If you use a tanning bed you better read this:

People who regularly use tanning beds may double or even triple their risk of developing melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, according to a new study.

The study found that people who have ever tanned indoors have about a 75 percent higher risk of melanoma, on average, than people who have never tried it.

But the risk of melanoma was much higher among frequent and long-term indoor tanners. Compared with those who had never touched a tanning bed, people who spent more than 50 hours under the lights were three times more likely to develop melanoma, according to the study, which is the largest of its kind to date. People who frequented tanning salons for more than 10 years or who logged more than 100 sessions were about 2.5 times more likely to develop the cancer.

The study comes as an FDA advisory panel is pondering tougher regulations on indoor tanning, including use restrictions (if not an outright ban) for people under age 18. At a meeting in late March, the panel discussed strengthening skin-cancer warnings at tanning salons and moving tanning beds to a class of medical devices that includes CT scanners, among other measures.

Amy Waldrop, of Clifton, Virginia, who was 41 years old when she first learned she had melanoma, told the FDA panel that her doctors said her use of tanning beds as a teenager was most likely responsible.

“Even after seeing my surgical scars, my teenage daughters have expressed an interest in using tanning beds,” says Waldrop. “They’ve told me that if tanning beds were that bad, they wouldn’t be legal.”

The testimony the FDA panel heard in March was “pretty compelling,” says Dr. Lynn Drake, a dermatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, and a nonvoting member of the panel. “This new study adds to the body of evidence supporting the fact that indoor tanning poses significant risks.”

Scientists begin recruiting mothers-to-be in North Carolina and New York this week for the largest study of U.S. children ever performed — aiming eventually to track 100,000 around the country from conception to age 21.

“We are embarking on the road to discovering the preventable causes of the major chronic diseases that plague American children today,” Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, one of the lead researchers, declared Tuesday.

Nearly a decade in the planning, the ambitious National Children’s Study tackles a major mystery: How the environment — everything from a pregnant woman’s diet to a child’s exposure to various chemicals — interacts with genetics to affect youngsters’ health and development.  This type of study is great and looks to providing important data for the next generation.

A recent study found that people who are good at interpreting facial expressions have “mirror neuron” systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling.  Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do the same thing.

Because they allow us to mimic what others are doing, it is thought that these neurons may be responsible for why we can feel empathy, or understand others’ intentions and states of mind. People with autism, for instance, show reduced mirror neuron activity during social cognition tasks. I guess it is true that we only understand about 15% of how the brain works.