The shopper stood staring at the large, ice-covered shrimp in the chiller-case of the high-end Seattle grocery.

"Fresh. Wild Gulf Shrimp. Never Frozen. $16.99 lb." read the sign.

"They're my favorites, but are they safe?" the woman asked the fishmonger.

"We couldn't and wouldn't sell them if they weren't," he answered, and quickly added that someone is testing the hell out of everything coming from the gulf.

He was telling the truth.

But several questions remain to be answered for consumers:

Airport body scanners emit radiation up to 20 times more powerful than previously thought, a scientist has warned.

Dr David Brenner, head of the centre for radiological research at Columbia University in New York, said Government scientists had not taken into account the concentration of the radiation on the skin. He said it raised concerns about a potentially greater risk of cancer than previously realised.

Dr Brenner, who is from Liverpool, said children and passengers with genetic mutations - around one in 20 of the population - were most at risk because they are less able to repair X-ray damage to their cells.

He added that the danger posed to individual passengers was "very low" but said more research was required to more accurately determine the risks.

Cellular energy levels surge in some brain regions in early hours of sleep

In the initial stages of sleep, energy levels increase dramatically in brain regions found to be active during waking hours, according to new research in the June 30 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. These results suggest that a surge of cellular energy may replenish brain processes needed to function normally while awake.

A good night's rest has clear restorative benefits, but evidence of the actual biological processes that occur during sleep has been elusive. Radhika Basheer, PhD, and Robert McCarley, MD, of Boston V.A. Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School, proposed that brain energy levels are key to nightly restoration.

"Our finding bears on one of the perennial conundrums in biology: the function of sleep," Basheer said. "Somewhat surprisingly, there have been no modern-era studies of brain energy using the most sensitive measurements."

Some years ago, a friend told me that he had been diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and that his psychiatrist had given him a prescription for Forest Laboratories' popular SSRI antidepressant Celexa (chemical name, citalopram hydrobromide; $1.5 billion in sales in 2003). Knowing him to be a vociferous critic of the pharmaceutical companies, I asked whether he agreed that the origins of his unhappiness were biological in nature. He replied that he unequivocally did not. "But," he confided, "now I might be able to get my grades back up."

This guy was, at the time, a full-time undergraduate student who managed rent, groceries and tuition only by working two part-time jobs. He awoke before dawn each morning in order to transcribe interviews for a local graduate student, then embarked upon an hour-long commute to campus, attended classes until late afternoon, and then finally headed over to a nearby café to wash dishes until nine o'clock in the evening. By the time he arrived home each night, he was too exhausted to work on the sundry assignments, essays and lab reports that populated his course syllabi. As the school year dragged on, he had become increasingly disheartened about his slipping grades and mounting fatigue and decided, finally, that something had to be done. So he'd seen the psychiatrist and was now on Celexa.

Children who get a combination of measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccines in one shot are at a slightly increased risk of getting a fever-related seizure, compared with children getting two separate shots - one containing measles, mumps and rubella and the another containing the chickenpox (varicella) vaccine, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

"The risk of a febrile seizure after any measles-containing vaccine is low - about one febrile seizure in 1,000 doses" says lead study author, Dr. Nicola Klein, co-director of Kaiser Permanente's Vaccine Study Center. "But if a child gets the combination vaccine, the risk doubles," says Klein.

Researchers looked at vaccine-safety data from more than 459,000 toddlers between the ages of 12 and 23 months and found there was one additional case of febrile seizure for every 2,300 doses of MMRV (measles, mumps, rubella, varicella) vaccine given. The seizures occurred seven to 10 days after the injection.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a febrile seizure is a fever-related seizure, which can occur when a child has a fever at or above 102°F or when a high fever is going down.

Forget sniffling pigs - the real swine behind last year's flu were working for the World Health Organization. Some people called me a paranoid conspiracy theorist when I said swine flu was a load of bunk and that the unproven, untested vaccine they rushed out for it was a dangerous moneygrab. But now, two new mainstream reports accuse the World Health Organization of the same sick behavior I warned you about: Financial conflicts, false panic, rash decisions, wasted money and secret panels - with the identities of many so- called flu experts still protected, like witnesses in a mafia trial.

An official report by the Council of Europe says the World Health Organization wasted "large sums of public money" and created "unjustified scares and fears." Not only that, but the report warns of health problems from the fast-track vaccine, which has been linked to everything from nerve disorder to death. I hope you believed me, and not the ethically challenged experts, when I told you it wasn't safe!

The report even points out that the WHO rushed to protect Big Pharma, not the public, by authorizing only patented vaccines for swine flu - instead of vaccines that could have been created just as quickly, and far more cheaply, using unpatented procedures. At the same time, a report in BMJ written with the Bureau of Investigative Journalists says the WHO's 2004 pandemic guidelines were based on the advice of a panel that included three experts who were bought and paid for by the leading manufacturers of flu drugs, and representatives from two major drug companies.

There's a loaded deck for you - and that was just the warm-up act. Last year, the organization created a 16-member emergency swine flu committee - a group so shrouded in secrecy that we STILL don't officially know who was in it. Of the handful of members that have been outed, there's at least one major conflict of interest.

Expect to hear these sordid tales for years to come... and we'll probably never know the whole truth - like what was really in all those dangerous vaccines.

So - who's paranoid now?

First in a three-part series

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

"I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' " Jenny Fallon recalls. "I think there were some cuckoos back there."

Fallon investigated.

"There's a whole lineage of very violent people - killers," he says.

One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. "Cousin Lizzy," as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.

A little spooked by his ancestry, Fallon set out to see whether anyone in his family possesses the brain of a serial killer. Because he has studied the brains of dozens of psychopaths, he knew precisely what to look for. To demonstrate, he opened his laptop and called up an image of a brain on his computer screen.

The Escambia County Health Department lifted a health advisory on Pensacola Beach on Friday on the advice of a beach official and against the advice of a federal environmental official.

But the advisory was not lifted for Gulf Islands National Seashore's Fort Pickens beach, immediately west of Pensacola Beach or Johnson Beach on Perdido Key.

And hours after the Pensacola Beach advisory was lifted, the health department asked for state approval to issue an oil-impact advisory that leaves the decision to swim in the Gulf of Mexico up to the discretion of individual beachgoers.

The signs would be posted on 41 of the 43 miles of Escambia County beaches - from the Florida-Alabama line to just west of Portofino Beach - impacted by oil.

In its never-ending attempt to fabricate "mental disorders" out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they've invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you're "mentally diseased" and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardian newspaper reports, "Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder" and goes on to claim this "disease" is called orthorexia nervosa -- which is basically just Latin for "nervous about correct eating."

But they can't just called it "nervous healthy eating disorder" because that doesn't sound like they know what they're talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn't). That's where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means "bones with holes in them").

According to a report from Florida's Department of Health, there's no amount of lead in the blood that's safe. Yet last year, the FDA tested for lead in 22 brands of lipstick and found lead in every single one of them.

It's estimated that the average woman inadvertently consumes four pounds of lipstick in her lifetime and even low levels of lead in the body have been linked to developmental delays, aggression, hyperactivity, irreversible brain damage, being antisocial, and having attention and learning problems. Newborns are regularly found to have lead in their umbilical cord blood, so this neurotoxin is affecting them long before their blood brain barrier has even formed. All this, and the FDA says the lead in lipstick isn't a problem.

One study found that children with higher levels of lead in their blood were more apt to be arrested later in life. This is because having lead in the body regularly makes people violent and aggressive. But who'd think that by applying lipstick each day while you're pregnant you'd be even slightly increasing the chances that your child will behave aggressively with playmates - or increasing the chances that your child will end up behind bars later in life? It sounds farfetched, but if you connect the dots, it's really not.