There is concern about e-cigarettes that they may cause addiction rather than cure it - California advocates are spending millions claiming Big Tobacco is marketing them to children - but like nicotine patches and chewing gum, teens may try them but unless they already smoke, they don't embrace them.

Writing in BMJ Open, the researchers base their findings on the results of two nationally representative surveys of primary and secondary schoolchildren (CHETS Wales 2 and the Welsh Health Behaviour in School aged Children) from more than 150 schools in Wales carried out in 2013 and 2014. In all, 1601 children aged 10-11 and 9055 11-16 year olds were quizzed about their use of e-cigarettes.

Cancer mortality remains significantly elevated among African-Americans but if recent trends continue, cancer outcomes will disappear over time, according to a new analysis of "Health Equity" - defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services as the highest level of health for all people.

Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening?

Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.

So what methods and professional standards are applied to the review of scientific evidence long after the original work was completed?

Very few.

This morning's Washington Post article titled FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000 doesn't answer the question. Instead, it simply cites the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as the sources of data indicating that FBI experts "overstated" the significance of hair comparisons on a wide scale.

There is an old saying that A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. This was brought home to me during a radio interview I did on Tuesday night in the wake of the Federal Government’s decision to remove the conscientious objection exemption for vaccination.

I was astonished that in 2015, some of these pieces of misinformation are still out there, and still believed, if the passionate radio callers (and several posts in my Facebook feed) are any indication.

Half of all patients who survive a cardiac arrest experience problems with cognitive functions such as memory and attention, according to new research from Lund University. A control group comprising heart attack patients had largely the same level of problems, which suggests that it is not only the cardiac arrest and the consequent lack of oxygen to the brain that is the cause of the patients’ difficulties.

Looking after yourself, and trying not to infect others, is a good strategy to prevent disease from spreading - not only if you are a considerate co-worker, but also if you are an ant, meerkat or other social animal, as revealed by an epidemiological model developed by the groups of Professor Fabian Theis from the Helmholtz Center Munich and Professor Sylvia Cremer from the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria.

In a Theme Issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on "The Society-Health-Fitness Nexus" published on 13 April 2015, they combine observations of hygienic interaction networks within ant colonies with epidemiological modeling to conclude that this strategy is best to prevent disease spread in social animal groups.

Nearly anyone touched by ovarian cancer will tell you that almost 80 percent of patients reach advanced stages before diagnosis and that most patients are expected to die within five years. One quarter of women diagnosed have no warning that they are resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy, the main line of defense and they probably have less than 18 months to live. 

Diagnosis, prognosis, and even treatment of ovarian cancer have remained largely unchanged for 30 years - the best indicator for how a woman will fare, and how her cancer should be treated, has been the tumor's stage at diagnosis. 

Literacy has been getting declining support in recent years. The Obama administration only wants to spend $187 million for its Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy initiative while the Bush administration had devoted $1 billion annually to the Reading First program. That means it is necessary to find out which programs work best.

A new study uses a scientific lens to look at the conversational art of instruction, a team of researchers identify specific ways teachers talk to students that measurably impact literacy skills.

Faster increases in life expectancy do not necessarily produce faster population aging, a counterintuitive finding that came as a result of applying new measures of aging developed at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in order to project future populations for Europe out to the year 2050.

Traditional measures of age simply categorize people as "old" at a specific age, usually 65, but previous research by Scherbov, Sanderson, and colleagues has shown that the traditional definition puts many people in the category of "old" who have characteristics of much younger people.