San Francisco  - Teenagers who watch a lot of television or spend long hours playing video games run a higher risk for depression as adults, according to a US study published this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

In the study, which began in 1995, 4,100 adolescents were asked about their television viewing habits and use of other electronic media such as video games. None of the participants had symptoms of depression when the study began.

Washington, Feb 3 : A beach vacation may turn out to be hazardous for your kids, for a new study has found that sunny holidays can make children vulnerable to future skin cancer risk.

The study, led by Lori Crane, Ph. D., M. P. H., chair of the Department of Community and Behavioral Health at the Colorado School of Public Health, found that vacationing at the shore led to a 5 percent increase in nevi (more commonly called "moles") among 7-year-old children.

Amsterdam  - A Dutch national has died of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, or mad cow disease, the Dutch Royal Institute for Health and the Environment RIVM said in a statement released on Monday.

The patient died in early January.

Post-mortem investigations performed by the Utrecht Medical Center, the teaching hospital affiliated with Utrecht University, and the Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease expertise centre in Rotterdam, confirmed the patient died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

Washington, Feb 02 : A new study, led by an Indian-origin researcher, has shown that sleep duration is linked to changes in the levels of specific cytokines that are important in regulating inflammation.

The results of the study, conducted by Dr. Sanjay R. Patel, assistant professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his colleagues, suggest that inflammation may be the pathway linking extreme sleep durations to an increased risk for disease.

New Delhi - At least five newborns were killed Saturday after a fire broke out in the maternity ward of a government-run hospital in India's northern state of Punjab, officials said.

The tragedy occurred at Rajendra Hospital in Patiala city, 60 kilometres south of the state capital, Chandigarh, city police chief Gurmit Chauhan told reporters.

A total of 10 children receiving treatment for jaundice were kept in phototherapy units when the machines caught fire, apparently due to a short-circuit, he said.

New York  - Researchers in Canada have developed a blood test that could make it possible to detect mad cow disease in animals months before they exhibit symptoms of the illness.

"That would be a great breakthrough because then we would not have to examine the brain of the dead animal, instead we'd have a simple, quick test, similar to a paternity test," German molecular biologist Christoph Sensen of the University of Calgary told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa in an interview on Friday.