It's no secret that poor sleep gets in the way of all kinds of good things in life. 

People who drive on too little sleep -- and there are a lot of us -- are more likely to be in accidents that result in injuries than people who've had enough rest.  When we haven't slept well, we make lousy food choices and have trouble metabolizing our food. 

Staying up too late studying actually hurts high-schoolers' academic performance.  Among the younger set, slight decreases in sleep make kids more likely to act out.  A team of faux astronauts suffered a variety of sleep disturbances over the course of a...

Serving hot food on melamine tableware could increase your exposure to melamine, a study released Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine suggests.

 Melamine, an industrial chemical used in everyday items such as cooking utensils, plates, paperboard and industrial coatings can apparently seep into food when it's heated, the study said.

In two separate tests, researchers from Kaohsiung Medical University and Kaohsiung Municipal Hsiao-Kang Hospital in Taiwan served a dozen participants about two cups of hot noodle soup in melamine bowls and ceramic bowls. After participants ate out of the...

Worried that your genetic information could be revealed?  You should be, says Harvard geneticist George Church. 

But it doesn't have to keep you from participating in genetic studies.

DNA privacy has been a subject of concern this week, as a team of geneticists reported Thursday in the journal Science that it was able to figure out the names of people who had donated their DNA to research -- even though test subjects' identities were stripped from their genomic data.

Using information posted to genealogy websites and other publicly available Internet resources, the Whitehead Institute...

As waiting rooms in other parts of the U.S. have been clogged with sniffling, feverish hordes, California has seemed to avoid the worst of this year’s flu — so far.

But that may change, as officials in California said this week that flu activity in the state had reached “a widespread level,” and that the number of visits to doctors and hospitals for the treatment of flu-like illness was higher than usual for mid-January. 

(For more on the flu’s spread West, read this report from Los Angeles Times writer Anna Gorman.) 

There is still plenty people can do to prevent...

With the presidential inauguration days away, the Food and Drug Administration wants to assure us that the food to be eaten amidst all the pomp and circumstance won’t give anyone a nasty case of food poisoning.

“This week, at the request of the U.S. Secret Service and D.C. Department of Health, we’ve assembled a team of 35 FDA staff from across the U.S. including 18 experts in retail foods and field inspection,” FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said on the FDA blog.  

“Their mission? To work closely with the D.C. Department of Health, local county health...

Why are women more prone to autoimmune diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis? A new study in mice points to a possible contributor: different types of bacteria that populate our guts.

It goes like this: Different mixes of bacteria reside in the innards of male and female mice. Those bacteria, in turn, affect the chemistry of the animals’ bodies -- and, it appears, their risk of autoimmunity.

The study, just published in Science, was done by Janet Markle of the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Toronto, and colleagues. It’s a little...

More than 1.66 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2013, while more than 580,000 Americans are expected to die of the disease, according to the annual statistics report of the American Cancer Society.

The report, released Monday, notes that the overall death rate for cancer in the United States has declined significantly since 1991, primarily because of reductions in smoking and improved cancer screening.

The report is based on data from the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Center for Health Statistics. Those sources show...

Paging Dr. House: There a new tick-transmitted spirochete in town, and this wily relative of the organism that causes Lyme disease is probably sickening more than 4,300 Americans a year with relapsing fevers and flu-like symptoms, according to a new report. The good news: A round of common antibiotics appears capable of vanquishing the newly discovered threat.

The organism, called Borrelia miyamotoi, was discovered in 1995 in Japan, but it was not until 2011 that disease hunters found and described evidence that it was making people sick in Central Russia. The organism was found in deer ticks...

California children with special healthcare needs receive worse care than those in most other states, according to an analysis by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health.

The foundation ranked California 46th in effective coordination of medical care and 50th for referrals to specialty care.

Children with chronic physical, developmental or emotional problems need special care. About 1 million such children live in California, according to the Palo Alto-based foundation, which was founded in 1997 to increase the quality and accessibility of children's healthcare. More than 40% of...

It’s the dream of any parent whose child is diagnosed with autism: The symptoms will fade away over time.

What keeps the dream alive is that in rare cases it comes true. Several studies over the years have documented cases in which children have improved so much that they no longer meet the criteria for diagnosis or require extra support in school.

Those children have long presented a puzzle to researchers. What distinguishes them from people for whom autism is a lifelong condition? And what distinguishes them from people with typical early childhood development?

Deborah Fein, a...

They may be caring, angry, provocative, bawdy or just plain inane. But even when read by strangers, the brief entries we write on Facebook are more memorable than the polished prose of writing professionals. And these online quips have more staying power with readers than do the faces of people we encounter on our daily rounds, a new study finds.

That may be a tribute to one of the most fundamental qualities of "microblogs," the bite-sized comments we cast upon an ocean of global communication like a message in a bottle: They are personal, spontaneous and conversational. As such, they seem to...