Record EU fine for Microsoft
BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Union is fining Microsoft Corp. $1.3 billion for charging rivals too much for software information.

Waiting-Room Computers Offer Web, Info
NEW YORK (AP) – For many parents-to-be the excitement and nervousness is often difficult to contain. For Kyle Piechucki, the wait was decidedly boring. Piechucki, now a father of two who lives in Oyster Bay, N.Y., is no deadbeat – he was ecstatic over the births of each of his children but simply grew tired of interminable waits at doctors’ offices. The boredom led Piechucki, 35, to develop a computer for those trapped in the purgatory of the waiting room.

Google U (by Jeff Jarvis)
Why should my son or daughter have to pick a single college and with it only the teachers and courses offered there? Online, they should be able to take most any course anywhere… Similarly, why should a professor pick just from the students accepted at his or her school? Online, the best can pick from the best, cutting out the middleman of university admissions. Now the next step: students teaching each other. My daughter and I have been playing with Livemocha, a language-learning social network that enables my exercises to be critiqued by native speakers in the language I’m learning; I do the same favor for people trying to learn English. It’s a great expression of the gift economy.

Study sheds light on parental instinct
LONDON (Reuters) – The parental bond may be all in the mind, according to a study published on Wednesday that pinpoints a possible region of the brain key to an instinctive desire to care for and nurture infants.

Autism’s Origins: Mother’s Antibody Production May Affect Fetal Brain
ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2008) — The mothers of some autistic children may have made antibodies against their fetuses’ brain tissue during pregnancy that crossed the placenta and caused changes that led to autism, suggests research led by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center investigators.

First System Of Human Nerve-cell Tissue Engineered
ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2008) — Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have demonstrated that living human nerve cells can be engineered into a network that could one day be used for transplants to repair damaged to the nervous system.

Overweight Hispanic Kids Show Early Markers for Diabetes
Blood vessel damage sets stage for insulin resistance, heart disease, study finds

Adult Stem Cells Help Those With Immune Disorders, Heart Disease
Analysis of studies finds modest benefit with both conditions

Cost of Breast Cancer Can Include Paycheck
Study found women lost average of 27% of their income after diagnosis
It cost me just about everything.

Almost human: Chimps adapt to survive
Daybreak is sudden and swift, as though an unseen hand had simply reached out and raised a dimmer switch. Cued by the dawn, thirty-four chimpanzees awaken. They are still in the nests they built the previous night, in trees at the edge of an open plateau.

Animal magnetism provides a sense of direction
They may not be on most people’s list of most attractive species, but bats definitely have animal magnetism. Researchers from the Universities of Leeds and Princeton have discovered that bats use a magnetic substance in their body called magnetite as an ”˜internal compass’ to help them navigate.

NASA Takes Aim at Moon with Double Sledgehammer
Scientists are priming two spacecraft to slam into the moon’s South Pole to see if the lunar double whammy reveals hidden water ice.

Earth’s final sunset predicted
A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun’s gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not.