More and more studies show that being overweight does not always shorten life — but some public-health researchers would rather not talk about them. (Nature)

If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it. (The Guardian)

In a sign of how much the controversy over human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) has waned, the most prominent lobbying group for hESC research announced today that it is folding after 12 years. The Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR) will transfer its work to another group that focuses on moving hESC research into the clinic. (Science)

A federal court Tuesday struck down Arizona’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy absent a medical emergency. (ABC News)

An experimental stem-cell treatment has restored the sight of a man blinded by the degeneration of his retinal cells. The man, who is taking part in a trial examining the safety of using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to reverse two common causes of blindness, can now see well enough to be allowed to drive. (New Scientist)

Peter Shumlin, the Democratic Governor of the small progressive-leaning state, signed into law a bill that lawmakers adopted last week. Vermont follows the states of Oregon and Washington in legalizing the practice. (AFP)

In 1979 China instituted the one-child policy, which limited every family to just one offspring in a controversial attempt to reduce the country’s burgeoning population. The strictly enforced law had the desired effects: in 2011 researchers estimated that the policy prevented 400 million births. In a new study in Science, researchers find that it has also caused China’s so-called little emperors to be more pessimistic, neurotic and selfish than their peers who have siblings. (Scientific American)

Upcoming paper in ‘Science’ pushes back against recent recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. (News-medical)

The poorest countries in the world are lagging behind higher-income developing countries in meeting the demand for modern contraception, U.S. researchers say. (UPI)

In the old days, sales representatives from drug companies would chat up local pharmacists to learn what drugs doctors were prescribing. Now such shoulder-rubbing is becoming a quaint memory — thanks to vast databases of patient and doctor information being used by pharmaceutical companies to market drugs. (New York Times)

The People’s Republic of China’s new system for acquiring organs—and the man behind it, former Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu—has been lauded in some circles as a decisive break from the use of executed prisoners as organ sources. But critics regard the new arrangements as implicitly coercive, and argue that the lack of transparency allows organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience and others to continue.  (The Epoch Times)

Fertility specialists have developed a radical technique that can boost the chances of IVF couples having a healthy baby. Doctors in Nottingham who devised the procedure say it could raise live birthrates at their clinic to 78%, around three times the national average for IVF treatment in the UK. (The Guardian)

Injectable nanoparticles developed at MIT may someday eliminate the need for patients with Type 1 diabetes to constantly monitor their blood-sugar levels and inject themselves with insulin. (Phys.org)

It was hailed some 15 years ago as the great hope for a biomedical revolution: the use of cloning techniques to create perfectly matched tissues that would someday cure ailments ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. Since then, the approach has been enveloped in ethical debate, tainted by fraud and, in recent years, overshadowed by a competing technology. Most groups gave up long ago on the finicky core method — production of patient-specific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from cloning. A quieter debate followed: do we still need ‘therapeutic’ cloning? (Nature)

Scientists have used cloning technology to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells, an experiment that may revive the controversy over human cloning. The researchers stopped well short of creating a human clone. But they showed, for the first time, that it is possible to create cloned embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to the person from whom they are derived. (The Wall Street Journal)

Bereaved parents agonising over whether to subject their dead child or stillborn baby to a full post-mortem now have an alternative that is potentially far less traumatic. For fetuses and infants under the age of one, MRI scans combined with minimally invasive procedures including blood tests are as effective as an autopsy at revealing the cause of death. (New scientist)

An eight-year old British girl of Indian descent was allegedly murdered by health care workers in India so they could harvest her organs, her grieving parents claim. (International Business Times)

The adoptive parents of a child born with male and female organs say South Carolina mutilated their son by choosing a gender and having his male genitalia surgically removed. (CNN)

A woman who was the first to have a successful womb transplant from a dead donor has had her pregnancy terminated after the embryo showed no heart beat, doctors in Turkey said on Tuesday. (Fox News)

In a secular age it might seem that the time for moral authorities has passed. However, research in the life sciences and biomedicine has produced a range of moral concerns and prompted the emergence of bioethics; an area of study that specialises in the ethical analysis of these issues. The result has been the emergence of what we might call expert bioethicists, a cadre of professionals who, while logical and friendly, have, nevertheless, been ordained as secular priests. (The Guardian)

Vermont is poised to become the third U.S. state to allow doctor-assisted suicide, after its legislature passed a bill allowing physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients. (Reuters)