D-CON kills rats and mice, the label reads. And, according to state and federal officials, it can kill hawks, owls, eagles, foxes, bobcats, mountain lions and other non-targeted wildlife too.

So can competing brands. Pesticide manufacturers have been selling a new generation of more potent anticoagulants because mice and rats have built up some resistance to the old standby warfarin.

These super-toxic rat poisons have a longer half-life before they break down, meaning they are more effective at working their way up the food chain -- not only killing rodents but their natural predators.

The...

Thinking of buying your kid a TV of his or her own for Christmas or Hannukah? Well here's a bit of advice from your friends at the American Journal of Preventive Medicine: Don't. It turns out there is a way to make television even more unhealthy for your children: Put a set in their bedroom.

Research has long established that for kids, more "screen time" is linked to higher rates of obesity. A new studygoes further. It finds not only that kids with a TV in their bedroom tend to watch more TV, which in itself should make them fatter, but also: Compared to television watched in, say, a family...

Want to get people to eat more salad and less junk food? Make vegetables cheaper and soda more expensive.

It’s not exactly a new idea, but a study out Tuesday offers some fresh support for those in favor of using sin taxes and subsidies to steer people toward a more healthful diet.

The study, published online by PLoS Medicine, is a meta-analysis of 32 other studies that use statistical modeling to gauge the impact of various tax and subsidy policies. Overall, it found that consumers buy less of something when the price goes up and they buy more of it when the price goes down.

For...

An increase in vision problems that cannot be corrected with lenses may be related to an uptick in diabetes rates over the same period, researchers said Tuesday.

The team, led by Dr. David S. Friedman of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, gathered survey and physical examination data collected from 9,471 U.S. adults over the age of 20 in 1999 to 2002 and from another set of 10,480 Americans in 2005 to 2008.  The researchers calculated that rates of prevalence of “non-refractive visual impairment” increased 21% in the overall study population, from 1.4% in...

Have you ever been to a TED conference — those immersion events aimed at facilitating cross-fertilization between attendees and speakers and "inspiration from unlikely places”?  If you have, you likely shelled out: An upcoming Long Beach event, “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” running Feb. 25–March 1, costs $7,500 to attend. It’s sold out.

TEDx conferences are a little different: Planned and coordinated separately from TED events and far  cheaper and easier to get into, they’re still licensed by TED (with a lot of rules) and “designed to...

For those of you struggling with your weight, here's a future transplant list you will want to be on: Receive a donation of some brown fat from a lean, healthy recipient, have it injected in or around your belly fat, and quickly see your metabolic function improve, your white-fat deposits make way for lean muscle and your scale show a downward trend.

That tantalizing prospect for fighting fat took a small step closer to reality Monday with the publication of a study that found that, in chubby mice, at least, such as procedure worked.

The study, conducted at Harvard University Medical Center's ...

Scientists said Sunday that the Clostridium difficile epidemic from 2002 to 2006 — an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness that spanned hospitals across the globe — was caused by two closely-related strains of the bacterium and not one, as had been previously believed.

Trevor Lawley of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England and coauthors from other institutions sequenced the genomes of C. difficile samples collected between 1985 and 2010, mainly from hospital patients. 

Analyzing the samples, they found the two lineages of the bacterium,which they named FQR1 and...

Obesity doctor Yoni Freedhoff was invited by the Ontario Medical Assn. to give a talk at a food industry breakfast on health and nutrition policy -- and then was disinvited.

Ticked off, he's decided to take his talk to a broader audience.

Freedhoff, a professor at the University of Ottawa and founder of Ottawa’s Bariatric Medical Institute who is outspoken on nutrition issues, describes the experience on his blog, Weighty Matters.  He writes that he prepared his talk on what he thought the food industry could do to help further public health -- but then was told a few days before the...

Among the changes:

If you're one of the 1 in 5 American adults who still smokes, here's another reason to quit -- or at least scale back on days that are likely to end with several drinks: A new study finds that the likelihood of experiencing a hangover after a bout of heavy drinking is greater for those who smoke heavily on the day of their alcohol consumption. Worse still, the new research found that when a day of heavy cigarette smoking leads to a night of heavy drinking, the misery of the resulting hangover is intensified.

The Dutch authors of the latest study believe they have captured something more than a...

It has been decades since the last major breakthrough of a popular, easy-to-use and effective form of birth control. The pill has been available since 1960 and the IUD since 1965. Condoms have been around for centuries, although today’s latex versions are improvements over those fashioned from sheep guts.

But some innovative research is underway in Kim Woodrow’s bioengineering lab at the University of Washington.  She and her students have produced electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers that can quickly dissolve and release drugs to prevent unplanned pregnancy and...