Today most people do not get enough sleep.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has called insufficient sleep an epidemic.

While we are finally paying attention to the importance of sleep, the need for dark is still mostly ignored.

That’s right. Dark. Your body needs it too.

Being exposed to regular patterns of light and dark regulates our circadian rhythm. Disruption of this rhythm may increase the risk of developing some health conditions including obesity, diabetes and breast cancer

Inhalable particles include all particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 10 micrometers (PM10), which is broken down into finer particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), which can enter the lung, and ultrafine particles with diameters less than 0.1 micrometers (100 nanometers), which can enter the blood stream.

Last summer’s Lake Erie toxic algae outbreak shut down the water supply for almost half a million people in Toledo and the surrounding suburbs.

Bottled water ran out in stores across the area, and residents fled the city in search of clean water — an option not available to Lake Erie’s diverse and fascinating array of wildlife.

The resulting call for action focused on setting toxin standards and reducing discharges of the fertilizer phosphorus, the primary driver of the toxic algae, to Lake Erie.

America has expensive health care but it also has the best health care. As the Federal government has discovered in trying to implement the Affordable Care Act, giving something away for free will not maintain that level of quality.

Instead, the future could be one where there are two classes of care - those with private insurance and those without. Higher treatment costs are already linked to better survival rates, according to a study by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the Cancer Outcomes Public Policy and Effectiveness Research (COPPER) Center at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Cancer Center.  

With only nine months to go before the most important international meeting on climate change since Copenhagen in 2009, what are the chances of success at this year’s Paris talks?

What might “success” mean?

And can the mistakes and challenges that have befallen previous meetings be avoided and tackled?

To help address these questions, let’s first dispense with three pervasive myths that continue to make the task of achieving an adequate global response to climate change harder.

Myth 1: the international climate negotiations have failed

1 to 1.5 percent of the global population has epilepsy, about 50 million people, but various epidemiological data indicate that between 20 to 35 percent of children with autism have epilepsy. If there are neurobiological causes of this comorbidity, they are unknown. 

Researchers at the University of Veracruz in Mexico have been searching for neurobiological reasons why a child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is 20-30 percent more susceptible to seizures that a child without ASD. Angel Alberto Puig Lagunes, a doctoral student in Brain Research, works with two experimental models, one with autism and another of epilepsy, to understand the differences in the amount of neurotransmitters and receptors that may determine susceptibility to seizures.

Commercial weight loss plans come and go. It is hard to have a week go by without some new weight loss gimmick being listed on the New York Times bestseller list, and a diet plan and pre-packaged meals are sure to follow.

Many people will ask doctors for recommendations when it comes to a weight loss plan but that can be hard to do. A new review analyzed 4,200 studies for solid evidence of the effectiveness of weight loss plans but concluded only a few studies met the scientific gold standard of reliability.

A new study notes that many breastfeeding mothers in the Philippines want more sex right after giving birth than they did before they became pregnant.

The Philippines culture has a low divorce rate so is it a relationship survival strategy? Or an increased sex drive?

Though girls at a young age enjoy Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), by the time they graduate from college their interests have changed. Women still prefer the life sciences and dominate the social sciences, but in other areas like physics the representation is not the same as the broad population. Engineering, which has the highest equality in pay between genders, still lags in women despite their efforts to recruit more females.

A team of psychologists report on an intervention for college undergraduates which found that female first-year students participate more actively and feel less anxious when they are able to work in small groups or "microenvironments" that are mostly female. 

A holistic medicine guru had a sucker customer patient with a pesky issue that couldn't be solved with the usual alternative and complementary medicine routine - eliminating gluten or adding whatever Miracle Vegetable is in the New York Times this week or "testing" for some non-specific autoimmune disease...Vitamin D levels all the rage for the last two years and will be until a few supplement salespeople poison someone so that was asked about also.