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Working off the Girl Scout cookiesWe don’t mean to be killjoys here. After all, there is nothing sweeter than coconut, chocolate and caramel cookies delivered by adorable Girl Scouts accompanied by a handwritten thank you note. The brightly colored boxes of Girl Scout cookies are popping up everywhere - in offices, your pantry and neighborhood. Here's what you might want to know about working off those cookies. FULL POST Knees bearing the weight of obesityObesity isn’t just about waistlines or clothing sizes. The toll of carrying all that excess weight affects your joints, and your knees can take a pounding. Four studies presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, examined how the heavier Americans have gotten, the more stress they’ve put on their knees. A Harvard Medical School research team found that the number of total knee replacement surgeries has doubled from 1997 to 2007. FULL POST Quiz: Test your sex smartsSex isn't just fun, it's important for health. Really. So our sex expert blogger Ian Kerner and his colleagues at GoodinBed put together this little test to see how sexually savvy you are. On the Brain: Avatars, and other mind-controlled machinesSome mind-bending research on how the brain interacts with machines kicked off the press meetings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference Thursday in Washington, D.C. Here are some of the ideas presented there: A step toward "Avatar" How do you know that your body is your own? Neurologist Olaf Blanke at the University of Geneva and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland discussed an unpublished study in which participants were put into a virtual reality environment and assumed the body of an avatar. An electrode-studded skullcap monitored brain activity. In the experiments, researchers tested what would happen if male participants controlled female avatars and if a first-person perspective were changed to third-person, as well as other activities. He and colleagues found that the sex of the avatar doesn't matter; if you're inside an avatar, you think it's your own body, and whatever happens to it is happening to you. Bionic arm gives hope for amputeesAn amputation takes away bone and muscle, but the connecting nerves that once controlled the arm are still there, and they're capable of sending commands to the muscles and receiving sensation, even from a missing nerve. They are, in a sense, like data cables floating in space. This is the basis for technology developed by Dr. Todd Kuiken, director of the Center for Bionic Medicine and director of Amputee Services at The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Restaurant workers show up sickOne out of eight restaurant workers has come to work at least twice in the past year while suffering from diarrhea or vomiting, according to a new survey of workers in nine states. That’s 12% of all workers, an increase over the 5% of workers found in previous studies, according to study author Dr. Steven Sumner, the study’s lead author and a resident in internal medicine at Duke University Hospital. The study is published in The Journal of Food Protection. |
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Get a behind-the-scenes look at the latest stories from CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and the CNN Medical Unit producers. They'll share news and views on health and medical trends - info that will help you take better care of yourself and the people you love. ![]() ![]() |
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