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It can be depressing to grow old, but there’s a ray of sunshine around every corner. For instance, a drug developed to treat leukemia has a surprising side effect?it restores color to gray hair. News hasn’t been this good since a heart medicine was found to grow hair on bald pates (and is now sold in drugstores as Rogaine). French doctors treated 133 cancer patients with the drug Gleevec and found that five men and four women who started out with gray hair had their old color back by the end of the treatment.
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Marriage is so important for men’s health that single guys have more risk of dying than smokers. A study done in the U.K. finds that even when the effects of smoking, drinking, overeating and lack of exercise are taken into account, married men still have a much lower risk of death. The effect is less for women.

Professor Andrew Oswald says smokers should get married as soon as possible. “Forget cash,” he says. “It is as clear as day from the data that marriage, rather than money, is what keeps people alive. It makes perfect sense to ask how a ring of gold can possibly do this. But the honest answer is, that we don’t know.”
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Kids who live in a home with at least 2 dogs or cats for the first year of their life are half as likely to become allergic to them than kids who grow up with only one dog or cat, or none. These new findings contradict traditional medical advice that pets cause allergies in children. Dennis Ownby, of the Medical College of Georgia, says, “Evidence is mounting that the opposite is true. These parents don’t have to feel guilty that they are increasing their child’s risk for allergies or asthma.” Exposure to two dogs or cats also cuts the risk of developing other allergies, to things like dust mites and pollen.
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There’s not much room on the International Space Station, so everything must be recycled?including urine and sweat, which can end up back in the water astronauts drink. Quenching your thirst with what was once flushed down the toilet seems repulsive, but it’s necessary in space?and we may be doing it here on Earth before long.
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