatment, the society said. NHS guidelines say overweight women should be warned of the health risks, but do not impose any ban on treatment. Being overweight can put both the health of the mother and child at risk through problems such as gestational diabetes and high...

"The British Fertility Society is recommending women with a body mass index of 36 and over should not be allowed access to fertility treatment. Underweight women and those classed just as obese (BMI over 29) should be forced to address their weight before starting treatment, the society said. "

TUESDAY, Aug. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Adult obesity rates increased in 31 states during the past year, leaving an estimated two-thirds of Americans vulnerable to fatal diseases such as diabetes, stroke and cancer.This, despite federal and state government efforts to curb the overweight epidemic, according to a new report from the Trust for America's Health.The report, titled F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing America, 2006, was released Tuesday and is the third in a series of annual reports by the trust detailing state obesity rates as well as the effectiveness of government policies to fight the problem.According...

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.” Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing. If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless...

The American Association for the Advancement of Science claims for its journal Science “the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million.” Be that as it may, Science is the Dan Rather of science journalism. “Fake Data, but Could the Idea Still Be Right?” in the July 14 issue actually makes the following statement (emphases mine): European investigators last week confirmed that a pioneering oral cancer researcher in Norway had fabricated much of his work. The news left experts in his field with a pressing question: What should...

Aug. 7, 2006 — - Last week President Bush underwent his annual physical. It revealed he was in pretty good health, except for one thing. According to his body mass index, he's overweight. His BMI was 26, putting him in the lower range of the overweight category. He weighs 196 pounds, meaning he has gained 5 pounds since last year and his percentage of body fat has increased to 16.8 percent, which is, overall, pretty good for a man who just turned 60. (To calculate your BMI, go here). Still, the appropriate body weight range is 157 to 192 pounds...

Apocalyptic visions of climate change used by newspapers, environmental groups and the UK government amount to "climate porn", a think-tank says. The report from the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says over-use of alarming images is a "counsel of despair". It says they make people feel helpless and says the use of cataclysmic imagery is partly commercially motivated. However, newspapers have defended their coverage of a "crucial issue". 'Nobody knows' The IPPR report also criticises the reporting of individual climate-friendly acts as "mundane, domestic and uncompelling". The style of climate change discourse is that we maximise the problem...

A very suspicious (and perhaps a tad demented) person might see more than just evidence of global warming in this heat wave that's crisping up the country of late. Clearly, there's a mysterious scheme afoot to get Al Gore elected — or, re-elected if you like — as president of the United States in 2008. Laugh if you like, but chew on this: Can it be mere coincidence that a “An Inconvenient Truth,” a movie about a PowerPoint presentation that consists of mostly scientific exposition, by a guy once so stiff he made John Kerry seem like a drag queen,...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- Gas escaping from the ocean floor may provide some answers to understanding historical global warming cycles and provide information on current climate changes, according to a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The findings are reported in the July 20 on-line version of the scientific journal, Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Remarkable and unexpected support for this idea occurred when divers and scientists from UC Santa Barbara observed and videotaped a massive blowout of methane from the ocean floor. It happened in an area of gas and oil seepage coming out of small volcanoes...

RESEARCHERS believe they have found a key insight into deja vu, the eerie sensation of seeing something that has already been experienced, the New Scientist magazine reports. Experiments suggest that deja vu can be triggered independently, without a real memory to prompt it, the British weekly magazine reports in its latest issue. Recognising a familiar object or scene is believed to unleash two processes in the brain. First, the mind searches through its memory archive to see if the contents of that scene have been observed before. If so, a separate part of the brain then identifies the scene or...

Few will know this genetic truth, because the 5-year-old's parents and school administrators have agreed that it's in his best interest to blend in as a female. Mental health professionals have diagnosed Pat - not his real name - with gender dysphoria, a condition in which a person believes that he or she is the opposite gender. After two years of examination, they have determined that he is not simply effeminate or going through a phase. "Gender dysphoria can take place during a fetus' development in the womb," said noted gender specialist and sexologist Marilyn Volker, Ph.D., of Miami. While...

The most amazing thing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed into its pages. Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum, 310 pages, $27.95) What's most amazing about Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson's modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism,...

Below is an eight page review of information on the subject of "global warming," and a petition in the form of a reply card. Please consider these materials carefully. The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds. This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide...

It is now firmly established, repeated ad nauseam in the media and elsewhere, that the debate over global warming has been settled by scientific consensus. The subject is closed. It seems unnecessary to labour the point, but here are a couple of typical statements: "The scientific consensus is clear: human-caused climate change is happening" (David Suzuki Foundation); "There is overwhelming scientific consensus" that greenhouse gases emitted by man cause global temperatures to rise (Mother Jones). Back when modern science was born, the battle between consensus and new science worked the other way around. More often than not, the consensus of...

A new Canadian study suggests a male's sexual orientation is influenced by so-called nature as opposed to nurture. Researchers at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., found evidence that the more biological older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be homosexual, findings which suggest a man's sexual orientation is genetically determined. The study says "prenatal mechanism (s) ... affect men's sexual orientation development," which means sexual orientation may be the result of biological processes that occur in the womb. The study's author, Prof. Anthony F. Bogaert, explored the causes behind what is called the fraternal birth...

Darwinism & the Culture of Death June 2006By Anne Barbeau Gardiner Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany. By Richard Weikart. Palgrave Macmillan. 312 pages. $59.95. From Darwin to Hitler is a fine work about how Darwin's notion of morality virtually supplanted Christian morality in Germany between the 1870s and the 1930s. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin suggested that morality was the result of biological evolution and that it differed only in degree, not in...

In Ann Coulter's latest book, she asserts that "liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion,'" including a creation mythology (evolution), priests (public school teachers) and a holy sacrament (abortion). "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," is the fifth book written by the best-selling author and commentator. "Godless" hits store shelves on June 6, 2006 (6/6/06, a date she deliberately chose since the numbers correspond to the mark of the beast.) Cybercast News Service interviewed Ann Coulter about her book. Our questions and her replies are published here, in their entirety. Cybercast News Service: During his May...

[The rhythm method and embryonic death J Med Ethics 2006; 32: 355-6]The “rhythm method” may kill off more embryos than other contraceptive methods, such as coils, morning after pills, and oral contraceptives, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.The method relies on abstinence during the most fertile period of a woman’s menstrual cycle. For a woman who has regular 28 day cycles, this is around days 10 to 17 of the cycle.It is the only method of birth control condoned by the Catholic Church, because it doesn’t interfere with conception, so allowing nature to take its course. It...

(AP) Is President Bush likely to see Al Gore's documentary about global warming? "Doubt it," Mr. Bush said coolly Monday. But Mr. Bush should watch it, Gore shot back. In fact, the former Democratic vice president offered to come to the White House any time, any day to show Mr. Bush either his documentary or a slide show on global warming that he's shown more than 1,000 times around the world. ---snip--- The White House said Mr. Bush already has acknowledged the impact of human behavior on global warming. "The president noted in 2001 the increase in temperatures over the...