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On February 6, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors marijuana ad hoc committee is going to hold a town hall meeting to give public a chance to hear a concise update and share recommendations about potential revisions of the medical marijuana cultivation ordinance code 9.31 of the county.

The state legislature passed the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act during the final hours of the 2015 legislative session to oversee the entire industry.

In response to the latest legislation, the supervisors have come up with ad hoc committee, including Supervisors John McCowen and Tom Woodhouse, for reviewing the county’s ordinance and report back to the board with recommended revisions to deal with local conditions and concerns considering the latest new laws.

Too much Facebooking could be a cause of insufficient sleep. The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers conducted a study, suggesting that heavy social media use may cause havoc with your sleep patterns.

Earlier studies have discovered that use of tech gadgets like computers and smartphones could mess with the sleep of adolescents and children.

The Pitt researchers focused mainly at young adults and discovered that the people who said that they spend a lot of time on Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine or LinkedIn have more chances of reporting sleep disturbances.

As per UC San Francisco researchers, a latest study has indicated that regular caffeine intake doesn’t contribute to extra heartbeats or heart palpitations.

The study results will be published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association. The results have challenged the broadly held clinical belief that caffeine products can cause extra heartbeats.

During the study, intake of caffeinated products was measured by the researchers for more than a year long period by roughly 1,400 randomly selected patients who belonged to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Cardiovascular Health Study database of about 6,000 patients, though the sampling didn’t include individuals who steadily had extra heartbeats.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama called for the quick development of tests, vaccines and treatments for battling the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus. The virus has been associated with birth defects. It is expected that the virus may spread to the United States in hotter months.

While citing the latest study, the US health officials are estimating that the virus may reach areas where 60% of the US population lives. They have decided to increase their efforts to study the relation between Zika virus infections and birth defects. Top health and national security officials briefed Obama on the potential spread of the virus on Tuesday.

Smoking kills -- the phrase holds true for all people, but if you have breast cancer then it kills you even earlier than supposed. To make the statement even more believable, a study published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology states that if women suffering from breast cancer continue to smoke after diagnosis, they die early than those quitting smoking.

The study was done on more than 20,000 white women between the age of 20 and 79, all diagnosed with breast cancer between 1988 and 2008. The researchers, after six years to diagnosis, contacted more than 4,500 of the women to know about their smoking status.

American government panel has recommended medical health care to cure depression through screening. In past, America has suffered huge financial losses due to depression. Screening as a treatment can aid in reducing or stopping symptoms of depression from coming back. Screening would be used to cure adults, especially pregnant and postpartum women.

This new recommendation is an update to similar recommendation issued in 2009 that targeted adults for depression screening. The suggestion was found published in Journal of the American Medical Association. The panel says people screened should be given accurate diagnosis, effective treatment and appropriate follow-up.