The old ‘eight glasses a day’ rule isn’t based on science, and experts say some of us may be overdoing it — It’s 10:30 in the morning, and I’m already peeing for the fourth time today. I peed when I woke up at 6:30 a.m. Then I drank a glass of water, had my habitual three cups of coffee, and peed a couple more times over the course of the next few…

Walking barefoot or in minimalist shoes can prevent multiple health problems — Where I live, in southwest Germany, there are a bewildering number of shoe stores that specialize in barefoot-style footwear. I’ve counted at least four Barfußschuhläden within a mile of my home. I’ve asked my local friends about this, and they shrug and say things like “Freiburg is an eco-city” or…

Heavy drinking impacts the parts of your brain that store memories — In 2006, a 24-year-old Seattle man was arrested and charged with the murder of four people — two women and two children — who were stabbed to death in their home. The evidence against the man was considerable and included the fact that he’d tried to burn the house down…

DMT — a psychedelic linked to near-death experiences — is the focus of new depression research — In December of 1990, a psychiatrist named Rick Strassman injected two men with N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, a potent hallucinogenic compound better known as DMT. “I died and went to heaven,” one of the men recounted to Strassman after the drug had worn off. “It was a cosmic blowtorch, a tempest of color.” …

Paying too much attention to your emotional state can make you miserable — If you want to feel slightly less happy right this minute, there’s an easy way to make that happen: Ask yourself how happy you’re feeling. “The moment you check in — how happy am I now? — you feel happiness less,” says Iris Mauss, PhD, a professor of psychology at…

New research on ‘cognitive replay’ underscores the problem of information overload — People in the radio business call them “buttons.” They’re those short music clips you hear in between news segments on NPR and other stations. Bob Boilen, former director of NPR’s All Things Considered, once talked about these music interludes in an interview with the American Journalism Review. He called them…

Acne was once rare. Today, up to 95% of American teens have it. — In 1990, a Swedish doctor named Staffan Lindeberg traveled to the Island of Kitava in Papua New Guinea. Kitava was home to a few thousand indigenous inhabitants — people whose lives were little touched by modernity. They had no cars or electricity, and their diets were “virtually uninfluenced by Western…

And how modern life is ripping them down — It happens to everyone now and then. You walk into a room and find you’ve forgotten why you’re there. Was there something you needed? Or something you wanted to do? Whatever it was, it’s gone. Psychologists call this “the doorway effect.” For a 2011 study in the Quarterly Journal of…

Social media may be uniquely dangerous for those who are struggling — If you login to Instagram right now and search for #depression, you’ll see a warning. It reads: “Posts with words you’re searching for often encourage behavior that can cause harm and even lead to death.” You can bypass this warning and see the tagged posts. Or you can click on…