I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter.

There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean sprouts they can make at their house.  No one cares about how much butter is in a dish when they go to a restaurant because it is a night out, a special occasion.  Calories are basically unimportant and taste remains supreme.  We want to eat something prepared by someone who only cares what we think about its flavor.

Obviously the human body was not designed to eat at a restaurant every evening.  If you do that, and you don't exercise, you are going to get fat. 

If you have ever left your porch light aglow during a late-night outing, you are probably familiar with the cloud of insect life through which you will have to pass once you get home at the end of the evening. In most places this is merely an inconvenience, but in areas where insects can carry dangerous diseases, their attraction to anthropogenic illumination can pose a serious threat to human health. 

(Adult Triatoma demidiata)

Depression is thought to affect approximately 3-4% of the global population each year, and while traditional therapies can improve the mental health of many people, others find that these offer no relief. Thus, researchers have long explored alternative or complementary treatments that might benefit these patients, but the efficacy of many such techniques has not yet been rigorously tested.

I was away from the site for a while now. I have a good excuse for it since all this while- I got my Ph.D. award, my work recognized by my peers and took up a new job – all at one time. Dynamics of my life were seemingly distracting me from writing. However, now I have settled, I am back to writing and blogging. Reading the opening lines, you may have realized that I was quite stressed up with my life, grappling all the frontiers together in a single time frame.

Many of you, especially in the UK will have undoubtedly heard of the collapse of Fabrice Muamba. A Bolton Wanderer's football player, who at the time was playing in a FA cup football match watched by thousands. But is this a one-off or are we scratching at the surface with what happened?

Recent media spotlight

Close to supermarkets or not, fat poor kids are different than fat rich kids

Over the past decade, the American obesity epidemic has provoked a wide range of possible solutions, from soda-pop bans in elementary schools to salad bars in high school cafeterias. Some cities have begun retooling their recreation infrastructure, making playgrounds and public sports fields safer and more accessible.

The jury is still out on such measures, but there remain two fundamental truths. One: Obesity, especially childhood obesity, is real and getting worse. Two: Obesity eludes simple, popular fixes.

Why take something for free and feel cheap if you can pay half a grand and support quackery? Precisely! Hangovers from alcohol are almost entirely due to dehydration, read: too little water in your body. Although you drank a lot of water along with the spirit, the alcohol made your body dehydrate; no matter you didn’t even dance enough to break a sweat. Our bodies also do not like the alcohol metabolites, the main problem being acetaldehyde from the action of the liver enzyme alcohol-dehydrogenase, and then acetic acid. I wrote about these and why Asians should be especially careful with booze in “Alcohol in China and Enzyme Evolution”.

Many animals use carotenoid-based color signals to indicate their attractiveness, as has previously been discussed here in the context of northern cardinal breeding success. As a refresher, carotenoids are generated by photosynthetic organisms such as plants, bacteria, algae, and fungi, and are responsible for yellowish and reddish coloration--such as cardinals' bright red plumage.

It took a recent and sensational headline about 10 preventable deaths in English Montreal hospitals in 2010-11 to draw attention to a nine-year old law that few non-hospital workers knew existed. Under Quebec's Bill 113, a patient has the right to be informed of any health institutional accident with potential consequences for the patient's health or welfare. For that to materialize, hospital workers are obligated by this law to report all errors, and management has to ensure transparency and implement means to reduce mistakes.