E-Cigarette Use Falls Among Teens

Vaping and marijuana use more popular among teens than regular cigarettes, according to NIH

A Betamorph E-Cigs employee exhaling vapor from an electric cigarette at the company's store in Albuquerque, N.M. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS

E-cigarette use among teens dropped in 2016, reversing an upward trend that had prompted the U.S. Surgeon General to recommend increased regulation and taxation.

Among high-school seniors, 12% this year said they had used e-cigarettes in the past month compared with 16% in 2015, according to the National Institutes of Health’s annual Monitoring the Future survey.

E-cigarettes and marijuana are both more popular among teens than regular cigarettes, whose use among teens has been declining for more than two decades, according to the survey. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor.

Among high-school seniors, 23% said they had used marijuana in the past month, and 11% said they had smoked conventional cigarettes. Some 13% of high-school seniors said they had used tobacco with a hookah in the past year, down from 23% in 2014, the peak since the survey began measuring hookah use in 2010.

Lenovo K6 Note Price Leaked Before Launch, Starts At Rs 14,999

The Lenovo K6 Note, which was initially unveiled at IFA 2016, is all set to launch in India this week. Recent company tweets suggest that the upcoming Lenovo device will arrive in India as soon as December 14th. However, Indian e-commerce website OnlyMobiles has jumped the gun and revealed the price ahead of the official launch.

The Lenovo K6 Note flaunts a 5.5-inch Full HD display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. It comes in all-metal unibody design, boasting Dolby Audio surround sound technology and stereo speakers at the back.

Under the hood, it is powered by a 1.4GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor coupled with Adreno 505 GPU for graphics. The phone comes in two variants — 3GB and 4GB RAM. The internal memory of 32GB is further expandable up to 128GB by means of a microSD card support.

Terminally ill boy dies in Santa's arms

(CNN) - Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Sam Venable knew he'd found a sad story, but he didn't know just how many hearts it would break.

Venable's column about a terminally ill 5-year-old boy dying in Santa's arms has spread everywhere since its publication Sunday in the Tennessee newspaper. Among other things, it nails the emotional richness of the holiday season.

"I've gotten a big response to this," Venable told CNN. "People have told me that they were crying when they read it, and I tell them that I was crying when I wrote it."

It all started several weeks ago when Eric Schmitt-Matzen, the Santa in Venable's column, got a call after work.

Can Virtual Reality Help Women Cope With Childbirth?

Clinical trials in Los Angeles plan to explore how virtual reality can be used to deal with acute pain through coaching and distraction. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

Clinical trials are using a VR headset to help manage pain during labor

rin Martucci had been enjoying the beach vista and gazing at a flock of birds overhead when something shook her view. The voice of Ralph Anderson, her gynecologist, broke through the sound of the waterfall next to her.

“We’re ready to push!” he said, gently taking Martucci’s virtual reality headset off and bringing her back to a hospital room at Orange Regional Medical Center in Middletown, New York. Martucci, 40, looked around at her husband and mother, their voices swirling excitedly around her: “She’s crowning! She’s ready!”

“I was like, ‘Wait, what are you doing?’. I thought I needed the goggles to push!,” Martucci says. She had been so engrossed in her virtual beachside hideaway, she hadn’t realised that her baby’s head was starting to show. It was time to take off the goggles.

Martucci is believed to be the first woman to use virtual reality (VR) for pain management during labor. With more women moving away from scheduled C-sections – which accounted for 32% of US births in 2015 – VR might offer another drug-free pain option during birth.

“I was on a beach, and there was a fire going,” Martucci recalls. “Wherever you moved, the scene moved with you. If I looked up, I saw the galaxy and the sun setting. On the right, there was a waterfall and a lot of movement with birds,” Martucci says. From time to time, a woman with an English accent peppered Martucci’s virtual world with guidance.

“You wanted to listen to her,” she says. “I remember her focusing on the breathing and your body tensing and relaxing, and tensing and relaxing. She kept saying ‘Focus on the birds,’” says Martucci. “It was really very calming. She would teach me how to breathe and be really in touch with your body.”

‘It made me feel I’m OK here’

Martucci had declined an epidural earlier in the day when she started to think her labor contractions were becoming too painful to manage on her own, but she was open to Anderson’s suggestion to try a pre-programmed VR headset.

Which iPhone 8 rumors can we trust?

The iPhone 8 is nine months away, but we’re already expecting it to have OLED and wireless charging. Watch the video to find out why.