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Daily Rounds: Caritas Hearing Today; Motherhood Triggers Brain Growth; Lifestyle Influences Genetics; The Oldest Galaxy Discovered: House Calls On Facebook

Cerberus has history of tough decisions - The Boston Globe "Over the past decade, it has shut down a Houston mortgage company and fired nearly 800 employees, after first canceling their health insurance. It took a bottling company public without disclosing that it had just lost a major client, then let go hundreds of workers. And it shuttered a Wisconsin paper mill three years after entering the paper business...This morning, at a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court hearing, Caritas and Cerberus face the final hurdle in an approval process that began in the spring." (Boston Globe)

The real 'mommy brain': New mothers' grew "Motherhood may actually cause the brain to grow, not turn it into mush, as some have claimed. Exploratory research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up in areas linked to motivation and behavior, and that mothers who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in key parts of the mid-brain." (EurekAlert)

Lifestyle Factors May Alter Genetic Traits, Study Finds | WBUR & NPR"Morris set up an experiment with lab rats to see if the biological consequences of a father overeating could somehow get passed on to his daughters." Incredibly, it seems, they could. When the researcher looked specifically at the daughters, he found that "all of them had a similar genetic makeup, but those with overweight fathers had some of the same problems that their dads did. They weren't overweight, but their production of insulin was impaired. The finding, says Andy Feinberg, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, is "a way it's saying the metabolic sins of the father can be visited on the daughters." (WBUR | 90.9 FM)

Astronomers Say They've Found Oldest Galaxy So Far - NYTimes.com "Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far." (The New York Times)

Nurse spots cancer on Facebook picture | News | Nursing Times (nursingtimes.net) "Nurse Nicola Sharp...was browsing through friend Michele Freeman’s profile when she saw a flash photo of Michele’s daughter Grace. It showed the two-year-old with a white pupil in her left eye instead of the usual “red eye” effect. Ms. Sharp knew this could indicate an eye tumour and, as a result, the child was diagnosed and treated for retinoblastoma.

This program aired on October 21, 2010. The audio for this program is not available.

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