Australian researchers find that each hour a day spent in front of television is linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and an 11% greater risk of all causes of death.

Watching television for hour upon hour obviously isn't the best way to spend leisure time - inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease. But a new study quantifies TV viewing's effect on risk of death.

Researchers found that each hour a day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, an 11% greater risk of all causes of death, and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer.

The food industry has been criticized for being secretive about its use of nanotechnology by the UK's House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.

Lord Krebs, chairman of the inquiry, said the industry "wants to keep a low profile" to avoid controversy.

While there were no clear dangers, he said, there were "gaps in knowledge".

As NaturalNews has previously reported, the U.S. is a nation seemingly hooked on mind-altering drugs. A study released last fall in the Archives of General Psychiatry documented a dramatic increase in the use of antidepressant drugs like Prozac since l996. In fact, these medications are now the most widely prescribed drugs in the U.S.

Think Americans are maxed out on the number of psychiatric meds that huge numbers of them are taking? Think again. A new report says U.S. adults are increasingly being prescribed combinations of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medications -- and they could be experiencing serious side effects as a result.

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto's GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

According to the study, which was summarized by Adam Shake at Twilight Earth, "Three varieties of Monsanto's GM corn - Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 - were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities."

Americans, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country's blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald's near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book Mad Travelers, the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women's social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself - the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.

Modified genes in our food supply may be modifying us, says Jeffrey M. Smith.

More than half the people in the U.S. say they don't want to eat genetically modified (GM) food, but many of them probably aren't sure why, or how to avoid it, Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette, explained Saturday to an audience of food retailers and manufacturers at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, CA.

The Details: There's a push in the U.S. to get genetically modified organisms (GMOs) out of our food supply. Other countries have already done this, and Smith, executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, hopes U.S. consumers will start paying closer attention to the issue. He estimates that if just 5 percent or so start rejecting GM food, it'll force a big change.

How do foods become genetically modified? In the traditional cross-breeding process, two varieties of, say, tomatoes might be crossed for a more robust fruit. But today's technology inserts out-of-species genes, often from bacteria and viruses, into the DNA of plants like corn, soybean, cotton, and canola, introducing genetic matter into our food that's never been there before. The process allows conventional growers to douse even larger amounts of poisonous herbicides onto the modified plants without killing the crop. That introduces more chemicals into the groundwater and waterways near the farm, but it also increases the amount of chemical residue on the foods. Some crops have even been modified so the plant produces its own pesticide.

Are you an independent person? Classic social psychology research suggests some people can't tell.

Why are people so blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their personalities?

Take an everyday example: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments. A few of these people explain it by saying they are 'laid-back', while others seem unaware that they're always late.

For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, they are aware of it and presumably not worried about appearing unconscientious. For the unaware it's almost as if they don't realise they're always late. How is that possible?

A comprehensive national study by UC Davis researchers has found that the introduction of an early childhood vaccine for bacterial pneumonia nearly a decade ago has decreased the incidence of pneumonia, but the drop was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the incidence of a serious and sometimes life-threatening complication.

The researchers conjecture that the doubling of the incidence of the complication, which causes pockets of purulence, or pus, around the lungs, may partly be the result of the vaccine eliminating certain types of pneumococcus, creating the opportunity for other bacteria to take its place.

The next time you get a gut feeling - pay attention. It could be your second brain talking.

"The gastrointestinal tract has an enormous amount of nerves and neurons," said Dr. Mitchell Cappell, M.D., Ph.D., chief of gastroenterology and fellowship director at William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak. "It has considerably more neurons than the entire spinal cord, so it is doing things all the time including talking or communicating with the brain."

While genetics play a key role in children's initial reading skills, a new study of twins is the first to demonstrate that environment plays an important role in reading growth over time.

The results give further evidence that children can make gains in reading during their early school years, above and beyond the important genetic factors that influence differences in reading, said Stephen Petrill, lead author of the study and professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.

"We certainly have to take more seriously genetic influences on learning, but children who come into school with poor reading skills can make strides with proper instruction," Petrill said.