Thinner Diabetics Face Higher Death Rate
By (ScienceDaily)
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American adults of a normal weight with new-onset diabetes die at a higher rate than overweight/obese adults with the same disease, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.
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Normal-weight adults with type 2 diabetes have been understudied because those who typically develop the disease are overweight or obese. In this study about 10 percent of those with new-onset diabetes were at a normal weight at the time of ascertainment.
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"Many times physicians don't expect that normal-weight people have diabetes when it is quite possible that they do and could be at a high risk of mortality, particularly if they are older adults or members of a minority group," Carnethon said. "If you are of a normal weight and have new-onset diabetes, talk to your doctor about controlling your health risks, including cardiovascular risk factors."
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Grateful teens have better mental health
By (UPI)
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Grateful teens are more likely to be happy and less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol or have behavioral problems, U.S. researchers say.
"Gratitude played an important role in many areas of positive mental health of the teens in our study," lead author Giacomo Bono of California State University said in a statement. "Increases in gratitude over a four-year period were significantly related to improvements in life satisfaction, happiness, positive attitudes and hope."
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"The teens also showed slight reductions overall in delinquency, such as alcohol and drug use, cheating on exams, skipping school, detention and administrative discipline," Bono told the American Psychological Association's 120th annual convention in Orlando, Fla.
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How Curiosity turns Mars into a climate-change lab
By James West
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. . . Curiosity, the car-sized mobile chemistry lab that dropped spectacularly onto the surface of Mars yesterday, will give scientists a rare chance to test their assumptions about how climate change works on Earth. It will hunt the surface of Mars for sediment to pick up and drop into its sophisticated onboard machinery, then send back critical insights into how the climate of Mars — once warmer, with rain, rivers, and deltas — has changed over billions of years, lashed by solar winds.
“You learn about how to understand an atmosphere by seeing different atmospheres,” said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist from Texas A&M University who is part of Curiosity’s climate team. “And the more we know about Mars’ atmosphere, the better we can really understand our own.”
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This has happened before, Lemmon explains. When scientists first ran Earth’s climate models against the climate of Venus, winds on Venus ground to a theoretical halt within days. Something in Earth’s modeling wasn’t accounting for how wind worked on that distant planet. By tinkering with new physics, scientists finally accommodated for Venus’ winds, thus reducing the margin of error in Earth’s climate models.
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“One of the things that Curiosity is going to help us learn much more about is … How does carbon cycle through the system? Where does it go? Where does it end up? Does it ever come back again? Is it ever buried deep enough that it come back again from volcanoes?”
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Walking increases in America but not enough, says CDC
By Alexander Besant
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data said that almost two thirds of Americans now take regular walks compared with 56 percent in 2005.
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The CDC report said that even with recent progress, only about half of US adults get enough physical activity each day.
The Centers recommend about two and a half hours of moderate aerobic activity per week at minimum.
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NASA Gives SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada $1.1 Billion for Next Phase of Spacecraft Development
By Tiffany Kaiser
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The three space companies have already received a chunk of money from NASA in earlier development phases, where Boeing was given $131 million, SpaceX received $475 million from separate NASA programs, and Sierra Nevada has got over $125 million.
Now, NASA has moved into its next phase of spacecraft development called Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap). The goal of this new phase is to design an entire launch system consisting of a launch vehicle, the space taxi capsule and ground operations.
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The three aim to launch seven crewmembers in each of their vehicles to the ISS in the near future. How near? Boeing wants to launch a crewed demonstration by late 2016 while SpaceX plans to do the same in 2015. Sierra Nevada aims for 2016 or 2017. It's also important to note that these dates are dependent on how much NASA is willing to hand over in later development phases.
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Does sunscreen actually prevent skin cancer?
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
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. . . at Discover's The Crux blog, Emily Elert expands on some of the other problems in play. One of the key things—and something that will hopefully be fixed by this time next year—there's nothing on the sunblock you buy to tell you how protective it is against skin cancer. SPF is all about the burn. So even if some sunscreens do protect against cancer, you don't have a good way to know whether or not you're using one of them.
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UVA rays can cause cancer but not sunburn, so they don’t factor into the SPF calculation. That means that if you slather on a high SPF sunscreen that only protects against UVB, you’d still absorb lots of UVA radiation, potentially increasing your long-term cancer risk.
Soon it will be easier to tell which sunscreens include ingredients that block or absorb UVA as well as UVB. According to FDA regulations passed last year, products that pass a “Critical Wavelength” test—meaning that they block wavelengths across the ultraviolet spectrum—will carry the label “Broad Spectrum” alongside the SPF, while sunscreens that don’t pass the test will be forbidden from claiming they have such capabilities. However, those regulations don’t go into effect until December, so for this summer, you’re still stuck with SPF. And, by the way, you probably need to apply twice as much sunscreen as you think to actually get an SPF as strong as that marked on the bottle: manufacturers test their products’ SPF with the assumption that you will slather on obscene amounts. This discrepancy could be contributing to the fact that the NIH, when looking the connection between sunscreen use and skin cancer in large populations, doesn’t see clear evidence that sunscreen is effective in reducing the risk of skin cancer. (It’s worth pointing out, too, that there is a clear genetic component in some skin cancers, so just avoiding sun or using sunscreen regularly are not the only factors that determine whether someone gets it.)
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Pubic hair has a job to do – stop shaving and leave it alone
By Emily Gibson
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It must have happened sometime in the last decade because the amount of time, energy, money and emotion both genders spend on abolishing every hair from their genitals is astronomical. The genital hair removal industry, including medical professionals who advertise their speciality services to those seeking the "clean and bare" look, is booming.
But why pick on the lowly pubic hair? A few sociological theories suggest it has to do with cultural trends spawned by bikinis and thongs, certain hairless actors and actresses or a desire to return to childhood or even a misguided attempt at hygiene.
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Pubic hair does have a purpose, providing a cushion against friction that can cause skin abrasion and injury, protection from bacteria and other unwanted pathogens, and is the visible result of long-awaited adolescent hormones, certainly nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about.
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