The battle that sent high school junior Gary Durant to jail was over in minutes. Two rival groups in the Carver Terrace complex of Northeast Washington traded gunfire.
Complete Story...

(sciencedaily) Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter. . . .  More...

(nyt) California faces the risk not just of devastating earthquakes but also of a catastrophic storm that could tear at the coasts, inundate the Central Valley and cause four to five times as much economic damage as a large quake, scientists and emergency planners warn. The potential for such a storm was described at a conference of federal and California officials that ended Friday. Combining advanced flood mapping and atmospheric projections with data on California’s geologic flood history, over 100 scientists calculated the probable consequences of a “superstorm” carrying tropical moisture from the South Pacific and dropping up to 10 feet of rain across the state. “Floods are as much a part of our lives in California as earthquakes are,” said Lucy Jones, the chief scientist for the United States Geological Survey’s multi-hazards initiative, adding, “We are probably not going to be able to handle the biggest ones. ” The geological survey estimates that such a storm could cause up to $300 billion in damage.  More...

(mark peters) Originally, “blizzard” involved no snow, wind chill, or wintry conditions at all. The Oxford English Dictionary records it as an early 18th century word for a sharp, violent blow, first found in 1829. As is often the case, the origin is unclear; it probably has some relation to words like “blow,” “blast,” “blister,” and “bluster. ” The Century Dictionary suggests it’s an alteration of “blazer” and provides a definition a little more in tune with the current sense: “A general discharge of guns; a rattling volley; a general; blazing away’. ” The Century also notes that “blizzard” meant verbal as well as physical violence: “Figuratively, a volley; a sudden (oratorical) attack; an overwhelming retort.  More...

(stldispatch) St. Louis has finally relinquished its title as the sexually transmitted disease capital, dropping to number two in the country for rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia. For several years the city’s disease rates topped the country. St. Louis has a chlamydia rate of 1,225 cases per 100,000 residents.  More...

(time) It is hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories of the outside, and a television set. From this subterranean realm, Felix, 5, Stefan, 18, and Kerstin, 19, have now come blinking into the world.  More...

(msnbc) A new study shows that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are almost four times as likely as others to be bullies. And, in an intriguing corollary, the children with ADHD symptoms were almost 10 times as likely as others to have been regular targets of bullies prior to the onset of those symptoms, according to the report in the February issue of the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. The study followed 577 children — the entire population of fourth graders from a municipality near Stockholm — for a year. The researchers interviewed parents, teachers and children to determine which kids were likely to have ADHD. Children showing signs of the disorder were then seen by a child neurologist for diagnosis.  More...

(sdunion-tribune) A team at the tiny San Diego biotechnology company Stemagen has become the first to document its successful cloning of human embryos by fusing donated egg cells with the DNA from skin cells of an adult man, according to an article that will be published online today by the journal Stem Cells. The company's work, led by chief science officer Andrew French, is a major step toward creating embryonic stem cell lines from cloned human embryos, or cells that are specific to one person and capable of evolving into the 200 different cell types in the body. Theoretically such cells one day could be used as a human toolbox: Someone's own embryonic stem cells could be transplanted into that person without the fear of rejection and could replace cells destroyed by diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. The process, known as therapeutic cloning, has plenty of opponents because the embryo theoretically could be implanted into a woman's uterus for reproduction. Reproductive cloning is illegal in California, and Stemagen said it stuck to a research protocol that met all current medical and ethical standards.  More...