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The Wii allows users to thrust, wave, swing and twist its one-handed, motion-sensitive controller to direct the on-screen action and simulate real life moves such as bowling, hitting a tennis ball, or shooting a bow and arrow.

"The children were on their feet and they moved in all directions while performing basic motor control and fundamental movements skills that were not evident during seated gaming," the team wrote.

"Given the current prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity, such positive behaviors should be encouraged."

The researchers compared bowling, tennis and boxing games on the Wii to the Project Gotham Racing 3 game on Microsoft's XBOX 360 console where players simply work the controls with their fingers.

Participants, who included six boys and five girls aged 13-15, played four computer games for 15 minutes each while wearing a monitoring device to record how much energy they burned.

On the Wii, the children sweated off about 60 more calories per hour -- a far lower amount than if they had actually played the sport. The workout was also not intense enough to contribute toward the recommended amount of daily physical activity for children, the researchers said.

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"Playing new generation active computer games uses significantly more energy than playing sedentary computer games but not as much as energy as playing the sport itself," the researchers said in the journal's Christmas edition

Most important, children removed from orphanages before age 2 had the biggest improvement — key new evidence of a sensitive period for brain development, according to the U.S. team that conducted the research.

"What we're really talking about is the importance of getting kids out of bad environments and put into good environments," said Dr. Charles Nelson III of Harvard Medical School, who led the study being published Friday in the journal Science.

The younger that happens, "the less likely the child is to have major problems," he added.

The research is credited with influencing child-care changes in Romania, and UNICEF has begun using the data to push numerous countries that still depend on state-run orphanages to start shifting to foster care-like systems.

"The research provides concrete scientific evidence on the long-term impacts of the deprivation of quality care for children," UNICEF child protection specialist Aaron Greenberg said. "The interesting part about this is the one-on-one caring of a young child impacts ... cognitive and intellectual development."

That orphanages are not optimal for child development comes as no surprise. Earlier studies have found that thousands of children adopted during the 1990s from squalid orphanages in Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere continued to face serious developmental problems even after moving to affluent new homes with doting parents.

But questions remain. Were those abandoned or orphaned children who spent more time in orphanages less healthy to begin with? How much damage does neglect and lack of stimulation in the early months of life do? How long does that damage last?

In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest's six orphanages to either keep living there or live with foster parents who were specially trained and paid for by the study. Romania had no foster-care system in 2000 when the research began.

The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew, and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.

By 4 1/2, youngsters in foster care were scoring almost 10 points higher on IQ tests than the children left in orphanages. Children who left the orphanages before 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.

Nelson compared the ages at which children were sent to foster care. For every extra month spent in the orphanage, up to almost age 3, it meant roughly a half-point lower score on those later IQ tests.

Children raised in their biological homes still fared best, with average test scores 10 points to 20 points higher than the foster-care kids.

What does that mean as these children grow up? Just this week an anxious acquaintance cornered Nelson to ask what to expect of a child who spent nine months in a Vietnamese orphanage.

"There's much more to functioning in life than your IQ," Nelson stresses.

Plus, he only now has begun testing these children again as they turn 7 and 8. They might catch up.

For now, Nelson tells adoptive parents, "The older the child is when they leave the institution, the more likely that child may have some developmental problems and the more difficult it may be to ameliorate those problems. ... The message to parents is simply to go into this with their eyes open, but not to give up."

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For the U.S. and other countries that depend on foster care instead of orphanages, the study has implications, too, because it used high-quality foster care that is not the norm in many places, Nelson noted. Studies comparing the impact of foster care of varying quality are under way.

The Romanian government requested the study and began its own foster care program shortly thereafter. Early study results are credited with influencing Romania's recent prohibition on institutionalizing children under 2 unless they are severely disabled.

Gilman was not involved with the study, which is published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A person's cognitive ability, which is mainly shaped early in life, can predict how well he or she will do later in life in terms of education, employment, whether or not they enter the criminal justice system and health.

But experts differ in whether genetics or environment are the primary shapers. And the role of the neighborhood has not been extensively studied.

For this study, sociologists at Harvard University analyzed Chicago census tract data from 1990 and 2000 and identified six neighborhood characteristics which, together, formed "concentrated disadvantage" and were linked to the cognitive abilities of children.

The six characteristics were: welfare receipt, poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, racial composition and density of children.

More than 2,000 urban Chicago children aged 6 to 12 were assessed for verbal ability and other characteristics.

The children, with their caretakers, were followed wherever they moved in the United States for seven years.

The researchers took into account the impact of moving into and out of areas of disadvantage. About 17 percent of black children not living in disadvantage moved to a disadvantaged neighborhood between 1995 and 2002, while 42 percent of black children in disadvantaged neighborhoods in 1995 moved to a non-disadvantaged neighborhood during those years.

Children who lived in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood halfway through the follow-up period were almost all black, and they fell behind their otherwise identical peers by about four points on an IQ test. This translates into about one year of schooling.

Almost one-third of black children lived at some point in "concentrated disadvantaged" neighborhoods compared to almost no white or Latino children.

The findings tilt the nature-versus-nurture debate toward the latter factor.

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"The study has implications for interventions, because they've identified the risk factors, it appears, that contribute to negative outcomes," Gilman said. "We don't have a lot of intervention research. It would seem that if you began to design intervention studies that target these specific risk factors, hopefully, you will begin to see an increase in verbal scores, particularly among African-Americans."

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have found the fossilized claw of a 2.5-metre (8-foot) sea scorpion, a nightmarish creature living before the age of dinosaurs.

"This is an amazing discovery," said university researcher Simon Braddy.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies but we never realized, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were."

The find was described by Braddy and transportation guide colleagues in the journal Biology Letters.

The claw of the sea scorpion Jaekelopterus rhenaniae measured 46 centimeters (18 inches) long, indicating the creature was half a meter longer than previous estimates of the ancient arthropods.

Just why prehistoric arthropods -- creatures with external skeletons and segmented bodies -- grew so large is unclear. Some scientists believe they may have become giants because of the higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past.

Another theory is that they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their likely prey, the early armored fish.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Eight unusual examples of a burned-out celestial object known as a white dwarf detected in our Milky Way galaxy represent a previously unknown category of stars, astronomers said on Wednesday.

White dwarfs result from the collapse of star cores in dying stars whose nuclear fusion has ceased. They usually have a mass about that of the sun, but are only a bit larger than Earth because they have blown off their outer layers, leaving behind only a small, dim and extremely dense core.

University of Arizona astrophysicist Patrick Dufour said previously known white dwarfs have fallen into two categories: those with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and those with a helium-rich atmosphere. But Dufour and three other scientists, writing toys guide  in the journal Nature, described eight white dwarfs that break the mold by possessing carbon atmospheres.

The researchers think they may have formed from stars much more massive than the sun but not quite massive enough to explode as a supernova.

"It was totally unexpected because all of the white dwarfs we knew so far were either hydrogen-rich or helium-rich. So this is a completely new kind of star," Dufour said in a telephone interview.

These eight white dwarfs are located in our own galaxy between about 1,000 and 2,000 light years from Earth, Dufour said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

The scientists have spotted at least a couple of other white dwarfs that might fit into this new category, Dufour added. All of them were among about 10,000 new white dwarfs recently identified in an extensive survey effort.

After blowing off their outer layers, white dwarfs typically leave behind a core of carbon and oxygen that is cloaked by a surrounding atmosphere of hydrogen or helium. The eight newly described ones have atmospheres primarily of carbon, with little or no trace of hydrogen or helium.

"It will be a challenge to try to explain how they form and what does this tell us about stellar evolution," Dufour said.

They might have evolved from a star similar to a unique one called H1504+65, the researchers said. Astronomers think this star violently expelled all its hydrogen and nearly all its helium, leaving behind a stellar nucleus with a surface half carbon and half oxygen.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is elevated in infants with parents who have been hospitalized for psychiatric illness or substance-abuse disorders, according to a new study.

In SIDS, which occurs without warning, apparently healthy infants seem to just stop breathing. The cause is unknown and most cases occur between the ages of 2 and 4 months.

In families with a parental history of psychiatric hospitalization, either fathers or mothers, the risk of SIDS was roughly doubled compared with the frequency seen in the general population, the authors report in the Archives of General Psychiatry. If both parents were hospitalized, the risk of SIDS was increased by nearly 7-fold.

For specific disorders, the greatest risk was associated with inpatient treatment for substance abuse. The risk was especially high if mothers were hospitalized, which increased the risk by 5-fold.

For mood disorders, such as depression, the risk was increased by about 2-fold for hospitalization of the mother or father.

Contrary to previous reports, schizophrenia-like disorders did not increase the risk of SIDS more than other psychiatric disorders.cell phones PDAs

"When treating severe adult psychiatric illnesses, it is important to identify patients who already have or will soon have infants in their care," Webb's group writes. "To help raise parental awareness of modifiable risk factors, these especially vulnerable infants may be better protected if infants' pediatricians are informed of parents' mental illnesses."

SOURCE: Archives of General Psychiatry, November 2007.

WASHINGTON - President Bush signed the Joshua Omvig suicide prevention bill on Monday, providing improved screening and treatment for at-risk veterans.

"As a nation, we cannot stand idly by when the needs of our brave soldiers are not being met," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who helped push the measure through the Senate. "We have a responsibility to truly support our troops by ensuring they have the services they need during their time in active service, and after they return home."

The law requires mental health training for Veterans Affairs staff; a suicide prevention counselor at each VA medical facility; and mental-health screening and treatment for veterans who receive VA care. It also supports outreach and education for veterans and their families, peer support counseling and research into suicide prevention.

The new law comes amid growing concerns over mental health issues borne by veterans who have seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The VA Inspector General, in a report last May, said Veterans Health Administration officials estimate 1,000 suicides per year among veterans receiving care within VHA and as many as 5,000 per year among all living veterans.

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Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, who sponsored the bill, commended Omvig's parents for their sacrifice and support of the new law.

"While suffering this personal tragedy, they went on to help other veterans and their families and have advocated for improving all mental health services at the VA," Boswell said.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Cervical cancer is much more common in Asia than the quarter of a million new cases recorded each year, according to an expert, who says governments should consider vaccinating all women because screenings are too costly.

"Not all cancers will be registered and you are probably underestimating by 40 to 50 percent," Stanley said.

After breast cancer, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women worldwide. It is caused by several types of the human papillomavirus (HPV), that is spread through sexual contact.

Most women's bodies are able to fight HPV infection, but it can result in cancer later on. Risks are higher for smokers, mothers of many children, women who have used birth control pills for a long time, or those who are HIV-positive.

While figures have fallen in advanced Western nations after Pap smear screenings and HPV vaccines were made widely available, the situation in Asia has stayed relatively unchanged over the past 50 years. Screenings enable early detection of the disease.

"Particularly in rural areas, these figures have not changed because conditions and factors that contribute to the disease have not changed compared to urban life in a developed country," Stanley said in an interview.

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INFECTION

"It is very much caused by infection of the HPV, and women acquire that when they marry. It's a sexually transmitted infection associated very much with early marriage, early childbearing, many children, lack of access to medical services." Half of the incidence of cervical cancer results in death, with most of those cases occurring in developing countries.

The disease strikes mostly between the ages of 35 and 65, when victims are in the prime of their lives as wives, mothers and career women.

"It's important economically because it literally removes the lynchpin of the family, the wife and mother," Stanley said. She said the ideal intervention would be vaccination and it could be carried out using a system that is already in place in Asia, where most children are protected from a range of diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, tuberculosis and polio.

In the case of HPV vaccines, it is generally considered to be best administered between the ages of 9 and 13 years, before girls become sexually active and potentially exposed to HPV.

"Vaccination is extremely well done in Asia. Between 85 and 90 percent of children even in the poorest of countries in Asia are covered. There is a well-established infrastructure for the delivery of vaccine. The challenge is to deliver the vaccine to 11-or 12-year-old girls," Stanley said.

"There is not an extensive screening program in virtually any country in Asia. The screening programs are not well organized and they are very expensive."

WASHINGTON - Employers added twice as many new jobs to their ranks than expected in October, an encouraging sign that the nation's employment climate is not cracking under the stress of a deepening housing slump.

Job gains were logged at schools, hospitals, bars and restaurants, hotels and motels, temporary-help firms, legal services, accounting and bookkeeping companies, the government and other places.

Those hiring increases more than offset jobs losses at factories, construction companies and mortgage businesses — casualties of the meltdowns in the housing and credit markets. Retailers and trucking companies also shed jobs.

"There is no question that employers are more cautious as they look forward. But I think many of them are not seeing it in their actual operations. They need workers and they are hiring," said John Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a placement firm.

The latest report on employment conditions nationwide was better than economists anticipated. Economists were expecting payrolls in October to grow by a much smaller 80,000.

"Businesses have not clammed up on the hiring scene as some feared," said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "The wheels aren't coming off the economy."

But on Wall Street, the good employment news failed to ease fears among skittish investors. The Dow Jones industrials were off around 15 points in afternoon trading. One day earlier, the Dow plunged more than 360 points, underscoring the fragile state of financial markets.

President Bush pointed to fresh employment figures as evidence that his economic policies work. "This is now our 50th consecutive month of uninterrupted job growth, the longest in the nation's history," he said.

Even so, the trend this year has been toward softer job growth. Wage growth, meanwhile, moderated a bit last month.

Average hourly earnings rose to $17.58 in October, a 0.2 percent increase. That was down slightly from a 0.3 percent rise in September. Over the past 12 months, wages were up 3.8 percent.

Still, economists said the wage gains should be sufficient to support consumer spending and keep the economic expansion — which began in late 2001 — intact.

The state of the nation's employment climate is a crucial factor determining whether the economy will, in fact, weather the financial storm. So far, decent job creation and wage growth have helped to offset some of the negative forces hitting some individuals from the housing slump, weaker home values and harder-to-get credit.

To be sure, problems challenging the economy are hitting some industries and workers hard. Construction employment has fallen by 124,000 since its peak in September 2006. Factories have cut more than 200,000 jobs over the year. Employment at mortgage firms has fallen by 56,000 since its peak in February.

The economy, which grew at a brisk 3.9 percent annual rate in the third quarter, is expected to slow to about half that pace or less in the current October-to-December quarter. The toll of the housing collapse and credit crunch are expected to catch up to consumers and chill their spending.

"The pace of economic expansion will likely slow in the near term, partly reflecting the intensification of the housing correction," Federal Reserve policymakers said Wednesday as they decided to lower their key interest rate again.con shop cond ebuy cost buy

The Fed sliced its key rate by one-quarter percentage point to 4.50 percent to protect the economy from undue economic weakness in the months ahead. It was the second rate reduction in six weeks.

At the same time, the Fed hinted that it may not need to cut rates again for a while. Economists said Friday's employment figures increase the odds that the Fed will leave its key rate unchanged at its next meeting in December.

Complicating the outlook: Surging oil prices, which have hit record highs in recent days and are hovering past $95 a barrel.

If high oil prices boost the costs of many other goods and services, inflation could spread through the economy. High energy prices also could cause people and businesses to cut back on other types of spending, putting another damper on economic growth.

As economic growth slows, the unemployment rate probably will creep up to 5 percent by early next year, economists say.

Many analysts believe the country will be able to avoid a recession, although the odds of one occurring have grown since the beginning of the year.  costume online cotton mall

"This was a very solid report that tells us the economy is hardly falling apart," Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors, said of the latest employment figures. But he added, "I am not yet willing to say we are out of the woods."

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.