Boosting neurotransmitter could reverse Down Syndrome: study

Chances are you’ve recently heard or read about the importance of “executive function”—the set of higher-order mental skills that allow us to plan and organize, make considered decisions, manage our time and focus our attention. (The famous “marshmallow experiment” was all about executive function.) No matter how smart or talented we—or our kids or our employees—are, not much will get done well without these key capacities.

An antibiotic can help some sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome, marking the first potential drug treatment for the disease which affects 30 million people in the United States, said a study released Wednesday.The ailment causes bloating, abdominal pain, watery stool or constipation, and the findings in the New England Journal of Medicine appear to confirm studies in the past decade that suggest it is caused by bacteria in the gut.

Children under the age of five who don't get enough sleep at night are more likely than kids who do get their 40 winks to become obese at a young age, a study published Monday showed."We found a robust longitudinal association between duration of nighttime sleep in early life and subsequent obesity measured at five to nine years," wrote the authors of the study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.                                              —Robert Frost

Scientists in the United States on Sunday offered a molecular-level explanation for how a Chinese herbal medicine used for more than 2,000 years tackles fever and eases malaria. The herb is an extract of the root of a flowering plant called blue evergreen hydrangea, known in Chinese as chang shan and in Latin as Dichroa febrifuga Lour.

Anyone who's failed a sobriety test will tell you that making coordinated movements while drunk is hard, and a new study explains why. Alcohol appears to disrupt connections between the brain's visual and muscle control regions.

By Daniel Lauchheimer:In a previous article I spoke about the medical device industry. In that article, I spoke about one branch of medical devices -- cardiac and orthopedic implants, but that only tells part of the story. Aside from the large implantable device industry, a large part of the segment includes imaging technology.