Autism symptoms can improve with age

Washington, September 27 : The symptoms of the brain development disorder autism can improve with age, says an assistant professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.

The new finding is based on a study whose first author Paul T. Shattuck worked on it as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Waisman Center.

Plants may help uncover why people respond differently to prescription drugs

Washington, September 27 : Researchers at the University of California, Riverside say that plants can be used to study why prescription medications work successfully to cure an ailment in some people, while the same dose of the same drug can cause an adverse reaction in others.

“The genetics behind variable drug responses is not peculiar to humans but exists also in other branches on the tree of life,” Nature Chemical Biology quoted Sean Cutler, an assistant professor of plant cell biology at UC Riverside, as saying.

Heavy exercise during early pregnancy may triple odds of miscarriage

London, September 27 : Danish researchers have advised women not to take any strenuous exercise in the early stages of pregnancy because it may triple the risk of miscarriage.

Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark quizzed more than 90,000 women on their exercise regime, and linked their answers to the outcome of their pregnancies.

Saddam asked Bush for a billion dollars to go into exile

London, Sept.27 : Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was hanged last December for crimes against humanity, is reported to have offered to step down and go into exile a month before the invasion of Iraq by Allied forces.

Anticipating defeat, Saddam is said to have approached U.S. President George W Bush with the offer that included going away for good in return for 500 million pounds (one billion dollars), the Daily Mail reports.

China’s Three Gorges Dam, a disaster in the making, say officials

London, Sept.27 : Chinese Communist Party officials have warned that the Three Gorges Dam project has the makings of a major environmental catastrophe.

In an unprecedented admission of blame, the officials called for the urgent introduction of preventive measures.

China has been promoting the world’s biggest hydroelectric project as the best way to end centuries of floods along the basin of the Yangtze and to provide energy to fuel the country’s economic boom.

Nazi doctors’ training college in Germany up for sale

London, Sept.27 : A manor house in an idyllic north-east German village, which was once used as a college to train Third Reich doctors’, is up for sale.

According to The Times, these trained doctors went on to sterilise “sub-humans” - the mentally and physically handicapped, and gypsy women, and ran a terrifyingly thorough euthanasia programme.

Now, the cash-strapped elders of Alt Rehse where the manor house, which trained about 20,000 doctors is located, want to get rid of the house.

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