Nomophobia, defined as smartphone separation anxiety,  is when people perceive smartphones as part of their extended selves.

Counselors, lawyers and therapists are aggressively pushing it as the fad diagnosis of 2017, but what behaviors and descriptors can help identify people with high nomophobia ? A new paper compares how people considered to have high and low nomophobic tendencies perceive and value their smartphones.

Cancer is a leading cause of illness and death worldwide. In 2015, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 8.8 million cancer-related deaths and nearly twice that are diagnosed each year. Since people are living longer, cancer diagnoses is likely to continue to increase by about 70% for at least the next two decades.

Given that more cancers are likely in the developing world, the search is on for treatments  that are simple and inexpensive to manufacture. The answer may lie in herbal medicine. The problem, as always, is that while there are numerous anecdotes about those, there are few studies. 

Just like some people are overweight but healthy - an obesity paradox - some people are thin but have a three-fold higher risk of mortality and/or cardiovascular events.

Weight is not the best way to understand metabolic health, according to an analysis of lean, overweight and obese people.

A new paper claims that ~20 percent of normal weight adults are still metabolically unhealthy and have a higher risk of mortality and/or cardiovascular events than metabolically healthy obese subjects. Oddly, a reduced accumulation of fat in the lower body puts lean people at risk.

One size does not fit all

Satellite data have detected widespread water within ancient explosive volcanic deposits on the Moon. That means its interior may contain more indigenous water than previously believed. The ancient deposits are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming from the deep lunar interior.

There is ongoing concern about species extinction but it isn't just the fact that 99.999% of species have never been cataloged, so it's impossible to know how many are extinct, it's that Mother Nature may cause it long before we could.

A new study suggests nature's ecological web is so tenuous that it's amazing anything survived this long; even the smell of a predator can have disastrous effects in populations of small size in flies. They spend less time eating, more time being vigilant, have less sex, and produce fewer offspring. 

It's not an 80/20 rule but if you are addicted to opiods you are likely to be visiting a small number of physicians in Ontario, according to a new analysis.