FINDINGS

Good and Bad News On Breast-Feeding

Nearly three-quarters of new mothers in the United States are breast-feeding their babies, but they quit too soon and resort to infant formula too often, federal health officials said yesterday.

A government survey found that three months after birth about 30 percent of new moms feed their babies breast milk alone. At six months, only 11 percent are breast-feeding exclusively.

Formula is not as good at protecting babies against diseases, eczema and childhood obesity. Ideally, nearly all mothers should breast-feed their babies for six months or more, said David Paige of Johns Hopkins University. But many do not -- because of jobs, the inconvenience and perhaps convincing advertising for baby formula.

The annual random-digit-dial survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the percentage of mothers who started breast-feeding rose slightly from 2000 to 2004, from 71 percent to 74 percent, based on nearly 17,000 responses. That is a new high.

Silent Pauses in Music Stimulate the Brain

Music may soothe the savage breast, but the brain thrills to the sound of silence.

That's the finding by Stanford and McGill university scientists who watched brain images of 18 volunteers listening to a series of movements within symphonies, punctuated by frequent pauses.

A one-to-two-second break between movements triggers a flurry of mental activity, they found. When the music resumes, the action shifts to a different part of the brain, then subsides.

"The pause itself becomes the event," said neuroscientist Vinod Menon of Stanford's School of Medicine. Menon is the senior author of a paper published in the journal Neuron. "A pause is not a time where nothing happens."

Skillful composers have long used silence to build a sense of anticipation -- some of music's finest moments are spent in transition.

Stanford's snapshots of this pause shine a light into what neuroscientists call "segmentation processes" -- the techniques used by the brain to take a stream of sensory information and parcel it into more easily comprehended pieces.

In Stem Cell Scandal, An Accidental Advance?

An analysis of a now-discredited South Korean stem cell line suggests the scientists may have inadvertently created the first human embryonic stem cells derived from human eggs alone, researchers said.

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk falsely claimed to have been the first to clone a human embryo using a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer in scientific papers published in 2004 and 2005. That work was discredited and the papers were withdrawn in a scandal that stunned scientists.

But researchers at Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston believe that the South Korean scientists may have unwittingly made a significant discovery.

"What is so interesting is they did by this by mistake," said George Daley, whose analysis appears in the journal Cell Stem Cell. "They didn't really know what they had."

Using a new genetic sleuthing method he derived with colleagues, he said they have determined that the South Korean cell line was derived from parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction in which an egg develops into an embryo without sperm.

-- From News Services