Research

In 1986, lawmakers decided the problem of illegal immigration had to be dealt with. More than 3 million people were living in the United States after crossing the border illegally or overstaying their visas. A new law signed by President Ronald Reagan gave legal status and a path to citizenship to most of those unauthorized residents - helping many secure a slice of the American dream but also giving fuel to critics who sought to turn "amnesty" into a pejorative. Less than 30 years later, the number of immigrants living in the country illegally is thought to have nearly quadrupled, and the freighted baggage of amnesty looms over new efforts to reform the nation's immigration laws.

A breakthrough in stem cell research has again raised the specter of human cloning. The discovery by a team at Oregon Health and Science University moves the world incrementally closer to that result, but its more immediate effect will be to spur efforts to regenerate healthy tissue for the injured and the ailing. Although it's reasonable to worry about where such a discovery may lead, those concerns shouldn't stop researchers from exploring the restorative properties of stem cells. The promise of stem cells is that they can develop into many different kinds of tissues rather than being locked into a specific cellular fate.

Most of us are curious about our family lineage. For Vanessa Williams, who recently took part in the show "Who Do You Think You Are" and explored her family's history, the task was both surprising and informative. Here, she talks about what she learned and how she plans to use that information. How did you become interested in finding out about your lineage? I've always been interested, but I was introduced to Ancestry.com [one of the websites that help people research their family backgrounds]

In a major case of academic poaching involving crosstown rivals, USC has lured away two prominent neuroscientists from UCLA with a promise to expand their internationally renowned lab that uses brain imaging techniques to study Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, autism and other disorders. Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson will move to the USC Keck School of Medicine campus next fall, along with scores of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staffers who now work at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, known as LONI.

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

Until recently, very few people had ever heard of raspberry ketones, the aromatic compounds that give the berries their distinctive smell. Today, health food stores have trouble keeping the capsules or drops of the stuff on their shelves. Almost overnight, an obscure plant compound became the next big thing in weight loss - and all it took was a few words from Dr. Oz. In a February episode of "The Dr. Oz Show," Mehmet Oz told viewers that raspberry ketones were "the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. " Once Oz calls something a "miracle," it doesn't remain obscure for long.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the supplement nitric oxide? Richard Sunland Nitric oxide is a gas naturally found in the body; its function is conveying information between cells. One of its main jobs is increasing blood flow by dilating blood vessels, and that's why it's sometimes given in supplement form to heart patients, orally and intravenously. In at least one study it's been shown to be effective for lowering blood pressure.

A worrisome abdominal pain drove Jalal Afshar to seek treatment last year at healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. The Pasadena resident and Kaiser member had lived for years with a rare condition known as Castleman's disease, which affects the lymph nodes and the body's immune system. But this was the first time he experienced such severe symptoms. Kaiser granted his request to see a specialist in Arkansas. But it ultimately declined to pay for his treatment there. By June, Afshar said, Kaiser was arranging for hospice care so that he could die at home.

WASHINGTON - How hot is hot when it comes to housing markets across the country right now? Crazy hot: Some houses sell within days, sometimes within hours, of listing. Then there are the growing numbers that sell even before they formally hit the market - sold through a controversial technique known as "pocket listing. " What's a pocket listing? Essentially it's a private, "off-market" listing, often of short duration. Instead of putting the house on the local Multiple Listing Service, which exposes it to a vast number of shoppers and agents via real estate websites, agents restrict access to information about the house to their own buyer clients or colleagues in the same brokerage, hoping for a quick, full-price sale.

Security researchers Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey have discovered a seven-digit numerical code that can unlock all kinds of secrets about you. It's your phone number. Using relatively simple techniques, this duo can use your cellphone number to figure out your name, where you live and work, where you travel and when you sleep. They could even listen to your voice messages and personal phone calls — if they wanted to. "It's really interesting to watch a phone number turn into a person's life," DePetrillo said.

Marine biologist Dan Madigan stood on a dock in San Diego and considered some freshly caught Pacific bluefin tuna. The fish had managed to swim 5,000 miles from their spawning grounds near Japan to California's shores, only to end up the catch of local fishermen. It was August 2011, five months since a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami had struck in Japan, crippling the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Madigan couldn't stop thinking about pictures he'd seen on TV of Japanese emergency crews dumping radioactive water from the failing reactors into the Pacific Ocean.

The number of violent crimes involving guns has plummeted in the last two decades, but more than half of Americans think the opposite is true, according to reports released Tuesday. Killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes involving guns have dropped since their peak in the mid-1990s, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. The rate of killings by gun has been cut nearly in half, according to another analysis of the same data by the Pew Research Center. The rate of other violent gun crimes fell even more sharply, by 75%, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns.

WASHINGTON -- An often-heard criticism of American politics is that lawmakers listen only to the views of their wealthy constituents, not to the poor. The recent vote in Congress to exempt the air traffic control system from across-the-board budget cuts -- a move that primarily benefited fliers, who tend to be more affluent than the average American -- provided a case in point. But was that vote typical of the system overall or a special case? New research that directly compares lawmakers' votes with the positions taken by their constituents challenges the view that the voices of the wealthy consistently drown out those of the poor.

For the first half of the 20th century, the cell was a mysterious, unfathomable entity. Nutrients went in and hormones, wastes and other products came out. But what happened in between was anybody's guess. Light microscopes could reveal the rough details of the cell's interior, but not with enough precision to illuminate function. Chemical studies were rudimentary at best. Three men changed that. Albert Claude of the Rockefeller Institute - now University - adapted the electron microscope to image cells, allowing a much higher resolution.

The history of Europe is written in its people's DNA. The Huns and the Slavs made incursions into Eastern Europe about 1,500 years ago. Migrants moved from Ireland to England in recent centuries. Populations in Italy and Spain have been comparatively stable. None of this is breaking news. But scientists were able to see it anew by examining the patterns of genes in 2,257 people now living in 40 countries on the continent. It's surprising "how much past history was still evident in the patterns we've seen," said Peter Ralph, a computational biologist at USC who reported the findings Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology.

BEIRUT - Huge explosions were reported in Damascus early Sunday, just two days after a reported Israeli airstrike in Syria targeting surface-to-air missiles possibly destined for neighboring Lebanon and the militant group Hezbollah. Syrian state media also blamed Israel for Sunday's predawn onslaught, saying that Israeli jet fighters had launched rockets on the capital. The site targeted was a military research facility in Jamraya, just outside Damascus, state media reported.

International Space Station Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield returns to Earth, and eventually Canada, on Monday. So, what better way to end the mission than doing a personalized rendition of David Bowie's classic "A Space Oddity," in the first music video from space. Hadfield, from the Canadian Space Agency, has been one chatty dude up there in the International Space Station, tweeting constantly during the Expedition 35 mission, which included a precedent-setting emergency spacewalk this weekend to repair an ammonia coolant leak.

Two-fifths of the elderly spend more than they earn, often forcing them to dip into savings to pay bills, according to a new study. Among those 65 and older, 40% shell out more on housing, medical care and other costs than they take in from Social Security, pensions and other sources, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. An additional 14.3% of that age group spend more than 75% of their incomes on regular expenses, leaving little cushion for unexpected financial setbacks, the study showed.

Teams will fan out across the Sierra Nevada on Thursday to perform their final snow survey of the season, a closely watched rite of spring that helps determine how much water will flow to farms and cities in coming months. But 18,000 feet above the Sierra slopes, an airborne experiment is underway that could revolutionize that ritual. Starting in early April, researchers have made weekly flights over the upper Tuolumne River basin, taking sophisticated instrument readings of the snow depth and reflected sunlight.

Mary Thom, an early staffer at Ms. magazine who rose to executive editor and later wrote an insider's history of the groundbreaking, mass-market chronicle of the women's movement, died Friday in a motorcycle crash in Yonkers, N.Y. She was 68. Her death was announced by the Women's Media Center, a nonprofit New York-based organization founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem. Thom was editor-in-chief for the center, which publishes features on women's issues in addition to offering media training and advocacy.