The panel of California educators and specialists made suggestions at a special educational forum in Mill Valley, Calif., on how physical education can be integrated into academic courses such as math, language arts, science, social studies and international languages to improve student performance. A University of Southern California study shows that workers who stood at a computer made decisions 20 percent faster than when they sat. Schools should follow the sports model of promoting individual athletes only when their skills are fully developed and they are ready to go to the next level, the experts said. This is in contrast to what happens now in schools, where all students move at the same pace in their classes, with those who take longer to learn falling behind and those who take less time being held back, said Roberta Park, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Pyong Woo Park, assistant professor if infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston said the finding could open the door to developing ways to treat deadly infectious pneumonia.
Bacterial pneumonia is a serious complication of patients with cystic fibrosis and other disorders.
The results were reported in the British journal Nature. These tools can be used to discover new cholesterol-controlling drugs, they say. Their results will help identify genes responsible for atherosclerosis, diseases associated with bile secretion in the liver and some cancers, said Steven Farber of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Michael Pack of the University of Pennsylvania, authors of the study reported in the journal Science. The investigators suggest that drugs that interfere with a gene implicated in their study of zebrafish may be a useful way to control high cholesterol in people. And zebrafish could be as good as mice for identifying genes that are involved in human lipid metabolism and disease, the investigators said.