You may be eating and drinking some odd things in the future. There is striking new evidence that green, or unroasted, coffee beans can produce a substantial decrease in body weight in a relatively short period of time. Drinking coffee doesn’t do it–you have to eat the beans. And here’s another odd cure: Other research suggests that ingestion of components of afterbirth or placenta may offer benefits to mothers and maybe even to non-mothers and males.
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Why do we get the flu in the winter? It’s basically because cold air and central heating both try out our nasal passages, so that we can’t "catch" viruses before they get into our body and make us sick. Flu season can begin as early as October, and it usually ends in March or sometimes not until April. The average flu death rate per season is around 12,000.
This has been an especially light flu season: For every patient who was hospitalized this season, 22 people were hospitalized during the 2010-11 flu season. The reason for this may be global warming.
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Here’s a possible cause of the aflockalypse: The company that makes Scotts Miracle-Gro fertilizer for your lawn could also be killing your songbirds.
Scotts pled guilty to charges that they illegally put insecticides into its "Morning Song" and "Country Pride" brands of bird seed. In 2008, Scotts distributed 73 million packages of bird seed coated with the insecticide Storcide II that was intended to keep insects from destroying the seed when it was broadcast onto your lawn or put into a feeder.
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The recent killing of Afghan civilians by an American soldier who undoubtedly had post traumatic stress disease–as well as the shooting of a black kid by a patrol officer here in the US–points out the need to identify soldiers and police who are vulnerable to PTSD BEFORE they are hired–but is this possible? It may be: scientists have identified specific genetic risks that make people more vulnerable to this condition.
Neuroscientist Joseph Boscarino says, "We found that individuals with these ‘at-risk’ genetic variants were more likely to develop PTSD, especially those that had higher exposure to traumatic events. Those without these four genetic variants appeared to be highly resilient to PTSD, regardless of trauma exposure history."
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