■ Griffin Furlong has been fighting an uphill battle, but this week the 18-year-old graduated as ”class valedictorian” after his mother to leukemia when he was 6, Furlong spent two years in a homeless shelter with his father and brother. “It was horrible,” he said. “A kid should not have to go through that.” A month ago, just before final […]
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When President Obama began lifting restrictions on travel, diplomatic and economic relations between the US and Cuba earlier this year, many Americans celebrated the fact that Cuban cigars and rum, among other things, would become more accessible. Now we hope for other things such as the Lung Cancer Vaccine that was discovered. For half a century, Cuban products have been rare in […]
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(1) The Albany, New York, company Vireo Health told reporters it would soon offer the world’s first certified Kosher marijuana, announcing that the Orthodox Union of New York had authenticated it as having met Jewish dietary laws (e.g., grown with insect-free plants). (Other Kosher-validating officials complained that the approval should apply only to marijuana that is eaten, not smoked.) […]
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A hallucinatory party drug could point the way to the first new treatments for depression in a generation. Scientists have discovered that ketamine (“Special K”), which club-goers take for dream-like highs, also improves mood disorders by repairing damaged connections in the brain. What’s more, ketamine works within hours as opposed to weeks— even for people whose mood disorders have proved […]
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■ A star college athlete has turned down a chance at sporting glory to donate bone marrow to a stranger. Cameron Lyle, a shot-putter at the University of New Hampshire, added his DNA to the federal bone marrow registry two years ago and promptly forgot about it. But this month, he discovered his marrow matched that of a 28-year-old leukemia […]
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Eddyville, Ky A prison doctor and two other staffers at the Kentucky State Penitentiary have been fired after a mentally disturbed inmate starved himself to death. James Kenneth Embry, 57, who had three years left on a nine-year drug sentence, was found dead in his cell in Eddyville in January. Embry started behaving erratically last spring when he stopped taking […]
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Why are Americans so fat—and getting fatter with every passing year? said Brian Stelter in The New York Times. Seventy percent of adults in the U.S. are either overweight or obese, and so are one third of children and teens. This week, HBO began airing a four-part documentary, The Weight of the Nation, that aims to serve as a “wake-up […]
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Major depression is not only psychologically crippling but can also age a person’s body on a cellular level. That’s the conclusion of a new study that examined blood samples from more than 2,400 people with and without depression. Researchers at the Free University of Amsterdam measured the length of telomeres, the small caps at the ends of chromosomes that protect […]
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Ketamine, better known as Special K known to be a psychoactive ‘party drug’ has pharmaceutical companies riding high. Mainly used clinically as an anesthetic in animals and humans, clinical tests have proven it to be effective in treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and suicidal behavior. The effects of Ketamine have a quick onset. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which generally take weeks […]
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