Are you missing that special someone? To let him or her know you really care, nothing says 'I love you' like a lab report showing your corticotropin-releasing factor levels are elevated.

A paper published in Neuropsychopharmacology notes that evidence suggests social bonds have a positive impact on health and buffer against stressors. Absence or sudden disruption of those bonds can lead to anxiety-like and depressive-like disorders. "Thus," the authors say, "understanding the neurobiological consequences of partner loss, particularly with respect to increased susceptibility to depression, may be informative for developing strategies for coping with the loss of a loved one."

You know things are bad when an insurance company tries to fix the health care system.

WellPoint Inc. is funding a competition in collaboration with X Prize Foundation to devise solutions that improve health care cost and quality. Although the actual award amount and competition guidelines won’t be ready until early 2009, the rumored jackpot is about $10 million.

According to the X Prize site , the two partners will solicit advice from various stakeholders, hold the competition, and test the finalists’ plans in WellPoint’s markets.

This story caught my eye because of the 'ew' factor, so naturally I wanted to share my newfound fear of catheters (which already took up a healthy amount of time during my daily phobia-pondering) with you all. Misery loves company, so I assume that stands true for other negatively connotated emotions like disgust, fear of microbes, etc.

People who believe eating genetically modified organisms will turn them literally into what they eat are in for a new nightmare - genetically engineered animals.

Highly ironic case of misinformed alarmist sprouting antlers, snout reported to FDA

The Food and Drug Administration issued a draft guidance on the regulation of genetically engineered animals today. (For those not well versed in the parlance of regulation, this is a document that describes FDA's current thinking on an issue. The agency alerts the relevant stakeholders that they can comment on the guidance, and then a final guidance is developed. This is not regulation, it's guidance - as the name implies, the document guides stakeholders in what actions they should take.)

Yes, you read that right - the very people you look to for comfort, for learning, for a shoulder to cry on, could lead you down the path of annihilation. You don't have to be a lemming zombie to take up terrorism after all!

A New Kind of Networking

Liverpool University's Center (or Centre, if you live across the pond) for Investigative Psychology led a project that constructed psychological "profiles" to describe how Jihadists were led into their violence, according to a BBC article.

Ol' Blue Eyes was way ahead of the curve in diabetes treatment - I nominate his 1956 hit, "I've Got You Under My Skin" for the official anthem for type 1 diabetes patients. A study published online in the New England Journal of Medicine Sept. 8 details a new continuous glucose monitor device placed - you guessed it - under the skin. The Skinny on CGM The authors, from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, randomly assigned 322 adults and children with intensively treated type 1 diabetes to CGM or normal blood glucose meter. Primary outcome was change in glycated hemoglobin at 26 weeks.