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Jordyn Bristow can’t remember how or why she became unbearably repulsed by feet. All she knows is that starting about three years ago, when she caught a glimpse of someone’s bare feet, she wanted to vomit. The urge hasn’t let up. “I start gagging—it’s horrible,” says Bristow, 18, who lives in Tasmania, Australia. She was recently at a grocery store when her dad pointed out an older man wearing flip-flops, which accentuated his cracked and apparently infected ingrown toenails. She started dry-heaving and had to leave the store and sit outside, struggling to catch her breath.Bristow has podophobia: an overwhelming fear of feet. While it’s unclear exactly how many people share this aversion, experts agree it’s rare. (It’s basically nonexistent in scientific literature.) That means it’s often ...

Most people are familiar with the best things to eat for a healthy heart: vegetables, low-fat dairy, and lean proteins like fish. Some fish like salmon also have the added benefit of being full of omega-3 fatty acids, which are healthy fats that can help to raise good cholesterol and lower triglycerides.Or so we thought. Studies on the benefits of fish oil, and fish oil supplements, haven’t been as conclusive when it comes to actually preventing heart disease for people who aren’t at higher risk. In the latest, published in BMJ, researchers report that people with no history of heart problems who regularly took fish oil supplements actually increased their risk of atrial fibrillation.The study involved more than 415,000 men and women in the health-data hub UK Biobank who agreed to share th...

For years, federal physical activity guidelines have told Americans how much time they should spend moving each week: at least 150 minutes, or 75 minutes if workouts are particularly vigorous. But the popularity of wearable fitness devices has made many people obsessively track their step counts instead, often shooting for the goal of 10,000 per day (even though some studies suggest that number is arbitrary).Is the length of your workout or your daily step count a better measure of wellness?“Both are good metrics,” says Dr. Rikuta Hamaya, a preventive-medicine researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and lead author of the new study. But Hamaya and his colleagues wanted to know if one was better than the other, so they designed a head-to-head comparison. The resulting study, pu...

(WASHINGTON) — Cyberattacks against water utilities across the country are becoming more frequent and more severe, the Environmental Protection Agency warned Monday as it issued an enforcement alert urging water systems to take immediate actions to protect the nation's drinking water.About 70% of utilities inspected by federal officials over the last year violated standards meant to prevent cyberthreats, the agency said. Officials urged even small water systems to improve protections against cyberattacks, noting that recent assaults from adversarial nation states like Russia and Iran have impacted water systems of all sizes.Some water systems are falling short in basic ways, the alert said, including failure to change default passwords or cut off system access to former employees. Because ...