VLEMX "keep informed"

By Betsy Rothstein on Mar 01, 2010 08:54 AM President Obama's recent physical has revealed that the President is in great health. Still, the reports from members of the White House Press Corp. and others indicate he still needs to work on "smoking cessation." This morning's NYT story discusses Obama's 30-year smoking habit. Read it here . Read Time's Karen Tumulty's report here . See ABC Jake Tapper's "Political Punch" report here . On a different matter altogether, NBC's Luke Russert tweets,"Does anybody else find it weird that people are so interested in Mr. Obama's colon health?" And New York Daily News's Ken Bazinet : "Not a big surprise jock POTUS is declared to be in 'excellent health.' He's got to avoid the fries, but work hard/play hard is lesson here."

Snoozing refreshes the brain's capacity to learn, study finds By Randy Dotinga HealthDay Reporter SUNDAY, Feb. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Want to ace that next test? Try taking a mid-afternoon siesta. While the findings are preliminary, new research raises the prospect that sleep, specifically a lengthy afternoon nap, prepares the brain to remember things. Think of it as similar to rebooting a computer to get it to work more smoothly. "Sleep is not just for the body. It's very much for the brain," said study author Matthew Walker, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Walker and colleagues divided 39 young adults into two groups. At noon, all the participants took part in a memory exercise that required them to remember faces and link them with names. Then the researchers took part in another memory exercise at 6 p.m., after 20 had napped for 100 minutes during the break. Those who remained awake performed...