Senate Democrats huddle on gun measures

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden met Thursday with Senate Democrats to brief the caucus about the rationale behind the administration’s recommendations on guns, arguing that, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, the nation “will not understand if we don’t act.”

Biden seemed intent to emphasize that the most politically challenging of the initiatives he has  recommended – an assault weapons ban – was still a priority for the administration, mentioning it first in remarks to reporters afterward.

“My message was to lay out for my colleagues what our game plan was, what we thought needed to be done,” Biden said after the more than hourlong meeting. “I made the case for not only assault weapons but for the entire set of recommendations the president laid out.”

Biden said he also asked to sit down with the key parties on Capitol Hill to plot strategy going forward.

All 23 of President Obama's gun policy proposals

A day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on guns, the vice president said there has been a “sea change” in public opinion since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, calling it the “straw that broke the camel’s back” to get the public behind gun measures for the first time in decades.

“I’m not saying there’s an absolute consensus on all these things,” he said. “But there is a sea change in attitudes of the American people. And I believe that the American people will not understand – and I know everyone in that caucus agrees with me – will not understand if we don’t act.”

Participants in the meeting said the vice president indicated he will continue to travel to make the administration’s case, as will the president. A week ago Biden traveled to Richmond, Va., to focus on the call for universal background checks, which is seen as the most likely of the slate of proposals to pass.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

At that time, Biden did not mention the assault weapons ban in remarks to reporters afterward, though aides said it did come up in the private discussion with officials present.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Biden told the caucus Thursday that the administration is still behind the ban, a priority of her California colleague, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“He said this is something that they support. And that the reports that he’s seen have shown that it did make a difference,” Boxer said.

That remains a challenge though, even in the Democratic-controlled Senate because the Democrats must defend 21 seats in 2014.

“Until I see the bills and the language, the only thing I’m going to say is I’m a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment. We’ve got to find a balanced approach, and I will take each amendment and bill as it comes,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who will be seeking reelection next year in a deeply Republican state.

Biden maintained that while there is no way to eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting, “there are things that we can do … that have virtually zero impact on your 2nd Amendment right to own a weapon for both self-defense and recreation that can save some lives.”

“I’ve always been confident we can reach a consensus on a broad cross-section of issues that can reduce some of this violence, even knowing it will be imperfect,” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

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Amazon.com Goes Down, Takes Break From Retail Biz

Amazon hosted a new kind of online door-crasher sale on Thursday. That is to say, its front door crashed.

For about a half-hour, starting just before noon Pacific time on Thursday, the main Amazon.com webpage was inaccessible to web surfers.

Visitors were greeted with a white page and the error: “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.”

The problem appeared to affect only the front page of Amazon.com. Other pages on the site were accessible here at Wired.

Others reported Amazon coming back within a few minutes of the outage, but at Wired’s offices in San Francisco, the site’s main page was inaccessible for a half-hour. Online, others reported similar problems. Amazon couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

It was an unusual outage for Amazon.com, but over the past year, the company has endured several high profile crashes at Amazon Web Services, where it sells online computing power to companies such as Netflix. Amazon’s web services — including a critical Elastic Load Balancing service that keeps webservers from being overwhelmed — knocked Netflix offline in June and again on Christmas Eve.

That prompted this zinger from Netflix Engineer Adrian Cockcroft Thursday as the outage was happening, “Maybe the guy who broke the ELB got moved sideways to a new job in Amazon retail.” At least part of Amazon’s own site now runs on AWS, but it’s unclear how much.

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A Minute With: Rapper T.I. dips into comedy in “Identity Thief”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris has seen and done it all – three Grammy Awards, a novel, time in jail, a fashion line, TV reality show, businessman and several movies.

Now the Atlanta-based singer is dipping into comedy, appearing in the film “Identity Thief” as an armed enforcer on the trail of a character played by Melissa McCarthy who is on the run from many of those she’s swindled.

T.I., 32, sat down with Reuters ahead of the movie’s February 8 release to talk about the film, what’s left on his to-do list, and his personal views on gun control.

Q: How did you wind up in a comedic film?

A: “I met with (director) Seth (Gordon) and learned he was the director of one of my favorite comedies, ‘Horrible Bosses.’ I asked him how would this movie compare to ‘Horrible Bosses’ and he said it’s going to be better. I said, ‘I’m in.’”

Q: Were you OK taking a supporting role rather than a lead?

A: “I actually enjoyed the fact that all of the heavy lifting was not on my shoulders. It was Jason (Bateman) and Melissa’s show, so the stage was set for me to not screw it up, you know what I mean?”

Q: Last year you appeared on television’s “Hawaii Five-O” and “Boss.” Do you have role models of hip-hop stars who have successfully crossed over to acting?

A: “Will Smith and Ice Cube. Looking at the roles Cube has been able to acquire, he created those opportunities for himself. So I think I could take that approach.”

Q: Is there a certain perception of you out there that might hinder you from being taken seriously as an actor?

A: “I think people might wonder whether or not T.I. can be anything other than T.I., so it’s constantly having to reassure people that I’m able to do what I already know I can do.”

Q: For some, T.I. is a successful recording artist and for others he’s someone who had several stints in jail on drugs and weapons charges. Can you confidently say that the past is the past?

A: “I’m not gonna say anything. It’s day by day, you know what I’m saying? I’m saying today this is how I am, this is where I am. And tomorrow hopefully will be better than today.”

Q: In 2011 after your last prison term, you showed a softer side by starring in the VH1 reality series “T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle,” with your wife and six kids. Was that an attempt to right your past transgressions?

A: “Nah. I think it’s a showcasing of who I am today. I don’t think that it any way diminishes the mistakes of yesterday. It just makes a correction if people assume that the mistakes of yesterday are ever-present today. It gives people a stage of truth and knowledge to judge from. So if you must judge, at least you can judge from fact.”

Q: You’ve just released your eighth album, “Trouble Man II: He Who Wears the Crown.” You also have a your own urban fashion line, A.K.O.O. What else do you need to check off your to-do list?

A: “Just to remain relevant and meaningful to the cool young consumer of today. The cool kids are out there being admired by others in their peer group, so you want to find ways to continue to put yourself on their minds.”

Q: How do you do that?

A: “(Social media) is a big aspect for those kids. … So with Instagram, if you take pictures it has to be a picture worthy of showing. If you say something on Twitter, it has to be something that’s worthy of listening to.”

Q: With gun control being a hot-button topic today, and with your own experiences with firearms, what are your thoughts on gun ownership?

A: “I can’t possess a firearm (due to previous convictions), so whether they make them illegal or not is gonna be the same thing for me. But I see a need for them. I’ve been in circumstances where I’ve had them every day and nothing happened. I’ve been in circumstances where I didn’t have them, and I needed them. In certain areas of society, having a firearm is just as common as having bottled water.”

Q: In what way?

A: “If you’re a shopkeeper, a barbershop owner, a convenience store owner and you handle cash in and out of this area, if everyone knows that you don’t have a firearm, then you are basically prey. In these areas, bullets are just as common as sticks of gum, you know what I’m saying? So I think I speak for those people.”

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Will Dunham)

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Anti-Wal-Mart Labor Groups Agree to Stop Picketing the Chain

(Reuters) - Labor groups that have long spoken out against Wal-Mart Stores Inc will stop much of their picketing against the world's largest retailer, though they still plan to continue to push the company to improve working conditions.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or UFCW, and OUR Walmart reached an agreement with the National Labor Relations Board, the groups and Walmart U.S., said on Thursday.

The labor groups claim that they were not trying to unionize Walmart workers with their actions, which included a small number of Walmart's more than 1.3 million U.S. employees engaging in protests outside of Walmart stores.

The agreement comes after Wal-Mart filed an unfair labor practice charge against the UFCW in November, asking the NLRB to halt what the retailer said were unlawful attempts to disrupt its business.

The UFCW and OUR Walmart - a UFCW-supported group of current and former Wal-Mart workers - said that they do not intend to have Wal-Mart recognize or bargain with them as the representative of Wal-Mart employees.

Walmart said that many of the union's demonstrations and pickets before Black Friday were illegal, a claim that the UFCW denied. OUR Walmart said its protests were legally protected.

The UFCW and OUR Walmart will stop any unlawful recognitional picketing, will stop encouraging unlawful disruptions by other affiliated groups and will stop any picketing at Walmart stores and facilities for at least 60 days.

Recognitional picketing is done to try to get an employer to recognize a union as the bargaining representative for its employees and is subject to certain restrictions under the National Labor Relations Act.

The groups also said they would not fight it if the NLRB sought a temporary injunction against any future activity that it found to be the equivalent of picketing.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Wal-Mart filed with the NLRB after groups planned major protests at its stores for Black Friday, a busy shopping day. The NLRB did not issue any ruling before that day, and while several protests took place they did not hurt sales, as the Walmart chain of thousands of stores across the United States said it had its best Black Friday ever.

The agreement is unlikely to make a huge difference to the campaign, as OUR Walmart, the UFCW and others can still publicly voice their concerns without doing anything that would be legally defined as picketing, said John Logan, professor of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.

OUR Walmart said the agreement does not limit its ability to help employees in their dealings with Walmart over labor rights and standards. The UFCW said that the pact allows the union to continue its support of OUR Walmart and its supporters. The groups said that they are not trying to unionize at Walmart.

"It seems to me they're trying to come very close to the edge," said Ronald Meisburg, a partner at law firm Proskauer, who was the NLRB's general counsel from 2006 to 2010 and also served a recess appointment as a board member for one year.

The agreement is "a big victory for the company," he added.

In mid-January, Walmart said that it would give part-time workers the first shot at full-time positions. It also plans to make scheduling more transparent, giving part-time workers the ability to choose more of their own hours.

"Walmart is hearing us and at least starting to make changes that will improve the lives of workers and their families and our communities, and we will continue to raise our voices until there is real change at Walmart," Colby Harris, a member of OUR Walmart from Dallas, said in a statement provided by the group.

Members of OUR Walmart pay dues of $5 per month.

(Reporting by Jessica Wohl in Chicago; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Carol Bishopric)

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Syrian state media report airstrike by Israeli military

JERUSALEM – Amid rising fear that Syrian President Bashar Assad could lose control of his nation’s stockpiles of chemical and advanced weapons, Israel bombed and destroyed a military research center outside Damascus, the capital, Syrian state media reported Wednesday.

Israeli and U.S. military and government officials declined to comment on the report.

If it occurred, the attack would mark Israel’s most aggressive military strike against its neighbor during the Syrian uprising against Assad's rule that began nearly two years ago.

Earlier in the day, international news agencies and Arab news outlets reported that the Israeli strike had targeted a weapons convoy along the Syrian-Lebanese border as it attempted to deliver cargo to the militant group Hezbollah. Those reports could not be confirmed. Syrian officials denied the reports of a convoy as “baseless.”

Israeli officials have been voicing concern in recent days that Syria’s advanced weapons might fall into the hands of militant groups that could use them against Israel.

Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu raised the issue during a Cabinet meeting this week and officials have repeatedly said that any transfer of such weapons outside Syria might trigger a military response.

According to Syrian TV, the research facility and an adjacent building were destroyed in the dawn attack Wednesday. Two people were killed and five were injured, Syrian news reports said.

It was unclear what sort of military research was being carried out in the center, in Jamraya, northwest of the capital. There were no initial reports of chemical contamination in the area.

Syrian officials characterized the center as scientific and said Israel’s “blatant aggression” proved that it has been behind the effort to oust Assad, according to statement from the Syrian military, carried by the official Syrian Arab News Agency.

“It has become clear to everyone that Israel is the motivator, beneficiary and sometimes executor of the terrorist acts that target Syria and its resistant people,” the statement said.

To date Israel has tried to steer clear of the Syrian conflict, fearing that any actions it might take, such as supporting opposition forces or launching a military strike, might backfire or become a propaganda coup for Damascus.

That very issue might lead the Syrian government, which has long claimed that U.S. and “Zionist” forces are behind the rebellion against Assad, to accuse Israel of attacking its territory.

Each side in the Syrian conflict has portrayed itself as an implacable enemy of Israel.

There is also concern that an Israeli strike could drag others into the Syrian conflict. Iran, Syria’s close ally, said early this week that any foreign attack against Syria would be regarded as an attack on Iran.

In addition to chemical weapons, Israeli officials have been particularly worried about Syria’s stockpile of Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. If such weapons were obtained by the militant Hezbollah movement, it would weaken Israel’s regional military power and hinder its ability to launch airstrikes in Lebanon.

“The initial speculation was about chemical weapons, but Israel is deeply concerned about Hezbollah acquiring this kind of advanced anti-aircraft missile,’’ said Jonathan Spyer, senior research fellow at the Center for Global Research in International Affairs in Herzliya, Israel. “It would transform Hezbollah’s game and potentially end Israel’s air superiority over Lebanon. This is entirely about Hezbollah, not about Syria.”

Officials in Lebanon denied knowledge of any Israeli attack, but complained that Israeli jets had violated their airspace for several hours, beginning Tuesday afternoon and continuing until Wednesday morning. Though Israel routinely flies over Lebanon for reconnaissance missions to keep a close eye on Hezbollah's arms stocks and movements of weapons, the activity overnight was reportedly heavier than usual.

It is often Israel’s policy to refuse to confirm or deny its activities in the region, partly out of a belief that silence might reduce the pressure on its enemies to react or retaliate.

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<em>Game of Thrones</em> Fans Create Spectacular <em>Minecraft</em> Version of King's Landing

The amazing Minecraft builders at at WesterosCraft are at it again, this time releasing spectacular new renderings of King’s Landing — the capital of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones — recreated with the distinctive blocks of the popular sandbox game.

The WesterosCraft team of Will Blew and Jacob Granberry posted the images of their latest work on reddit… and nearly brought their whole house down. (“Annnnnnnnnd you guys broke the server! Please be patient we’re working on keeping it up :),” the creators posted in the thread showing off the latest images.

The folks at WesterosCraft are slowly but surely working to build the entire universe of Game of Thrones in Minecraft and with this latest installment they estimate they’re about 70 percent done with the entire continent of Westeros. The team also notes that the the latest section of George R.R. Martin’s world took some 100 builders four months to complete and includes roughly 3,000 unique buildings.

At least the hard work paid off. In a final edit to the reddit posting, creator “pizzainacup” responded to the online feedback to the images saying, “holy crap: is that what it feels like to be an internet celebrity?”

Check out Minecraft King’s Landing in the gallery above. See you in the Red Keep.

Images courtesy WesterosCraft, via Imgur

[via Kotaku]

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Lindsay Lohan could face jail after March trial in California

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actress Lindsay Lohan will stand trial on March 18 on charges she lied to California police about a June car crash and violated probation, raising the possibility she could be sent back to jail.

A judge in Los Angeles on Wednesday set the trial date on charges related to the car crash and said the court will hold a hearing at the same time on whether Lohan in the incident violated probation from a 2011 jewelry theft.

The star of the movie “Mean Girls,” who has been in and out of rehab and jail since 2007, wore a black sleeveless dress and looked tired at the brief court hearing. She arrived in Los Angeles late Tuesday from New York and has abandoned her longtime lawyer in favor of new attorney Mark Heller.

Lohan has pleaded not guilty to three misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, lying to police and obstructing police when she said she was not behind the wheel of her sports car, which smashed into a truck in Santa Monica, California in June.

Lohan, 26, left court without speaking to the media.

The former “Parent Trap” child star has been in and out of trouble since a 2007 arrest for drunk driving and cocaine possession.

Sautner warned Lohan that she could be found in violation of probation even if she is acquitted on charges connected to the car crash because the standard of proof is lower.

Lohan was ordered to appear at Wednesday’s hearing because she decided to switch lawyers, firing longtime attorney Shawn Holley this month.

She was arrested in New York on a misdemeanor assault charge on the same day in November that the Santa Monica car crash charges were filed. The Manhattan district attorney‘s office has not filed a criminal complaint in the assault case.

Lohan’s appearance in Los Angeles had been in doubt after Heller wrote to the court earlier this week saying was suffering from an upper respiratory infection and could not appear.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” Judge Stephanie Sautner told Lohan at the hearing.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

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Readers may submit comments or questions for The Consumer by e-mail to consumer@nytimes.com.

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Facebook Beats Forecasts on Earnings and Revenue

SAN FRANCISCO — Wall Street is still not sure about Facebook.

After an eight-month roller coaster ride on the public market, the company on Wednesday beat earnings expectations by aggressively ramping up targeted advertisements to its users, including on mobile phones. It reported fourth-quarter revenues of $1.59 billion, representing 40 percent growth. Analysts were looking for a 34 percent growth in revenue, to $1.52 billion in this quarter, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Facebook earned $64 million in net income, or 3 cents a share. Excluding certain items, Facebook said it had a net income of $426 million in the fourth quarter, or 17 cents a share. Analysts had expected 15 cents a share.

But after the earnings report, the stock fell over 5 percent from Wednesday’s closing price of $31.24, before recovering.

Most Facebook users log in on their cell phones, and so the most closely watched piece of the quarterly earnings was how much money the company brought in from its mobile users. It reported that advertising on the mobile newsfeed accounted for 23 percent of its advertising revenues, up from 14 percent in the third quarter of 2012; at the time Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told analysts he wished to “dispel the myth” that the company can’t profit in the mobile era.

This quarter, analysts expected the company to rev it up considerably; Aaron Kessler, an analyst at Raymond James, for example, estimated it would rise to more than 25 percent. “They’re experimenting a lot with ad formats,” he said “Not all of them will stick. It’s still in a somewhat experimental phase.”

Despite the stock’s decline after the earnings report, it is still much recovered since last year’s slump. After Facebook’s fairy tale debut in the public markets last year at $38 a share, the stock plummeted, as Wall Street soured on its ability to grow profits as fast as it had wished. Shares slumped to half the public offering price last September.

But the company focused on its advertising business; rolled out a series of new products aimed at taking on some of its biggest rivals, including Google and Apple; and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, took greater initiative to reassure investors it had their interests at heart. Facebook’s share price has steadily improved in the last few weeks, suggesting that the company’s charm offensive to investors is paying off.

Facebook’s biggest, long-term challenge remains how to profit from the enormous piles of personal data of its one billion users without alienating them or inviting the wrath of government regulators in the United States and abroad. Secondarily, it must figure out a way to profit abroad: The lion’s share of its revenues still come from North America and to a lesser extent, Europe.

In the last few months, Facebook has floated several trial balloons designed to please Wall Street and in particular, to persuade investors that it can thrive in the mobile era.

It offered marketers more refined targeting options, including Facebook Exchange, which allows companies to track users as they are browsing and shopping for products around the Web and show them advertisements for those products when they are logged back on to Facebook.

Before Christmas last year, in a bid to step into territory dominated by Amazon, it rolled out the Gifts application, which allows users to buy goods and services for their Facebook friends, and in turn, share with the company an extremely valuable piece of data: their credit card numbers.

Its most ambitious move came in mid-January with a new search tool that mines the vast data posted by individual users and brands. The tool, which the company calls “graph search,” promises to help users answer their questions about everything from jobs to restaurant recommendations. It is part of the company’s efforts to take on smaller sites like Yelp, for restaurants, and LinkedIn, for employment, and ultimately needle its biggest rival, Google, which dominates the search market.

Jared Belsky, executive vice president of a digital marketing agency, 360i, said marketers were more optimistic about the Facebook platform than even a few months ago. “They have so much information to share on consumers, they are getting better at making data available,” he said. “They’re helping us target better, but to a point.”

Facebook remains a shadow of Google: With about $5 billion in revenues in 2012, Facebook earned a little under one-tenth of what Google brought in. Even in the mobile advertising business, Google takes in over half of all revenues, compared with about 8 percent by Facebook, the research firm, eMarketer estimates.

As part of its aggressive appeals to mobile users, a few weeks ago, Facebook rolled out a way for users to make free voice calls using the Internet (think Skype) and leaving voice messages for friends unable to text (think Facebook app for cars).

The Facebook mobile application earlier this month became the most popular in the United States, accounting for 85 million unique users, according to the market research firm ComScore. The company had released a new, faster version of its application for the iPhone last August, followed later in the year by a new version for Android phones.

It showed more advertisements to desktop users and its mobile subscribers. Sponsored Stories advertisements appear in the mobile newsfeed and app developers can market their products with what are called app install ads.

One offering, Poke, a fleeting text application aimed squarely at young audiences, sank like a lead balloon. Poke was clearly intended to rival Snapchat, which is popular among teenagers, a demographic that Facebook desperately needs to hold onto.

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