Each year some 1,500 Swedes decide to end their lives.   No one can be sure what the reasons are but they often include mental and sometimes physical issues.

It could also be surroundings, say researchers at Stockholm University and the University of Oxford, though that would seem to be taking a 'Keep up with the Jones'es' mentality a little far.    But various types of behavior, feelings, and attitudes are spread in social networks and the researchers have studied whether such a drastic step as taking your life can also be influenced by others. They used  register data on all individuals who lived and worked in Stockholm County during the 1990s.

Researchers say they have found the first unambiguous evidence that an animal other than humans can make spontaneous plans for future events. The report in Current Biology highlights a decade of observations of a male chimpanzee calmly collecting stones and fashioning concrete discs that he would later use to hurl at zoo visitors.

While researchers have observed many ape behaviors that could involve planning both in the wild and in captivity, it generally hasn't been possible to judge whether they were really meeting a current or future need, he added. For instance, when a chimp breaks a twig for termite fishing or collects a stone for nut cracking, it can always be argued that they are motivated by immediate rather than future circumstances.

India, the largest and most prosperous nation in south Asia, raised the legal age for marriage to 18 in 1978.   In the past 15 years, national policy efforts have been developed to increase educational and economic opportunities for girls and women, reduce child marriage and expand family-planning support.  Despite India's economic and educational reform efforts in the last decade, the prevalence of child marriage remains high.

New data published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology suggest that relatively healthy women with severe depression are at increased risk of cardiac events, including sudden cardiac death (SCD) and fatal coronary heart disease (CHD). Researchers found that much of the relationship between depressive symptoms and cardiac events was mediated by cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking. 

Terminally ill patients and their family caregivers often feel abandoned by their doctors and feel a sense of "unfinished business" with them, according to a new study by an oncologist at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

The study results, published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine, identified two themes: before death, abandonment worries related to loss of continuity of communication between patient and physician; and at the time death or after, the patient's family's feelings of abandonment from a lack of closure with the physician. 

The theory that a higher metabolism means a shorter lifespan may have reached the end of its own life, according to a study published in the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. The study, led by Lobke Vaanholt (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), found that mice with increased metabolism live just as long as those with slower metabolic rates.