Montel Williams, Emmy Award-winning television personality and patient activist, recently said he was impressed with Israel’s liberal attitude toward medical marijuana, and he believes the U.S. could learn a thing or two from the Jewish state.

The activist was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and has since been an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana to relieve pain caused by the disease.

From news.yahoo.com:

The former host of the popular long-running talk show “The Montel Williams Show” is in Israel on a fact-finding mission to learn about its medicinal cannabis practices. He is meeting with legislators, scientists and physicians.

At the height of his TV career, Williams was one of the most recognizable faces in America alongside fellow daytime TV hosts Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera.

“We need to get out of the dark ages and into the new ages,” he told The Associated Press. “Not every patient can use cannabis, but for those who can — why deny it?”

Itay Goor-Aryeh, the head of the pain management unit at the Sheba Medical Center in central Israel, said certain doctors in Israel can approve cannabis prescriptions and disperse them to patients.

An Earth-observing satellite will be launched after a five-year delay to test new technologies aimed at improving weather forecasts and monitoring climate change.

“We’ve already had 10 separate weather events, each inflicting at least $1 billion in damages,” said Louis Uccellini of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

From news.yahoo.com:

The satellite will lift off before dawn Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a Delta 2 rocket that will boost it into an orbit some 500 miles (800 kilometers) high.

The space agency already has a fleet of satellites circling the Earth, taking measurements of the atmosphere, clouds and oceans. But many are aging and need replacement.

The latest — about the size of a small school bus — is more sophisticated. It carries five different types of instruments to collect environmental data, including four that never before have flown into space.

The information will “help us understand what tomorrow will bring,” whether it’s the next-day forecast or long-term climate change, said Andrew Carson, the mission’s program executive at NASA headquarters.

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In a report released on Thursday, the UK department of health said most adults in the nation of 60 million people are eating about 10 percent more calories than necessary.

Officials said the country needs to collectively trim 5 billion calories from its daily diet to stop the bulging waistlines.

From news.yahoo.com:

But in a slightly confusing twist, the government also issued new calorie recommendations that are about 100 calories higher than the last figures in 1991. Men are now allowed to eat about 2,605 calories of food every day while for women, it’s 2,079.

British officials say the new numbers are based on a better understanding of current activity levels and that an individual’s ideal calorie count varies depending on factors like how much they exercise and their body mass index. Previous calorie recommendations underestimated the impact of physical activity, even though people are now more sedentary than two decades ago.

“This is not a license to eat more,” said Alan Jackson, head of the scientific group that came up with the new recommendations.

Dietary and lifestyle differences could possibly explain why South Asians and Europeans require different doses of drugs to treat similar conditions, according to Vidya Perera, final year pharmacy doctoral student at the University of Sydney.

Perera found that people from South Asia could manage with lower drug doses because of lower levels of CYP1A2, which is an enzyme that metabolizes drugs.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

Vegetables such as cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli are known to increase levels of CYP1A2,’ according to a Sydney statement.

‘The lower levels of CYP1A2 in South Asians, however, appears to be due to the common practice of cooking these vegetables, using ingredients such as cumin and turmeric, ingredients known to inhibit the enzyme,’ explained Perera.

‘This is the first study to look at CYP1A2 activity in South Asians. Understanding the correct dose of a medicine is crucial to achieving beneficial results and avoiding adverse drug reactions,’ she said.

The research was presented by Perera at the AusBiotech 2011 in Australia.

A US government panel recently said that routine screening for prostate cancer does not help save the lives of healthy men and often triggers the need for more tests and treatments.

The draft recommendations of the US Preventive Services Task Force that will be made public soon are likely to face a pushback from advocates of the PSA blood test as well as from drug makers and doctors who benefit from the now-lucrative screening industry.

From news.yahoo.com:

Based on the results of five clinical trials, the recommendation to avoid a prostate-specific antigen test — which measures the level of the protein in the blood — applies to healthy men of all ages without suspicious symptoms.

But it could have an especially dramatic impact on care for men aged 50 and older, who are routinely administered the PSA test.

“The principal risk is overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Most of the cancers that we detect are not cancers that would have ever gone on to cause a man harm in his lifetime,” panel co-chair Mike LeFevre told AFP.

“The vast majority of cancers don’t need to be treated and yet about 90 percent of men getting a PSA-based diagnosis here in the United States end up getting treated, and the risks of treatment are significant,” LeFevre added.