Metabolic syndrome, also known as metabolic syndrome X, is commonly used to describe the associations of various risk factors in diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Based on a study of 8,028 individuals representative of the general population aged over 30 who attended a nationwide health examination survey, researchers writing in PLoS ONE have concluded that seasonal changes in weight increase the risk for metabolic syndrome.

In people having 'winter blues', the risk of metabolic syndrome is heightened by 56 per cent.

More giving information and less giving direction is the advice of a group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University mid-way to the drafting of the 2010 nutrition guidelines.

For nearly three decades, Americans have become accustomed to hearing about the latest dietary guidelines, which are required by federal regulation to be revised and reissued at five-year intervals.

A newly identified fault that runs under the Adriatic Sea is actively building more of the famously beautiful Dalmatian Islands and Dinaride Mountains of Croatia, according to a new research report.

Geologists had previously believed that the Dalmatian Islands and the Dinaride Mountains had stopped growing 20 to 30 million years ago. From a region northwest of Dubrovnik, the new fault runs northwest at least 200 km (124 miles) under the sea floor.

The Croatian coast and the 1,185 Dalmatian Islands are an increasing popular tourist destination. Dubrovnik, known as "the Pearl of the Adriatic," is a UNESCO-designated World Heritage site.

About 121 million people world-wide are believed to suffer from depression. This can be seen in disturbed appetite, sleep patterns and overall functioning as well as leading to low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and guilt.

"In 2002," write Zalasiewicz and colleagues, "Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, suggested that we had left the Holocene and had entered a new epoch - the Anthropocene - because of the global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development."

The authors document a radical yet compelling case for the idea that the appearance of humans has so physically changed Earth that there is no organic justification for linking pre- and post-industrialized Earth within the same epoch (the Holocene).

They state that the global environmental change since the start of the Industrial Revolution Earth has been sufficient to leave a 'global stratigraphic signature' distinct from that of the Holocen

HIV and AIDS are huge threats to human health. Each day in 2005 around 7,600 people died from HIV-related causes and a further 38.6 million people were living with the disease. Two million of these were living in the high-income countries of North America and Western and Central Europe. Estimates suggest that that year 4.1 million people contracted the virus.

Estimates also suggest that 70% of HIV-infected people stay sexually active, with a substantial proportion continuing to participate in unprotected sex.