UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

FDA adds 41 drugs to diet pills alert

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Thursday added 41 products to an alert about diet pills containing potentially dangerous undeclared drugs, officials said.

The regulatory agency now says 69 types of diet pills contain possibly unsafe hidden drugs -- a figure that is probably less than the actual number on the market, FDA new drugs and labeling compliance Director Michael Levy said.

"I think it's fair to say that we have a major initiative investigation ongoing into this type of product," Levy told USA Today.

"We are buying these products, and we are testing them, and we are considering what our options are," he said. "There is definitely the possibility that there could be criminal charges."

The pills using undeclared drugs that may put health at risk include Sibutramine, the active ingredient in the FDA-approved weight-loss drug Meridia, known as Reductil in Europe and most other countries. Sibutramine is a controlled substance that can cause seizures, heart attacks and strokes.

Other undeclared drugs include Rimonabant, the active ingredient in appetite-reducer Acomplia, which failed to win FDA approval and has been withdrawn in Europe; Phenytoin, an anti-seizure medication that has been tied to birth defects and the autoimmune disease Lupus, and phenolphthalein, a laxative that is a suspected carcinogen.

Most of the pills are made in China, an FDA lawyer told USA Today.

First asteroids found with Earthlike crust

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Jan. 8 (UPI) -- Two meteorites found in Antarctica are from an asteroid with an outer layer or crust similar to the Earth's continents, U.S. scientists said Thursday.

The finding is the first from an asteroid with an Earthlike crust, the University of Maryland geochemists and other researchers reported in the journal Nature.

The discovery also represents the oldest example of rock with this composition ever found, they said.

The meteorites point "to previously unrecognized diversity" of materials formed early in the history of the solar system, write the authors, who are also from the University of Tennessee and the Carnegie Institution for Science.

"What is most unusual about these rocks is that they have compositions similar to Earth's andesite continental crust -- what the rock beneath our feet is made of," Maryland geologist James Day said.

"No meteorites like this have ever been seen before," he said.

Andesite is an igneous, volcanic rock that gets its name from the Andes mountain range in South America, where it is plentiful.

The two meteorites were discovered in Antarctica's Graves Nunatak Icefield in 2007, the scientists said.

They said the rocks are more than 4.52 billion years old and were formed during the birth of the solar system.

Their age, combined with the oxygen isotope data, "points to their origin from an asteroid rather than a planet," Day said.

Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets or planetoids, are bodies, primarily of the inner solar system, that are smaller than planets but larger than meteoroids, but exclude comets.

Loud noise permeates cosmos, NASA says

GREENBELT, Md., Jan. 8 (UPI) -- A mysterious extra-loud radio noise permeates the universe, preventing astronomers from observing heat from the first stars, U.S. scientists at NASA said.

The noise, picked up by a balloon-borne instrument, makes no sense, based on science's current understanding of the cosmos, the scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

"The universe really threw us a curve," said astrophysicist Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted," he said.

Scientists ruled out primordial stars or known radio sources -- including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy, the Milky Way -- as the noise's source.

But they don't know anything else about it, including its cause or why it's so loud.

The instrument, launched in July 2006 from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, flew to an altitude of 120,000 feet, where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.

Its mission was to search the sky for heat from the first generation of stars. Instead, it found a cosmic puzzle, NASA said.

The noise complicates NASA's efforts to detect the first stars, thought to have formed about 13 billion years ago -- not long, in cosmic terms, after the Big Bang.

Study: Spirituality adds happiness to kids

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- Increasing children's spirituality boosts their self-worth and happiness, while religious practices have little effect, a Canadian study suggested Thursday.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Happiness Studies, found that spirituality, or an inner belief system that a person relies on for strength and comfort, explained up to 27 percent of the differences in happiness levels among children ages 8 to 12.

By contrast, institutional religious rituals, practices and beliefs -- including attending church, praying and meditating -- produce nearly no change in children's happiness, the University of British Columbia study found.

Factors such as gender or money also contribute very little to happiness, lead study author and psychology Associate Professor Mark Holder said.

The researchers asked 320 children, from four public schools and two faith-based schools, to complete six different questionnaires to rate their happiness, their spirituality, their religiousness and their temperament.

Parents were also asked to rate their children's happiness and temperament.

The authors found that children who said their lives had meaning and value and who had deep, quality relationships -- both measures of spirituality -- were happier than those who didn't.

The authors suggest that strategies aimed at increasing personal meaning in children -- from encouraging altruism and volunteering to asking kids for three things they're thankful for rather than "this is what I did today" -- may increase their happiness.

The study is one of the few seeking to understand children's happiness.