Too little or too much of an enzyme called SRPK1 promotes cancer by disrupting a regulatory event critical for many fundamental cellular processes, including proliferation, according to a paper in Molecular Cell.

After playing in every game for some 14 years in baseball, Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees - "The Iron Horse" - took himself out of the lineup because his manager wouldn't. He had been dropping balls, unable to get to routine plays, hitting in the low .100s, shuffling rather than running.

A month later he was diagnosed with the disease that would become synonymous with his name. That he had been able to do any sports at all, much less Major League Baseball, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
- ALS - is startling to doctors and patients today. Two years later he was dead but today, as many as 30,000 Americans are living with it.

Analyzing federal health care data, a team of researchers led by a Johns Hopkins specialist concluded that doctors overlook or discount the early signs of potentially disabling strokes in tens of thousands of American each year, a large number of them visitors to emergency rooms complaining of dizziness or headaches.

The findings from the medical records review, reported online April 3 in the journal Diagnosis, show that women, minorities and people under the age of 45 who have these symptoms of stroke were significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed in the week prior to sustaining a debilitating stroke. Younger people in the study were nearly seven times more likely to be given an incorrect diagnosis and sent home without treatment despite such symptoms.

In modern NASA culture, extended spaceflight might as well be science fiction. The no-risk requirement coupled with volumes of employment criteria, rules and regulations were why the Constellation program was going to take far longer to go back to the moon than it took to go there in the first place and there is no serious manned exploration in the works.

Nonetheless, the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, would like to get more funding to create a health framework and they even make a recommendation that is positively un-government-like: allow exceptions to existing health standards on a mission-by-mission basis, but they dutifully qualify that any exceptions should be rare and occur only in extenuating circumstances. 

 There are various efforts to try and spur more equality among genders in certain fields. Companies say they don't care about gender - and they don't, unless government forces them to hire people to fill in boxes on government forms.  They say they just want the best people and they can't hire people who don't show an interest in working there. Gender activists say the task falls to companies to change how they approach potential hires, an idea which doesn't please anyone except gender activists.

Sometimes errors happen, sometimes fraud happens. Sometimes methodology is suspect.