Free Republic

If you’ve knocked back a few and feel a warm flush creep up your face and ears, you’re not alone. While often thought of as annoying rather than dangerous, alcohol flush may be a sign of something more serious brewing beneath the surface, a new study suggests. Roughly 8% of the global population experiences the drunken sensation, mostly in East and Southeast Asian demographics, which has been previously dubbed “Asian glow.” But it’s more than just a nuisance on a night out — the flush is caused by an inherited, genetic hiccup. Those with the gene variant ALDH2*2 are deficient...

Many police departments have banned the use of neck restraints, citing safety concerns in the wake of incidents that have received widespread media coverage in recent years. However, new research from Wake Forest University School of Medicine shows that vascular neck restraint (VNR), when applied by trained law enforcement officers, is a successful and safe technique for officers to use when arresting aggressive or violent suspects.The study appears in the November issue of the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. “It’s important to note that VNR is distinctly different from a chokehold,” said William P. Bozeman, M.D., professor of emergency...

Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to surround herself with more scandals than you can shake a stick at, as we said when I was growing up in Texas. We had the Mena, Arkansas scandals when her husband, Bubba, otherwise known as William Jefferson Clinton, was Attorney General and then Governor. Ambrose Evans Pritchard, the British Telegraph investigative journalist did a masterful documentation of that in his The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, when Bill was President facing impeachment in the 1990's. Then there are the Clinton Foundation scandals documented in the 2015 Peter Schweitzer book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of...

Across the country, many employees are seated at desks for the majority of an eight-hour workday. As technology creates an increase in sedentary lifestyles, the impact of sitting on vascular health is a rising concern. Now, researchers have found that when a person sits for six straight hours, vascular function is impaired -- but by walking for just 10 minutes after a prolonged period of sitting, vascular health can be restored.

Earth's flora is responsible for the glaciers and rivers that have created this planet's distinctive landscapeAstronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants. We all know how Earth's landscape came about, right? Oceans and land masses formed, mountains rose, and precipitation washed over its surface; rivers weathered bare rock to create soil and plants took root. Well, new research...