Wellington - New Zealand's Auckland University researchers have found that overweight fathers are more likely to have undersized babies, New Zealand media reported on Wednesday. The findings, which have been published in the journal Obesity, come from a study that looked at more than 2,000 couples in New Zealand's Auckland and Australia's Adelaide. Small babies ...

Melbourne, The ozone hole, which had caused serous environmental concerns, is now shrinking and it could completely heal by the end of the century, bringing more rain to eastern Australia, scientists said today. Matthew Tulley from Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne said the hole is now healing because of climate protection measures adopted by several countries. &quo...

It's debatable whether getting your genes tested can tell you anything very helpful about your health, for now at least. But it could make a huge difference to your children's. Genetic tests can reveal if you are a carrier of disorders such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy. In some countries, tests for some genetic diseases a...

Los Angeles - U.S. researchers have found a link between exposures to violence in childhood with aggravated asthma in later life. The study involved 397 adults with moderate to severe asthma who lived in an inner-city community. Nearly one-quarter ...

Washington - The recession seems to be socking Americans in the heart as well as the wallet: Marriages have hit an all-time low while pleas for food stamps have reached a record high and the gap between rich and poor has grown to its widest ever. The long recession technically ended in mid-2009, economists say, but U.S. Census data released Tuesday show the painful, lingering eff...

Rio De Janeiro - Brazilians are eating a lot of rice and beans as well as high-calorie junk food lacking nutrition, a study released Thursday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) found. According to the study, over 90 percent of Brazilians eat daily helpings of fruits and vegetables lower than the levels recommended by the Health Ministry (400 g...

Washington - Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced Wednesday in a statement. Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable po...

Kathmandu - The ruins of 2000-year-old buildings have been found in Kichakbadhsthal, a historic place in Jhapa district in eastern Nepal in the course of excavation. The remains of walls of buildings made of bricks measuring 36 centimeters long, 26 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters thick have been unearthed, reported the National News Agency RSS on Sunday. They were excavate...

It's debatable whether getting your genes tested can tell you anything very helpful about your health, for now at least. But it could make a huge difference to your children's. Genetic tests can reveal if you are a carrier of disorders such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy. In some countries, tests for some genetic diseases...

Jerusalem - A new study carried out by a Tel Aviv University researcher indicates that the common backache may not only be caused by bad positions or aging, but also by your genes. Prof. Gregory Livshits of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine says that genes play a major role in back pain, especially in the lower back, and in spinal deterioration. In a decade-long projec...