Could obesity be treated as a form of drug addiction? A new study suggests that some overweight people may be addicted to eating in the same way that, say, a cocaine addict craves another hit of his favorite drug. Researchers at Yale University gave a small group of young women questionnaires to determine their levels of food addiction. Then they […]
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Yanshi, China Dead dogs, pigs: Another sudden mass animal die-off has left many Chinese worried about their own health. Scores of pigs and dogs dropped dead overnight in Dongtun village, apparently from poisonous gas emitted from a chemical plant. “All the dogs in the village had basically died off,” one resident said. “Those that hadn’t died were in their last […]
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Africa’s lions are dwindling toward extinction at an alarming rate, Duke University researchers say. Using new high-resolution satellite data from Google Earth, they’ve discovered that the savanna habitat that lions need to survive has shrunk by 75 percent over the past 50 years and is far more fragmented than conservationists previously realized. Over the same period, the lion population is […]
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Residents of rich countries are more likely to be affected by depression than those who live in poorer nations. That’s the startling conclusion World Health Organization researchers reached when they interviewed nearly 90,000 people in 18 countries about their mental health. France and the U.S. were the most depressed; 21 percent of French people and more than 19 percent […]
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Luckily for most of the U.S., the likelihood this eruption would happen is pretty low: about one in 100,000 any given year. If it did happen, it would be pretty devastating, though. “Thinking about a Yellowstone super eruption is like imagining a large asteroid hitting the Earth,” says Jacob Lowenstern, a research geologist with the USGS and Scientist-in-Charge of […]
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Suddenly everyone wants to be low-caste, said Badri Narayan. It used to be considered an extreme disadvantage to be in one of India’s oppressed castes or indigenous tribes. But decades of affirmative action and quota systems have changed all that. Now, many lower-middle castes are agitating to be reclassified as “more backward,” in effect “struggling to move down the ladder […]
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New York City Several former federal investigators now say that a missile likely caused the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, in which all 230 people aboard were killed, and that the official explanation for the disaster was intentionally falsified. The National Transportation Safety Board determined after a four-year investigation that a fuel tank explosion had caused the crash, which […]
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A research group tested a group of about 125 cyclists aged between 50 and around 80 – ¾ of the group were male and ¼ were female. They did not study any people with high blood pressure, alcoholics, smokers, or any other health problems. Another group of non-exercising adults aged between 50 to 80 and 20 to 36 underwent tests […]
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Stress and depression can take a combined toll on the heart, creating a “psychosocial perfect storm” that dramatically increases the risk of death from heart disease, new research has found. A study involving nearly 4,500 adults with coronary artery disease found those who also suffered from significant stress and depression were nearly 50 percent more likely to die or have […]
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It was in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age that the modern concept of celebrity was born, said George Packer. But if the worship of gaudy wealth and fame began in The Great Gatsby era, we’ve taken it to new, “perverse” heights in 21st-century America. Today, celebrity demigods dominate every field: There are celebrity chefs, bankers, computer engineers, chief executives, hip-hop […]
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