Sunday Newscape Magazine

Dallas, Texas - Once hailed as a miracle weight-loss drug, Fen-phen was removed from the market more than a decade ago for inducing life-threatening side effects, including heart valve lesions. Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center are trying to understand how Fen-phen behaves in the brain in order to develop safer anti-obesity drugs with fewer side effects.

San Diego, California - A species of fruit fly from the Seychelles Islands often lays larvae instead of eggs, UC San Diego biologists have discovered. Clues to how animals switch from laying eggs to live birth may be found in the well-studied species’ ecology and genes.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT.

Los Angeles, California - A new picture of the early Earth is emerging, including the surprising finding that plate tectonics may have started more than 4 billion years ago - much earlier than scientists had believed, according to new research by UCLA geochemists reported November 27 in the journal Nature.

Every year about this time, I harvest a new crop of hope that’s been watered by an abundance of denial. I envision a holiday season infused with peace, saturated with a spirit of thankfulness and goodwill. There will be no chaos this year, no crush of time bearing down on us like a frenetic freight train. Order will prevail in my world of good things and gracious living. Martha Stewart will be proud of me.