It has become one of the most controversial questions in cancer medicine: Can using a cell phone cause brain tumors? The federal government and the mobile-phone industry have maintained that there is no conclusive data to support a link between cell-phone radiation and cancer, but a growing band of scientists are skeptical, suggesting that the evidence that does exist is enough to raise a warning for consumers — before mass harm is done. What scientists and regulators ...

Society At A Glance 2009 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 132 pages The Gist: If you're looking for another reason to hate on France, you might check out the latest report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to the Paris-based group, the French spend twice as much time enjoying meals each day than most Americans, and get nearly an hour's more sleep each night than most Japanese . The study, which is based on government ...

An e-mail has been making the rounds among some of my physician colleagues. "I am shocked that information about the prescriptions I write for my patients is being sold to drug companies for marketing purposes," begins the missive. "This is a violation of my privacy as a physician and an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship!" The note implores doctors to support laws that restrict the sale of physician-prescribing information to drug companies and to sign up ...

People tend to think gentrification goes like this: rich, educated white people move into a low-income minority neighborhood and drive out its original residents, who can no longer afford to live there. As it turns out, that's not typically true. A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Pittsburgh and Duke University, examined Census data from more than 15,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. in 1990 and 2000, and found that low-income non-white ...

The Uninsured: A Primer Key Facts About Americans Without Health Insurance The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; 36 pages The Gist: As members of Congress vote on controversial health-care-reform legislation, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation has analyzed census data to provide a closer look at the people without health insurance in the U.S. Its report, focused on people younger than age 65, found 45.7 million "nonelderly" uninsured people in the U.S. last year . Low-income adults without dependent children — ...

The term "dirty money" is for real. In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue. Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine. "When I was ...

College students used to complain about dining-hall mystery meat. Their new gripe? Puny e-mail inboxes. Students have been howling that school e-mail accounts are too small to handle their daily deluge of mail and attachments. To address that problem, a growing number of colleges and universities are outsourcing their e-mail. The companies swooping in to manage student accounts for free Google and Microsoft. Like search, software and operating systems, campuses are a burgeoning battleground for the tech titans. Google now manages e-mail for more than ...

Women diagnosed with early stage breast cancer are faced with a tough choice — either to have parts of the affected breast removed, followed by several weeks of potentially toxic radiation therapy; or opt for mastectomy, removing the entire breast and contending with the disfigurement that entails. The decision typically rests on where and how widespread the tumors are. It's no wonder, then, that more and more women are relying on high-tech MRI scans to help them examine their ...

Between GPS devices on your car's dashboard and digital maps of almost any locale in the world on your smartphone or laptop, it's hard to get lost these days. We may take these 21st-century services for granted. But someone still needs to do the actual legwork of mapping these places and making sure the information is accurate. Meet the people at Tele Atlas, the company that provides so-called "base maps" to such high-profile clients as Google, MapQuest and RIM, the ...

I was 14 the first time I got falling-down drunk. I was attending summer golf camp at the University of Arkansas. It was 1985, and a preternaturally talented young golfer named John Daly was my camp counselor. This was six years before Daly won the PGA Championship as a rookie. He would also become famous for his drinking, but in 1985 he was still just a big kid, five years older than I was but not especially more mature. ...