It is the first time a major sexual minority study reveals unfair treatment. The premiere survey conducted at a national level has asked high school students about their sexuality. It found that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered teens had a greater risk for depression, bullying and other types of violence, compared to their straight colleagues.

According to Dr. Jonathan Mermin, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the numbers were “heartbreaking”.

The study found what smaller studies have been hinting for years. However, this particular survey is important because it’s the first time the government looks at teenage sexuality in connection to identity. The study found that around eight percent of the high schoolers described themselves as LGBT. That accounts for 1.3 million students across America.

These teenagers were three times more exposed to rape, than their straight counterparts. LGBT teenagers skipped school a lot more than their colleagues, as they did not feel safe. One-third of them was bullied on school premises. These teens were twice as exposed to injury or threat with a weapon on school property.

Over forty percent of LGBT students considered suicide and twenty-nine percent attempted to do so in the year previous to the survey. When it came to drug use, 1.3 percent of straight students had used heroin, compared to a six percent figure of the lesbian, gay , bisexual and transgendered students who have done the same thing.

Dr. Mermin also pointed out that the nation should act on reducing these figures quickly. The survey was conducted with 13,600 students across the United States, with ages ranging form 14 to 17.

Although the figures reveal loneliness and discrimination which is too longstanding and too familiar, at least they helped create a national database with information on teen sexuality.

Dr. Debra Houry, who is in charge of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control wants more prevention campaigns.

She mentioned programs such as Green Dot which empowers students to support victims of bullying.  Other programs help vulnerable students cope with dangerous situations.

The report did not look at the underlying causes of the situation.

What’s your opinion on this news piece? Have you ever experienced bullying? Please leave a comment below and tell us what you think. Thank you.

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New research suggests that reading books could prolong your life. The study involved looking at 3,635 people’s reading habits.

Experts split the sample in three groups: those who did not read at all, those who read up to three and a half hours per week and those who read for more than three and a half hours weekly.

The study got published in Social Science and Medicine and it revealed that book readers are more likely to be females with a college education and in higher income groups.

Researchers correlated this information with other factors, like age group, race, health, employment and marital status.

Compared to those who did not read at all, those who were in the middle group were seventeen percent less likely to die over a course of twelve years, and those who read more than three and a half hours weekly were the least likely to die, by twenty-three percent.

Those who read more lived two years longer than those who did not read at all. There was a similar connection between newspaper readers or periodical readers but it was not as strong as the above-mentioned link.

Even people who read as little as a half hour per day have a better chance of survival than those who don’t read at all – according to senior author, Becca R Levy, professor of epidemiology at Yale.

Others have argued that reading remains a sedentary activity, so maybe it’s not fair to expect increased life spans for reading.

But the authors of the study remain convinced that reading, perhaps through enhancing knowledge, leads to longer lifespans.

Another Mayo Clinic Study on Aging found in 2008 that reading books could protect older people from dementia, by as much as 50 percent.

Over the last few years, we are seeing an increase in the e-book market. Nearly half of all Americans were reading e-books in 2014.

The trend seems to be less in favor of paperback books. A lot of people choose e-books because they are less expensive, they can read them off their tablet and they are more portable than traditional print books.

What’s your opinion on this article? Do you agree that reading expands your life? Leave a comment below. Thanks!

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Pizza boxes have been deemed unsafe for consumers, due to chemicals that are used during their manufacturing process.

The impending ban was revealed on Monday, January 4, by representatives of the United States Food and Drug Administration, following a petition issued in October 2014 by a group of 9 non-profit organizations.

More precisely, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Breast Cancer Fund, the Environmental Working Group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Improving Kids’ Environment, the Center for Food Safety, the Clean Water Action, the Center for Environmental Health and the Children’s Environmental Health Network have all been militating against the use of dangerous food contact substances (FCS) in day-to-day packaging.

FCS compounds provide a protective layer for paper containers, such as pizza boxes, impeding fatty content and water coming from the warm meals from seeping into the packaging.

Thanks to this coating, pizza can remain fresh and keep its toppings intact while being transported by delivery staff. At the same time, the packaging can stay relatively clean, without becoming soggy or being spoiled by the food it protects.

However, now health officials have come to the conclusion that 3 varieties of perfluoroalkyl ethyl, commonly serving as FCS, are in fact hazardous to consumers.

Prior studies had suggested that such perflourinated substances, used in a wide variety of merchandise, ranging from electronics to footwear and non-stick pans, can lead to various thyroid disorders  and to an inflammatory bowel disease known as ulcerative colitis.

It can also trigger preeclampsia, a condition which causes pregnant women to have excessively high blood pressure, which can even prove deadly to the mother or the baby, or can result in congenital disorders and other complications before, during or after birth.

It appears more evidence has been stacked up against the use of such compounds in food packaging, and although the risks faced by American consumers haven’t been fully estimated and understood it’s still better to eliminate them altogether.

As a result, it will soon be illegal to incorporate perflourinated substances in boxes ensuring the storing and transportation of warm meals.

For now, the decision to prohibit the use of perfluoroalkyl ethyl as an FCS has been made public on Thursday, January 7, in the Federal Register, the daily journal issued by the United States Government, and 30 days will have to pass before the interdiction is fully enforced.

Unless the ban is contested and a public hearing is required by February 3, 2016, from that point onward manufacturers will no longer be allowed to include the hazardous substances as part of pizza boxes and other types of food packaging.

The ban was welcomed by Erik Olson, senior strategic director of the food & agriculture and health programs, at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

According to him, while the interdiction concerning toxic FCS substances is important, this in fact just a small victory in the wide-ranging war against harmful chemicals commonly found in food items.

For instance, another petition issued by this organization has called for the FDA to strictly forbid 7 other substances which have been proven to be carcinogenic.

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Christmas has always been about red, green and white color combinations, so designers think it’s time for a change. This year, try to leave traditional decorations aside and opt for these surprising color combinations for Christmas. We guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

1. Pastel Christmas colors

Pastel colors need not be used only in the summer. It is the conclusion we have reached after we’ve seen the recent Christmas color trends. Pastel shades of pink, blue, yellow and green can literally work wonders on your Christmas tree. They give a fairytale-like feeling to your home and decorations seem to be made out of frosted snow.

2. Blue and White Christmas

In case pink and warm tones are too feminine for you, you can replace them with blue and white color combinations. Designers like these schemes because they have a strong impact without making the Christmas tree or the house too gaudy. They work great with the white snow and the blue sky outdoors and they make a perfect match with the green leaves of the Christmas tree.

3. Earthly Christmas

Some people think Christmas decorations and Christmas colors are too ostentatious for them and they often give up decorating their homes. Designers recommend them earthly tones of brown, orange and green. To better understand this color scheme, think of firs and their simple yet, appealing cones. An earthly Christmas color combination will bring nature into your home.

4. Purple Christmas

Christmas is rarely associated with pink or purple, or at least, that’s what most people used to think. Until they finally saw the first purple Christmas tree. One of the most surprising color combinations for Christmas, no doubt about it and it works great for children, who often feel more attracted to such lively colors.

5. Black and White Christmas

Baroque is back and Christmas can’t escape its power, either. This year, you and your family can spend a truly aristocratic Christmas by choosing to decorate your Christmas tree with black and white accessories. For an impressive contrast, you can add expensive-looking silvery ornaments in your home, like candle holders, wreaths and table centerpieces.

Vegetarian hot dogs may actually contain meat and human DNA, a recent study has shown.

The research was conducted by Clear Labs, a company headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, which employs molecular food testing technology in order to ensure optimal product quality in the global food industry.

Experts analyzed 345 hot dogs and sausages from 75 different brands and 10 retailers. After a thorough molecular food testing process, Clear Food staff managed to identify potential allergens and other hidden components which regular analysis might have failed to detect.

They assigned each item a Clear Score, based on the correspondence between its label claims and its real ingredients. By and large, the findings were nothing short of disturbing. According to food experts, around 14.4% of the samples were “problematic in some way”.

More precisely, although vegetarian hot dogs should obviously be devoid of any animal ingredient, it was proven that around one in ten of these products actually contained meat.

Chicken was especially prevalent in these supposedly vegetarian items, with other types of meat such as beef, turkey and lamb being less common.

For example, researchers identified pork in around 3% of the food items that had been actually labelled as kosher, although, according to Jewish dietary law, consuming such meat coming from “unclean animals” is strictly forbidden.

Another problem signaled by the company was the fact that food producers had grossly overestimated the amount of protein which these hot dogs and sausages actually contained.

For instance, one sample was labelled as having 2.5 times more protein content than it was proven through molecular testing.

Even more shockingly, Clear Labs detected hygienic issues related to the presence of human DNA in 2% of the products which were included in the trial, and in two thirds of the vegetarian samples.

The food analytics company also created a hierarchy of the best hot dogs and sausages, based on overall quality and specific ingredients.

It was established that Trader Joe’s Soy Chorizo might be the most suitable alternative for vegetarian customers.

When it came to meat products, the safest choices appeared to be Oscar Meyer beef franks, Ball Park hot dogs and Hebrew National kosher beef franks.

On the other hand, Clear Labs experts thought it would be best to avoid brands such as Nathan’s and Vienna Beef.

Nowadays, around 20 billion hot dogs are consumed by Americans on a yearly basis, according to estimations made by the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.

In 2014, U.S. buyers spent around $2.74 billion on dinner sausages and around a fifth of this sum on breakfast sausages. Also, they purchased almost 1 billion packages of hot dogs in retail stores, amounting to approximately $2.5 billion.

Hot dogs and sausages are especially popular at major league baseball stadiums, so it’s no wonder that the top 10 cities when it comes to consuming these iconic food items are also famous for their MLB teams.

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A Scottish woman claims she can actually smell Parkinson’s disease, and scientists believe her announcement may not be off-base.

Joy Milne, of Perth Scotland, has declared that around 6 years before her husband Les was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease she could actually sense that something was wrong, because his fragrance had suddenly become different.

“His smell changed and it seemed difficult to describe. It wasn’t all of a sudden. It was very subtle – a musky smell”, declared Milne, in an interview with BBC Scotland.

It was the same scent that the woman identified among other people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, when she joined the non-profit organization Parkinson’s UK.

The woman’s husband eventually passed away in June, at the age of 65, following a 20-year old period of battling the disease.

Recently, Milne’s claims have sparked interest among researchers at Edinburgh University, who wanted to test the validity of her professed abilities.

An experiment was conducted, which included 6 volunteers that actually suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and 6 others who hadn’t been known to have this condition.

The subjects were required to wear a t-shirt for an entire day, and afterwards the clothing items were collected, bagged and coded, so that Milne could smell them.

The team of researchers, led by Tilo Kunath, a Chancellor’s Fellow at the school of biological sciences at Edinburgh University, wanted to see if the woman could indeed detect a distinct odor among the participants affected by Parkinson’s.

Surprisingly enough, Milne was proven correct in all of her diagnoses. Initially, scientists had considered she had guessed reliably on 11 out of 12 cases, because on one occasion she had claimed a person suffered from the nervous system disease although he had actually volunteered as part of the control group.

However, 8 months later, during a routine medical examination, it was proven that the man actually did have Parkinson’s disease.

Researchers now speculate that the skin of those who develop this condition might go through certain changes before more definite symptoms of Parkinson’s actually appear.

It may be that Milne’s heightened sense of smell could identify those modifications, and this could mean that soon a new diagnostic test using this molecular signature might be created to provide better screenings for this condition.

Such early and effective detection using a simple swab could allow more people who have developed this degenerative disorder to find out that they suffer from Parkinson’s and begin treatment as soon as possible.

For now, a follow-up study is being prepared, which will assess Milne’s accuracy in identifying Parkinson’s patients among a group of 200 volunteers.

The research is sponsored by Parkinson’s UK, a charity whose primary mission is to find a cure or at least some better treatments for this condition, while improving the lives of those affected by it.

Nowadays, Parkinson’s disease is encountered among over 1 million Americans, and more than 5 million people worldwide.

The most common symptoms associated with this condition include tremors, impaired balance, speech and swallowing issues, hypokinesia (slowness of movement), executive dysfunction and limb rigidity.

One in 100 people older than 60 suffer from this motor system disorder, but it can even be diagnosed among younger patients.

At the moment there is no reliable biomarker or test for this condition, and this results in numerous diagnosis errors. Therefore, Milne’s remarkable abilities might prove instrumental in finally developing an accurate predictive tool.

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Birth order has little influence on personality, a recent study conducted by German researchers at the University of Leipzig has shown.

The experts reviewed personality and intelligence data from over 20,000 adults: 5,240 Americans, 10,456 Germans and 4,489 Britons.

This information had resulted from several national surveys conducted in recent years, and the findings were published on October 19, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers wanted to determine if there was actually a connection between birth order and the prevalence of one of 5 major personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism.

It had been generally believed that older siblings are usually the most ambitious, bossy, successful and reliable.

Similarly, middle children had been stereotyped as being people-pleasers, in search of their own identity and always fearful of being neglected.

On the other hand, younger siblings were expected to be thoroughly spoiled, self-centered, charming, manipulative and immature.

However, researchers didn’t identify any such patterns and trends when analyzing and aggregating their study data, no matter what the age gap between siblings was. Correlations couldn’t be established when reviewing data while taking each country separately, nor when making cross-country inferences.

Although it was revealed that firstborns tended to score higher at IQ tests, scientists believe this isn’t actually a result of biology, but in fact it’s closely linked with a higher amount of social interaction within the family.

As they explain, older siblings often act as mentors to their younger brothers and sisters, due to their broader knowledge and experience. The process of having to recall previously memorized information, of reformulating it and presenting it in a simple manner is highly demanding from a cognitive point of view.

As a result, the intelligence of these firstborns is highly stimulated, and develops more significantly. Moreover, they also enjoy the greatest amount of attention from their parents, who employ all their resources in order to educate and guide their new offspring.

In comparison, second children usually benefit from less parental engagement, and this lack of focus grows even more with every new baby born in the family. As a result, IQ tends to drop by around 1.5 points for every younger sibling, researchers have determined.

“What is most striking about these findings is that they are in conflict with those of other large studies that have shown that birth order differences in personality definitely exist, even if they are rather modest in magnitude”, declared Frank Sulloway, adjunct professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sulloway insists that birth order differences are a real occurrence, but they tend to change with the passage of time. For example, a later-born child might initially appear less conscientious, but eventually become more successful than firstborns, due to superior social skills.

Study authors believe however that their findings are accurate, and explain that in fact age effects often tend to be misidentified as birth order effects.

For example, a younger sibling might appear more immature simply because of lack of worldy experience, so it is unfair and highly inaccurate to judge such individuals by comparing them to their older, more seasoned brothers or sisters.

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An alarming study has shown that antioxidants speed up cancer growth, instead of being beneficial in combating the disease. The research, published on October 14 in the journal Nature, was conducted by experts at the University of Texas.

The purpose was to test the effects of antioxidants on human cancerous test. In an animal trial, laboratory mice received transplants with human melanoma (skin cancer) cells. Afterwards, some of the rats were treated with antioxidants, while the others were given a placebo.

The antioxidant used in the experiment was N-acetylcysteine (NAC), which is frequently included in dietary supplements, and is also administered to children with genetic disorders or to HIV/AIDS patients.

It was determined that, among those which had received the antioxidants, cancer spread much faster, malignant cells in the bloodstream were much more numerous, and the tumors were larger and more widespread.

This process which causes cancer cells to multiply and form other life-threatening growths in different parts of the body is known as metastasis. It appears that metastasizing melanoma cells have elevated levels of oxidative stress, and in response to it the majority of them actually die.

Therefore, the possibility of tumors spreading to other locations is usually limited, given that cancer cells seldom survive in the bloodstream. However, if antioxidants are administered, cancerous cells are protected from this stress and actually thrive, which makes metastasis much more likely and rapid.

The study contradicts the ubiquitous opinion that antioxidants are one of the healthiest types of compounds in the world, and that they should be prescribed indiscriminately to every individual.

Products rich in antioxidants, such as berries, leafy veggies, green tea, beans and pecan nuts, have long been hailed as superfoods that should be part of the ideal diet.

Also, the 3 major antioxidant vitamins (vitamin C, vitamin E and beta-carotene) have also been considered essential in guarding cells against “free radicals” that could potentially damage them and disrupt DNA.

In fact, based on this belief, in former trials, cancer patients were actually treated with antioxidants, until they began dying at such heightened rates that the experiment had to be discarded.

Now it appears this recent research explains why that happened. As study authors have shown, the act of administering oxidants to people who have malignant tumors actually helps cancer cells to become more prevalent, instead of benefiting normal cells, and combating the disease.

Prior research had also suggested this theory. For example, an animal study conducted by Vanderbilt University in 2012 showed that prostate cancer cells became more prevalent after antioxidant use, and another paper from 2014 proved that rodents with lung cancer died twice as fast after being given vitamin E and acetylcysteine.

As a result, based on these findings, it becomes clear that antioxidants are much safer to be consumed by healthy people. For individuals who suffer from cancer, it would be advisable to include pro-oxidants as part of the treatment instead, according to researchers.

Oxidative stress is the process through which metastasis can actually be limited or halted entirely. Therefore, it would be preferable to try and accelerate the destruction of cancer cells using chemicals that inhibit anti-oxidation.

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