Health & Medicine
- Health & Medicine
Your cholesterol drug might help you weather the flu
Data suggest illness is less likely to be fatal in those taking statins
- Health & Medicine
Flu shots for moms-to-be benefit babies
Study of about 4,000 pregnant women shows link between newborn health and whether mom got vaccinated
- Health & Medicine
Mice: seasonal flu vaccine and vulnerability to pandemic strain
Earlier this year, Dutch scientists showed that vaccinating mice against seasonal strains of flu rendered the animals unnecessarily vulnerable to dying if they later encountered a pandemic flu strain. Authors of this study now ask whether there are lessons in their data for parents. Such as whether to ignore recommendations that youngsters get seasonal-flu shots during years when pandemic flu is raging. Others suggest this idea, at least as regards people, is bunk.
- Health & Medicine
Psychiatric meds can bring on rapid weight gain in kids
Drugs that alleviate severe mental disorders can also result in troubling metabolic changes.
- Health & Medicine
Redefining self, phantom self
Amputees who feel phantom limbs can learn to do physically impossible body tricks
- Health & Medicine
Skin bacteria different in diabetic mice
An excessive number and low diversity of skin bacteria could explain why wounds in diabetics are slow to heal
- Humans
A gene critical for speech
Scientists argue a newly discovered stretch of DNA essential for larynx development may have allowed the evolution of language.
- Life
Estrogen helps ward off belly fat
Hormone is one reason that men and women carry weight differently
- Animals
Junk food turns rats into addicts
Bacon, cheesecake and Ho Hos elicit addictive behavior in rats similar to the behavior of rats addicted to heroin.
- Life
People can control their Halle Berry neurons
Researchers pinpoint individual brain cells that respond to particular people and objects.
- Agriculture
Report tallies hidden energy costs
The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don’t pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation's power grid.
- Health & Medicine
Exercise helps brains bounce back
Study of rhesus monkeys shows running protects dopamine neurons from death.
