Combining several comprehension-aiding techniques yields documents that are vastly superior to traditional forms, but legal fears still impede changes that could improve patient understanding. (American Medical News)

Supreme Court justices stated that collecting DNA should be a routine procedure for police. In their ruling on the case Maryland v King, the justices said officials at all levels of government did not need a warrant to take DNA samples from any person arrested for a “serious” crime, to keep the information in a database and use it to solve cold cases. (BBC)

Studies of families show intelligence is 40 to 50 per cent inherited, and otherwise depends on environment. Since mass-analysis of DNA variations became possible, a number of studies have sought the genes involved in this inheritance, and some papers have claimed strong associations between particular genes and IQ. Yet results have varied widely and none have been replicated. (New Scientist)

Now, a consortium of 69 institutions in 13 countries hopes to address the problem by creating an organization to enable the free flow of information in genomic medicine. On 5 June, the consortium, which is calling itself the ‘global alliance’, announced that the organization will develop standards and policies to encourage data-sharing of a person’s DNA sequence combined with clinical information. (Nature)

A Boston startup wants to bring smart analytics to critical care in order to help doctors spot and treat at-risk patients. (MIT Technology Review)

New research provides critical insights into how normal breast precursor cells may be genetically vulnerable to develop into cancer. The research is published June 4th in the inaugural issue of Stem Cell Reports, an open-access journal from the International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) published by Cell Press. Scientists discovered that a particular class of normal breast precursor cells have extremely short chromosome ends (known as telomeres). As a result, these cells would be expected to be prone to acquiring mutations that lead to cancer if they managed to stay alive. (Medical Xpress)

This report describes and evaluates cell therapy technologies and methods, which have already started to play an important role in the practice of medicine. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is replacing the old fashioned bone marrow transplants. Role of cells in drug discovery is also described. Cell therapy is bound to become a part of medical practice. (The Wall Street Journal)

No more than a single embryo should be transferred at a time in most younger women undergoing assisted-baby making, according to new guidelines for the nation’s for-profit fertility industry aimed at minimizing multiple births. But in a recommendation that has some bioethicists alarmed, the guidelines state that doctors can consider transferring up to four or five embryos in women 40 and older. (Montreal Gazette)

The US government has no problem with this prospect, yet some experts and industry watchers are jittery. They fear that distributing the plants could set a precedent for unsupervised releases of synthetic organisms, and might foster a negative public perception of synthetic biology — an emerging experimental discipline that involves genetically engineering organisms to do useful tasks. (Nature)

The Catholic Church in America has been fined for dismissing a pregnant unmarried teacher who had used IVF. The case is seen as a barometer on the degree to which religious organisations in the United States can regulate employees’ lives. (The Herald Sun)

AgingCare.com survey data reveals that the majority of family caregivers support their elderly loved one’s ability to seek physician-assisted suicide as means to end terminal suffering. (Sacramento Bee)

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/06/04/5469241/more-than-65-of-family-caregivers.html#storylink=cpy

Biology is on the verge of getting its versions of the lever, wheel and axle, pulley and other basic machines that enable engineers to build almost any mechanical device, a new analysis has concluded. The viewpoint article on availability of this new toolkit — for engineering biological factories that can produce new biofuels, crops and chemicals, among others — appears in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology (”Engineering for the 21st Century: Synthetic Biology”). (Nanowerk)

CSIRO scientists have developed a test to identify unsafe stem cells. It is the first safety test specifically for human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) — as published today in the international journal Stem Cells. (Science Daily)

According to researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, stem cells that strongly express a gene called WNT3 are biased to develop into cells and tissues including pancreas, liver and bladder. This discovery suggests that other genes may serve as biomarkers for selecting stem cells with a preference for turning into different tissue types. Such markers would make it easier for stem cell scientists to choose the right cell line to start with when generating specific tissues for study. (Phys.org)

Pluristem Therapeutics Inc. said Tuesday the Food and Drug Administration suspended a clinical trial of one of its stem cell therapies, sending the company’s shares lower. (Businessweek)

Melillo is one of the first people with lower limb paralysis to try out MindWalker – the world’s first exoskeleton that aims to enable paralysed and locked-in people to walk using only their mind. (New Scientist)

The World Health Organization is warning of an increased risk of disease epidemics in Syria and neighbouring countries as summer approaches. (BBC)

The announcement last month of a long-awaited breakthrough in stem-cell research — the creation of stem-cell lines from a cloned human embryo — has revived interest in using embryonic stem cells to treat disease. But US regulations mean that many researchers will be watching those efforts from the sidelines. (Nature)

It’s a touchy topic: broaching the issue of having children. But OB-GYNs say they are increasingly making it as routine as asking about contraception during annual visits. They are educating patients about fertility rates, which gradually begin to decline around age 32 and then rapidly decline after age 37. And they are discussing the risks of miscarriage and chromosomal abnormalities, which increase at age 35 and above. (The Wall Street Journal)

Futurists warn of a technological singularity on the not-too-distant horizon when artificial intelligence will equal and eventually surpass human intelligence. But before engineers can make a machine that truly mimics a human mind, scientists still have a long way to go in modeling the brain’s 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion connections. (Fox News)