A nationwide survey indicates that heroin users are attracted to heroin not only for the high, but because it is less expensive and easier to get than prescription painkillers. It was once a gateway…

Most physicians would choose a do-not-resuscitate or "no code" status for themselves when they are terminally ill, yet they tend to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing…

People sometimes use indoor tanning in the belief that this will prevent burns when they tan outdoors. However, indoor tanning raises the risk of developing melanoma even if a person has never had…

MINNEAPOLIS – People with high levels of cynical distrust may be more likely to develop dementia, according to a study published in the May 28, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal…

Heroin is popular again, though not for reasons you expect. Gone are the days of desperate junkies in poverty settings. Now it is primarily cheap young urban professionals. Few studies on the…

Men with gender dysphoria, commonly called gender identity disorder, are born as males but behave as and identify with women and want to change sex. Around puberty, the testes of men start to produce…

Evidence for massive and abrupt iceberg calving in Antarctica dating back 19,000 to 9,000 years ago is based on an analysis of new, long deep sea sediment cores extracted from the region between the…

Why are some 75-year-olds downright spry while others can barely get around?  Some people who smoke look old from a young age while others don't. Part of the explanation, say researchers writing…

A mechanism that enables the development of resistance to Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) anticancer drugs, thereby leading to relapse, has been identified by Kathy Borden of the University of Montreal…

NEW YORK, NY (May 21, 2014) — The overall number and nature of mutations—rather than the presence of any single mutation—influences an individual's risk of developing schizophrenia, as well as its…

Tai Chi is a traditional Chinese pastime that had its origins in self-defense. Like with many sports and hobbies, its benefits in relaxation and fitness are well-documented. A new paper in Cell…

In most sports, youth helps. The adage was that if an older person can do it better than a younger person, it isn't a sport. But the lines of performance are lot more blurry today and youth is…

Lung cancer is one of the top killers of people. Once patients receive a diagnosis, chemotherapy is common but accurate predictions about whether or not this treatment will help are impossible. New…

Snakebite is one of the most neglected of all tropical diseases, with nearly 5 million people bitten by snakes each year and fatalities globally up to 30 times higher than that of land mines and…

Two new shipping routes have opened in the Arctic: the Northwest Passage through Canada, and the Northern Sea Route, a 3,000-mile stretch along the coasts of Russia and Norway connecting the Barents…

If you are an organic farmer, you may be worried your crops can be "contaminated" by a field genetically modified with a gene to express a natural toxin against pests. Nasty weeds sometimes…

AUSTIN, Texas — Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions have discovered that the more diverse the diet of a fish, the less diverse are the microbes living in its…

A recent review of hundreds of chemical analyses of Moon rocks indicates that the amount of water in the Moon's interior varies regionally – revealing clues about how water originated and was…

A new paper  in Nature Climate Change asserts that global warming is causing the hybridization of trout – interbreeding between native and non-native species – to increase in the interior…

The open-access, open-data journal GigaScience (published by BGI and Biomed Central), announces today the publication of an article on the genome sequencing of 3000 rice strains along with the…