Like most people, Kevin Hall used to think the reason people get fat is simple. "Why don't they just eat less and exercise more?" he remembers thinking. Trained as a physicist, the calories-in-vs.-calories-burned equation for weight loss always made sense to him. But then his own research--and the contestants on a smash reality-TV show--proved him wrong. Hall, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), started watching The Biggest Loser a few years ago on the recommendation of a friend. "I saw these folks stepping on scales, and they lost 20 lb. in a week," he says. On the one hand, it tracked with widespread beliefs about weight loss: the workouts were punishing and the diets r
Some nights, it's like you can't get your brain to shut up long enough for you to fall asleep. You're mentally reviewing the day you just completed while also previewing the day ahead; sometimes, your mind may even reach way back into the archives and pull up something embarrassing you did back in high school. So fun! Racing thoughts can be a sign of a serious mental health condition like anxiety. But these nights also happen to everyone from time to time -- and once we're too old for bedtime stories, it's not always clear what to do. There's no one solution that will work for everybody, of course, so instead, we've rounded up suggestions from eight sleep experts. At the very least, it's som
One in 10 deaths around the world is caused by smoking, according to a major new study that shows the tobacco epidemic is far from over and that the threat to lives is spreading across the globe. There were nearly one billion smokers in 2015, in spite of tobacco control policies having been adopted by many countries. That number is expected to rise as the world’s population expands. One in every four men is a smoker and one in 20 women. Their lives are likely to be cut short – smoking is the second biggest risk factor for early death and disability after high blood pressure. The researchers found there were 6.4m deaths attributed to smoking in 2015, of which half were in just four populous c
At least a million babies have been born in the U.S. using lab-assisted techniques, a new report finds. The latest report on in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other assisted reproductive techniques (ART) shows that nearly 68,000 babies were born using one or the other of the methods in 2015. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology said about 213,000 treatment cycles were tried in 2015, giving the methods an overall 32 percent success rate. The number is probably higher than that. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, part of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), reports data from its member clinics and has only been collecting that information since 1985.
