We scrunch. We twist. We pull the skin on our faces or legs taut just so razors can whisk away the undesired hairs sprouting on the fertile landscape of our bodies. Yet many of us do these tasks with a sense of futility, of inevitable failure, because we believe this regular ritual of removal causes hair to grow back mightier than before—rising like a phoenix renewed but with even coarser, thicker

By Janice Neumann (Reuters Health) - Moderate-intensity exercise, or even just walking, can improve quality of life for depressed middle-aged women, a large Australian study suggests. By Janice Neumann (Reuters Health) - Moderate-intensity exercise, or even just walking, can improve quality of life for depressed middle-aged women, a large Australian study suggests. Women who averaged 150 minutes o

The disorder is complex and has so far eluded a simple biological explanation A commercial sponsored by Pfizer, the drug company that manufactures the antidepressant Zoloft, asserts, “While the cause [of depression] is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance.” Using advertisements

Contrary to findings from mass Stone Age graves, women were equally as likely to be victims of deadly blows as men Stone Age farmers lived through routine violence, and women weren't spared from its toll, a new study finds. The analysis discovered that up to 1 in 6 skulls exhumed in Scandinavia from the late Stone Age — between about 6,000 and 3,700 years ago — had nasty head injuries. And contrar

China burns nearly as much coal as all other nations combined, including coal shipped from the U.S. Chinese coal consumption surged for a 12th consecutive year in 2011, with the country burning 2.3 billion tons of the carbon-emitting mineral to run power plants, industrial boilers and other equipment to support its economic and population growth. In a simple but striking chart published on its web

Recent research supports the effectiveness of "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing" Imagine you are trying to put a traumatic event behind you. Your therapist asks you to recall the memory in detail while rapidly moving your eyes back and forth, as if you are watching a high-speed Ping-Pong match. The sensation is strange, but many therapists and patients swear by the technique, called e

People can process short sentences and solve equations before they're aware of the words and numbers in front of their eyes, finds new research that suggests we might not actually need full consciousness to perform rule-based tasks like reading and arithmetic. In a series of experiments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, more than 300 student participants were unconsciously exposed to words an

"Junk" DNA Holds Clues to Common DiseasesWith the new annotation of the human genome, researchers are finding that most of the code between genes is controlling crucial functions for life and health When the draft of the human genome was published in 2000, researchers thought that they had obtained the secret decoder ring for the human body. Armed with the code of 3 billion basepairs of As, Ts, Cs

One of the strangest findings to emerge from the world of obesity science lately is that people who sleep less tend to weigh more. But until recently, we have been stifling our yawns and scratching our heads about why: Does lack of sleep alter our biology? Or does it affect our eating behavior? Now two brain-imaging reports suggest the answer is both. The first study, published in March in the Jou