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Driving might be a badge of freedom for teen-agers, but it can also be deadly. Traffic crashes are the leading cause of teen fatalities in the United States, accounting for 44 percent, according to the National Safety Council. A new study suggests that urban sprawl could put teens at more risk. There is a strong relationship between the number of miles a teen drives and the risk of injury or death. Teens in sprawling counties were more than twice as likely to drive more than 20 miles per day as teens in compact counties were -- and the younger they were, the more miles they drove.

Researchers have determined the specific way in which a destructive protein binds to and interferes with a molecule that removes low-density lipoproteins, the so-called "bad" cholesterol, from the blood.

Four-year-old Braden Eberle was worried. "Mom, I swallowed something," said the San Jose boy. His mother, Jill, reassured him when she learned that it was just a tiny magnet that had slipped loose from a construction-type toy. But the next day, he swallowed another. The magnets snapped together in his intestinal tract, pinching the tissue. Many of the magnets in today's toys contain neodymium, a metal with an unusually strong magnetic force.

What if we could prevent cancer recurrence for years after surgery by giving simple recall injections every two or three years? This concept may no longer be a fantasy. Scientists have now shown in a clinical study that a vaccine against a protein found in cancer cells produces an immune response that can be boosted and strengthened with additional vaccine shots.

Researchers have discovered that drinking just 500ml of beetroot juice a day can significantly reduce blood pressure. The findings could have major implications for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Approximately one-third of popular songs include reference to explicit drug, alcohol or tobacco use, although this portrayal varies widely by musical genre, according to a new report.

Patients with diabetes, cardiac problems, kidney disorders or high blood pressure could benefit from the development of new hologram technology. The new "smart" holograms, which can detect changes in, for example, blood-glucose levels, should make self-diagnosis much simpler, cheaper and more reliable.

Adults who were abused as children have about half the symptoms of moderate to severe depression if they have certain variations in a specific gene, compared to people with different variations in the same gene. The gene makes a receptor, on brain cells, for a stress-related hormone. The variations were protective in two separate studies, one mostly of African Americans and the other of whites, across socioeconomic levels.

Four days' exposure to a REM sleep deprivation procedure reduces cell proliferation in the part of the forebrain that contributes to long-term memory of rats. REM sleep deprivation was achieved by a brief treadmill movement initiated by automatic online detection of REM sleep. A yoked-control (YC) rat was placed in the same treadmill and experienced the identical movement regardless of the stage of the sleep-wake cycle.

Heavy marijuana use has been found to contribute to gum disease, apart from the known effects that tobacco smoke was already known to have. In a group of more than 900 New Zealanders, smoking cannabis more than 40 times a year since age 18 was found to be responsible for more than one-third of the new cases of periodontal disease between ages 26 and 32, according to a new study.