While cognitive abilities naturally diminish as part of the normal aging process, it may be possible to take a bite out of this expected decline.

Eating a group of specific foods known as the MIND diet may slow cognitive decline among aging adults, even when the person is not at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers at Rush University Medical Center. This finding is in addition to a previous study by the research team that found that the MIND diet may reduce a person's risk in developing Alzheimer's disease.

For nearly 50 years Medicare has required patients to endure at least a three-day stint in the hospital before they become eligible for coverage of skilled nursing care afterward.

A new study finds that the main consequence of waiving the rule, as Medicare Advantage plans commonly do, has been a good one: less time in a bed and a gown for those who go on to skilled nursing care.

Adding the price tag to prescription medicines worth more than £20 in England is just a "headline grabbing gimmick" which could mislead patients into believing that cheaper drugs are less important, according to an editorial in Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin.

On July 1st this year, health secretary for England Jeremy Hunt announced plans to print the indicative cost of medicines on all packs of those worth more than £20 alongside the phrase "funded by the UK taxpayer." The initiative aims to encourage more people to take personal responsibility for the use of finite public resources, added to which the health secretary claimed that the move would help cut waste and improve patient care as more people would be inclined to take their meds.

Numerous genes that regulate the activity of a neurotransmitter in the brain have been found to be abundant in brain tissue of depressed females. This could be an underlying cause of the higher incidence of suicide among women, according to new research.

Studying postmortem tissue from brains of psychiatric patients, Monsheel Sodhi, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at  the University of Illinois at Chicago, noted that female patients with depression had abnormally high expression levels of many genes that regulate the glutamate system, which is widely distributed in the brain.

US Right to Know of Oakland, California, is using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to suppress and harass scientists and imply they have unethical links to the agricultural biotechnology industry - in short, the group insists scientists are being bought off.

What was wrong when opposition groups did it to climate scientists, according to supporters of anti-science agendas like Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council, is suddenly just fine when it is being used against every other evidence-based position, but especially when it comes to helping their wealthy donors in the $100 billion Big Organic industry.

The Thing, Human Torch, Invisible Woman and Mister Fantastic are back this summer!

In the new movie reboot, the team gets its powers while in an alternate dimension. At Reactions, though, they stick to comic-book canon. In this week's video, they explain the original way the Fantastic Four got their power - radiation - with help from SciPop Talks.

Researchers at the UW Medicine, Veteran's Administration Puget Sound and Saint Louis University have made a promising discovery that insulin delivered high up in the nasal cavity goes to affected areas of brain with lasting results in improving memory.

The findings were published online July 30 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

"Before this study, there was very little evidence of how insulin gets into the brain and where it goes," said William Banks, UW professor of internal medicine and geriatrics, VA Puget Sound physician and the principal investigator of the study. "We showed that insulin goes to areas where we hoped it would go."

It is hardly news when partygoers end up in the emergency room from an overdose of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), aka ecstasy (and a whole bunch of other names, such as Molly, E, X, many others).

Rather than simply report on another recent case at a music festival in California, in which ecstasy may have been the cause of two deaths, we thought it might be more interesting to explain what ecstasy really is, and debunk the myths that surround it.

People associate wasps with memories of picnic invasions, BBQs under siege, and painful stings. There is a lot more to these much-maligned insects though, and with more than 100,000 different species, their life histories range from the quietly unobtrusive to the bizarre and gruesome. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology documents one such disturbing example of wasp larvae that takes control of their unfortunate spider hosts.

If you are watching what you eat, working out, and still not seeing improvements in your cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc., here's some hope. A new report suggests that inflammation induced by deficiencies in vitamins and minerals might be the culprit.

The researchers show that - in some people - improvement results in many of the major markers of health when nutritional deficiencies are corrected. Some even lost weight without a change in their diet or levels of activity.