Alcohol advertising inside MBTA subway cars reaches thousands of Boston Public School students every school day, a new study from Boston University reports, exposing young people to the kind of messages that research links to increased underage drinking.

A team from the Boston University School of Public Health sampled about 30 percent of Boston's subway cars and found an average of almost two ads for alcohol per subway car on the Orange, Red, Green and Blue lines. The Orange Line had the most and the Red Line had the fewest alcohol ads.

They concluded that the ads -- mostly beer and bourbon -- were seen more than 18,000 times per day by students from 11 to 18 years old as they rode to and from school, reaching about half of the more than 9,000 students who travel to school by subway each day, according to ratings used by advertisers to measure the success of their ads. That level of reach is the same as those students seeing about five Super Bowl ads every day, study senior author Dr. Michael Siegel said in an interview.

An online program designed to foster better diet and exercise habits may be linked to lower health costs in people at risk for certain health problems, a Boston study suggests.

Researchers led by Dr. Thomas Moore of Boston University School of Medicine were testing the effects of DASH for Health, a Web-based nutrition and exercise program offered as an employee benefit at computer company EMC, Boston Medical Center, and pharmacy chain CVS Caremark. A new study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research tracked employees and their family members at EMC to see whether medical costs were different for people enrolled in the program compared to people who didn't participate.

The online program gives advice to individuals on nutrition and exercise based on their age, gender, diet, blood pressure, and weight. Users can see progress toward goals they may have and receive general health information weekly. For the study, the researchers logged medical expenses from insurance claims for 12 months before and after EMC employees and their spouses began using the DASH program.

After one year, overall medical costs for the 1,967 people in the program had not changed significantly from the previous year, compared to costs over the same two years for the more than 15,000 people who did not participate. But among the 735 participants who had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes, costs were $827 lower per person on average than the year before they entered the program.

When the researchers tried to account for differences between participants and non-participants to see if something other than the program might explain the lower medical costs, they found that the results had borderline significance, meaning they were close to what could have occurred by chance. But the authors said other evidence suggests that the program may be responsible for the cost difference: People with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes who used the site more than nine times a year had annual costs that dropped $55 with each additional visit to the site.

"We already know from previous studies we have done that [after one year] people lose weight, lower their blood pressure, and improve their eating habits," Moore said in an interview. "But this study says that not only do they do all of that, but for people who have medical conditions where you think that improving diet would be very helpful -- like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes -- they can also reduce the amount of money they spend on their health care."

Moore is chairman of e-Havior Change, the company that owns the copyright to the DASH for Health program.

Massachusetts has made a strong showing in a $348 million federal grant program that encourages biomedical researchers to engage in high-risk projects with the potential to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into treatments.

Eleven of 42 Transformational R01 grants are flowing to scientists in the state and 12 of 55 New Innovator award winners are based here. One of 18 Pioneer Award recipients is from Massachusetts. All three programs from the National Institutes of Health are designed to spur exploration that may have been deemed too risky in past rounds.

Boston University's Metropolitan College is offering scholarships to patients being cared for at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the university said today.

The program, housed in the BU division geared to adult learners, offers assistance starting in the fall to cancer patients who want to start or resume an undergraduate education as full-time or part-time students. Current Dana-Farber patients or patients who have received care in the past 18 months are eligible to apply for the scholarships. They will be awarded based on financial need.

Money for the scholarships comes from donations, BU said. About $25,000 has been raised. Courses at Metropolitan College cost from $350 to $700 per credit.

A healthcare executive with a background in Boston has been named to manage operations at a high-security research laboratory in the city's South End, Boston University announced today.

John D. Nash became chief operating officer of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on July 20. He comes from the Ireland Cancer Center at University Hospitals in Cleveland, where he was senior vice president and general manager. Before that he was executive vice president and chief operating officer of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Earlier in his career Nash was chief of hospital operations at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He earned a bachelors' degree at Boston College and master's in healthcare administration from Duke University.

The BU biolab, housed in a $198 million building on Albany Street, is vacant while additional safety reviews are completed, which could take until late next year. Residents in the South End and Roxbury have sued to block its opening, contending that the deadly viruses and bacteria studied there would pose too great a hazard to the densely populated neighborhood near the lab.

Hospitalizations for children diagnosed with obesity almost doubled between 1999 and 2005, a new national study reports. Costs have almost doubled too, even though federal figures measuring the prevalence of childhood obesity appeared stable over the same period of time.

A research team led by Dr. Leonardo Trasande of Mount Sinai School of Medicine tracked the increase in hospitalizations of children and adolescents from 2 to 19 years old by analyzing records from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, the largest database for US hospitalizations. The researchers included obesity as a primary diagnosis as well as obesity when it was secondary to another medical condition, such as asthma, diabetes, or a mental illness.

Hospital stays for these children climbed from 21,743 in 1999 to 42,429 in 2005 while costs in constant dollars rose from $126 million to $238 million. The most common conditions the children had along with obesity were psychiatric disorders, pregnancy-related conditions, asthma, and diabetes. The increase in obesity diagnoses could not be explained by increases in the other conditions, which decreased or stayed the same, except for diabetes.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The controversial Boston University research laboratory built to study the world's deadliest germs will open its doors to scientists in a few months for training exercises, the university announced this afternoon.

When the researchers enter the South End facility late in the summer or early in the fall, they will not use any bacteria or viruses. Instead, university officials said, the exercises are being conducted to "test safety, health, and operational procedures." Later, emergency response teams -- including police officers and firefighters -- will engage in emergency response drills. The exercises are expected to last six to eight months.

The drills represent another milestone in BU's six-year-long quest to open its National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, which has encountered sustained opposition from neighborhood activists in the South End and Roxbury. Lab opponents sued in state and federal court to halt the facility, and while judges allowed construction to continue, they ordered further environmental reviews.

The four medical schools in Massachusetts earned passing grades for their conflict-of-interest policies in a new report card issued by a medical student's organization, including a jump from F to B for Harvard and a change from I to D for Tufts.

The American Medical Student Association's PharmFree Scorecard gave Bs to Boston University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School for their guidelines governing interactions between pharmaceutical companies and medical students and faculty members. Tufts University School of Medicine got a D. Last year's grade was and I for "in process" while the school was working on its policy.

Dr. Anthony A. Gianelly, who was a leader at Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine for more than three decades, died of a heart attack May 28, BU said today. He was 72.

Gianelly was chair of the Department of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics at BU from 1968 to 2003 and had returned as interim chair in 2007. He won teaching awards as well as recognition for his research over his 40-year career. His three books include one in Italian, reflecting frequent lectures in Italy that spurred him to learn the language, BU said.

A native of Boston, Gianelly graduated from Harvard College in 1957, where he played on the football, track, and rugby teams. He earned a doctor of dental medicine degree from Harvard, studied orthodontics at the Harvard/Forsyth Dental Center, and joined the BU dental faculty in 1967. He received his MD from Boston University School of Medicine in 1974.

A memorial service will be held at 10:30 June 26 at BU's dental school, 670 Albany St.

The video is short, simple, and powerful.

A woman with advanced dementia -- wearing lipstick, beads and a white shawl -- stares blankly at the camera while her daughters ask her questions. A man's voice describes what she and others at this stage cannot do: communicate, walk or sit alone, feed themselves. She does not respond when her daughter asks her how many daughters she has, and she needs help to keep her spoonfuls of pureed food in her mouth.

Less than two minutes long, the video was shown to almost 100 elderly people taking part in a study comparing the effects of watching the narrated video of advanced dementia with listening to the verbal narration alone. Just over 100 other participants heard the narration. Both groups were then asked to choose what kind of end-of-life care they would want if they were in the same irreversible condition.

People who viewed the video were more likely to choose comfort care over life-extending measures than people who heard a verbal description alone, Dr. Angelo Volandes of Massachusetts General Hospital and his colleagues report in the British Medical Journal. Those who saw the video were also more knowledgeable about the disease, and more of them remained firm in their choice of end-of-life care six weeks after seeing the video.

"Most of our patients do not have experience with advanced stages of disease nor with the interventions such as CPR," Volandes said in an interview. "Video may be one way of better informing patients about decisions at the end of life. Video makes these conversations quite real."