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• This year's Antarctic ozone hole is 5th biggest
  This year's ozone hole over Antarctica was the fifth biggest on record, reaching a maximum area of 10.5 million square miles in September, NASA says. That's considered "moderately large," NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman said in a statement. NASA has tracked the size of the hole for 30 years. Last year, it was 9.7 million square miles, about the size of North America. The hole is an area of depletion in the stratospheric ozone layer, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays from space. Created by human-produced gases, the ozone hole generally forms in August and grows to its maximum size in September or October before breaking up.
• Few options remain when job insurance disappears
  Leah Smith shells out more than $730 a month for health insurance but you won't hear her complaining. Among the jobless, Smith is one of the lucky few with solid health insurance that she can afford. And it covers thousands of dollars in prescription drugs she could never pay for herself. Health problems forced the 55-year-old to leave her job as a human resources director several years ago. She takes medication to help cope with spine problems, multiple sclerosis and high blood pressure, among other ailments. She's covered under the Indiana Comprehensive Health Insurance Association, a state-backed safety net program, and pays $2,198 every three months. That's not cheap. It's about what the average worker pays over three years for her portion of a single-coverage plan through an employer, according to statistics from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. The Indiana insurance pool is one of the limited possibilities for people who lose their jobs and are searching for health insurance. It's a problem more Americans will face as more people lose jobs in the economic downturn.
• Study: War deployments make kids more aggressive
  Preschoolers with a parent away at war were more likely to show aggression than other young children in military families, according to the first published research on how the very young react to wartime deployment. Hitting, biting and hyperactivity - "the behaviors parents really notice" - were more frequent when a parent was deployed, said lead author Dr. Molinda Chartrand, an active duty pediatrician in the U.S. Air Force. The study, which was small and included fewer than 200 children, adds to previous evidence of the stress that deployment puts on families. Last year, a study of almost 1,800 Army families worldwide found that reports of child abuse and neglect were 42 percent higher during times when the soldier-parent was deployed. This time, researchers looked at families living on a large Marine base in 2007. (The base wasn't identified in the study.) Children, 3 to 5 years old, with a deployed parent scored an average of five points higher for behavior problems on two questionnaires widely used in child psychology than did the children whose Marine-parents weren't deployed. About 1 in 5 of the older preschoolers with a parent at war displayed troubling emotional or behavioral signs.
• Space junk falls harmlessly in South Pacific
  A refrigerator-sized piece of space junk fell harmlessly into the South Pacific Sunday night, according to NASA. The junk was a tank full of ammonia coolant on the international space station that was no longer needed. Astronaut Clayton Anderson threw it overboard during a spacewalk in July 2007. Space station program manager Mike Suffredini said Monday that the debris splashed down somewhere between Australia and New Zealand Sunday night. The tank had served as a reserve supply of spare coolant at the space station since 2001.
• Study: Women lead men in bacteria, hands down
  Wash your hands, folks, especially you ladies. A new study found that women have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do. And everybody has more types of bacteria than the researchers expected to find. "One thing that really is astonishing is the variability between individuals, and also between hands on the same individual," said University of Colorado biochemistry assistant professor Rob Knight, a co-author of the paper. "The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria we found on the hands of women," added lead researcher Noah Fierer, an assistant professor in Colorado's department of ecology and evolutionary biology. The researchers aren't sure why women harbored a greater variety of bacteria than men, but Fierer suggested it may have to so with the acidity of the skin. Knight said men generally have more acidic skin than women. Other possibilities are differences in sweat and oil gland production between men and women, the frequency of moisturizer or cosmetics applications, skin thickness or hormone production, he said.
• Teen pregnancies tied to tastes for sexy TV shows
  Groundbreaking research suggests that pregnancy rates are much higher among teens who watch a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior than among those who have tamer viewing tastes. "Sex and the City," anyone? That was one of the shows used in the research. The new study is the first to link those viewing habits with teen pregnancy, said lead author Anita Chandra, a Rand Corp. behavioral scientist. Teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs. Previous research by some of the same scientists had already found that watching lots of sex on TV can influence teens to have sex at earlier ages. Shows that highlight only the positive aspects of sexual behavior without the risks can lead teens to have unprotected sex "before they're ready to make responsible and informed decisions," Chandra said. The study was released Monday in the November issue of Pediatrics. It involved 2,003 12- to 17-year-old girls and boys nationwide questioned by telephone about their TV viewing habits in 2001. Teens were re-interviewed twice, the last time in 2004, and asked about pregnancy. Among girls, 58 became pregnant during the follow-up, and among boys, 33 said they had gotten a girl pregnant.
• HEALTHBEAT: Brain slows at 40, starts body decline
  Think achy joints are the main reason we slow down as we get older? Blame the brain, too: The part in charge of motion may start a gradual downhill slide at age 40. How fast you can throw a ball or run or swerve a steering wheel depends on how speedily brain cells fire off commands to muscles. Fast firing depends on good insulation for your brain's wiring. Now new research suggests that in middle age, even healthy people begin to lose some of that insulation in a motor-control part of the brain - at the same rate that their speed subtly slows. That helps explain why "it's hard to be a world-class athlete after 40," concludes Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the work. And while that may sound depressing, keep reading. The research points to yet another reason to stay physically and mentally active: An exercised brain may spot fraying insulation quicker and signal for repair cells to get to work. To Bartzokis, the brain is like the Internet. Speedy movement depends on bandwidth, which in the brain is myelin, a special sheet of fat that coats nerve fibers.
• Calif. surgeon faces trial in organ donation case
  Ruben Navarro loved horror movies. He watched the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" series with his mother, Rosa, and liked to visit Knott's Berry Farm when it was transformed every October to "Knott's Scary Farm." Since his death 2 1/2 years ago, Rosa Navarro says she has been living a real-life nightmare without her only child. Ruben Navarro, who had multiple medical problems, died in a San Luis Obispo hospital after a heart attack, then was taken off a ventilator and prepared for organ donation. The circumstances surrounding that death will be center stage in opening statements scheduled to begin Monday in the trial of Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, a San Francisco transplant surgeon who is accused of hastening Navarro's death so his organs could be harvested. "He was my world," Rosa Navarro told The Associated Press on Thursday. "It's been very, very hard for me. He didn't die with respect and integrity." Roozrokh, 34, faces one count of felony dependent adult abuse. Two other felony counts were dismissed by San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge Martin J. Tangeman in March.
• Mega Millions jackpot now $42 million
  There has been another rollover in the jackpot for the Mega Millions multistate lottery - to $42 million. The rollover occurred because no player matched all the winning numbers from Tuesday night's $