Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
Last month, it was announced that Belgium based Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) and London based SABMiller have agreed to merge for around $106 billion, the third largest deal in corporate history. The new company will produce an estimated one third of all beer sold worldwide.
Smokeless tobacco is used far less than cigarettes, primarily among men and young people, but it has become a cause for concern due to links with adverse health effects and identification as a cause of cancer.
Survey results and biomarkers published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers&Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, find that U.S. adults who used only smokeless tobacco products had higher levels of biomarkers of exposure to nicotine and a cancer-causing toxicant -- the tobacco-specific nitrosamine NNK -- compared with those who only used cigarettes.
Brian Rostron, PhD, an epidemiologist in the Center for Tobacco Products at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Tasers, created to save lives by subduing criminals and others without shooting them, are now the target of health papers. They are used by over 16,000 police forces in 107 countries and use compressed nitrogen to fire two barbed electrical probes that deliver a pulsed 50,000 volt shock, causing intense skeletal muscle contractions and pain.
Writing in BMJ, journalist Owen Dyer says the health risks are greater than previously thought. Of recent concern is the police use of Tasers against mentally ill patients, which has prompted the UK home secretary, Theresa May, to order a review of police use of force against mentally distressed people.
Don't believe the hype when you see claims about creams and ointments that promise to prevent or reduce pregnancy stretch marks.
The line-shaped lesions also known as striae gravidarum affect 50 percent to 90 percent of women. However, some women are at higher risk than others, due to factors like family history, how much weight they gain in pregnancy, whether it's a single or multiple birth and whether they've had stretch marks before for another reason like obesity. Though not everything is known about what causes stretch marks, is it known that skin stretching is not the only risk factor.
HOUSTON -- (Nov. 17, 2015) -- When it comes to needles and drawing blood, most patients agree that bigger is not better. But in the first study of its kind, Rice University bioengineers have found results from a single drop of blood are highly variable, and as many as six to nine drops must be combined to achieve consistent results.
The study, which appears online this week in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology, examines the variation between blood drops drawn from a single fingerprick. The results suggest that health care professionals must take care to avoid skewed results as they design new protocols and technologies that rely on fingerprick blood.
A group of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University in collaboration with Russian Science Foundation developed a unique method for the selective study of electron transport chain in living mitochondria by using nondestructive analysis. The study was published in Scientific Reports.
In a randomized clinical trial of more than 300 participants, researchers from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have found that ranibizumab -- a drug most commonly used to treat retinal swelling in people with diabetes -- is an effective alternative to laser therapy for treating the most severe, potentially blinding form of diabetic retinal disease. Results of the government-sponsored study also show that the drug therapy carries fewer side effects than the currently used laser treatment.
Warning labels on medications about the dangers of driving don't stop people from getting behind the wheel, according to Dr Tanya Smyth, from the Queensland University of Technology Centre for Accident Research&Road Safety.
Driving while affected by prescription and over-the-counter medications had the potential to be as dangerous as driving under the influence of illegal drugs. Medication warning labels and accompanying pharmacist advice were the primary method to control drug driving but required the user to self-assess their impairment.
Evolution had a few more drinks once again, according to a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which wants to prompts a rethink of what it means to be an animal.
Jellyfish, those commonplace sea pests with stinging tentacles, have actually evolved over time into "really weird" microscopic organisms, made of only a few cells, that live inside other animals.
Genome sequencing confirms that myxozoans, a diverse group of microscopic parasites that infect invertebrate and vertebrate hosts, are actually are "highly reduced" cnidarians -- the phylum that includes jellyfish, corals and sea anemones.
If you're a man, how much you eat may have more to do with the gender of your dining companions than your appetite, according to a paper published in Evolutionary Psychological Science which claims that men will eat significantly more food in the company of women than they will with other men.
If a tumor is like a seed, the soil around it plays a significant role in its growth, according to a study which finds that the microenvironment of a tumor cell has significant impact on cancer metastasis. This discovery by Siyuan Zhang at the University of Notre Dame and a team at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has focused attention on fighting cancer in the tumor cell's microenvironment.
As the 20th-century novelist Joseph Conrad famously wrote, "It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose," and Nature is very busy, so she makes lots of them. But as a genius, she can use them to advantage. Take for example whole genome duplication -- an error in DNA replication, or mating between different species, that doubles the number of chromosomes, leading to a duplication of the vast majority of genes. Such grand mistakes turn out to be among the major forces accelerating evolution.
