The reason to force young people to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was because they are an easy profit center. They won't use much in the early years but they will when they are old, when a new generation of young people will be forced to pay.

It hasn't really worked out that way. While emergency room visits did go down slightly, visits were instead done more in an office for the difference, the cost of mental illness ER visits in this age group increased "significantly," as did diseases of the circulatory system, according to a paper in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

A new study shows how dangerous autoimmune responses, seen in diseases such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, might be "dialed down" without compromising the immune system's ability to fight viruses and bacteria. 

The new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences defines a mechanism at work in an anti-autoimmune drug candidate called ozanimod, currently in advanced phase 3 clinical trials for multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis.

According to the World Health Organization, influenza causes serious illness among millions of people each year, resulting in 250,000 to 500,000 deaths. Those most at risk include infants younger than six months, because they cannot be vaccinated against the disease. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri School of Medicine have identified a naturally occurring protein that, when added to the flu vaccine, may offer protection to babies during their first months of life.

A new position statement goes contrary to the consensus and finds that the introduction of gluten into the infant diet, or the practice of introducing gluten during breast-feeding, does not reduce the risk of celiac disease in infants at risk. The statement appears in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.

A true-muonium only lives for two microseconds. These atoms are made up one positively and one negatively charged elementary particle, also known as muons. Although they have yet to be observed experimentally, a Japanese theoretical physicist has come up with new ways of creating them, in principle anyway, via particle collisions. 

The first method would involve colliding a negatively charged muon and a muonium atom made up of a positive muon and an electron. The second would involve colliding a positively charged muon and a muonic hydrogen atom made up of a proton and a negative muon. . 

Amsterdam, Jan. 18, 2016 - If you're scared of the dentist's needles you're not alone -- but new research means you might not have to put off that appointment again. A study published in Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces reveals how the dentist could give you anesthetic using a tiny electric current instead of a needle.

The researchers behind the study, from the University of São Paulo, say their new findings could help improve dental procedures and bring relief to millions of people who are scared of needles. It would also save money and avoid contamination and infection, they say.