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Fri, 05 Nov 2021
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US: Cancer Cases Investigated At Connecticut Plant

A new study may solve the question of whether the chemicals at a Pratt and Whitney plant are causing cancer clusters in its workers. The results from the first phase of the multi-year study.

Widow Carol Shea says "everyone is very anxious to find out what the first results will be."

Health

Woman Suffers Orgasm-Related Stroke

Sex triggered a life-threatening stroke in a healthy 35-year-old Illinois woman, her doctors report. Sex- and orgasm-triggered strokes in relatively young women and men are rare, but not unheard of. They require a combination of factors and events not unusual in themselves, but which are highly unlikely to occur at the same time.

Question

'Near death' has biological basis

Near death experiences appear to have a biological explanation, research suggests. The US team said the same parts of the brain are activated when people dream as in near death experiences.

The study, in Neurology, compared 55 people who had had near death experiences and 55 who had not. Those with near death experiences were more likely to have less clearly separated boundaries between sleeping and waking, the scientists found.

Pharoah

Study into near-death experiences

A large study is to examine near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients. Doctors at 25 UK and US hospitals will study 1,500 survivors to see if people with no heartbeat or brain activity can have "out of body" experiences.

Some people report seeing a tunnel or bright light, others recall looking down from the ceiling at medical staff. The study, due to take three years and co-ordinated by Southampton University, will include placing on shelves images that could only be seen from above.

Wolf

Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists

Deep-seated political differences aren't simply moral and intellectual: They're also biological.

In reflex tests of 46 political partisans, psychologists found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to be shocked by sudden threats.

Accompanying the physiological differences were deep differences on hot-button political issues: military expansion, the Iraq war, gun control, capital punishment, the Patriot act, warrantless searches, foreign aid, abortion rights, gay marriage, premarital sex and pornography.

Cow

Milk off shelves as China's safety scandal grows

China's food safety crisis widened Friday after the industrial chemical melamine was found in milk produced by three of the country's leading dairy companies - prompting stores, including Starbucks, to yank milk from their shelves.

The recalls come as evidence is mounting that adding chemicals to watered-down milk was a widespread practice in China's dairy industry.

Sipping from a carton of milk at a news conference, the chief financial officer of one of the companies, Mengniu, apologized for the tainted milk. But he insisted only a small portion of the company's inventory had been contaminated and said the tainted milk came from small-scale dairy farmers.

Arrow Down

HHS 'Conscience Rule' Threatens Reproductive Choice

Occasionally the Bush Administration proves it's never too busy destroying nations to harass the least among us.

Health

Understanding Emotions Improves Our Food Choices

Menus and advertising affect our emotions, and if we understand those emotions, we make better food choices, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

hot fudge sundaes
©iStockphoto/Franklin Lugenbeel
Pictures of hot fudge sundaes arouse consumers.

Authors Blair Kidwell, David M. Hardesty, and Terry L. Childers (all University of Kentucky) examined the "emotional intelligence" of consumers, including obese people. They found that people who made the healthiest choices had high correlations between their emotional intelligence and confidence in their emotional intelligence - what the authors call "emotional calibration."

"When perusing a restaurant menu, many consumers may not be aware of the subtle implicit feelings of arousal elicited by visually appealing presentations of unhealthy food choices," the authors write. Faced with choices between healthy and unhealthy food options, individuals who are confident that they can appropriately interpret and employ their emotions, but who do not actually possess these emotional abilities, are likely to make low-quality decisions."

Info

More than skin deep: There's no such thing as a 'safe' suntan, researchers warn

There may be no such thing as a 'safe' tan based on ultraviolet (UV) radiation, according to a series of papers published in the October issue of Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research, the official journal of The International Federation of Pigment Cell Societies (IFPCS) and the Society for Melanoma Research.

The authors of the three review papers - leading researchers in the fields of cell biology, dermatology and epidemiology - have examined the effects on skin of UV radiation, including that from indoor tanning beds. As well as highlighting the need for greater research into this area, they have called for the use of such beds by under-18s to be banned, along with any publicity that claims that tanning beds are safe.

Syringe

Olmsted on Vaccination and Autism: No Child By Two

I've got an idea: Let's not vaccinate kids until they turn two, at the earliest. Of course, I'm not a zealot like the industry-funded Every Child By Two folks who made themselves look like paranoid idiots in New York City last week. I'm just someone who has heard enough from parents and read enough simple science to know that, for starters, some children are vulnerable in ways we don't understand to neurological problems after vaccination; some vaccines given too early can trigger asthma; some vaccines -- HepB and chickenpox, to name two -- are unnecessary; and the whole kit-and-kaboodle has never been studied in toto on human infants, but when it was tested on primates, those little monkeys got really sick and developed features that resemble autism.