The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today unveiled the winners of an unusual competition in which academic researchers teamed up with pharmaceutical companies to propose new uses for abandoned drugs. The nine projects, funded at a total of $12.7 million a year, show that NIH’s 19-month-old National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is achieving its goal of finding new ways to speed drug development, NCATS officials said. (Science)

U.S. healthcare inflation is projected to drop to 6.5 percent next year despite millions more newly insured Americans added to the system, consultants say. (UPI)

The American Medical Association declared obesity a disease, which means 90 million U.S. adults and children have a medical condition requiring treatment. (UPI)

Pollutants in the air are known to affect brain development, but the first national study of in utero exposure and autism rates raises new concerns. (CNN)

The House of Representatives voted this evening to pass legislation to ban abortion after 20 weeks, except in what Democrats assailed as “narrow” cases of incest of a minor, rape, and health of the mother, prompting a partisan debate on the House floor as lawmakers grappled over the question of how soon a fetus is able to detect pain in the womb. (ABC News)

Japanese experts were on Tuesday set to discuss rules for experiments with animal-human embryos, as scientists seek permission for tests that could see human organs produced inside the growing body of an animal. (Fox News)

Forty-one states have enacted abortion restrictions at different stages of pregnancy. The chart below shows at which point after a woman’s last menstrual period that state laws ban abortion. Each bar’s height is proportional to the state’s population. (New York Times)

Terminally ill patients are suffering wildly varying standards of end-of-life care depending on their disease, postcode and ethnicity, a new report has found. (The Telegraph)

A system which uses giant holograms to help medical students master their subject has been pioneered by two London-based junior doctors. (BBC)

The eyes of people with neurological conditions, including ADHD and Parkinson’s, have a distinctive motion that could form the basis of clinical diagnosis. (Scientific American)

A brand-name drug maker can be sued for violating antitrust laws if it agrees to pay a potential competitor to delay selling a generic version, the Supreme Court ruled. (Los Angeles Times)

In her new book, “What Doctors Feel,” Dr. Danielle Ofri tells the unforgettable story of a pediatrician she interviewed, a woman she calls Eva. In taut, vivid prose, Dr. Ofri describes a tragic event that occurred during Eva’s residency. She helped deliver a baby doomed to asphyxiation within minutes of birth because of a severe lack of amniotic fluid in the womb. (New York Times)

Despite India’s enormous population, it would be cost-effective to fight its growing AIDS epidemic by testing all 800 million sexually active adults in the country every five years and treating all those infected, a new statistical study has concluded. (New York Times)

The beleaguered Susan G. Komen Foundation has named a nationally known health policy and research expert in Washington, D.C. to replace founder Nancy Brinker as its chief executive, the breast cancer charity announced Monday. (Washington Post)

The stigma associated with mental illness discourages investment in finding cures — even though the burden of the disorders on society is immense. (Nature)

Most people in the United States could soon know someone whose genome is held in a research database. Concerns are growing about our ability to properly control access to that information. Also growing among some scientists is the feeling that restricting access to genomic data fetters research. How long will it be until an idealistic and technically literate researcher deliberately releases genome and trait information publicly in the name of open science? (Nature)

A special type of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, may increase the risk for insulin resistance among children conceived in this way, according to a new study from Greece. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society’s 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. (E! Science News)

In a world first, a healthy baby has been born using a “safer” method of the infertility treatment IVF. Baby Heath - who is now nearly eight weeks old - was conceived using a natural hormone to kick-start his mother’s ovaries. (BBC)

A team from the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center of Columbia University has generated patient-specific beta cells, or insulin-producing cells, that accurately reflect the features of maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY). (Nanowerk)

Fewer doctors in the United States are choosing to become primary care physicians – especially in rural areas of the country, Medical Daily reported. (Fox News)

One of the most prominent founders of the field of bioethics and a longtime professor and professor emeritus at Georgetown passed away yesterday at the age of 92. Dr. Edmund D. Pellegrino, who would have been 93 on June 22, was Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics and senior scholar at Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Considered one of the founders of bioethics and an early pioneer in teaching humanities in medical schools, he was the author of more than 600 published articles in medical science, philosophy and ethics and author or co-author of 23 books. (Georgetown University)