Dutch researchers interviewed parents of 3,000 babies up to six months old and found that colic was twice as likely in infants whose mothers smoked 15 to 30 cigarettes a day.

LEARNING TO LEARN The thinking has long been that kids with dyslexia and other learning disabilities must work twice as hard to absorb as much as their peers. Now some teachers are making classwork more inviting to all students by adopting dyslexia-friendly “universal instructional designs” that use visual aids like…

Dutch researchers report that using plant-derived margarines once a day at lunch seems to drive down bad-cholesterol levels as effectively as consuming them three times a day.

GOOD NEWS

SURVIVORS An experimental bone-marrow transplant may help treat kidney cancer, a disease so virulent that once it spreads, it kills half its victims within a year. Stem cells–the primordial cells that give rise to new cell lines–are collected from bone marrow. Once transplanted, they generate a…

Sydney will be affected by illegal substances and methods, including EPO. The drug’s introduction in 1987 was followed by a series of mysterious heart attacks among Dutch cyclists.

It isn’t cheating if everybody else is doing it.” So declared Canadian track coach Charlie Francis in 1988 when his sprinter Ben Johnson became the Olympics’ highest-profile disqualification ever by testing positive for steroids. But of 8,465 competitors at Seoul, only Johnson and nine others were booted for drugs. What’s…

The networks are doing their best to translate other foreign “reality” shows to American tastes, among them Chains of Love and Love Test.

Now that Survivor is over, what will we watch? The networks are doing their best to translate other foreign “reality” shows to American tastes: ABC has picked up Britain’s Jailbreak (10 “prisoners” under 24-hr. surveillance try to escape for big money), and NBC has locked up Holland’s Chains of Love…

In the Netherlands a company called Rigid Airship Design is building a 591-ft.-long airship, which it hopes to begin testing at the end of next year.

Just once, Scott Danneker would like to see a TV documentary or magazine story about his employer that doesn’t feature the airship Hindenburg’s bursting like a lava-filled egg over Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937. “What would happen if people felt compelled to mention Pan Am Flight 103 every time…

The Dutch official unemployment rate of 4% is the lowest in the E.U. But jobless people over the age of 57½ are not counted as unemployed; neither are almost 1 mil. on disability benefits.

Since the age of steam, the European labor movement has mustered red flags and brass bands on May Day for a traditional show of strength. But this year, post-May Day, Europe faces a labor paradox that Karl Marx never foresaw. While 15 million people are registered as unemployed in the…

In the NL. recipients have to pay income tax on stock options as soon as they are bestowed. But intense competition from option-rich firms abroad are starting to change that climate.

To Juan Villalonga, the arrangement must have seemed fair enough. Shortly after taking over as head of the Spanish telecommunications firm Telefonica in February 1997, he awarded the company’s 100 top executives–including himself–a bushel of potentially lucrative stock options that could be cashed out after three years. With…

Researchers from the NL. studied the effect of coffee consumption. The bottom line: drinking 48 oz. of unfiltered coffee a day may carry a 10% increase in risk for heart attack or stroke.

Are you one of the millions of Americans who can’t start the day without a steaming cup of coffee? Growing dependence on that morning caffeine jolt has made the U.S. one of the biggest coffee consumers in the world, swallowing about one-third of the world’s coffee production. Is that good…