Health authorities should emphasize the positive message that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is unassisted cessation, despite the promotion of cessation drugs by pharmaceutical companies and many tobacco control advocates. Read more from this post.

Nicotine in third-hand smoke, the residue from tobacco smoke that clings to virtually all surfaces long after a cigarette has been extinguished, reacts with the common indoor air pollutant nitrous acid to produce dangerous carcinogens. This new potential health hazard was revealed in a multi-institutional study led by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read more from this post.

The state of Michigan, which used a five-step checklist developed at Johns Hopkins to virtually eliminate bloodstream infections in its hospitals' intensive care units, has been able to keep the number of these common, costly and potentially lethal infections near zero - even three years after first adopting the standardized procedures. A report on the work is being published in the February 20 issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal). Read more from this post.

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Researchers studying 120 British youth from inner-city areas found that mothers who became depressed when pregnant were four times as likely to have children who were violent at 16. This was true for both boys and girls. The mothers' depression, in turn, was predicted by their own aggressive and disruptive behavior as teens. Read more from this post.

A new study shows that children adopted early from foster care didn't differ from children who were raised in their birth families but that children adopted from institutional care performed worse than those raised in families on tests measuring visual memory and attention, learning visual information, and impulse control. Findings suggest that children make tremendous advances in cognitive functioning once they reach their adoptive families but the impact of early deprivation is difficult to reverse completely. Read more from this post.

A new study of young children in orphanages in Bucharest, Romania, has found that children placed in foster care before age 2 were more apt to develop secure attachments to their foster parents than those who entered foster care after age 2. In contrast, the study found that children cared for in institutions who weren't placed in foster care were more likely to have unusual and abnormal patterns of attachments to their caregivers. Read more from this post.

A new national study suggests that preschool-aged children are likely to have a lower risk for obesity if they regularly engage in one or more of three specific household routines: eating dinner as a family, getting adequate sleep and limiting their weekday television viewing time. The study showed that 4-year-olds living in homes with all three routines had an almost 40 percent lower prevalence of obesity than did children living in homes that practiced none of these routines. Read more from this post.

Advanced maternal age is linked to a significantly elevated risk of having a child with autism, regardless of the father's age, according to an exhaustive study of all births in California during the 1990s by UC Davis Health System researchers. Read more from this post.

What Makes a Young Champion? 2010 (Singapore) is a youth-oriented forum in celebration of Singapore 2010. The two-day forum takes place on the weekend before the inaugural Youth Olympic Games, and encourages youths to discover and explore the various aspects of championship in new and different ways. Read more from this post.

On Tuesday, February 9, from 2:45pm - 4:45pm, role models Julia Baggs and Kelby Thornton from Chevron Corporation are introducing Techbridge girls from Holbrook Elementary School in Concord to the science of geology with a hands-on engineering activity involving layer cake. Read more from this post.