COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk said it could launch obesity treatment liraglutide in the United States by the end of next year and rejected some analysts' doubts over the medicine's commercial potential. The world's biggest insulin producer is hoping the treatment for severe obesity will help to at least partly offset the delay to its next generation insulin treatment Tresiba after U.S. regulators asked for more tests.

Danish pharmaceutical group Novo Nordisk, the world's biggest producer of insulin for diabetes sufferers, on Wednesday topped analyst profit expectations for its first quarter of 2013 From January to March, the group posted a net profit of 5.982 billion Danish kroner (802 million euros), as it enjoyed strong sales of its diabetic drug Victoza and "modern insulins." Analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires predicted 5.85 billion kroner in net profit.

The shape of a man's face can help predict his sporting acumen, according to a study on Wednesday that found Japanese baseball players whose faces were relatively broad rather than long were most likely to hit a home run. University of London psychologists measured the facial width-to-height ratio, or fWHR, of 104 batters in Japan's professional Central League Pennant who played in the 2011 and 2012 seasons. In both seasons, the players who scored the most home runs had the highest fWHR, said the study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

People in the middle hierarchy at workplace may suffer more stress compared to their boss at the top or the workers they manage, a new study has claimed.Researchers from Manchester University and Liverpool University observing monkeys found that those in the middle hierarchy suffer the most stress due to social conflict.Katie Edwards from Liverpool's Institute of Integrative Biology spent nearly 600 hours watching female Barbary macaques at Trentham Monkey Forest in Staffordshire.Her research involved monitoring a single female over one day, recording all incidents of