Cigarette smoking not only contributes to wrinkle and premature skin aging but it also turns the skin yellow in the face and the whole body.

According to a study, the total number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day and total years smoked are linked together with the amount of skin damage.

When skin is exposed to sunlight, it becomes coarse, wrinkled and discolored with a pale yellow tint.

Smoking can also damage the connective tissue that supports both the skin and the internal organs which means the skin loses its elasticity and forms wrinkles.

Cigarette smoke, among other things, causes blood vessels beneath the skin to constrict, reducing blood supply to the skin, therefore the previous plumy looked skin turns pale and yellow.

Feeling wronged at work and treated unfair in life can increase a person's risk of suffering a heart attack, researchers have said.

In a unique study that linked fairness with heart health, researchers from the University College London found that those who felt they are being unfairly treated by their employer, family or society are twice as likely to suffer heart diseases as those who perceived the world as fair. They also had poorer physical and mental health overall.

Researchers tracked the health of 8,000 British working civil servants for almost 11 years and asked them to score their responses to the statement: "I often have the feeling that I am being treated unfairly" on a scale of 1 to 6, where 1 equals strongly disagree and 6 equals strongly agree.

Scores of 1 or 2 were categorized as low, those of 3 or 4 as moderate and those of 5 or 6 as high. Tabulation of data found that of the 3,000 subjects who felt they were unfairly treated, 64 out of 966 in the low category suffered a heart attack or angina.

This compared to 98 out of 1,368 in the moderate and 51 out of 567 in the high categories. People in the high category were 55% more likely to have heart disease compared to those who did not feel they were unfairly treated. Women and those with lower incomes and status significantly felt they were being unfairly treated.

Reacting to the study, Dr. Ashok Seth, head of cardiology at Max Healthcare, said, "Because people are better off nowadays, earning much more money than what they did 15 years ago, stress of running a house has decreased significantly."

"In comparison, workplace tension due to cut-throat competition has climbed significantly. Today, most of us spend a minimum of 10 hours at work, five days a week. This means that the majority of our time when we are awake, we are under work stress. This drastically affects our cardiac health."

The study appeared in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health recently.

Scientists have come up with a new genetically based remedy that is used to regenerate hair follicles resulting in regrowth of hair.

Hair loss affects millions of people around the world, and the leading cause of it is excess testosterone.

Researchers previously believed that mammals could not regenerate hair follicles since hair follicles become dormant and they don't have regenerative qualities.

George Cotsarelis, a dermatologist said, "We have found that we can influence wound healing with 'wnts' [a large family of secreted protein growth factors] or other proteins that allow the skin to heal in a way that has less scarring and includes all the normal structures of the skin, such as hair follicles and oil glands, rather than just a scar." With the introduction of wnt proteins, scientists have been able to double the number of hair follicles."

Human head has approximately 100,000 follicles and each follicle produces a single strand of hair. More than 30 percent of men lose their hair before reaching the old age.

Specialists suggest that scalp massage and stretch can help in improving blood flow to the hair follicles and slows down the baldness.

A costly treatment method to baldness is hair restoration, which involves a painful hair implants and surgery.

In an expensive and tedious surgery called Flap, a portion of bald area is replaced with hair-bearing skin especially from the back of the nape. The surgery does not have a high result.

Another method to treat baldness is using prescription drugs like Regain and Propecia.

A boy born in mountainous San Marino in northeast Italy will likely live to 80, but newborn girls in Japan have even better prospects.

But Sierra Leone registered the shortest male life expectancy at 37 years, the same as for girls in Swaziland, the bottom of the female list, according to WHO's "World Health Statistics 2007''.

Females in Japan have a life expectancy of 86, the same as in last year's WHO statistics.San Marino men, who were tied with Japanese men last year at 79, have added a year to go ahead.

Following San Marino on the male side were Australia, Iceland, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland at 79 years and then Canada, Israel, Italy, Monaco and Singapore at 78. France was tied for the place at 77 years with a group of countries including New Zealand and Britain. Germany was at 76 years, and the United States was tied with Cuba and other countries for 33rd place at 75.

Countries with long-lived women include Monaco, 85 years, and Andorra, Australia, France, Italy, San Marino, Spain and Switzerland at 84. Canada tied Iceland and Sweden at 83 years for women, and Germany was in a group at 82 years. Britain came in at 81 years and the United States tied for 32nd place with Costa Rica and Denmark at 80 years.

Afghanistan is the toughest place for babies to survive, with an infant mortality rate of 165 in 1,000 live births, compared with the two babies who die per 1,000 born in Singapore or Iceland.

But Sierra Leone is worse than Afghanistan for mothers' survival, with a maternal mortality rate of 2,000 per 100,000 live births. The rate for Afghanistan was 1,900. Ireland did best at four deaths, followed by Spain, Italy, Finland, Canada and Austria at five deaths.

The report also noted that tobacco use had a "high prevalence among the world's poorest people,'' and suggested that the low life expectancy in some countries could be linked to high rates of diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

US scientists fear a gene thought to be crucial for chemotherapy to work may instead help cancer survive or help it come back again.

The p53 gene's job is to tell faulty cells to self destruct, and so experts assumed it helped in killing cancer cells that chemotherapy had injured.

But a trial at the Georgia Institute of Technology has found chemotherapy patients with normally functioning p53 fare worse than those with mutated p53.

If this is the case, a new strategy for fighting cancer might be to develop drugs to disable the functioning of p53 in the tumors of patients undergoing chemotherapy.

Lead researcher John McDonald explained: "We propose that p53 may help repair some of the cancer cells damaged by chemotherapy leading to tumor recurrence and explaining the higher mortality rate of patients whose tumors had a functioning p53.

"If we are correct, inhibiting p53 in tumors being treated with chemotherapy may substantially improve patients' long-term survival."

His team studied tumor samples from patients with ovarian cancer. Some of the cancer patients had been treated with chemotherapy prior to surgery, and some had not.

Only 30% of the chemotherapy patients who had normally functioning p53 were alive five years later, compared to 70% of those with mutated, non-functioning p53.

Studies suggest that p53 actually continues to protect some cancer cells from the effects of chemotherapy. This will be a very important finding if it is confirmed in other experiments - and it might help in developing better ways to treat ovarian cancers.