Health & Medicine

  1. Health & Medicine

    Mice robbed of darkness fatten up

    Time of day can affect calories' impact, a study shows.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    How being deaf can enhance sight

    Hearing-specialized brain regions can adapt to processing visual input, cat experiments show.

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  3. Life

    The unusual suspects

    With no obvious culprit in sight, geneticists do broader sweeps to identify autism’s causes.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Pesticide in womb may promote obesity, study finds

    One-quarter of babies born to women who had relatively high concentrations of a DDT-breakdown product in their blood grew unusually fast for at least the first year of life. Not only is this prevalence of accelerated growth unusually high, but it’s also a worrisome trend since such rapid growth during early infancy has — in other studies — put children on track to become obese.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Getting to the bottom of diabetes and kidney disease

    Renal cells called podocytes may need insulin to maintain tissues’ blood-filtration role, a study in mice finds.

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  6. Earth

    Air pollution appears to foster diabetes

    Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Medical Nobel goes to developer of IVF

    Robert Edwards receives prize for work that led to 4 million births.

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  8. Life

    To researchers’ surprise, one Pseudomonas infection is much like the next

    Consistent genetic changes in the lung bacteria that commonly plague cystic fibrosis patients are a welcome discovery because they may point to new treatment strategies.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Pernicious influences on dietary choices

    Because humanity developed during eons of cyclical feasts and famines, we survived by chowing down on energy-dense foods whenever they became available. Today that's all the time. But a number of recent studies point to additional, less obvious influences on what and how much we choose to eat.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Few Americans eat right

    The Institute of Medicine periodically issues recommendations on what people should eat to be healthy and maintain a reasonable weight. Americans have largely ignored this well-intentioned advice, a new study shows. It reports that “nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.”

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  11. Life

    A thousand points of height

    A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.

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  12. Life

    A salty tail

    Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.

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