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I'd like to find activities that keep the brain active, and are fun or stimulating. I produce art when I'm more organized. I listen to many kinds of music that I consider worth listening to. I read a lot, not as much as before the net, but some. I know, or I should say, I believe that intelligence is a flexible affect of how one uses their mind at any given point. The level measured can go up or down, depending on one's physical, emotional, or spiritual environment, and how the subject chooses to interpret such a given environment. Years...

It may be common for psychiatric patients who are Muslim to attribute their hallucinations or other symptoms to "jinn," the invisible, devilish creatures in Islamic mythology, researchers in the Netherlands have found. The findings demonstrate one way in which culture may influence how people perceive their psychotic symptoms, and could help Western psychiatrists better understand patients who have an Islamic background. Moreover, in today's connected world, patients may fuse the symbols from their own backgrounds with those of other cultures to explain their symptoms, study leader Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Groningen,...

For decades we’ve been told to eat less cholesterol and saturated fat because they can cause or contribute to heart disease. Recently, however, these recommendations have been thrown out the window by some experts while the so-called real culprit—carbohydrates—are tossed to the lions. So, are cholesterol and saturated fat your friends while whole-grain bagels and organic quinoa are your enemies? Before you decide to make burgers and steaks a regular part of your diet or become distressed because you are a vegetarian or vegan, let’s take a closer look at what is being reported. A growing number of studies, including...

A World Health Organization official says an Ebola vaccine developed in Canada may be the first to be approved for use, possibly before the year is out. Marie-Paule Kieny says data from the first safety studies in humans of two experimental vaccines should be available by November. She says if they are deemed safe to use, it could open the door initially for use in health-care workers tending the sick. One of the experimental vaccines was developed at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. The company which licensed that vaccine, NewLink Genetics, announced this week that it had received approval...

The virus causes symptoms like a cold, except worse, and is prompting up to 30 children a day to seek care at one Kansas City hospital, where about 15% of the youngsters were placed in intensive care, officials said. In a sign of a possible regional outbreak, Colorado, Illinois and Ohio are reporting cases with symptoms similar to the same virus and are awaiting testing results, according to officials and CNN affiliates in those states. In Kansas City, about 450 children were recently treated at Children’s Mercy Hospital, and at least 60 of them received intensive hospitalization, spokesman Jake Jacobson...

... part of the population in West Africa is immune to the Ebola virus, according to virologists who specialize in the disease. Assuming they are correct, and if those people can be identified... Immune persons could safely tend the sick and bury the dead just as smallpox survivors did in the centuries before smallpox vaccine. ...antibodies could be harvested from their blood to treat new Ebola victims. But many factors remain unclear, including which Africans have antibodies and how much antibody is needed to be protective.... “It's fair to say that some people are immune,” said Robert F. Garry Jr.,...

Two months before Californians go to the polls to choose a governor, the state's top elections official tearfully acknowledged Friday that she has been consumed by a "debilitating" depression that has often kept her away from the office.. Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who oversees statewide voting, told The Times that she has a history of depression and has moved out of the two-story country home she owns with her husband. She now resides in a trailer park on the outskirts of Sacramento. "I have suffered from depression since I was in college, and I am having a more difficult...

Beginning September 18, the nation will prohibit residents from leaving their homes for four days, with the hopes that health officials will be able to detect early-stage cases, Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, a presidential advisor in Sierra Leone, told Reuters. “The aggressive approach is necessary to deal with the spread of Ebola once and for all,” he said. Unfortunately, the news was accompanied by worsening statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), which announced on Friday that out of the roughly 4,000 people that have been confirmed to have the virus, 2,105 people have died in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and...

Fox News is reporting that employer-provided health care plans may be a thing of the past. Former Obama health adviser Zeke Emanuel predicted that Obamacare will replace 80 percent of employer-provided health plans will disappear in 10 years. “It’s going to actually be better for people. They’ll have more choice,” Emanuel said. “Most people who work for an employer and get their coverage through an employer do not have choice.” …

NEWPORT BEACH (CBSLA.com) — Investigators with the Orange County Health Department were working Friday to determine what may have caused several people to get sick after eating at an upscale Newport Beach restaurant. KNX 1070’s Ron Kilgore reports authorities say six diners came down with the intestinal bacteria Shigella after eating at the True Food The self-billed healthy living restaurant was shut down on Aug. 28 for two days over what county inspectors labeled an “imminent health risk” due to at least one confirmed case of Shigella. Following the closure, True Food reopened after the entire restaurant was sanitized and...

On this 2nd anniversary of donating a kidney (9/5/2012) my recipient Jerry writes: "God used you to give me another chance in life and to watch my children grow. Words can't say enough how thankful I am." I am glad to have served the Lord in that small way to keep such a great guy around. Here's something good you might do in a world of so much wrong. Donate Life.

A certified hypnotist used his techniques to lose 70 pounds in six months.Rob Malone, 52, of Red Bud, lost the weight between December 2012 and June 2013. “I recorded some self-hypnosis audios and put them on my phone,” he said. “Visualization is a big part; I’d visualize myself going through the checkout line without buying anything. That’s a huge part of this. And I worked on my cravings for sugar, Snickers bars, (starchy) carbs.” He put on weight partly by eating candy. “I would buy two bags of (miniature) Snickers and eat them all in two days,” he said. He...

Pro-choice activists concerned over women’s rights to safe reproductive health pulled into Copley Square Wednesday as part of a national bus tour calling for a lift of bans that deny abortion coverage for low-income women. Since kicking off the 10,000-mile Be Bold Road Trip in Los Angeles, C.A. on Aug. 9 the tour has hit up Portland, O.R., Minneapolis, M.N, and Chicago, I.L., before parking Boston.

GENEVA— The World Health Organization reports more than 800,000 people die by suicide every year. WHO, which is launching its first global report on suicide prevention, said more people die from suicide than from conflicts, wars and natural disasters combined. The World Health Organization reported every 40 seconds a person somewhere in the world commits suicide. Despite this shockingly high statistic, WHO said only a handful of countries have policies aimed at suicide prevention. WHO Director of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Shekhar Saxena said there also is much more that communities can do to provide support for vulnerable people....

If cow’s milk is the Gen X of dairy, and soy milk the Gen Y, then camel milk may very well be Gen Z. As of this January, U.S. shoppers can buy the country’s first retail camel milk at market. The brand, Desert Farms, is now sold in Whole Foods Market stores in California, as well as through the company’s website. One of the first things shoppers might notice about camel milk is the price. At approximately $18/pint, camel milk is far from cheap. But, according to founder Walid Abdul-Wahab, camel milk’s benefits may be well worth the cost—especially to...

The home-cooked meal has long been romanticized, from ’50s-era sitcoms to the work of star food writer Michael Pollan, who once wrote, “far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention.” In recent years, the home-cooked meal has increasingly been offered up as the solution to our country's burgeoning nutrition-related health problems of heart disease and diabetes. But while home-cooked meals are typically healthier than restaurant food, sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton from North Carolina State University argue that the stress that...

According to a study published in Nature, oceanic mercury levels have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Far surpassing earlier estimates, data collected during research cruises from 2006-2011 in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has revealed a 340% increase in surface-level mercury content. During the cruises, deep seawater samples (depths up to 5km) were compared to surface water samples. The analysis implicates the burning of fossil fuels as the primary culprit of this dramatic rise, with mining activities thought to have also contributed a significant amount.

People in Malawi are buying life-saving antiretroviral drugs meant for people living with HIV, and misusing them to brew gin as well as fattening livestock. Some brewers who are fermenting maize husks in the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to produce a traditional gin known as ‘kachasu’ claim the resulting gin is very strong and matures quickly. There are also some small-scale commercial chicken and pig farmers misusing ARVs, adding them to broiler feed believing it will enhance weight gain so they can sell them quicker. The farmers’ activity has resulted from their observations made of people living with HIV who gain...

Mark Smith was a microbiology graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when, in 2011, a family friend became infected with the notorious superbug clostridium difficile. C. diff can cause severe diarrhea, disability, and malnutrition and is responsible for roughly 14,000 deaths in the United States each year. In 2012, after taking seven rounds of the antibiotic vancomycin and failing to improve, Smith’s friend received a DIY fecal transplant from his roommate—in their apartment, using an over-the-counter enema kit. The friend recovered within days, but “the whole thing was absurd, not at all how it should be done,” Smith...

The search for a rare white snake slithering through Thousand Oaks continued Wednesday, two days after the venomous and potentially lethal reptile bit a dog. Animal control officers spent the morning and late afternoon hunting for the monocled albino cobra, which was last seen in a yard in the 1300 block of Rancho Lane in the southern Ventura County suburb. “It’s a little unnerving,” said Thousand Oaks resident Arianne Deeder, 39, who lives in the neighborhood. “I’m keeping an eye out.” Deeder has chickens in a back yard coup and fish in a pond, along with a dog and a...