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The US Supreme Court will likely decide on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- which requires American citizens to either buy health insurance or incur a penalty -- sometime this session. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled against the law, while other appeals courts, including one in Cincinnati, have either rejected the case or upheld the law.

When the National Academy of Sciences issued its review of the FBI anthrax investigation earlier this year, the press fixated primarily on one point: The report found no conclusive evidence that Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist the government contends was responsible for a series of anthrax-laced letters mailed in 2001, produced them.

It's not often that Hollywood ventures into the realm of epidemics and public health, and when it does, the outcome is usually laughably out of touch with reality -- like Outbreak, the 1995 movie about a deadly Ebola-like virus that infected a city. To prevent the virus from spreading, the military decided to bomb the city to oblivion. Fortunately, a cure was discovered just in the nick of time.

The plot just kept getting thicker. First, the culprit was cucumbers and tomatoes from Spain. Then it was bean sprouts from northern Germany. Then it wasn't.

Jonathan Tucker, one of the world's most eminent experts in chemical and biological weapons, arms control and disarmament, and nonproliferation, died recently at his home in Washington, DC. He was 56 years old.

As I endeavored to write a positive take on the prospects for the upcoming Seventh Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in December, the proverb "There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip" kept coming to mind. In other words, a lot could still go wrong in December. Perhaps it's the history of the near-death experience of the Convention in the 2001-2002 Fifth Review Conference, or maybe it's the Convention's existence on the intersessional process (ISP) life-support system of 2003-2005 and 2007-2010.

If one listened closely to the discussions around the recent meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the upcoming review of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), one might have heard a distant rumble of concern. These worries stem from the widespread recognition that advances in the life sciences are progressing at a rate faster than the treaty seems able to keep pace with.

When Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity, he made extensive use of "thought experiments" -- hypothetical exercises that, while impossible to carry out in real life, are useful for testing complex theories. In one well-known case, he compared the passage of time on a train traveling at close to the speed of light with that of a stationary observer in order to elucidate a concept known as the "relativity of simultaneity."

As Japan struggles to contain the crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, government officials in other nations are nervously assessing their own emergency-response policies and procedures for a nuclear reactor accident. If any country is prepared to handle the worst that nature can present, it's Japan, where strict building codes and evacuation drills saved many lives from the March 11 disaster. But even Japan was not ready for a colossal 9.0 earthquake followed by a devastating tsunami.

In the late 1990s a deadly new disease emerged from the tropical forests of Malaysia, spread by fruit bats whose natural habitat had been destroyed by deforestation. The Malaysian government was unprepared for this new disease and subsequently bore high costs from the outbreak, including more than 100 human lives lost as well as an economically devastating collapse of its pig-farming industry. Eventually, the new scourge was identified and named: the Nipah virus.