Today's Globe: mental screening for children, NJ prenatal HIV testing, John R. Pappenheimer

As of Monday, annual checkups for the nearly half a million Massachusetts children on Medicaid will carry a new requirement: Doctors must offer simple questionnaires to detect warning signs of possible mental health problems, from autism in toddlers to depression in teens.

HIV testing will soon become part of routine prenatal care and be required for some newborns in New Jersey under a new law supporters say is putting the state in the forefront of the national fight against HIV transmission to babies.

Physiology professor John R. Pappenheimer, the last of three intellectually gifted siblings who taught at Harvard and Harvard Medical School, died of respiratory failure on Dec. 9 in Cambridge. He was 92 and until not long ago still rode his bicycle, adding to a lifetime of pedaling he tallied in the tens of thousands of miles.