Binge drinking can cause absent-mindedness and forgetfulness in many teenager's days later, a study says. A team from Northumbria and Keele universities compared 26 binge drinkers with 34 non-bingers in memory tests, and found the drinkers suffered from short-term memory loss.

The scientists looked at students aged 17 to 19, the age group when the brain is still developing. Researchers said that binge drinking was defined as "at least eight units a session for a man and six for a woman, once or twice a week," BBC reports

early 30 surveys by France's INSERM, a public organization dedicated to biological, medical and public health research, have established a link between lack of sleep and obesity in both children and adults.

Sleep loss caused a 23 to 24 percent increase in hunger, translating into an extra 350 to 500 kilocalories a day, "which for a young sedentary adult of normal weight could lead to a major amount of added weight," Spiegel said according to Agency France Presse

There are improvements in the physical and emotional health of Canadian youths, particularly on areas of bullying, smoking and couch-potato behavior. According to William Boyce of Queen's University, bullying incidents in 2006 among 9,500 Grade 6 to 10 students across the nation slightly dipped to 40 percent from 43 percent in 2002.

Boyce explained the slight drop to higher awareness in campuses and in Canadian society about the negative effects of physical, verbal, sexual and cyberspace bullying. But racial bullying had gone up a little bit, Boyce admitted

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a press conference Tuesday he favors the reclassification of cannabis to a class B drug instead of its present class C status. The move would reverse cannabis' downgrade by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, which was seen as having encouraged its heavier use by young Britons.

Brown's policy comes ahead of a report slated to come out this month following a formal review of cannabis' classification ordered by the prime minister on June as soon as he took office

Overwhelming evidence indicated that skipping breakfast is directly linked with fat gain. The results come from a five-year study called "Project Eating Among Students" or EAT, designed to examine the eating and exercise habits of 15-year-old adolescents at the time of the survey.

About 1,007 boys and 1,215 girls of different races and economic standings from public schools in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, agreed to undergo the study