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Habits are behaviors that are so deeply wired into our brains that we perform them automatically. They can be both good and bad: A habit can allow you to follow the same route to work every day without thinking about it, freeing your brain to think about other things. But we can develop plenty of bad habits too.

A new study has found that a small region of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, where most thought and planning occurs, controls which habits are switched on at a given time.
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If you have a car accident and are taken to the hospital, you’re less likely to die if you’ve been drinking (as long as you weren’t drinking so much that it CAUSED the accident!) It turns out that injured patients are less likely to die in the hospital if they have alcohol in their blood, and the more alcohol, the more likely they were to survive.

Injury epidemiologist Lee Friedman says, "This study is not encouraging people to drink. However, after an injury, if you are intoxicated there seems to be a pretty substantial protective effect."
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You may think you know who your ancestors were, but do you REALLY? Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations–including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans–are descended from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans.

This discovery helps fill gaps in scientific understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while providing an explanation for some genetic similarities among what would otherwise seem to be very divergent groups.
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If we could test every infant’s DNA at birth, we could predict what future diseases they might have and guard against them early–right? Wrong!

In the April 3rd edition of the New York Times, Gina Kolata quotes researcher Bert Vogelstein as saying, "The punch line is that this sort of personalized medicine will not in any way be the most important determinant of patient care."
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