Daily Rounds: Rethinking Cancer; Insurers' Earnings Strong; Twins Reunited; The Science of Annoying

Beyond the Genome, Cancer’s Secrets Come Into Sharper Focus - NYTimes.com "But recent discoveries have been complicating the picture with tangles of new detail. Cancer appears to be even more willful and calculating than previously imagined." (nytimes.com)

Health insurers post strong quarterly earnings from Business Updates "The biggest commercial health insurers in Massachusetts yesterday posted sharply higher second-quarter earnings, citing their efforts to rein in administrative spending and a slower rise in medical costs reflected in the contracts they’ve negotiated with hospitals and doctors. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s largest health insurance company, recorded net income of $56.5 million for the three months ending June 3o, a reversal from the $14.3 million loss Blue Cross reported for the corresponding period last year." (boston.com)

Learning Your Sister Is 'Someone Else's Twin' : NPR "Thirty-seven years ago, identical twins Begona and Delia were born at almost the same time as another infant named Beatriz in a hospital in the Canary Islands. Due to a hospital mistake, one of the twins was switched with Beatriz. "This caused the single child [Beatriz] to grow up with the wrong set of parents and caused an unrelated pair of girls to grow up in a family thinking all their lives that they were fraternal twins," says Nancy Segal, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton.... the [true] twins didn't meet until they were 28 years old — an observant retail clerk confused one of them for the other one, who was her good friend." (npr.org)

Why do we get so annoyed? - The Boston Globe "But though being annoyed is a near-universal experience, very few scientists actually study it. The examination of anger, frustration, and neuroticism all date at least to Freud’s couch, but annoyance is largely overlooked as its own experience, according to science journalist Joe Palca, who has just published a book with colleague Flora Lichtman called “Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us.’’' (boston.com)