Pollution is bad for the lungs but it's also bad for the heart, says a recent study of 48 Boston-area patients, all of whom had coronary artery disease. 24-hour Holter monitors were used to examine electrocardiograms for the conductivity change, called an ST-segment depression, which may indicate inadequate blood flow to the heart or inflamed heart muscle.

The average 24-hour levels for all pollutants included in the analysis were below accepted or proposed National Air Quality Standard thresholds, meaning patients were breathing air considered healthy.

Previous studies have documented that exposure to road traffic can trigger heart attacks, and that particulate air pollution increases the risk for cardiac death or heart attack.

If you've grown concerned that young people chuckling ironically at news clips of real events may actually not be getting a real grasp of what those fake news shows are ridiculing, you can rest assured there is no truthiness to it. A new study suggests that those entertainment news shows, such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, may not be as influential in teaching voters about political issues and candidates as was previously thought.

Previous studies have reported up to 48 percent of all adults and 60 percent of young voters used fake news shows as a source of campaign news in the 2004 presidential election. But researchers from Ohio State University have found reasons to discount how effective these shows are in informing the general public.

Patients visiting an ophthalmologist report that prayer is important to their well-being and that God plays a positive role in illness, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of Ophthalmology.

"Ethical medical practice includes physician behavior, beyond technical competence, that promotes healing and optimizes the patient's welfare," the authors write as background information in the article. "The physician who respects the patient as a person with dignity must acknowledge the patient's value system to establish a relationship that permits conversations that nourish trust for joint therapeutic decision making. For many patients, religion and spirituality is important to their value system and may represent a unique source of motivation and coping with life events, including the experience of personal illness (illness refers to the response of a patient to a disease)."

In an article in Nature, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) has reported results from its first comprehensive study which focused on the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma.

The TCGA team, comprised of more than 100 investigators from seven cancer centers and research institutions throughout the country, analyzed 601 genes in tumor samples from 91 glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) patients.

Investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and University of Southern California, members of the TCGA team, studied 2000 genes.

The probability of someone cheating during the course of a relationship varies between 40 and 76 percent. "It's very high," says Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier, PhD student at the Université de Montréal's Department of Psychology.

According to psychologists, people with avoidant attachment styles are individuals uncomfortable with intimacy and are therefore more likely to multiply sexual encounters and cheat. But this has never been proved scientifically, which is what Beaulieu-Pelletier attempted to do in a series of four studies.

The student wanted to know if the type of commitment a person has with his or her loved ones is correlated to the desire of having extra-marital affairs. "The emotional attachment we have with others is modeled on the type of parenting received during childhood," she says.

Virginia Tech chemistry Professor Harry Dorn has developed a new area of fullerene chemistry that may be the backbone for development of molecular semiconductors and quantum computing applications.

Dorn plays with the hollow carbon molecules known as fullerenes as if they are tinker toys. First, in 1999, he figured out how to put atoms inside the 80-atom molecule, then how to do it reliably, how to change the number of atoms forming the carbon cage, and how to change the number and kinds of atoms inside the cage, resulting in a new, more sensitive MRI material and a vehicle to deliver radioactive atoms for applications in nuclear medicine.