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Bill Maris, head of Google's investment arm, says humans will live to be 500-years-old in the future, while today's cancer treatments will soon seem "primitive" as scientists continue to hunt for cure. Humans will live to be 500-years-old, according to a top Google executive, who said the company was investing millions of dollars in life sciences to ensure this vision became a reality. Bill Maris, a venture capitalist and the managing partner of Google Ventures, the internet giant's investment fund, said it had hired scientists as partners in order to identify start-ups that could cure cancer and make chemotherapy "seem...

TRONDHEIM, Norway, March 8 (UPI) — A new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has found there is no connection between psychedelic drugs and mental health issues. The researchers analyzed data from the U.S. National Health Survey (2008-2011). The data includes over 130,000 randomly selected adults, including nearly 20,000 psychedelic drug users. The analysis showed people who use LSD or psilocybin mushrooms do not have an increased risk of mental health problems.

While today's human body contains a variety of these proteins, Eirin-Lopez believes they evolved from a single ancestor millions of years ago. This finding, published recently in Molecular Biology and Evolution, is pivotal in unraveling the mysteries of DNA organization and regulation, and could someday lead to innovative biomonitoring strategies and therapies targeting a variety of diseases including cancer.

Drinking three to five cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of clogged arteries that can lead to heart attacks, a Korean study suggests. Kangbuk Samsung Hospital in Seoul led the study of 25,138 South Korean men and women. The participants, who were 41 years old on average and free of heart disease, were categorized based on how much coffee they drank and underwent a health screening. The results were compared to non-coffee drinkers. The study found participants who drank between three and five cups of java a day had the lowest levels of calcium buildup in their coronary...

Scientists at Northeastern University have discovered an antibiotic in the soil that looks to be effective at killing deadly pathogens like MRSA and tuberculosis. Even more promising, lead researcher Kim Lewis says those pathogens weren't able to develop a resistance to the antibiotic.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama said Thursday that the U.S. has undergone a “culture change” in the five years since she started raising awareness about childhood obesity, but as she celebrated achievements on multiple fronts the first lady also warned that the progress is “incredibly fragile.” That’s because special interests “whose first priority is not our kids’ health” are “waiting for us to get complacent or bored and move on to the next trendy issue,” Mrs. Obama said at an annual health summit. She cited the fight over a recent child nutrition law as an example.

Good news that the House stood strong on the DHS bill. We'll see what happens next - the fight is just beginning. While no small issue, there is one even more important. That is, the lawsuit of 36 States against the ACA regarding subsidies for States who didn't set up their own exchanges. It specifically says in Obamacare that their citizens will NOT receive subsidies. This will determine if our Supreme Court is just or just us on our own. Justice Roberts is going to have to do back flips to sustain such an unambiguous clause.

Anti vaxer Mom takes her kids to Disneyland. They get the measels. They go home and expose 1000 more people to measels.Woo Hoo!

On February 20 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the creation of a special enrollment period for taxpayers to avoid penalties for non-compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual mandate. Open enrollment for 2015 officially ended February 15, and prior to the CMS announcement, those who failed to sign up for insurance and weren’t otherwise covered would have been subject to a fine (or “shared responsibility payment”) of the greater of $325 per adult, or two percent of taxable household income when they filed their tax returns in 2016. Because many people may not be aware...

Surgeon Sergio Canavero will be embarking on a project to implement the world's first human head transplant. It's a fascinating concept. You have an otherwise perfectly healthy head on a body that no longer functions. You have, also, an otherwise perfectly healthy donor body. What if you could take the head from its non-functioning body and transplant it onto the healthy body?

Stop chugging sugary soda and munching sweet treats. Cut back on red meats, butter and other sources of saturated fat. Lay off the salt shaker. Eat plenty of fruits and veggies. And don't worry about having an egg and an extra cup of coffee with your breakfast. These are the conclusions of the advisory panel that helps shape America's official dietary guidelines, and they appear to be about the same as they were back in 2010, the last time the guidelines were updated, dietitians say. "What's good about the report is that much of it is reinforcing what we saw...

A Rutgers nutritional scientist and two cancer biologists at New York City’s Hunter College have found that an ingredient in extra-virgin olive oil kills a variety of human cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The ingredient is oleocanthal, a compound that ruptures a part of the cancerous cell, releasing enzymes that cause cell death. Paul Breslin, professor of nutritional sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and David Foster and Onica LeGendre of Hunter College, report that oleocanthal kills cancerous cells in the laboratory by rupturing vesicles that store the cell’s waste. The findings are published in Molecular...

Alaska has been named the happiest and healthiest state in the nation. In 2013, the Last Frontier state held the eighth position on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. One year later, the state climbed to the top of the list for the first time since 2008. To compile the list, researchers interviewed 176,000 United States residents. Each participant was asked to rate their happiness and health on a scale of 0 to 100. The categories include social life, financial stability, physical well-being, community involvement, and purpose in life.

A potentially deadly "superbug" resistant to antibiotics infected seven patients, including two who died, and nearly 200 others were exposed at a Southern California hospital through contaminated medical instruments, UCLA reported Wednesday.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) has introduced a bill to keep the "federal food police" out of schools, taking aim at Obama administration nutrition standards applied to bake sales.Poe's bill, H.R. 881, would prevent federal nutrition standards developed by the Department of Agriculture under a 2010 law championed by first lady Michelle Obama from being applied to school fundraisers.“The federal food police need to stay out of our schools,” Poe said in a statement. “First, the regulators came into our lunchrooms, then vending machines and now school fundraisers."The nutrition standards, which limit the calories and fat in food sold in schools,...

Eating a whole egg, yolks and all, has gotten a bad reputation over the years, but new dietary guidelines may send egg white-only omelets by the wayside. The recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which are now under review, are expected to downplay the importance of lowering cholesterol intake. The most recent set of guidelines in 2010 recommended consuming less than 300 milligrams per day of dietary cholesterol, which is about the amount in one egg. In the coming weeks, the committee is expected to release the report for use by the Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments...

The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol in your diet The nation's top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption. [...] The current U.S. guidelines call for restricting cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams daily. American adult men on average ingest about 340 milligrams of cholesterol a day, according to federal figures. That recommended figure of 300 milligrams, Eckel said, is "just one of those things that gets carried forward and carried forward even though the evidence...

First lady Michelle Obama believes Americans can keep the federal government from meddling with their lives by eating healthy foods and maintaining an active lifestyle. In an interview with Cooking Light magazine published Monday, Mrs. Obama said the best way to avoid dealing with “the system” is to take care of one’s own body. Doing so, she said, will eliminate trips to the doctor and the need to deal with Obamacare. “It’s just making sure people understand that the most powerful thing that they can do for their overall health is feed their bodies good nutritious food,” the first lady...

Retired neurosurgeon and presidential hopeful Ben Carson attempted Sunday to diffuse the vaccination debate that has gripped the political scene, saying there’s no reason to turn vaccines for measles and other diseases into a partisan issue. Mr. Carson, a star in conservative circles, said scientists have debunked skeptics who warn of debilitating side effects from vaccines, and parents who forgo vaccinations are eroding the herd immunity that has lulled them into complacency. “We’ve had such an effective vaccination program that you’re not seeing the diseases,” Mr. Carson told “Fox News Sunday.” A measles outbreak traced to Disneyland in California has...

Doctors are warning parents against reviving “measles parties” intended to expose children to the disease at a gathering with at least one infected person. The parties ostensibly help children build immunity against the disease and are used instead of vaccinating or leaving exposure up to chance. Such practices have been discouraged despite similar events such as “pox parties” which expose children to chickenpox for the purpose of building immunity. “CDPH strongly recommends against the intentional exposure of children to measles as it unnecessarily places the exposed children at potentially grave risk and could contribute to further spread of the outbreak,”...