People love to latch onto studies that match their confirmation bias, so studies claiming health benefits for red wine, chocolate and organic food get a lot of attention and not much skepticism about controls. Any epidemiology claim will do when it comes to finding benefit or harm.

A new review calls into question previous studies which suggest that consuming light-to-moderate amounts of alcohol (0.6-0.8 fluid ounces/day) may have a protective effect on cardiovascular health. Instead, they find that reducing the amount of alcoholic beverages consumed, even for light-to-moderate drinkers, is more likely to improve cardiovascular health, body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure. 

No one worries about children like parents, and having a child with a pacemaker is even more worrisome. But kids who are worried over too much develop a low sense of self-competence which can contribute to decreased quality of life, according to a paper in Journal of Developmental&Behavioral Pediatric.

What's a concussion? Since 10 doctors can give 10 different answers it's unclear, but they are the subject of a lawsuit by former NFL football players, and thus concern has trickled down to school age children and there needs to be a consistent evidence-based definition.

A research review has identified the clinical indicators most strongly associated with concussion as an important first step in the process of developing evidence-based guidelines for concussion diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.

Based on analysis of the best available research data, a multidisciplinary panel of experts has identified a set of four indicators with the "highest and most consistent prevalence" among patients with possible concussion.

As with people, some chimpanzees are smarter than others, and as with people, a lot of that variation in intelligence depends on the genes that individuals carry and pass on from one generation to the next.

A new study found no effect of either sex or rearing history on the cognitive skills of chimpanzees. That is, chimpanzees raised by human caretakers performed no better on cognitive tests delivered to them by humans than did individuals raised by their chimpanzee mothers.

Researchers have matched an upward curve in temperatures in the last few decades with increases in patient's seeking treatment for kidney stones, which both reflects and foretells a warming planet's impact on human health, they say. Of course, they also found increases in very low temperatures.

Researchers using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico discovered a split-second burst of radio waves, the first time that a so-called "fast radio burst" has been detected using an instrument other than the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

Scientists using the Parkes Observatory have recorded a handful of such events but because no other facilities did, the assumption was that the Australian instrument was picking up signals originating from sources on or near Earth.