Britain's leading scientific institution said it is urging countries to back a campaign to stop a possible ban on stem cell research as part of a global treaty banning human cloning.
The London-based Royal Society is stepping up its drive to push the United Nations to ban the cloning of babies, but to make no ruling on using the technology for medical research, or therapeutic cloning, at its 59th General Session in October.
The 191-nation General Assembly is divided over whether to allow therapeutic cloning to continue or to adopt a broad cloning ban championed by the Bush administration and Costa Rica with strong backing from the U.S. anti-abortion movement and many predominantly Roman Catholic nations.
Eat s'more: Scientists have found that eating dark chocolate appears to improve the function of important cells lining the wall of blood vessels for at least three hours.
The study, involving 17 healthy young volunteers who agreed to eat a bar of dark chocolate and then get an ultrasound, found that eating dark chocolate seemed to make the blood vessels more flexible, which helps prevent the hardening of the arteries that leads to heart attacks.
But the scientists cautioned that the weight gain from eating a lot of chocolate probably would cancel out the apparent benefit.
Great Wall from space: China has launched a satellite that will carry out land surveying and other scientific projects for several days and return to Earth, government media reported.
The satellite blasted off at 3:50 p.m. local time atop a Long March 2C rocket from the Jiuquan space center in the country's northwest desert, the Xinhua News Agency said.
It was the 19th recoverable science satellite China has launched, the agency said. The report said the satellite would remain in orbit "for a few days" but didn't specify when it would return to Earth.
Just say yes: Can Prozac help you kick cocaine? Can Ritalin? How about a blood pressure pill or medicine for muscle spasms? If you're an alcoholic, could you get help staying sober by taking an anti-nausea drug used by cancer patients?
Scientists are exploring those questions right now. In fact, in the field of addiction medicine, one of the hottest sources of new drugs is ... old drugs. Despite years of research, there is no drug approved in the United States for treating cocaine dependence. To find such a treatment, the National Institute on Drug Abuse is sponsoring human studies of 21 medicines already on the market for something else. That's about two-thirds of all the potential cocaine drugs being tested on people, says the director of NIDA's pharmacotherapy division.
Over at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, nearly all the potential alcoholism drugs tested on people under institute sponsorship over the past 10 years were previously approved for some other use, says the co-leader of the institute's medications development team.
Compiled by Laila Weir. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
