Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own me... (more)
TODDLERS as young as two are being diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed drugs including Ritalin.
Figures obtained by The Daily Telegraph reveal 311 children in NSW aged five and under depend on controversial medication, including 58 four-year-olds and 13 three-year-olds.
Health Department figures show that, nationally, doctors have prescribed ADHD drugs to five toddlers aged only two, despite possible side effects.
WORKING-CLASS students have lower IQs than those from wealthier backgrounds and should not be expected to win places at top universities, an academic has claimed.
Bruce Charlton, an evolutionary psychiatrist at Newcastle University, has written a paper asserting the reason why fewer students from poor families are admitted to Oxford or Cambridge is not because of social prejudice, but lack of ability.
He suggests that low numbers of working-class students at elite u... (more)
This stunning censored interview conducted by medical historian Edward Shorter for WGBH public television (Boston) and Blackwell Science was cut from The Health Century due ... (more)
Are we winning the wars officials say we must? Wars against cancer, AIDS and terrorism?
Hollywood films and health officials herald happy endings, but family and friends everywhere are ill and getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, and broke popping pills and paying m... (more)
Boston’s Children’s Hospital bills itself as the hospital for children — and now it’s also the hospital for children who want a sex change, a procedure some critics are calling “barbaric.”
Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric specialist at the hospital, has launched a clinic for transgendered kids — boys who feel like girls, girls who want to be boys — and he’s opening his doors to patients as young as 7.
The Duke of Edinburgh says global overpopulation is to blame for rapidly rising food prices.
In an interview for a documentary with Sir Trevor McDonald, he says: "The food prices are going up – everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food, but it's really that demand is too great, too many people."
The Duke adds: "It's a little embarrassing for everybody, no one quite knows how to handle it. Nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by the govern... (more)
Scientists have created what is believed to be the first genetically modified (GM) human embryo.
A team from Cornell University in New York produced the GM embryo to study how early cells and diseases develop. It was destroyed after five days.
The British regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has warned that such controversial experiments cause “large ethical and public interest issues”.
Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of soldiers are being trained to fight America's future wars.
Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.
More than 60 years later, the U.S. Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.
ABORIGINAL children were injected with leprosy treatments in a medical testing program that used members of the Stolen Generation as guinea pigs, a Senate Committee has heard.
Greens Senator Bob Brown said he was "shocked and alarmed" by the claims, heard today by the Senate legal and constitutional committee's inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008.
On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance sa... (more)
State environmental health authorities said Thursday they are unable to determine whether respiratory problems reported by hundreds of citizens in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties in autumn were linked to an aerial spraying against the light brown apple moth.
A 32-page report released by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment found that the 487 complaints gathered after the spray campaigns were not detailed or consistent. As a result, the analysis was inconclusive.... (more)
Failure to address global warming will have us all dead or eating each other by mid-century.
So says Ted Turner, the restaurateur, environmentalist and former media mogul whose controversial comments have earned him the nickname "Mouth of the South."
If steps aren't taken to stem global warming, "We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow," Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS's Charlie Rose t... (more)
One press of a button and you can end your life with a swift injection of potassium chloride. That is the boast of Roger Kusch, once one of Germany's most promising conservative politicians and now the improbable promoter of a mercy-killing machine.
If the “Perfusor”, designed to sidestep strict laws banning assisted suicide, goes into production then Germany rather than Switzerland could soon become the destination of choice for those seeking to kill themselves. ... (more)
In the fall of 2006, a BBC wire report speculated that global economic inequality and rapid advances in genetic engineering would some day combine to split mankind into two subspecies. "The descendants of the genetic upper classes would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures." The BBC was careful to put its sci-fi scenario far into the future-100,000 years d... (more)
The two-decade search for an AIDS vaccine is in crisis after two field tests of the most promising contender not only did not protect people from the virus but may actually have put them at increased risk of becoming infected.
The results of the trials, which enrolled volunteers on four continents, have spurred intense scientific inquiry and unprecedented soul-searching as researchers try to make sense of what happened and assess whether they should have seen it coming. ... (more)
A Tory councillor has claimed that there should be compulsory sterilisation for parents on benefits.
John Ward prompted comparisons with Adolf Hitler and calls for his resignation after attacking "professional spongers" who he claims "breed for greed".
He has removed the original comments from his website blog and said he was sorry if he caused any problems.
But Mr Ward, a 58-year- old bachelor, has since published a defiant claim that he was "exposin... (more)
Shocked doctors blame hormones in food and water for some toddlers showing signs of breast growth, The Sun reports.
Other pre-school youngsters even experience periods that normally start in their teens – and have temper tantrums just like adolescents.
The phenomenon is feared to have become more common since the 1990s – with doctors having to give increasing numbers of tots jabs to keep puberty at bay.
In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.
A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery's first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy.
A chemist called it "criminally intolerant chemical warfare to enslave the American people." A self-described inventor and "secret investigator" said the government was trying to "kill you slowly." Another man put it bluntly: "Communism is one of the factors behind it."
In the summer of 1966, a year after the Watts riots, Los Angeles City Council members took up what The Times called "one of the most controversial proposals ever." The hearings drew hundreds of agitated citizens.... (more)
MORE than 17 girls a week have been experiencing adverse reactions such as seizures and numbness after taking cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil since it became widely distributed in April.
But the Department of Health and Ageing, while revealing the number of reactions, is refusing to release the details of them - despite growing controversy overseas, including links to at least seven deaths.
There have been previous reports in Australia of young girls fainting, expe... (more)
