Slate.com reported on a horrifying story yesterday about parents who, after giving birth to a child with some health complications, whiled away their time raising a cyber baby and left their real-world infant to starve. The South Korean parents met online, and soon developed a romantic relationship that resulted in the birth of a
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A recent study examining the potential impact of sin taxes—increasing the cost of junk food, in particular—as a means to promote healthier choices found that, in a lab setting at least, when unhealthy foods cost more, people tended to eat them less. Now, new research attempts to size up the value of sin taxes in the real world. A
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The Consumer Product Safety Commission is preparing a safety warning about baby slings, which can potentially pose a suffocation risk for infants, according to the Associated Press. The warning comes as a result of the fact that several infants have died in the fabric carriers, likely due to the fact that they fell into a position that
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Live kidney donors have similar long-term survival rates as non-donor peers, according to a new study published in the March 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Each year, an estimated 6,000 healthy people donate kidneys to ailing loved ones or, in some cases, to strangers through large chain donations. Yet
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The results of a new poll from the National Sleep Foundation, highlighted yesterday in the New York Times, reveal that roughly one in four Americans who are married or living with a romantic partner regularly feel too exhausted for sex. The survey, which included more than 1,000 randomly selected people ages 25 to 60, focused on sleep
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One person’s initial generosity can spark a chain reaction of benevolence, according to the latest study from prolific social contagion researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis.
Even former President Bill Clinton, not always the model of healthy eating, admitted he was surprised by the results of a three-year program to remove full-calorie soft drinks from schools. At a press conference in New York City on Monday, Clinton announced that since 2006, 88% fewer beverage calories were shipped to U.S. elementary, …
As part of a broader effort to shed their unhealthy food reputation, in Australia and New Zealand McDonald’s is teaming up with Weight Watchers to market some menu items as healthy options that fit into the diet program’s points system, the Telegraph reported last week. The collaboration means that McDonald menus will bear the Weight …
When the weather gets nicer, frequency of cocaine-related deaths tends to go up, according to a study published last week in the journal Addiction. By comparing New York City mortality data from 1990 through 2006 with average temperature information for the region from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, researchers
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Recently, on the George Lopez Show, actress Jennifer Love Hewitt gushed about “vajazzling,” a new trend in ladies’ intimate fashion that involves rounding out a bikini wax with the decorative application of Swarovski crystals, Salon reports. The procedure, which is offered at Completely Bare spa in New York City for $115, including the
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A recent surge in eye injuries among small children caused by exposure to capsules of liquid detergent prompted eye specialists to issue a warning about keeping the soap packets out of children’s reach. Writing in the British Medical Journal this week, a team of British eye doctors said that problems caused by exposure to the capsules
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Administering a small magnetic pulse to the back of the head may be an effective, and drug-free, method for combating migraine pain, according to new research published online this week, and in the April issue of the journal Lancet Neurology. Previous research has suggested that this single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (sTMS)
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Men who regularly take aspirin, ibuprofen (Advil) or acetaminophen (Tylenol) more than twice a week may be at increased risk for hearing loss, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Medicine and highlighted by the L.A. Times‘ health blog. The research included nearly 27,000 men between ages 40 to 74 at the
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