After the uproar caused by his offer to let parents choose traits like eye and hair colour when selecting embryos for implanting, fertility specialist Dr Jeff Steinberg said on Tuesday that his clinics will only be offering parents the facility to screen embryos on medical grounds, such as genetic diseases.

Steinberg, who has clinics in Los Angeles and Manhattan, said that a story published on Monday in the New York (NY) Daily News about his plan to let parents choose physical traits, even for cosmetic reasons, led to a flood of calls. He is now saying they are not going to do that and will be focusing on families with a history of genetic diseases like albinism and colour blindness instead.

Until Monday, his clinic's website showed an announcement that they were planning to offer "predictive genomics" that would allow parents to have embryos screened for "eye color, hair color, cancer tendency and more", said the NY Daily News.

Steinberg pioneered IVF in the 1970s, and predicts that a trait-selected baby will be born next year, said a BBC News report.

His clinics already offer sex selection, and a mother who underwent treatment at the NYU Fertility Center to select the gender of her third baby defended the service. She told the NY Daily News on Tuesday that:

"When you have two of the same, it's awesome and amazing, but when you have one of the other, too, it's just different."

Some experts are annoyed that the controversy over this issue will distract people from how the same science, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD, can be used to prevent inherited diseases from being passed on.

PDG takes a cell from the embryo before it is implanted in the womb and screens it for so called "rogue" genes. The same procedure can be used to screen for cosmetically desirable traits such as eye and hair colour. An embryo with the desirable traits is then selected for implantation while those that don't have them are discarded.

Steinberg told the media that he did not think this was a dangerous road but rather an uncharted one.

Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics told the BBC that:

"This is the inevitable slippery slope of a fertility process which results in many more embryos being created than can be implanted."

Steinberg said the technology has been around for years and it was "time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand".

Another UK fertility expert, Dr Gillian Lockwood who sits on the ethics committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists cautioned that offering such services will turn babies into "commodities that you buy off the shelf".

"If it gets to the point where we can decide which gene or combination of genes are responsible for blue eyes or blonde hair, what are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger with green eyes?" she said to the BBC.

A new Dutch and Canadian study of young men's drinking behaviour while watching an hour of TV (a movie clip with advert breaks) found that, compared to those who did not see much alcohol portrayed on screen, those who saw alcohol portrayed frequently, on average consumed 1.5 more 200 ml bottles of alcoholic beverage.

The study was the work of scientists from the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University Nijmegen and the Research Centre for Adolescent Development in Utrecht University, both in The Netherlands, and colleagues from the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. It was published for online access on 4 March in the Oxford University Press journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.

First author Rutger Engels, professor in developmental psychopathology at the Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen said that:

"This is the first experimental study to show a direct effect of exposure to alcohol portrayals on TV on viewers' immediate drinking behaviour."

In their background information the researchers described how movies and adverts generally put alcohol in a positive light and the assumption is that this encourages young people to drink it. So they decided to set up an experiment to test it.

They designed a naturalistic setting (which they described as a "bar lab") where friendship pairs of young men could watch a movie "home cinema" style for 1 hour, including 2 commerical breaks. While they did this they had access to a fridge filled with alcoholic and soft drinks. The idea was to replicate an observable version home-based TV viewing.

The researchers recruited 80 male university students aged from 18 to 29 and randomly assigned them to one of four groups (20 in each group), characterized by the frequency with which alcohol was portrayed in the movie and the commercial breaks:

1. Movie and adverts with many positive portrayals of alcohol. The film was American Pie, and the participants saw 18 instances of characters drinking alcohol and 23 other instances where alcoholic drinks were shown. The commercial break also included adverts for alcoholic drinks.

2. Movie with many and adverts with no positive portrayals of alcohol. The film for this group was also American Pie with the same exposure as in group 1, but the commercial breaks showed no adverts for alcohol.

3. Movie with few and adverts with many positive portrayals of alcohol. The film was 40 Days and 40 Nights during which the participants only saw characters consume alcohol in 3 instances and there were 15 other instances when alcoholic drinks were shown. The commercial break also included adverts for alcohol.

4. Movie with few and adverts with no positive portrayals of alcohol. The film for this group was also 40 Days and 40 Nights and the commercial break had no adverts for alcohol.

The results showed that:

* Over the period of an hour, the young men in group 1, who watched the film with many positive portrayals of alcohol, together with commerical breaks containing adverts for alcohol, consumed an average of nearly three 200 ml bottles of alcoholic beverage.

* The young men in group 4, who watched a film with few positive portrayals of alcohol and saw no adverts for alcohol only drank an average of 1.5 bottles of alcoholic beverages in an hour.

* The most alcohol anyone consumed was 4 bottles and the least was none.

The researchers concluded that this study is the first to show that there is a "causal link between exposure to drinking models and alcohol commercials on acute alcohol consumption".

Engels said the study clearly showed that portraying alcohol in films and adverts not only influenced people's attitudes about drinking within a culture or society, but might also have a direct effect on behaviour, such as triggering a craving in people who already consume alcohol.

"While watching an ad for a particular brand of beer, you are not only more prone to buy that brand next time you are in the supermarket, but also that you might go immediately to the fridge to take a beer," Engels suggested.

The researchers said if their findings are replicated in other studies this should be a wake up call for policymakers, inasmuch as:

"If moderation of alcohol consumption in certain groups is strived for, it may be sensible to cut down on the portrayal of alcohol in programmes aimed at these groups and the commercials shown in between."

Another implication, they wrote, may be that:

"In situations in which this is possible (eg cinemas), availability of alcohol should be reduced when movies and commercials contain alcohol portrayal and individuals in a group at risk for problematic drinking are present."

The federal government should make preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and promoting mental health in young people a national priority, says a new report from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. These disorders -- which include depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, and substance abuse -- are about as common as fractured limbs in children and adolescents. Collectively, they take a tremendous toll on the well-being of young people and their families, costing the U.S. an estimated $247 billion annually, the report says.

Research has shown that a number of programs are effective at preventing these problems and promoting mental health, the report says. Such programs could be implemented more broadly, but currently there is no clear federal presence to lead these efforts. The White House should create an entity that can coordinate agency initiatives in this area, set public goals for prevention, and provide needed research and funding to achieve them, said the committee that wrote the report.

"There is a substantial gap between what is known about preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and what is actually being done," said Kenneth E. Warner, committee chair and dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "It is no longer accurate to argue that these disorders can never be prevented. Many can. The nation is well-positioned to equip young people with the skills and habits needed to live healthy, happy, and productive lives in caring relationships. But we need to develop the systems to deliver effective prevention programs to a far wider group of children and adolescents."

Most mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders have their roots in childhood and adolescence, the report notes. Among adults who have experienced these disorders, more than half report the onset as occurring in childhood or early adolescence. In any given year, an estimated 14 percent to 20 percent of young people have one of these disorders.

First symptoms typically occur two to four years before the onset of a full-blown disorder - creating a window of opportunity when preventive programs might make a difference, the report says. And some programs have shown effectiveness at preventing specific disorders in at-risk groups. For example, the Clarke Cognitive-Behavioral Prevention Intervention, which focuses on helping adolescents at risk for depression learn to cope with stress, has prevented episodes of major depression in several controlled experiments.

Other programs have demonstrated broader preventive effects in general populations of young people, the report says. Programs that can be offered in family or educational settings show particular promise in promoting mental health and addressing major risk factors.

One example of an effective school-based program is the Good Behavior Game, which divides elementary school classes into teams and reinforces desirable behaviors with rewards such as extra free time and other privileges. Studies have shown that the program significantly reduces aggressive and disruptive behavior during first grade. The one-year intervention also has benefits over the long term, lowering the students' risk of alcohol and drug abuse, as well as rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts. And it significantly reduces the likelihood that highly aggressive boys will be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder as adults. Research has shown that programs that focus on enhancing social and emotional skills can also improve students' academic performance, the report notes.

Still other programs improve children's mental health and behavior by enhancing parenting skills, the report says. The Positive Parenting Program, for example, uses a range of approaches, from a television series on how to handle common child-rearing problems to in-person skills training for parents struggling to handle children's aggressiveness or lack of cooperation. These methods have been shown to lower kids' disruptive behaviors, a positive change that persisted one year later.

The report recommends that the White House create an entity to lead a broad implementation of evidence-based prevention approaches and to direct research on interventions. The new leadership body should set public goals for preventing specific disorders and promoting mental health and provide the funding to achieve them. The departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services should align their resources and programs with this strategy. These agencies should also fund state, county, and community efforts to implement and improve evidence-based programs. At the same time, the report cautions, federal and state agencies should not support programs that lack empirical evidence, even if they have community endorsement.

The committee also urged continued research to build understanding of what interventions work for whom and when, and how best to implement them. The National Institutes of Health should develop a comprehensive 10-year plan to research ways to promote mental health and prevent mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders in young people. In addition, agencies and foundations should establish equality in research funding between ways to prevent mental and behavioral disorders and ways to treat these problems, the report says; currently, the balance is weighted toward research on treatment

Doodling while listening can help with remembering details, rather than implying that the mind is wandering as is the common perception. According to a study published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, subjects given a doodling task while listening to a dull phone message had a 29% improved recall compared to their non-doodling counterparts.

40 members of the research panel of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge were asked to listen to a two and a half minute tape giving several names of people and places, and were told to write down only the names of people going to a party. 20 of the participants were asked to shade in shapes on a piece of paper at the same time, but paying no attention to neatness. Participants were not asked to doodle naturally so that they would not become self-conscious. None of the participants were told it was a memory test.

After the tape had finished, all participants in the study were asked to recall the eight names of the party-goers which they were asked to write down, as well as eight additional place names which were included as incidental information. The doodlers recalled on average 7.5 names of people and places compared to only 5.8 by the non-doodlers.

"If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream," said study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology, University of Plymouth. "Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task."

"In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process. If that process is important for the main cognitive task then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade," added Andrade. "This study suggests that in everyday life doodling may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing."