Today in Globe Business

Bay State heads to a jobless recovery

Many of Massachusetts’ key industries have begun to rebound along with the broader economy, increasing sales and production, but hiring only cautiously - if at all.

That caution is contributing to what is almost certain to be another jobless recovery in Massachusetts and elsewhere, a pattern that has marked economic turnarounds since the early 1990s. Even though the economy is expanding, it is not growing fast enough to generate jobs and reduce unemployment in the state, already at its highest level since the 1970s.

Over the next year, economic activity in Massachusetts will increase more than 2 percent, slightly faster than in the nation as a whole, but employers here will still slice 37,000 more jobs, according to forecasts by Moody’s Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa. That job loss, while significant, is less than the projected rate nationwide.

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Tapping the brakes on health sector's growth

The state’s health care and life sciences companies have been counter-cyclical players through the economic downturn, getting bigger and hiring more people while other businesses were forced to cut back.

Now that the Massachusetts economy appears poised for recovery, however, there are signs the steady growth enjoyed by health care, biotechnology, and related industries may be coming to an end.

Cost containment efforts by federal and state governments, and at private insurance companies, are putting fresh pressure on the same state providers that went through a growth spurt two years ago when Massachusetts passed a law improving residents’ access to health care.

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People are still evolving, heart study numbers say

Charles Darwin famously studied evolution in the Galapagos Islands. Now a team of scientists has chosen a decidedly less exotic locale to study the subject - Framingham.

Residents of the Boston suburb have long participated in a landmark study of their cardiovascular health, which has shown that smoking and high cholesterol increase risk of heart disease. Now data compiled for the heart study are providing evidence of human evolution in action - and have led researchers from Yale University, Boston University School of Medicine, and the University of Pennsylvania to predict that the community’s next generation of women will be slightly chubbier and shorter and have lower cholesterol.

Evolution occurs because organisms with advantageous traits are more likely to survive and pass on those traits to their offspring - a process called natural selection. It is widely believed that modern medicine and technology have brought human evolution to a screeching halt, since most people - and not only the “fittest’’ - can now survive and pass on their genes. But the authors of the new research say their work shows natural selection is still occurring.

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INNOVATION ECONOMY: A personal take on the rise and fall of Digital

Highlights from Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. For the full blog, visit www.boston.com/innovation.

Harlan Anderson turned 80 this month. With Ken Olsen, he started Digital Equipment Corp., which was one of the pillars of the Route 128 era in Massachusetts and at one point was the second-biggest technology company in the world, after IBM. Next month, his memoir (“Learn, Earn & Return: My Life as a Computer Pioneer’’) will be released.

Oh, and he also started blogging recently.

I spoke with Anderson earlier this month to ask him about becoming an author, meeting (and later parting ways with) Olsen, how they raised money for the start-up, and what he views as the Achilles’ heel that undermined DEC.

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