We told you recently that light smoking — smoking fewer than 10 cigarettes a day — increases overall mortality by 87 percent. Smoking even half a cigarette a day still increases overall mortality by 67 percent. If you were holding out hope that someone would eventually produce a single solitary health...
Everyone has a crappy day every now and again, but for Anish Sheth, co-author of What’s Your Poo Telling You?, it’s been a rewardingly crappy life. “Growing up in a family of physicians, poo was a common topic around the dinner table,” explains Sheth. “It was health-related,...
All I remember is that it was purple. When you visit Portland, Oregon, there are a handful of culinary experiences everyone insists you must check off: Ice Cream, Thai food, the tin-foil artistry encasing your leftovers from a certain Cajun restaurant, and of course, Voodoo Doughnuts. Admittedly,...
There are two ways to wake up from a nap: refreshed, invigorated and raring to go, or like a reanimated corpse who isn’t sure what century it is. The latter is called sleep inertia, that temporary period of grogginess, disorientation, drowsiness, sleepiness, reduced alertness and impaired performance...
You know that satisfied feeling you get just after you scratch your balls and sniff your fingers? Yeah, this is something like that. Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that smelling a romantic partner’s clothing was associated with lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol...
I’m a vitamin C truther. In fact, as of writing this, I’m drinking my second vitamin C supplement of the day and it’s not yet noon. Why? Because I’m sick. I have a cold and the mucus in my sinuses is so pressurized I can feel it wanting to...
Now this is science put to good use: Researchers in Australia have developed an ingestible electronic capsule to monitor gas levels in the human gut. When paired with a pocket-sized receiver, the device reports on your fart development in real time. The researchers expect their tiny plastic...
It’s been found time and again that a glass of wine is actually good for the heart. The problem is that most of us are unsatisfied with a single glass of Cabernet. Instead, we prefer to drink like we’re running from something (or all the things). We...
There’s nothing an avid runner loves to do more — aside from sniffing their own farts, and casually mentioning the new personal record they set in their most recent 10K — than bragging about achieving that elusive runner’s high. To hear them tell it, runners enter a blissed-out trance every time...
Bad news first: Turns out we are all, each of us, in some way or another, totally alone. Not just in the existential sense that death is unfortunately a single-seat ticket to the terrifyingly unknown next level, but it’s now understood that standard-issue loneliness for living, breathing...
There have always been cultures, groups and individuals — sports, the military, fitness freaks, the hyper-successful — who claim that negative self-talk is motivating for them in a way positivity can’t touch. But can that ever really be a good thing? I asked Chicago psychologist Jacqueline Duke. “For some, the use of shame...
Welcome to the future: Researchers recently took an important step forward in mimicking how the human body produces sperm, and could one day (likely 10 or so years from now) create artificial, lab-grown sperm and eggs for infertility treatment. It’s all quite science-y, but here’s the gist,...
