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WASHINGTON - By the light of the silvery moon, corals get in tune, and soon, it's a spawning delight. While that silvery moon was written about people, the songwriter understood the motivation. Now, scientists think they may have found out how reef-building corals manage to coordinate their sex lives in moonlight bay.

They report in Friday's issue of the journal Science that while corals don't have eyes they are able to sense changes in light — especially blue light — and respond to them. The corals contain ancient proteins called cryptochromes which react to light. Cryptochromes have also been found in mammals and insects where they effect the circadian clock that regulates the daily rhythms of life.

This finding indicates that the basic means used by mammals today to regulate daily patterns was in use at the beginnings of multicellular animals, the researchers said. And, they added, it supports the idea that these proteins evolved under the blue light of the ancient seas.mal bath

The research was funded by the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship and the ARC Center for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. regulators on Thursday said warnings about the risk of sudden hearing loss linked to popular drugs for impotence, including Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, would be added to the drugs' labels.

Eli Lilly sells Cialis and GlaxoSmithKline Plc sells Levitra.shopping baske

A further review of the FDA's side effect data found 29 cases of sudden hearing loss with a relationship to the three drugs. In two thirds of the cases, the hearing loss was ongoing, the agency said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Obesity is the single strongest risk factor for colon cancer in women, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

"Of all the risk factors -- age, family history, smoking -- the most potent risk factor was being obese," Dr. Joseph Anderson of Stony Brook University in New York, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

"One in five lesions may be attributable to obesity."

Colorectal cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer death in the United States. It will affect 153,000 Americans in 2007, according to the American Cancer Society, and will kill 52,000.

Family history, smoking and diet are all linked with colorectal cancer but Anderson said experts are still struggling to identify the causes that underlie most cases.

Doctors can use colonoscopy, in which a tiny camera is threaded up into the colon, to not only detect precancerous polyps but to remove them, thus often preventing cancer.

Anderson and colleagues examined the records of 1,252 women who underwent colonoscopy, classifying patients by age, smoking history, family history of colorectal cancer, and body mass index or BMI. Obesity was defined as having a BMI of 30 or higher.

Then they looked to see who had the most polyps, and who was more likely to have them at all.

"BMI was a huge risk factor. And it's a risk factor that's increasing," Anderson said.

BMI was not linked to the risk of colon cancer for men, Anderson and colleagues found.

"We need to counsel people on things like losing weight and staying thin," said Anderson, who presented his findings to a meeting in Philadelphia of the American College of Gastroenterology.

"Given the increasing number of obese patients in the United States, identifying them as high risk may have important screening implications," he added.

Why obesity might be linked with colon cancer is unclear, said Anderson.

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"Probably the leading factors are going to be insulin and insulin-like growth factor," he said. People who have more visceral fat -- the fat around the internal organs that is associated with the worst effects of being overweight -- also have higher levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Patients who undergo weight-loss stomach surgery have a higher death rate than is true for the general population, including more suicides, perhaps linked to depression, researchers said on Monday.

Dr. Bennet Omalu and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh said a review of more than 16,000 bariatric operations done in Pennsylvania over a nine-year period found a "substantial excess of deaths owing to suicide and coronary artery disease" compared to normal death rates found in the population at large.

"It is very likely that the suicide deaths were ... underestimated because some of the deaths were listed as drug overdoses rather than suicide on the death certificate," Omalu's team wrote in their report, published in the Archives of Surgery.

"The large number of deaths due to suicide and drug overdose, in excess of what we expected, is also a cause for concern. Most of them occurred at least one year after surgery, suggesting that careful follow-up, especially the need to recognize and treat depression, should be provided," they added.

There were 440 deaths among the patients, who had an average age of 48 when the operations were performed. About 1 percent of the patients in the study died within a year of the procedures and 6 percent died within five years.

Heart disease was listed as the cause of death in 76 patients -- about 20 percent of the group -- a rate higher than would be common in the general population, the researchers found.

There were 14 suicides, compared to two that would be likely to occur in the population at large in a group of people that size, said the study

Omalu's team said surgery is an effective treatment for severe obesity, with heavily overweight patients often losing 80 percent of their excess body weight within one or two years.

The higher death rates found in the study were likely due to complications caused by obesity itself, from both before and after the surgery, they said.

In a second study, Dr. Christopher Still and colleagues at the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pennsylvania, found that bariatric surgery patients who lost some weight beforehand get out of the hospital quicker.

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The study of more than 800 patients who underwent open or laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery between 2002 and 2006 found that those who lost more than 5 percent of their excess body weight before the operation were less likely to stay in the hospital longer than four days compared to those who did not lose weight beforehand.

It also found that those who shed 10 percent of the excess weight ahead of time were more than twice as likely to have lost 70 percent of their excess weight a year later, compared to those who lost none at all.

The researchers said the effect has to do with the beneficial effects of weight loss on high blood pressure, diabetes and other problems.