Red wine can also shoot up your BP

Red wine may be considered good for overall health, but it raises blood pressure as much as beer does, Australian researchers have reported. According to Reuters, people at risk of high blood pressure should not switch to red wine in the hope of being able to drink more, they have concluded. A relationship between alcohol consumption and blood pressure is well established, but the relative effect of specific alcoholic beverages is controversial, conclude scientists at the University of Western Australia. Some drinkers may have thought that red wine's antioxidant compounds can counteract the effects of alcohol in raising blood pressure. But, writing in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, the researchers said they found no such effect in 24 healthy, non-smoking men.

Schoolbus air poisonous

Researchers at the University of California have found that in large urban areas, children riding in school buses with diesel engines inhale more bus exhaust than everyone else in the city. Exposure to the ultrafine diesel particulate matter, or DPM, is known to increase the risk for cancer. Scientists at Berkeley and Los Angeles tested the air inside six buses while they were being driven through the metropolitan area with the windows opened and closed. The study reported in the Environmental Science & Technology found that children riding in these school buses inhaled 34 to 70 per cent more DPM than the weekday commuters did during the same day.

Bright light can relieve stress

Exposure to bright artificial light can relieve some cases of depression as effectively as psychotherapy or antidepressant medication, new research suggests. In a statistical review of 20 rigorously designed studies, researchers found strong evidence that exposure to artificial broad-spectrum light was a good treatment not only for seasonal affective disorder, in which people become more depressed in the darker days of winter, but for the more common nonseasonal depression as well. Treatment time varies from 15 minutes to 90 minutes a day. Dawn simulation, a variation of the treatment, recreates the timing and intensity of a normal sunrise each morning. Symptoms start to diminish within weeks, the review adds.

Gadget to feel your pulse

To make the doctor's job even easier, Washington-based health technology firm Medtronic has innovated pads containing infrared light emitters and sensors to feel a patient's pulse in an emergency. The sensors detect light reflected from various parts of the body, including heart. So budding doctors won't need to hone their clinical skills at all.