A mind-control parasite

A parasite lurking in your cat’s litter box could make you suicidal. A study of 46,000 Danish women found that those who were infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a common parasite that lives in the guts of cats and is transmitted through their feces, were 1.5 times more likely to kill themselves than those who weren’t infected and the more T. […]

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How elephants defy getting cancer

How elephants defy getting cancer

As the world’s largest land mammals, elephants should suffer one of the highest cancer rates—they simply have far more cells that could potentially mutate and become malignant. But new research reveals that elephants rarely get cancer—and the reason why may help in the search for human treatments. Only about 4.8 percent of elephants die from cancer, compared with up to […]

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The pill and prostate cancer

Hormones found in birth control pills could be polluting the water supply and increasing men’s risk of prostate cancer. That’s the suspicion of Canadian researchers who found that countries that have the highest percentage of women using oral contraceptives also have the highest rates of men with prostate cancer. Women who take birth control pills excrete estrogen from the medication […]

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Bacteria That Make You Thin

The species of bacteria that dominate our guts may strongly affect whether we’re thin or fat. Researchers at Washington University collected samples of gut bacteria from pairs of twins in which one was obese and the other thin. Then they transplanted the bacteria into mice. The mice that received the bacteria from the obese twins became obese; the mice that […]

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Dangers at the stoplight

Red lights may prevent deadly auto accidents, but waiting at one poses a different kind of hazard to your health. Car exhausts emit harmful pollutants, known as nanoparticles, which have been linked to heart and lung disease. When researchers from the University of Surrey in England analyzed drivers’ exposure to these pollutants at various points in their typical daily commutes, […]

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Heavy drinking and binge drinking rise sharply in US counties

As rates of any drinking remained largely unchanged, binge drinking and heavy drinking have increased at the county level, influenced mainly by higher rates of drinking among women SEATTLE – Today, Americans are more likely to be heavy drinkers and binge drinkers than in recent years due in large part to rising rates of drinking among women, according to a […]

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