Health & WellnessS


Bulb

Proof that brain 'work-outs' in middle age can stave off dementia

Craig Brown
Scotsman
Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:11 UTC
Reading, taking up hobbies and getting involved in arts and crafts in late middle-age can help prevent or delay memory loss later in life, research has shown.

It also suggested that people who watched television for fewer than seven hours a day in later years were 50 per cent less likely to develop memory loss than people who watched for more than seven hours.

The study found that during later years, reading books, playing games, participating in computer activities and doing craft activities, led to a 30 to 50 per cent decrease in the risk of developing memory loss compared to people who did not do those activities.
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Cookie

For Digestive Bliss Eat Foods that Don't Fight

Barbara Minton
Natural News
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:11 UTC
How we eat may be just as important as what we eat. The diets eaten by most Americans are based on the belief that any number of different foods can be digested at the same time. This belief may be why more than half the population suffers from some sort of digestive distress for which there seems to be no remedy. As sales of antacids soar off the charts, maybe it's time to rediscover the art of food combining.
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People

Smells -- even smells we don't notice -- affect our judgment of others

Dave Munger
Cognitive Daily
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:43 UTC
I had a newspaper route up until I was in the ninth grade, and what I dreaded about the job was going door-to-door collecting subscription fees. The worst part was probably the odors in some of the houses. One house emanated a toxic mixture of Lysol, alcohol, pet dander, and cigarette smoke. These people inevitably were out of cash, so I had to return again and again until I finally was able to negotiate payment -- sometimes months overdue.

But maybe the smell was prejudicing my judgment. Lots of people couldn't pay me right away. Why should I only hate the ones with drinking/pet/smoking/air freshener problems? Other than the fact that they had all those problems, they weren't any better or worse than anyone else (aside from the nice old ladies who baked me cookies I could smell a half-block away).

Hmm... come to think of it, there's a lot a smell can tell you about a person. Are they overperfumed, undermouthwashed, sweaty, smoky, or infused with motor oil? Different scents clearly have different meanings.
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Eye 2

Men really do see half naked women as 'objects', scientists claim

Richard Alleyne
Telegraph
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:35 UTC
Researchers scanned the brains of certain men as they looked at a photograph of a woman in a bikini and discovered that sections of the brain that usually reacted to objects lit up. With men, who were known to have sexist tendencies, they also discovered that a part of the brain that usually turned on during social interaction actually de-activated when they saw the photograph.

Professor Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting that she believes that the results show that some men did not see sexualised women as a "human".
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Health

First case of child botulism in Greece


eKathimerini
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:59 UTC
A 3-month-old baby was recovering in an intensive-care unit at a hospital in Rio, near Patras, yesterday after becoming one of only a handful of children in Europe to contract infant botulism during the last decade.

In the first reported case of the potentially fatal disease in Greece, a special drug, which is a human-derived botulism antitoxin, was flown in from California on Sunday.
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Syringe

British scientists condemn using children in GM food trials as unacceptable

Sean Poulter
The Daily Mail
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:53 UTC
Children in China and America were fed GM rice
© (posed)Children in China and America were fed GM rice in a controversial trial
Children have been used as 'lab rats' in GM rice trials that were carried out in breach of ethics rules drawn up in response to the medical crimes of Nazi Germany, it is claimed.

Youngsters aged 6-10 were fed so-called Golden Rice, which has been modified to contain enhanced levels of beta carotene or vitamin A.

The rice is being developed to combat Vitamin A deficiency, which is linked to damage to the sight, poor brain development and immune system failure.

However high consumption can also have harmful toxic effects and cause birth defects.

Critics are furious that the GM rice was not put through animal feeding trials to ensure it was safe before being given to children.
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Health

Leukemia patients treated with arsenic, vitamin A

Tan Ee Lyn
Reuters
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:03 UTC
Hong Kong - Doctors appear to have safely and successfully treated patients with cancer of the blood and bone marrow with a combination of arsenic and vitamin A, according to long-term study in China.

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the doctors said they prescribed the regimen to 85 patients and monitored them for an average of 70 months.

Of these, 80 patients went into complete remission and the researchers did not find any associated long-term problems in their heart or lungs and there was no development of secondary cancers.
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Magnify

Many Children with Hearing Loss Also Have Eye Disorders


PhysOrg
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:37 UTC
About one-fifth of children with sensorineural hearing loss also have ocular disorders, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

An estimated one to three per 1,000 children have some degree of sensorineural hearing loss, which occurs as a result of damage to the nerves or the inner ear, according to background information in the article. Half of all cases in children result from environmental causes and half from genetic causes; one gene, GJB2, accounts for a large proportion of sensorineural hearing loss cases in white patients.

"Especially early in life, sensorineural hearing loss is associated with delays in language, speech, cognitive and social development," the authors write. "Given the effects of hearing impairment, children with sensorineural hearing loss are particularly dependent on other means of information acquisition. If these children were to have unrecognized ophthalmologic abnormalities that limited visual acuity, there could be further detrimental effects on development."
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Laptop

Can Blogging Make You Happier?

John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
PsychCentral
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:00 UTC
According to researchers in Taiwan, the answer is "Yes."

The researchers (Ko & Kuo, 2009) administered a 43-item self-report survey to 596 college students who were mostly between ages 16 and 22 and female (71 percent). The college students were young adults who had blogging experience, and specifically with blogging for the purpose of keeping a personal journal.

The researchers found support for deeper self-disclosure from bloggers resulting in a range of better social connections. These included things such as a sense of greater social integration, which is how connected we feel to society and our own community of friends and others; an increase in social bonding (our tightly knit, intimate relationships); and social bridging - increasing our connectedness with people who might be from outside of our typical social network.
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Bad Guys

Voting Himself Rich: CDC Vaccine Adviser Made $29 Million Or More After Using Role to Create Market

Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
Age of Autism
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:00 UTC
Dr. Paul Offit of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) took home a fortune of at least $29 million as part of a $182 million sale by CHOP of its worldwide royalty interest in the Merck Rotateq vaccine to Royalty Pharma in April of last year, according to an investigation by Age of Autism. Based on an analysis of current CHOP administrative policies, the amount of income distributed to Offit could be as high as $46 million.
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