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Amid an international outcry, China carried out the death sentence of a British man convicted of smuggling heroin into the western province of Xinjiang. London had sought clemency for Akmal Shaikh, 53, arguing that he was mentally ill and had been exploited by other smugglers. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "appalled" by the Dec. 29 lethal injection, which Chinese officials defended as being in accordance with...
...hints that the drugs could make anyone - not just depressed people - feel better raised tantalizing (and troubling) questions about the future of mood-bending drugs. If Prozac gives you an up even when you're not down, why wouldn't you want to take it? Dr. Peter Kramer of Brown University asked that question in his best-selling 1993 book, Listening to Prozac. A drug that makes patients feel "better than well," he suggested, might give rise to a new era of "cosmetic psychopharmacology," in which reshaping your personality would be as easy as highlighting your hair...
Once upon a time in the annals of women's stories, getting married was the fairy-tale ending. These days, marital ambivalence rules the literary scene. December brought Julie Powell's new memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession (Little, Brown; 307 pages), in which the Julie & Julia author tells the sad, sordid tale of the recent years she spent butchering pigs, cows and her husband's heart. Meanwhile, in a New York Times Magazine story, writer Elizabeth Weil detailed her efforts to subject her "perfect union" to every kind of therapeutic scrutiny available in Northern California...
...vitamins acted as methyl donors: they caused methyl groups to attach more frequently to the agouti gene in utero, thereby altering its expression. And so without altering the genomic structure of mouse DNA - simply by furnishing B vitamins - Jirtle and Waterland got agouti mothers to produce healthy brown pups that were of normal weight and not prone to diabetes...
...body scanners, which produce X-ray-like images that can reveal if there are packages concealed beneath a passenger's clothing. Last week, the Netherlands said it would introduce compulsory body scans for all passengers at Dutch airports as soon as possible. Just days later, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown followed suit, announcing that the scanners would also be introduced at airports in the U.K. However, the two countries may be on their own - other European Union members are hesitant to spend the money to install the scanners amid concerns over privacy violations and the effectiveness of the machines...