Young people who identify with the goth subculture might be at increased risk of depression and self-harm, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

The findings show that teenagers who identified very strongly with being a goth at age 15 were three times more likely to be clinically depressed and were five times more likely to self-harm at age 18 than young people who did not identify with the goth subculture.

"Our study does not show that being a goth causes depression or self-harm, but rather that some young goths are more vulnerable to developing these conditions," says lead author Dr Lucy Bowes from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Most people know smoking is risky, by now it is something of an IQ test if you take up that habit. There is no amount of awareness that will stop all people from doing all things, young people like to rebel and if they get hooked on nicotine, it can be difficult to pull away after they come to their senses.

But both harm reduction and smoking cessation can help once people decide to quit: There are other tobacco products, like snus or chewing tobacco, and then there are nicotine replacements, like gums, patches and e-cigarettes.

Yet they are all made by corporations and each corporation believes it will benefit by confusion, so a large number of people aren’t aware of the differences. Unfortunately, overly broad US Food and Drug Administration labels don't help.

Physicists have found a radical new way confine electromagnetic energy without it leaking away, akin to throwing a pebble into a pond with no splash. It appears to contradict a fundamental tenet of electrodynamics, that accelerated charges create electromagnetic radiation, said lead researcher Dr. Andrey Miroshnichenko from The Australian National University (ANU).

"This problem has puzzled many people. It took us a year to get this concept clear in our heads," said Miroshnichenko, from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "Ever since the beginning of quantum mechanics people have been looking for a configuration which could explain the stability of atoms and why orbiting electrons do not radiate." 

People around the world are living longer, even in some of the poorest countries, but a complex mix of fatal and nonfatal ailments causes a tremendous amount of health loss, according to a new analysis of all major diseases and injuries in 188 countries.

Thanks to marked declines in death and illness caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria in the past decade and significant advances made in addressing communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional disorders, health has improved significantly around the world. Global life expectancy at birth for both sexes rose by 6.2 years (from 65.3 in 1990 to 71.5 in 2013), while healthy life expectancy, or HALE, at birth rose by 5.4 years (from 56.9 in 1990 to 62.3 in 2013).

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal summarizes the European Union’s decades-long flight from science, common sense and consistency. These un- or even anti-science positions are driven by many idées fixes, baseless myths and superstitions, promulgated by “consumer groups” and by deep green “environmentalists,” who claim to be concerned about Mother Earth. 

It's time to stop counting calories and start promoting the nutritional value of foods, according to an editorial in Open Heart. 

Drs Aseem Malhotra and James DiNicolantonio, and Professor Simon Capewell, argue that rather like stopping smoking, simple dietary changes can rapidly improve health outcomes at the population level.  They believe this will more rapidly cut illness and death from cardiovascular disease and curb the rising tide of obesity. For example, boosting omega 3 fatty acid (from fatty fish), olive oil, and nut intake have all been associated with reductions in deaths from all causes and from cardiovascular disease, within months, they say.

In its first clinical trial, an antibody therapy produced at least partial remissions in a third of patients with multiple myeloma who had exhausted multiple prior treatments, investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and other organizations have reported.

The drug, daratumumab, proved generally safe in patients, even at the highest doses tested in the study. The results of the trial - a combined phase 1 and 2 study - strongly support testing of the drug in a larger group of patients in both phase 2 and 3 trials, the authors say.

Following one of the largest-scale scientific reproducibility investigations to date, a group of psychology researchers has reported results from an effort to replicate 100 recently published psychology studies; though they were able to successfully repeat the original experiments in most all cases, they were able to reproduce the original results in less than half, they report.

Male teens who experiment with cannabis before age 16, and have a high genetic risk for schizophrenia, show a different brain development trajectory than low risk peers who use cannabis.

The discovery, made from a combined analysis of over 1,500 youth, contributes to a growing body of evidence implicating cannabis use in adolescence and schizophrenia later in life. 

"If I offered you a bruised banana, you probably wouldn't be interested," said Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, director of Drexel University's Center for Hospitality and Sport Management. "But what if I offered you some banana ice cream on a hot summer day? I bet you'd find that a lot more appealing."

It was this simple observation that inspired a new model for recovering would-be wasted - or surplus - food and repurposing it to feed hungry people, generate revenue and even create jobs. The model was recently piloted in West Philadelphia, home to a large population of low-income and food insecure individuals, as part of the Environmental Protection Agency's Food Recovery Challenge with support from Brown's Super Stores.