In a nod to the increasingly busy lives of modern Catholics, perhaps, a French company set up a unique hotline in time for Lent this year, enabling people to confess their sins over the phone, NPR reports. (Lent is observed between Ash Wednesday, which was February 17 this year, and Easter Sunday, which will fall on April 4.) While
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A drug that held hope for many Alzheimer’s patients and their loved ones failed a late-stage clinical trial, proving negligible benefits over placebo, the New York Times reports. The drug, called Dimebon (latrepirdine), was being developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer together with a small new company, Medivation, but failed to meet
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As my colleague Bryan Walsh reported back in 2008, wind farms and solar panels aren’t the only places that scientists have been looking for some extra electricity. From knee braces that tap into the energy in a person’s stride to vibration harvesters that soak up energy from the buzz of a busy highway, researchers are hard at work coming
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The topic of virtual violence in video games resulting in real life aggression has long been controversial—and many courts have tested the limits of the “video games made me do it” defense. Now a new study published this week in the March issue of the Psychological Bulletin adds to the debate with findings suggesting that, while
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According to the family of Mary Robbins, who died of cancer in early February at age 71, on her deathbed Robbins changed her mind about willing her body to a non-profit organization for cryogenic preservation. In 2006 Robbins signed an agreement with Alcor Life Extension Foundation—the same group that preserved the head of baseball
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Despite the lack of scientific evidence linking the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, roughly one in four parents still believe that vaccines may put some healthy children at risk for developing an autism …
Advances in technology have made it so that we can increasingly go online, play video games and even watch TV from almost anywhere—on a growing range of devices. Yet, does all of this improvement in access come with a cost? To see how increased screen time may impact family and peer relationships, a team of researchers from New Zealand
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Understanding what distinguishes people who battle with dementia and Alzheimer’s as they age from those whose mental acuity remains strong well into their 80s, 90s and even older, is a major focus of current psychiatric research. Previous studies have pointed to the potentially protective value of exercise, social support and even
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People like attributing human characteristics to non-human beings and things. We’ve been doing it since we first started depicting gods in our own image. In a new study, published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, psychologists Adam Waytz from Harvard University and Nicholas Epley and John T. Cacioppo from the
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Previous diagnostic criteria for gestational diabetes were based on the risk, posed by high blood sugar levels, that pregnant women faced for developing diabetes after giving birth. And, under those criteria, rates of gestational diabetes have surged nearly 50% in the past decade, with 5% to 8% of pregnant women being diagnosed with the
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Patients who show up in their doctor’s office after having already conducted countless hours of internet research and come up with several potential self-diagnoses can prompt some mixed feelings from physicians. While some may embrace their patients’ desire to know as much as possible about their condition, others can find the task of
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Public health officials grappling with the obesity epidemic have debated a wide range of approaches to helping slim the American waistline. To some degree, everything from building more sidewalks to banning chocolate milk has been explored. Yet few tactics have been as polarizing as the possibility of introducing tariffs on treats. …
Public health officials campaigning to reduce our excessive salt consumption—Americans generally eat twice the recommended amount each day—often point out that a societal approach to change is essential, as most of the salt we consume is already in food before we even pick up the shaker. Dining out isn’t exactly a low-sodium
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