A new small, wireless self-contained pacemaker appears safe and feasible for use in patients, according to a small study in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Although traditional pacemakers pose minimal risk, patients are still vulnerable to some short- or long-term complications, said Vivek Y. Reddy, M.D., lead author of the study and director of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

Those complications can stem from the pulse generator implanted under the skin of the chest, where infections or skin breakdown can occur, and particularly from the leads, or wires, that run from the generator through a vein to the heart. Leads can break, dislodge or contribute to a vein blockage.

Bottom Line: Habitually playing violent video games appears to increase aggression in children, regardless of parental involvement and other factors.

Author: Douglas A. Gentile, Ph.D., of Iowa State University, Ames, and colleagues.

Background: More than 90 percent of American youths play video games, and many of these games depict violence, which is often portrayed as fun, justified and without negative consequences.

As a child, you may have been fascinated to learn that draining the water from a bathtub causes a spinning tornado to appear.

That or gravity may have been your first introduction to classical mechanics. As the water rotated faster, a vortex appeared.

Yet if the water is extremely cold liquid helium, the fluid will swirl around an invisible line to form a vortex that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Sometimes, two of these quantum tornadoes flex into curved lines, cross over one another to form a letter X shape, swap ends, and then violently retract from one another—a process called reconnection.

Can you explain what a deductible is?

If you can, you are in the majority - but not by much. Instead, survey results have found that the people most likely to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, those earning near the Federal Poverty Level, remain the most clueless about health care policies. 

There is a week to go before enrollment in mandatory health care closes and to-date most of the discussion has revolved around technical glitches, exaggerated enrollment, doctors and health plans throwing out patients and alarming costs for most of the public.

Bosses who are most conscientious about the fairness of workplace decisions make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but they may be burning themselves out.

A new paper found the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors mentally and emotionally.  The researchers surveyed 82 bosses twice a day for a few weeks. Managers who reported mental fatigue from situations involving procedural fairness were less cooperative and socially engaging with other workers the next day. 

(Millbrook, NY) People living in northern and central parts of the U.S. are more likely to contract Lyme disease and other tick-borne ailments when white-footed mice are abundant. Mice are effective at transferring disease-causing pathogens to feeding ticks. And, according to an in-press paper in the journal Ecology, these "super hosts" appear indifferent to larval tick infestations.

Drawing on 16 years of field research performed at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, the paper found that white-footed mice with hundreds of larval ticks survived just as long as those with only a few ticks. Even more surprising, male mice with large tick loads were more likely to survive during a given season.