“Sometimes I wonder where their brains are at,” Tillotson’s mother, Lori Lee, said of her children. “They do such impulsive things, and sometimes I just don’t think they’re thinking.”

Neuroscientists confirm that teenagers do have brains, but they’re wired differently from those of adults. Why many teenagers seek thrills, break rules and seem nonchalant about their own safety has been a question brain scientists have worked to answer in the last two decades. Top researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging to see this brain activity.

Read the full article here.

A new thing that has happened for the past couple of years is my family doctor and a couple of specialists have sent me business holiday cards!  I think it is a really nice touch and the fact that they go through the trouble of doing it is touching.  I know I try and send out cards to all my friends and family every holiday season but I am guilty of missing a few.  Please respond in the comments section and let me know if anyone you do business with have implemented this practice.

A Spanish study has found that people who eat food high in trans fats and saturated fats increase their risk of depression, Agence-France Presse reported.

The six-year study analyzed the diet and lifestyle of more than 12,000 volunteers. At the beginning, none of the participants has been diagnosed with depression. By the end, more than 600 people were battling the condition.

“Participants with an elevated consumption of trans fats (fats present in artificial form in industrially produced pastries and fast food…) presented up to a 48 percent increase in the risk of depression when they were compared to participants who did not consume these fats,” Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, said.

On the other end of the spectrum, researchers looked at the impact that foods such as fish, vegetable oils and olive oil had on mental health, and found they are “associated with a lower risk of suffering depression.”

Or maybe it is all the weight you put on from gorging on junk foods!

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.”

“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.

“It’s really a miracle, (the mother) had taken no stimulants during ovulation,” said Ahmed Salam, the gynaecologist who headed the team which delivered the babies, quoted by MENA. According to the hospital director, the seven babies weighed between two and three kilograms (4.4 to 6.6 pounds) each at birth and have been put in incubators.  I hope she has a big family to help her with these bundles of joy!

Clutching photos of the bottled drug to overcome a lack of Spanish, they have maps sketched by euthanasia activists to locate back-street pet shops and veterinary supply stores near the U.S. border. There they can buy a bottle for $35 to $50, enough for one suicide, no questions asked.

“We have a moral right to a peaceful death. I don’t want to die with a total loss of dignity, incontinent, barely able to see and stand up, suffering as my mother did,” said Bron Norman, a healthy 65-year-old Australian woman who spent $2,860 to fly to Mexico in March to buy pentobarbital.

Used legally across the world to anesthetize and euthanize farm animals and pets, pentobarbital, sometimes known by the trade name Nembutal, is tightly restricted to veterinarians. But lax regulation in Mexico means it can easily be bought.

Euthanasia campaigners call it “the Mexico option” and say they are willing to travel so far because pentobarbital is one of the few drugs that produces a reliable and tranquil death by sending a person to sleep before shutting down breathing.

Exit International has helped 250 people from Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand get pentobarbital in Mexico over the past few years. And, it says, interest is growing. Foreign buyers usually fly to U.S. border cities and cross over to Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez, the group says. A Reuters reporter buying a bottle in Nuevo Laredo was given a range of brands to choose from.

An aging populations in rich nations have sparked a global debate over the legality of euthanasia and the right of terminally ill people to bring forward their own deaths.

Euthanasia is legal only in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the U.S. state of Oregon and doctors in those countries can use pentobarbital to end human lives. Many Christians around the world oppose so-called mercy killings, saying they go against God’s will.

But the case of Chantal Sebire, a French woman with an uncurable face-distorting tumour, rekindled the pro-euthanasia camp. Sebire was found dead of an overdose in March days after a court rejected her bid for assisted suicide.  In devoutly Catholic Mexico, most terminally ill entrust themselves to family or doctors rather than seek euthanasia.

A Mexican health ministry spokesman said it was working with the agriculture ministry to step up control of veterinary medicines, but declined to give details.  Australian interest in the “Mexico option” grew after the government overruled a state-level euthanasia law in 1997.  The Australian government banned Nitschke’s book, “The Peaceful Pill Handbook,” which gives tips on everything from carbon monoxide to buying pentobarbital in Mexico.

U.S. anti-euthanasia groups also deplore such activism. In the late 1990s, American doctor Jack Kevorkian — dubbed Dr. Death — was convicted of second-degree murder and jailed after he helped at least 130 people end their lives.  I think folks should control the way they live and die.

The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain. When examinations found what was believed to be an eight-centimetre (3.2-inch) tumour, he underwent the operation to remove it. It was only then that surgeons realised it was a towel. “The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour,” the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.

Asahi hospital officials visited the man and apologised, he said. The former patient has no plans to sue the hospital, which is in talks with him over compensation or other measures, the official said. Japanese media reports said the man, who was not identified, still had his spleen removed.  I am sure he will end up with a few hundred thousand bucks!

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.