Weighing the options: Doctors in Baton Rouge are looking for 306 pregnant women who are overweight to participate in a study to determine whether getting advice by smartphone or meeting with a coach or doctor can best help them control weight gain. More than two-thirds of such women gain an unhealthy amount of weight during their pregnancy, says study co-leader Leanne Redman, an assistant professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Get all the details in the full story by The Associated Press here; or visit Pennington’s Web page about the study here.
For the record: The Internal Revenue Service says late changes to federal tax laws should mean only a short delay for most taxpayers to file their 2012 returns. The agency announced today that more than 120 million taxpayers—about 80% of all filers—should be able to start filing their federal returns on Jan. 30. Others will have to wait until late February or March to file because the agency needs time to update and test its systems. Those who will have to wait include people claiming residential energy credits, depreciation of property or general business credits. The filing season had been slated to start Jan. 22 but was delayed because of the big tax package passed by Congress on Jan. 1.
Mercury rising: America set an off-the-charts heat record in 2012. A brutal combination of widespread drought and a mostly absent winter pushed the average annual U.S. temperature last year up to 55.32 degrees Fahrenheit, the government announced today. That’s a full degree warmer than the old record set in 1998. Breaking temperature records by an entire degree is unprecedented, scientists say. Normally, records are broken by a tenth of a degree or so. The full story is here.
