If eating a few hundred unnecessary calories is not reason enough to avoid midnight snacking, here’s another: the more you eat, the less alert is your brain. Why would want an alert brain when you’re trying to sleep? Because as counterintuitive as it seems, a clear brain with optimum concentration […]

Number one on the list of things you can’t catch from a toilet seat is- are you-ready?  Venereal disease. At least, according to Donald McNeil Jr., writing in the New York Times, there is no medical evidence that anyone has ever picked up a venereal disease from a toilet seat. […]

Want another reason not to get a tattoo? Researchers at New York University’s Langone Medical Center can give you one: tattoos can itch for years. An NYU news release reports that as many as 6 percent of New Yorkers who get “inked” have experienced some form of tattoo-related rash, severe itching, […]

First, the bad news: salt pills do nothing to boost the performance of endurance athletes. The good news? There is none really, although the same researchers at St. Louis University who found no benefit from salt pills also found that they don’t hurt performance either. A U of St. Louis […]

Why do people run marathons? More to the point, why to they run them again and again? Are runners particularly slow learners? Or do they forget the pain? Writing in the New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds reports on a study in which Polish researchers stood at the finish line of […]

It’s called chronobiology, and it looks at the ways our body changes over the course of the day and night. The Wall Street Journal reports on the rising popularity of the science, and on recent chronobiological findings such as these: blood pressure peaks around 9 p.m.; most heart attacks occur […]

Will you live to be 100? Do you really want to live to be 100? Seriously? Thomas Perls, a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center and professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, thinks he can help you find out how long you will live. Perls has built a 40-question online tool […]

The next time someone accuses you of hallucinating just tell them you’re one of the five percenters. That’s the percentage of the general population that, according to researchers at the University of Queensland, experiences hallucinations at some point in their lives. And no, it’s not a bad thing–most of the […]

Men who are having trouble peeing may want to consult their dentist. That’s right: dentist. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and the Departments of Urology and Pathology at University Hospitals Case Medical Center are convinced that prostatitis–inflammation of the prostate–is linked to gum disease. A […]