Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

How healthy are you? Your best guess might be pretty accurate: researchers found that people who gave their health a positive rating were less likely to fall ill or die over the next 30 years than were those who thought they weren’t as healthy. The work is in the journal Public Library of Science ONE .

Obesity is associated with a host of health problems. But a new study finds that obese people may actually have an advantage in a specific medical situation: they’re less likely to die after surgery from certain respiratory complications than are their non-obese counterparts.

A recent article on the Al Jazeera English web site cites a disturbing statistic: infant mortality in certain U.S. Northwest cities spiked by 35 percent in the weeks following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant . The author writes that "physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and [ sic ] may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.” The implication is clear: Radioactive fallout from the plant is spreading across the Pacific in sufficient quantities to imperil the lives of children (and presumably the rest of us as well)

Apart from working and sleeping, the thing Americans do the most is watch TV--5 hours a day on average. But all that time in front of the tube may up your risk of death, according to a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association . [Anders Gr