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For teens, prescription drugs are easy to come by

More then one third of U.S. teens say they can get a hold of prescription drugs—to use for getting high—within just a day, according to a study from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Among kids between the ages of 12 and 17, nearly one in five said they would be able to access

Could medical imaging using radiation actually be causing harm?

Medical imaging techniques ranging from CT scans to myocardial perfusion imaging (or imaging of the heart), have become a regular part of medical diagnostics. Yet, according to a study published in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, it isn’t yet clear whether the radiation necessary for these imaging procedures

A neurological explanation for the placebo effect?

It has been well documented in medical literature that when people believe they are receiving treatment, they will actually experience a reduction in symptoms—even if their “treatment” is an inactive placebo. This is particularly true when it comes to pain reduction, or analgesia; patients who believe they are being given powerful

A patch to help patients heal after heart attack

After a heart attack, the muscles in a patient’s heart are often weakened, increasing the risk for future heart complications, including a second cardiac arrest. Yet a new development from a team of Israeli scientists could change that in the future. In a study of rats, the researchers were able to grow a “bioengineered cardiac patch” by

High blood pressure in middle age is linked to memory problems

In the past, research into the relationship between blood pressure and cognitive impairment has yielded a wide range of results—some studies found that low blood pressure was linked with memory and processing problems, others that high blood pressure was associated with these risks, and others found no correlation at all. In an attempt

When lost or disoriented, people really do walk in circles

By tracking humans as they wandered in the forest, desert and blindfolded through a giant field, scientists determined that there is some truth to the popular belief—when people are lost, we actually do walk in circles.

It has long been common perception that people tend to meander in orbits when disoriented, and in fact, scientists

Why do we remember bad things? A single chemical may make all the difference

With a single well-timed injection, scientists show they can erase a bad memory from the mind of a rat.

For their remarkable finding, researchers from Brazil and Argentina gave electric shocks to rats and then tested how long the animals remembered and tried to avoid shocks in the future. The researchers showed that rats will quickly …

Do fancy running shoes do more harm than good?

If you’re a runner, odds are pretty good that you’ve been injured at some point in the last year or two. Journalist Christopher McDougall has an interesting and no doubt controversial explanation. It’s your shoes, he says. There’s too much of them: too much cushioning, too much arch support, too much stabilization, too much …

What causes tone-deafness?

A new study from researchers at Beth Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School suggests that tone-deafness may be the result of a missing neural connection. By using a brain imaging technique that allows them to examine the links between the right temporal and frontal lobes, the scientists compared the neural connectivity of 10

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