Today more than 1 in every 3 baby boomers — that huge glut of people born between 1948 and 1964 — is unmarried. And those unmarried boomers are disproportionately women. As this vast generation rushes into retirement, there's a growing concern among experts on aging: Who will take care of all these people when they're too old to care for themselves?

It's a question many of the experts take personally. "That is what scares me, says Sara Rix, who works for the AARP Public Policy Institute, studying the economic prospects of women in the workforce. "Because I am one of those people," she says, "and I do think about it."

"Oh, I've got wonderful nieces and nephews," Rix says, noting that's what a lot of her boomer peers claim, too. "Well, in fact, they've got their families. They've got their in-laws. They've got their parents. And I don't think it's reasonable to expect much out of them."

Kathleen Kelly, who runs the Family Caregiver Alliance and the National Center on Caregiving in San Francisco, says she's seeing the same sort of concern in her social circle. "I'm in my 50s, and my friends are all talking about, 'Could we all move in together? Could we buy an apartment building and all live together?' There are all sorts of permutations of this conversation," Kelly says. "But it really is something that people are thinking about, particularly women."

And, because boomers are boomers, some are doing more than just thinking about it. Already, there's a small but apparently growing movement of boomer women forming group houses with their single peers.

One of those homes belongs to Bonnie Moore. She's a pert, 60-something divorcee who lives in a well-kept, five-bedroom house in Bowie, Md., a cozy suburb of Washington, D.C.

In order to stay in her house after her divorce, Moore needed financial help. But she wanted to do more than just add boarders who would help pay the bills, she says. The home she's organized instead is "a little bit like family, a little bit like roommates, a little bit like a sorority house," she says from the sofa of her softly lit living room. "It just evolves."

Moore, an attorney and CPA, isn't actually childless. She has a grown son who lives in Utah and has been urging Moore to move there to be closer to him and his family. "He's just sort of saying, 'Well, Mom you're old now; we have to take care of you,' " Moore says. "And I'm saying, 'I'm not old. I've got 20 years out there in my yard, thank you very much,' " she says with a laugh.

Moore has been careful about selecting as housemates women who get along, but who also have a sense of independence. "All of us, we have our own separate lives," she says. "We do our own separate things, but we'll meet up in the kitchen and chitchat. And then we'll all go our different ways, which makes it nice. None of us are joined at the hip, and yet we all live together and do our own thing and live in the same house."

Lorene Solivan is one of Moore's three current roommates — "the youngest," Solivan says proudly, having just turned 60.

Solivan, an event manager for a food company, had been living in an apartment in Northern Virginia. But she was having financial troubles of her own and was looking to downsize.

"And then I saw the ad on Craigslist: GOLDEN GIRLS HOUSE. I said, 'Oh, that looks like fun,' " she says.

Solivan, who does much of the group's cooking, says it's been a nice transition for her. To live with a built-in social group of people your own age is "a big plus," she says, "whether you're 20, 40, or 60 — whatever the case may be."

That's why Bonnie Moore is trying to take her concept and expand it. She already has a website and is working on a guide to help other single boomer women set up houses like hers. "I think it'll be fun," she says. "And I'd like to be part of various seminars and workshops for women [about] the whole idea of living communally and learning to get along in this kind of environment."

Still, there are a lot of obstacles. One big one is that most boomers don't realize they might need help getting or paying for long-term care if their health falters.

"I call it the 70-70-70 conundrum," says Bruce Chernof, president and CEO of The SCAN Foundation, which focuses on long-term health care issues. "Seventy percent of people over the age of 65 will need some form of long-term care supports as they age," he says. But when you look at polling, "roughly 70 percent of Americans don't actually think they're likely to need it, and roughly 70 percent think Medicare will probably cover it when they get there."

The problem, of course, he adds, is that "those last two 70 percents are not true."

Then there's the numbers problem. "We know that ... about a third of baby boomers are single," says Kathleen Kelly. "But we also know that there's a large percentage of those that are in their 50s and 60s [who] are getting divorced, and so we're going to have more single individuals in the future. We just haven't seen this before."

At the same time, most boomers have had fewer children than previous generations did, and many boomers have no children.

"So there's less adult children to take the place of the caregiving cohort that currently is providing ... caregiving to their parents," she says. And today, family caregiving provides an estimated $450 billion a year worth of unpaid care.

Sara Rix of AARP says a big problem for single boomer women is that they're not financially prepared to hire the caregivers they might need if they don't have family members to volunteer the time. "[These single women] are still likely to be concentrated in what we've traditionally called the 'pink collar' jobs," she says, which are "the lower wage, low benefit occupations. So when they reach old age, they often reach old age without pension coverage."

Most of these women will have Social Security, Rix says — assuming that they are eligible, and that the rules don't change between now and when they retire. But for many older women, that will be all, or nearly all the money they have to live on, she says, "and it's not going to pay for a lot of care — formal care. So it's a frightening future for a lot of women."

There are things women can do to make that future a little less frightening, says Kelly. Some suggestions are pretty obvious, like maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle.

But another bit of advice may be less intuitive, Kelly says, "and that is to invest in social relationships and networks." She doesn't mean the sort of social networks people create on the Internet, but rather, "a community of individuals [living with or near you, so] that you may be able to share tasks and responsibilities as you grow older."

That brings us back to Bonnie Moore, who says that deciding to form a group house was about more than just financial necessity. "I think women naturally are more community oriented," Moore says. "It's just part of the woman's nature."

And besides, she adds, "to come home and have someone say, 'Hi, how was your day?' ... That's really nice sometimes."

So if you're a boomer and you liked that group house you shared in college or just after, good for you. The United States is one of the few developed nations that has no organized public policy for providing long-term care — so group living may be in your future as well as your past.

A massive tornado swept through the Oklahoma City area Monday afternoon, leaving ruin in its path.

Moore Medical Center, which stood directly in the tornado's path, was devastated. But the workers, patients and their families in the hospital escaped.

Nick Stremble, a registered nurse and manager at the hospital, told Shots Tuesday what he saw.

"My ER is destroyed," he said. "My department was at the Moore Medical Center. I mean it's wiped out. The building is roped off so we're not doing anything there."

About 250 or 300 people were inside as the storm approached. The staff was able to direct everyone to designated zones located in the center of the hospital.

"[We] were able to move everbody to a safe location ... [and] get everybody where they needed to go and kind of hunkered down," Stremble said.

Stremble was doing a final sweep of the floors when he saw the storm heading for the hospital:

"I could see the debris in the air, and there was no mistaking it was going to be hitting the hospital. It was just right in front of me, so I ran downstairs to the safe zone and let everybody know they needed to hunker down. You could hear the noise picking up and wind kind of picking up and howling. And you can start to feel pressure on the doors, so I kind of braced the door with my back, trying to keep the door closed."

Stremble saw a door near him get sucked open and then he prepared himself as things deteriorated:

"My door got [blown] inward and I got pinned between the door and the wall. ... I was facing down the hall, and I could see all the folks being hit with the wind that was coming through the building, and the people that were kind of along the wall just kind of starting to tumble and roll and be pushed down the hall. And they all kind of ended up in a pile, down in front of another set of doors."

He said it's tough to comprehend the damage. "You can't recognize your landmarks — everything is just flat. It's disorienting to look around and not know where the streets should be."

The staff at Moore Medical Center staff is now working at other branches of the Norman Regional Health System and preparing for the possibility of more storms and more patients.

Health insurance deductibles typically only go one direction: up.

It's not unusual for people these days to be responsible for paying thousands of dollars in medical claims before most plan benefits kick in.

Rewards to policyholders for claims that don't meet the annual deductible can be a boon for healthy people. But the approach might not pass the smell test next year when the Affordable Care Act bans discriminating against people based on their health.

A "deductible credit" program, sponsored by UnitedHealthcare's Golden Rule Insurance Co., is available in 26 states on most of the company's renewable plans sold on the individual market, according to Ellen Laden, a spokeswoman.

Here's how it works: If someone has a plan with, say, a $3,000 deductible and doesn't have that amount in claims the first year, the deductible is reduced by 20 percent, to $2,400. The following year, the deductible falls by another 20 percent if the deductible isn't met, to $1,800. The third year, the amount can shrink another 10 percent, to $1,500, half the original deductible and the maximum reduction allowed under the program.

"It's a way to retain customers," says Carrie McLean, a senior manager of customer care at eHealthInsurance.com, an online vendor. Policyholders who might otherwise go shopping for a plan when they get their annual rate increase may be persuaded to stick with the same company if they think they're getting a better deal than they could elsewhere, she says.

Of course, as deductibles have risen in recent years, people are less likely to meet them. According to an analysis by eHealthInsurance.com of one large insurer's 2012 claims, just under 11 percent of people with a $2,500 deductible met the deductible for that year. For those with a $5,000 deductible plan, the figure dropped to just under 4 percent. Only 3 percent of people with a $7,500 deductible had that much in claims, and at the $10,000 deductible level the figure was just over 2 percent.

That's not true for the smaller number of people with serious medical conditions. Many of them regularly meet and exceed even high deductible thresholds.

Starting next year, the Affordable Care Act will prohibit insurers on the individual market from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging them more.

And Timothy Jost, a health law professor at Washington and Lee University, said the deductible credit program could be considered discriminatory under the federal health law next year.

"It's designed to permit continued cherry picking of patients," he says.

Golden Rule's Laden says the company is still finalizing its strategy for next year.

"We're currently reviewing the Affordable Care Act and its impact on the deductible credit feature to ensure that our products and practices remain in compliance with it and all other applicable laws," she said in a statement.

When movie stars become unbankable, they're no longer a slam dunk at the box office. When investments become unbankable, they're relegated to the Wall Street's junk pile. For ordinary Americans deemed unbankable — those who don't have a traditional checking or savings account — it can be hard to simply pay bills.

And that absence of a bank account is about to become a big problem for those who also lack health coverage — and for the health insurance companies trying to sell them coverage. After all, how do you sell a product to a customer who has no easy way to pay you?

One in five households in the U.S. have only a tenuous relationship with a traditional bank. Many of 51 million adults in these households rely on check-cashing stores and money lenders, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The federal health law requires most Americans to carry health insurance starting next January. The presents a particular problem for those households. Most health plans accept a credit card for the first month's premium payment and then require customers to pay monthly with a check or an electronic funds transfer from a checking account.

Those options won't work for the so-called unbankables looking to purchase health coverage with federal subsidies through online insurance marketplaces, says Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a firm that is advising private insurers and states on how to comply with the law. "You don't want to take these millions of unbankable people through the entire enrollment process and then at the end of line say, 'OK, the only way you can pay for your share of the premium is with a bank account number,' " he says.

The consequences could be severe. When your cable gets turned off, you miss The Walking Dead or Pawn Stars. But starting next year, if your insurance is canceled, you'll be breaking federal law and liable for any medical bills.

Researchers who study consumer financial behavior say people have their reasons for spurning banks. New immigrants, for example, may have distrusted the banks in their home country and brought that skepticism with them to the U.S. And for many people of modest means, overdrafts and fees charged by traditional banks can upend the financial balance in their household.

"The bank account is extremely stressful when you don't have a job that's reliable," says Tran, a 25 year-old community organizer and Ivy League graduate who lives south of San Francisco.

Her current employer doesn't offer her health benefits, and she was turned down, she says, when she applied for health coverage on her own. Tran hopes to get hired to a full-time position and asked that we use just her last name so it didn't give her bosses a bad impression.

Tran says when she took her new job and no longer had direct deposit, Bank of America began charging her, up to $12 a month. "I was not happy with the charges," she says.

Consumers who will be required to purchase health coverage will need payment options that are simple, easy and affordable, say consumer advocates and health care experts.

"I think there is a dawning awareness that this is a large problem," says Brian Haile, senior vice president for health policy at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service. Until last year, Haile was wrestling with this problem on behalf of the state of Tennessee, where he served as director of the Insurance Exchange Planning Initiative. "We raised these issues with the federal government well over a year ago and in a series of about four or five letters." Haile said he didn't get much of a response then.

Indeed, neither the Affordable Care Act, nor any other federal health laws, require health insurers to accept all forms of payment, such as credit cards or the cash-loaded, prepaid debit cards that many people without bank accounts often rely on.

Federal officials are wary of doing anything to discourage insurance companies from selling plans on the exchanges, say current and former state health officers who have pressed the federal Department of Health and Human Services for a ruling.

One of the largest players on the new exchanges is likely to be WellPoint, a Blue Cross and Blue Shield licensee. In an email, a WellPoint spokesperson says the company is "evaluating expanded payment options to members." Other insurers, including Cigna and UnitedHealthcare, are urging state officials in planning documents to allow companies to set their own payment policies.

Federal health officials issued a letter in April stating that all health plans selling coverage in the federally run insurance marketplaces in 28 states will have to accept payments in ways that don't discriminate against their customers, but didn't prescribe what those payments should be.

Varney is a reporter with our partner Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service.

Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie has been in the headlines, by her own choice for a change.

Genetic testing showed she was at high risk for breast cancer, so she decided to have a double mastectomy to improve her odds. She revealed her choice, and the thinking behind it, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

On Tuesday's Tell Me More, host Michel Martin spoke to a mother and daughter who faced the same issue.

Regina Brett is a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She wrote about the path she and her daughter Gabrielle (Gabe) Brett took in an award-winning series called "The Inheritance." Both women had prophylactic double mastectomies.

Regina says Jolie's action could alter the public discussion:

"You know, when we had surgery, people kind of rolled their eyes and said, 'Jeez, are you crazy? What are you making such a radical decision for?' So I think it's important somebody that famous has the gene and is honest about her decisions."

Gabe described why she decided to have a surgery because of her cancer risk:

"I just needed to know. I was going to ... you know, go through life believing I had a time bomb in me no matter what. So if I could get the relief of finding out I was negative and I was not a carrier, then I could relax a bit more. If I found out I was positive, then I felt like I could get the surveillance and the screening, regular mammograms, breast MRIs, and be really proactive about it. But not knowing was not going to be helpful."

Gabe on how she sees her decision in hindsight:

"No-brainer now that we have a family, and now that my priorities are different. The hardest part is actually coming to grips with, I'm going to remove a healthy part of my body. And I think once I made that decision, you know, the weeks leading up to surgery, I had a lot of anxiety, but honestly the minute I got rolled out of surgery and I was awake and alert, I felt such relief."

Regina, on the decision to not have reconstructive surgery:

"For me, I wasn't going to have breasts again. I would have maybe an implant with skin over it but for me it wasn't the breasts that I had known and loved my whole life. I wouldn't feel anything. I wouldn't feel if somebody touched me, and I realized I would only be having breasts for everyone else to look at and say 'wow, she looks great.' ... So I bought prosthetic breasts, and I named 'em Thelma and Louise."

Parents who want to keep their teenagers safe while they're driving might want to tuck them in bed early the night before.

Drowsiness is a well-known risk for adult drivers, but teenage drivers are more impaired than adults when facing an equivalent lack of sleep, an Australian study finds.

"Young people are particularly at risk for sleep deprivation," Alexandra Martiniuk, lead author of a study on sleep teens study's lead author, and a researchers at the George Institute in Sydney, said in an email to Shots. "It doesn't take drastic sleep reductions to increase the risk of crash."

And many young people aren't getting nearly enough sleep. In this study, which tracked the habits of almost 20,000 new drivers in Australia for two years, 10 percent of the 17-year-olds and 17 percent of the 20- to 24-year-olds said they slept for six hours a night or less.

That's a lot less than the 8 1/2 to 9 1/4 hours of sleep a night that teenagers need, according to other studies.

Six hours of sleep a night was enough to increase the young people's relative risk of an accident. Those short-sleepers were also more likely to engage in risky behaviors like drinking and using illegal drugs.

The large number of participants in this study, and the fact that it followed their behavior over time, make it more likely to be accurate than studies that ask people to remember what they did. The researchers relied on police reports of accidents.

The findings lend support to the use of graduated drivers' licenses that keep new drivers from driving at night. It found that the risk of accidents was greatest when young people were driving between 8 p.m. and dawn. This may help explain why most fatal accidents with teenagers happen at night, even though most of their driving is done during the day.

Drinking and driving poses much more of a risk than lack of sleep, but the study didn't have a way to measure the new drivers' blood alcohol level at the time of accidents. That could confuse this data, but the scientists are confident that the lack of sleep remains a risk even when accounting for other factors.

"This age group is just learning to drive," Martiniak told Shots. Blunting a new driver's shaky skills with sleep deprivation, she says, "makes for a dangerous combination."

The study was published online in JAMA Pediatrics.

When the sun rises over the Rio Grande Valley, the cries of the urracas — blackbirds — perched on the tops of palm trees swell to a noisy, unavoidable cacophony. That is also the strategy, it could be said, that local officials, health care providers and frustrated valley residents are trying to use to persuade Gov. Rick Perry and state Republican lawmakers to set aside their opposition and expand Medicaid, a key provision of the federal health law.

The Rio Grande Valley has a load of troubles: high unemployment, low-paying jobs, warring Mexican cartels, a meager tax base and legions of people without health insurance. While many of those woes seem incurable, expanding Medicaid to the region's uninsured is, to Paula Gomez, who runs several local health clinics, a no-brainer.

"I think if we're not ready, if Texas doesn't buy in in the next three months, shame on us," she says.

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation — 1 in 4 Texans has no health coverage — and the rate in the Rio Grande Valley is even higher. Medicaid is closed to anyone earning more than $196 a month, leaving many working adults ineligible and without coverage.

Under the health law, the federal government would pay the entire cost of the expansion for the first three years, then 90 percent in subsequent years. As it stands, Texas would have to spend about $1 billion a year over the next three years, say Democrats, to receive $27 billion in federal matching funds.

But Gov. Perry says Texas can ill afford to expand Medicaid, and he doesn't trust that the federal government will pay its promised share. At a news conference last month, he blasted Obamacare's Medicaid provisions:

"Seems to me an appropriate April Fool's Day event, makes it perfect to discuss something as foolish as Medicaid expansion, and to remind everyone that Texas will not be held hostage by the Obama administration's attempt to force us into the fool's errand of adding more than a million Texans to a broken system."

For now, uninsured patients in the Rio Grande Valley pay what they can for basic medical care, but specialty care — to follow up on a lump in the breast, for example — is almost always out of reach without some type of insurance, including Medicaid, according to Dr. Henry Imperial, the Brownsville Community Health Center's medical director. "Once you diagnose a cancer, then what? How are you going to give me chemotherapy or surgery or radiation therapy?" he asks.

Hospitals in Texas end up with millions in unpaid bills, and the counties, by state law, have to provide basic medical care to destitute residents. That has led a number of counties in the Rio Grande Valley — and elsewhere — to pass resolutions supporting the Medicaid expansion.

For local Republicans, that mild act of defiance against a powerful governor — who is opposed to every provision in the federal health law — can seem like political suicide. It's not something they're eager to draw attention to.

"It's contrary to what the [GOP] leadership in Austin is recommending, but we thought it was important enough to take a position," says Republican Carlos Cascos, the county's top elected official.

State Rep. Eddie Lucio III, a Democrat from Brownsville, faces daunting odds in trying to persuade the conservative Republicans who control the Legislature to buck Perry and approve a bill to expand Medicaid in Texas.

Lucio says he's not sure what effect, if any, the resolutions by county officials, including Republicans like Cascos, are having. There is ample pessimism here in Brownsville that lawmakers 350 miles away in Austin will ever understand life in the Valley.

But because there is no hard deadline for when Texas or any other state has to sign up for the Medicaid expansion, health clinic director Paula Gomez is pressing on. She says she still remembers fighting the state to get drinkable water in the Rio Grande Valley, and she'll patiently fight this war too.

Men who were diagnosed with ADHD as children are more likely to be obese in adulthood, according to a new study.

The men who had ADHD weighed 19 pounds more at age 41 than otherwise similar men who hadn't had ADHD as boys, the researchers found.

"It makes sense, because they're self-medicating with carbohydrates," says Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist in Sudbury, Mass., who has ADHD and treats adults with ADHD. "Carbs do the same thing that stimulant medications do — promote dopamine," says Hallowell, who wasn't involved in the latest study. "So you get the gallon of ice cream at midnight."

Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder may affect up to 11 percent of American children, the majority of them boys.

Earlier studies had suggested that adults with ADHD may be more likely to gain weight.

That research doesn't prove that the ADHD is causing the weight gain. And this new study doesn't prove that, either. But it does provide better evidence for a potential link because it followed the same group of people over time. It looked at a group of 111 boys with ADHD at age 8. Then their weight was assessed at age 41. The men with ADHD were then compared to similar men who didn't have ADHD as children.

The men who had had ADHD weighed an average of 213 pounds, and 41 percent of them were obese. By contrast, the men who hadn't had ADHD weighed 194 pounds on average, and 22 percent were obese.

The study leaders realized that weight was becoming an an issue for their participants when some who came in for MRI scans were too fat to fit in the machine.

"In most studies you eliminate those people," says F. Xavier Castellanos, a psychiatrist at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York and a co-author of the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. Instead, the researchers started collecting information on the participants' weight and body mass, or BMI.

This study doesn't figure out why boyhood ADHD might be causing weight problems in adulthood. The weight gain could be caused by psychological factors or neurobiology, Castellanos speculates. Differences in the pathways for dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, have been found in both people who are obese and people with ADHD, he says.

Or it could be that the impulsiveness typical of ADHD makes it harder for people to say no to food. Children who take stimulant medications like Ritalin typically don't have problems with weight gain because the medications suppress appetite. But eating issues may emerge later.

Hallowell says he often sees adult patients with ADHD who struggle with overeating. "Nutrition should be part of the treatment plan," he says.

Parents of children with ADHD should take particular care to make sure their children develop lifelong good eating habits, Castellanos says. "The reality is that ADHD people can be at risk for being swayed by temptation."

Her hair is brown and tied back into a professional-looking ponytail. She wears a blue shirt, tan sweater and delicate gold chain. It's the first time she has met the man sitting across from her, and she looks out at him, her eyes curious.

"So how are you doing today?" she asks cautiously, trying to build rapport.

"I'm doing well," he answers. His eyes blink.

"That's good," she continues. "Where are you from originally?"

"I'm from L.A.," he tells her, and this makes her smile slightly.

"Oh!" she says with surprise in her voice. "I'm from L.A. myself!"

She is from L.A. She was created in Los Angeles and "lives out her life" there on a computer screen in a lab at the University of Southern California. She's not a real woman but a virtual one, created to talk to people who are struggling emotionally, and to take their measure in a way no human can. Her makers believe that her ability to do this will ultimately revolutionize the way mental health care is practiced in this country. Her name is Ellie.

There's Power In A Well-Timed 'Uh-Huh'

The project that resulted in Ellie began almost two years ago at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. Two scientists in particular are responsible for her existence: psychologist Albert "Skip" Rizzo and computer scientist Louis-Philippe Morency.

Rizzo and Morency spent months laboring over every element of Ellie's presentation and interaction with patients, experimenting with a range of different personalities, outfits and vocal mannerisms.

"Everything has been thought of," says Morency. For example, when patients talk, Ellie encourages them to continue talking with a well timed "uh-huh," just as real people do.

"We have recorded more than 200 of these uh-huhs," Morency says, "and these are so powerful. Because a simple 'uh-huh' and a silence — if they are done the right way — can be extremely powerful. So we spent a lot of time on these little details."

But the most important thing about Ellie is not her skill at gently probing all of the people her scientist brings into the lab to talk to her. Her real value, the reason she was built at all, is her skill at taking and analyzing thousands of measurements of those people.

Under the wide screen where Ellie's image sits, there are three devices. A video camera tracks facial expressions of the person sitting opposite. A movement sensor — Microsoft Kinect — tracks the person's gestures, fidgeting and other movements. A microphone records every inflection and tone in his or her voice. The point, Rizzo explains, is to analyze in almost microscopic detail the way people talk and move — to read their body language.

"We can look at the position of the head, the eye gaze," Rizzo says. Does the head tilt? Does it lean forward? Is it static and fixed?" In fact, Ellie tracks and analyzes around 60 different features — various body and facial movements, and different aspects of the voice.

The theory of all this is that a detailed analysis of those movements and vocal features can give us new insights into people who are struggling with emotional issues. The body, face and voice express things that words sometimes obscure.

"You know, people are in a constant state of impression management," Rizzo says. "They've got their true self and the self that they want to project to the world. And we know that the body displays things that sometimes people try to keep contained."

So, as Ellie gets the person in front of her to ruminate about when they were happy and when they were sad, the machines below her screen take measurements, cataloging how much the person smiles and for how long, how often they touch their head.

Morency says the machines record 30 measurements per second, or "about 1,800 measurements per minute." Literally every wince, pause and verbal stumble is captured and later analyzed.

Ellie was originally commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense. After all of the deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military was seeing a lot of suicides and wanted to find a way to help military therapists stop them. Soldiers don't always like to confess that they're having problems, but maybe their bodies would say what their words wouldn't.

This is why Ellie is being programmed to produce a report after each of her sessions — it's a kind of visual representation of the 60 different movements she tracks.

"For each indicator," Morency explains, "we will display three things." First, the report will show the physical behavior of the person Ellie just interviewed, tallying how many times he or she smiled, for instance, and for how long. Then the report will show how much depressed people typically smile, and finally how much healthy people typically smile. Essentially it's a visualization of the person's behavior compared with a population of depressed and nondepressed people.

If the person's physical behaviors are similar to someone who's depressed, then the person will be flagged.

The idea here is not for Ellie to actually diagnose people and replace trained therapists. She's just there to offer insight to therapists, Morency says, by providing some objective measurements.

"Think about it as a blood sample," he says. "You send a blood sample to the lab and you get the result. The [people] doing the diagnosis [are] still the clinicians, but they use these objective measures to make the diagnosis."

Real People Are Complicated

Now, obviously this work raises all kinds of issues, and even on a practical level, real obstacles remain. Jeff Cohn, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, studies the relationship between physical movements and emotion and says signals from the face, voice and body are incredibly complicated to interpret.

"Individuals vary a lot in how expressive they are," Cohn explains. "You know, if I'm someone who is very expressive and I smile frequently, [even] when I'm depressed and smiling less, I may still smile more than you do if you're a tight-lipped, not very emotive individual."

This means, Cohn says, that using Ellie in the way blood tests are used — as proof positive of one diagnosis or another — will be really difficult.

"It strikes me as unlikely that face or voice will provide that information with such certainty," he says.

But Skip Rizzo, the psychologist working on Ellie, genuinely believes these technologies will eventually change the field of mental health. One of the central problems with humans, he says, is that they bring their own biases to whatever they encounter, and those biases often make it hard for them to see what's directly in front of them.

"You can get training to be a health care provider or psychologist," he says, "and try to put those things on hold and be very objective. But it's still a challenge. It's always going to be biased by experience. What computers [like Ellie] offer is the ability to look at massive amounts of data and begin to look at patterns, and that, I think, far outstrips the mere mortal brain."

This summer, Ellie is being tested. She's scheduled to sit down with dozens of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

She'll ask them about their lives, encourage them to open up.

Then, silently, Ellie will measure their answers.

On average, men aren't as healthy as women.

Men don't live as long, and they're more likely to engage in risky behaviors, like smoking and drinking.

But in the past decade, global health funding has focused heavily on women.

Programs and policies for men have been "notably absent," says Sarah Hawkes from the University of London's Institute of Global Health.

She and a colleague published a commentary in The Lancet on Friday calling for more gender equality in global health funding.

"If you look at the top 10 health problems around the world, they are much more common in men," she tells Shots. "But the current focus is predominantly on women's health. "

Take for instance, the United Nations's Millennium Development Goals. In 2000, global leaders agreed on eight ways to improve the lives of the poorest people around the world.

The fifth goal is specifically aimed at maternal health. And all of the other goals "touch on essential aspects of women's well-being, and in turn, women's empowerment is critical for achieving the goals," the U.N. Women's website says.

There isn't a specific goal targeted at men.

Hawkes agrees that maternal health is important and should be funded. "We don't want to see this money diverted away from women's health," she says. "But focusing on maternal health means you miss the biggest burdens of disease."

Hawkes says that when you look at recent data, men lose three times more years of healthy living than women because of tobacco, alcohol and unsafe driving.

"It's cool to be a man that smokes and drinks — who drives a fast motorbike, or fast cars," she says. "If you were really serious about saving lives, you would spend money tackling unhealthy gender norms" that promote these risky behaviors.

Health economist Karen Grepin of New York University agrees that more focus should go to stopping tobacco and alcohol use. But she doesn't think there should be specific policies for men versus women. "If we focus on closing inequality, we'll miss the boat," she says. "The goal is to reduce mortality, not to reduce inequalities in the measure of mortality."

Grepin, who wasn't involved with the commentary, also doesn't think that the recent focus on women's health is a bad thing.

"Women are politically, economically disadvantaged around the world," she tells Shots. "There are really important consequences for women's health. They play a large role in taking care of children. When they get sick, there's a spillover effect in the house — for the next generation."

Grepin thinks that maternal health may have been undervalued and underfunded in the past. "In many places, women still have a high risk of dying during childbirth, which is completely avoidable," she says. "The fact that this still happens is appalling. It's a blight on society that needs to be addressed."

With the recent emphasis on maternal health, she says, the world is making progress on this front. The risk of a mother dying during childbirth has declined by nearly half worldwide since 1990.

"Has that necessarily driven up mortality in men?" she asks. "Probably not."

When the American Psychiatric Association releases its new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — DSM-5 — this weekend, lots of journalists and commentators will refer to it as "psychiatry's bible."

That's a term that makes the manual's authors and other mental experts cringe.

"Bible implies that it's been handed down by some deity as the absolute truth," says Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who's had a hand in the past two revisions of the DSM. "We don't consider this to be a bible. It's a guidebook."

Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, also wants people to know the DSM isn't some sacred text. "It's a dictionary, not a bible," he says.

The DSM has taken on biblical proportions over the years because its list of several hundred disorders is often used to decide whether a particular behavior is abnormal and insurance will cover a problem. DSM-5, for example, has provoked lots of debate about new diagnoses like Binge Eating Disorder or Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder in children.

But insurance coverage and defining what's normal are not why the DSM was created. It was created to solve a communication problem.

Before DSM-III came along in 1980, "It was really chaotic," Insel says. "We had no common language" for describing mental disorders. The new manual provided clear definitions for the first time, he says, so that "when one person says major depressive disorder another person will know what that is."

Revisions since then have updated those definitions and added or eliminated diagnoses based on the latest research, First says. "The DSM is a synthesis of the best knowledge at this moment in time," he says. "So DSM-5 is the culmination of research in the past 20 years."

That makes the DSM "a tool used by clinicians to take care of patients," not a bible, First says.

Insel adds that the DSM only becomes a problem when mental health professionals forget that and start "looking at the manual instead of listening to their patients. That's never a good outcome."

When the diagnosis is cancer, the expenses can pile up in a hurry.

Even people with insurance can face steep copayments for drugs, a sizable share of hospital bills and significant incidentals. These side effects of cancer care are sometimes even called "financial toxicity."

So wouldn't it make sense for doctors and patients to talk over the financial strain that cancer treatment might bring and what might be done to manage it?

Well, it's not always easy for patients to bring it up, says S. Yousuf Zafar, a gastrointestinal cancer specialist at Duke Cancer Institute. He and his colleagues recently asked hundreds of insured cancer patients at Duke and three affiliated rural cancer clinics about their financial concerns.

Median household income for the people in study was about $60,000 a year, and the median out-of-pocket costs for their care were nearly $600 a month .

"The bottom line was that patients want to talk about the cost but only a minority actually do," Zafar tells Shots.

The people who did talk about financial issues told the researchers it was helpful to do so. "They said it helped decrease their expenses," Zafar says. Unfortunately, in this study the researchers didn't get into the details of how that happened.

But he drew one possible way from his own practice. "I treat colon cancer, and I have the option of giving a drug as an IV or an oral pill," he says. "If I give the pill form, the patient faces a copay even if they have insurance, and that copay goes away if I give the intravenous version."

The two forms of the drug are pretty much the same when it comes to effectiveness, though the side effects differ a little. "For the most part, it doesn't matter to me," he says. "It comes down to patient preference and cost."

Why don't most patients ask about costs?

"Many said they didn't think their financial problems were bad enough to bring it up," he says. "Many said they wanted the best care regardless of costs." And they may have been worried that doctors might cut corners on care after a cost discussion.

Some patients said it's not their doctor's job to think about the costs, Zafar says, and others figured the doctor wouldn't know what to do about them anyway.

Patients might have a point there. "I don't think the majority of oncologists are prepared to have a discussion about cost," he says. "Quite honestly, we haven't received the training to do so."

In the meantime, doctors can direct patients to social workers and financial counselors to lend a hand. "Any help is likely better than none," Zafar says.

Doctor need to get with it, though. "We can't necessarily give the best care to patients unless we address cost," Zafar says.

The research hasn't been published yet. Zafar will present the findings to cancer specialists at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago in a few weeks.

The tragic deaths of 29 coal miners in a massive explosion in 2010 have provided new evidence of a resurgence of the disease known as black lung.

On Monday, a team of pathologists and lung disease experts will present the results of a detailed study of lung tissue from some of the victims of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia. They'll describe the findings at the American Thoracic Society's annual conference in Philadelphia this weekend.

"Our pathology — where we actually see the lung tissue, we actually see the scars, we see the dust — confirms we're seeing a problem," says Robert Cohen, the lead researcher and chairman of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Cook County Health and Hospitals System in Illinois.

Cohen's team reviewed lung tissue obtained from autopsies of seven of the Upper Big Branch victims. Only seven families of the deceased coal miners granted permission for the study.

Six of the seven samples bore telltale scarring that indicates black lung. One of the samples showed a "fairly advanced form of the disease."

One of the miners worked for less than five years underground, and several had worked about 10 years in coal mines. They ranged in age from about 30 to 60. The names and specific information about the miners weren't disclosed because their families were promised confidentiality.

Cohen says the relatively young ages of some of the miners and limited tenure underground "means that there were probably some intense exposures and excessive exposures over a short period of time. That raises some concerns."

Extraordinarily high rates of black lung in the Upper Big Branch victims were first found during autopsies just after the explosion. The West Virginia medical examiner told mine disaster investigators that 24 of the victims had sufficient lung tissue for testing. He concluded that 71 percent had black lung, a rate 10 times the average for southern West Virginia.

At the time, investigator Davitt McAteer, a former federal mine safety chief, said the autopsy results were shocking because of "the number of miners who showed evidence of black lung, particularly among younger miners and miners who you would not have expected to have black lung."

McAteer asked Cohen to assemble a team of experts to examine the lung tissue of as many victims as possible.

Cohen acknowledges that the sample size is limited. "It's a small number of miners," Cohen says. "But the miners who were referred to the study were a random sample — people who just happened to be working in that mine that day who were killed in the disaster."

Several investigations of the disaster concluded that mine owner Massey Energy had permitted dangerous accumulations of coal dust in the mine. That may explain the high rate of black lung in the tested lung samples of victims.

"Mines that tend to have accidents do tend to be less clean than mines that don't have accidents," Cohen says. But Upper Big Branch "may be representative of a number of mines in the United States today," he says.

Cohen also says the tissue analysis "adds supportive information" in the wake of a number of studies documenting a resurgence of black lung in portions of Appalachia, onset of the disease among younger miners and more rapid progression to advanced stages of disease.

Cohen and another group of researchers summarized those studies in a report last month in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

That report, Cohen says, tackles "ancient legendary teachings" about black lung that have led to misdiagnoses and rejection of claims for black lung benefits payments.

"Contemporary medical school training and residency training and even fellowship training hasn't really kept up with the latest research and science in coal-mine dust lung diseases," Cohen contends.

"Many pulmonary physicians were diagnosing miners with lots of exposure to coal dust as having disease as unknown cause," he adds.

The report says many physicians erroneously believe that only round scars on lung tissue, and only scars in upper lobes, are signs of black lung. "That's not true," Cohen says. The disease "can cause irregular scars or linear scars all over the lungs."

The report urges more frequent X-rays and lung function tests for coal miners. It also urges physicians to "take exposure histories" for coal miners, including the jobs they performed, the machinery they operated, the kind of mines that employed them and how long they worked.

A spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, a trade group, responded narrowly to the report, noting the group's support for mandatory X-ray testing of coal miners. The testing is voluntary now.

"This would provide miners and mine operators the information required to take corrective actions where miners are found to suffer from lung disease," says NMA spokeswoman Nancy Gravatt.

Federal law gives miners the right to seek reassignment to jobs with less coal dust exposure when they have indications of disease, but miners' advocates worry that mandatory testing will give coal companies the ability to dismiss workers with signs of black lung.

Cohen says the lung tissue testing of the Upper Big Branch victims and the new report for physicians confirm "that there is a problem in our control of our exposure to dust that's causing worsening disease and resurgent disease."

The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration said in 2010 that tougher coal-mine dust exposure limits are a top priority. Congressional Republicans delayed action on new limits until the Government Accountability Office could complete a study. The GAO study was issued last August, and it supported MSHA's efforts.

The agency set a target date for next month for rule-making on its proposal, but it's unclear whether that deadline will be met. MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere says, "I have no new information about the dust rule."

Black lung has killed 70,000 coal miners since 1970. NPR, the Center for Public Integrity and The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette documented widespread industry cheating in the coal-dust control system and weak federal regulation in a series of stories last year.

Update 5:15 pm:

"These results are beyond disturbing," says Wes Addington, an attorney at the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, which represents coal miners seeking black lung benefits.

"I don't care how small the sample," Addington adds. "To find black lung in 85 percent of these miners shouldn't be happening in this country."

Coincidentally, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has just published a study in the American Journal of Public Health that assesses the accuracy of its black lung data documenting the resurgence of the disease in Appalachia.

Industry critics were concerned that researchers tested miners who already had symptoms. But the NIOSH review found that healthy miners with no X-ray indications of black lung participated in the NIOSH screening and returned for additional testing even when they had no symptoms.

The NIOSH study reviewed its reporting for bias and concludes that it is "broadly accurate, although the data likely underestimated the national prevalence of [Coal Workers Pneumoconiosis]," the formal label for black lung.

The undercount, the researchers say, is likely due to the fact that the surveillance system is limited by federal mandate to working coal miners and does not include those who have retired. Black lung is progressive and retired miners may still develop symptoms and advanced disease.

The report also reviewed NIOSH data on other possible causes of lung disease suffered by coal miners and found the "increasing prevalence of pneumoconiosis among coal miners could only be attributed to inhalation of unsafe amounts of coal mine dusts, and could not be attributed to age, smoking, other diseases, or background radiographic abnormalities."

NIOSH concludes the study by urging MSHA to adopt its proposed new standard for coal mine dust exposure, which NIOSH first recommended in 1995.

There's a lot to love about biking to work: the exercise, the fresh air, the cost savings and the benefits for the environment.

But does it make you healthier?

That's a question that's not as easy to answer as you might think. But since today is Bike to Work Day, we'll give it a try.

A large study of 30,000 people in Copenhagen over 14 years found that those who biked to work lowered their risk of death by 40 percent compared to sedentary people. And in the short term, another study of 100 people in Perth, Australia, who replaced some car commutes with bike trips over the course of a year, found the bicycling improved aerobic fitness, cholesterol numbers, and lowered the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

That seems pretty straightforward. But what about the risk of getting crushed by a trash truck? Anyone who's bicycled even a little bit knows all too well the fear of an encounter with a motor vehicle. Just yesterday the Washington Post reported on 20-year-old bicyclist who was critically injured after being hit by a car in downtown Washington.

In 2011, 677 bicyclists died in collisions with motor vehicles. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, bicycle travel accounts for 2 percent of traffic deaths and just 1 percent of trips.

But that stat doesn't account for the miles traveled by bicyclists, and how long it takes them to travel those miles, as well as the type of road they're on, and time of day. (Bicycling later in the day is riskier, and alcohol use may be a factor in that, on the part of both motorists and bicyclists.)

Data on bike accidents is even sketchier, since bicyclists don't typically report crashes to insurers the way drivers do.

A very unscientific survey on the NPR science desk found that almost all of the bike commuters have been injured at least once, with most of the injuries involving broken ribs and collarbones.

Many of them involved collisions with other bicyclists or pedestrians. Some involved another bicyclist violating traffic laws, and some were just bad luck. That includes the time Joe Palca hit a pothole, crashed, and wiped out Richard Harris, who was riding beside him. Both suffered broken bones. Harris says that's the only accident he's had in 21 years of bike commuting to NPR.

"For me, biking to work is the only reason that I've kept in even marginal shape throughout my 20s and 30s," says global health reporter Michaeleen Doucleff. At age 20 she mangled the cartilage in one knee when she hit a pedestrian; he broke a wrist. "Otherwise, I've been pretty lucky. Sixteen years of commuting and just one major accident. Knock on wood."

Several studies have tried to weigh the risk of injury and death in weighing the health aspects of bike commuting. A 2011 study of a bikeshare program in Barcelona found that the increased life expectancy due to better health substantially outweighed the accident risk. Biking's health benefits also outweighed harms caused by exposure to pollution. The further the bicyclists traveled and the more days they biked, the greater the health benefits.

A 2010 study that compared bike commuting to car commuting in the Netherlands estimated that the health benefits of biking adds 3-14 months of life, compared to 5-9 days lost due to accidents, and 0.8 to 40 days lost due to air pollution exposure.

And a 2009 study in The Lancet estimated that switching to biking would do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve health than using low-emissions vehicles.

But these studies were done using computer models, not by actually measuring the health of bicyclists and drivers over time. And they were done using data from European cities, where longstanding acceptance of bicycle travel should make for safer commutes.

Indeed, one of the more fascinating threads to emerge from the skimpy science of bike commuting in America is that the more people bike, the safer it may become. In cities like Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis, bike travel has soared in the past few years, but accident rates have stayed stable. That may be because of new bikeways that separate cars and bikes, or the fact that drivers are getting used to sharing the road with cyclists.

What next for bike commuters? Expect plenty of argument over whether adults should be required to wear bike helmets.

"Helmets prevent 85 percent of brain injuries," says Frederick Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington who has studied helmets and injury. "One of the concerns now is that with the bikeshare programs like the one that's going to start in New York and the one you have in DC, they have not dealt with the whole helmet issue."

Some proponents of increased urban biking say that helmets shouldn't be required because it discourages bicycle use for short commutes, errands, and impromptu rides. They point to enviable safety data from European cities where most bike commuters don't wear helmets. A 2012 study of bicycle riders in DC and Boston found that 20 percent of bikeshare riders used helmets, compared to 50 percent of adults using their own bicycles.

But the doctors aren't buying it. "Concussion is what we're trying to prevent," says Dr. David Milzman, a professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University and co-author of the study. "There's all this crazy literature that the helmet makes you actually more likely to get injured, because people think they're safer with a helmet. That stuff is crap."

Get a concussion, Milzman says, and you'll be lucky if you miss just a few weeks of work.

Stimulating the brain with a very small electrical current through the forehead could boost a student's ability to learn and remember basic mathematics, a provocative experiment suggests.

The work, published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology, could help those who struggle with mental arithmetic. But the study was small and the long-term effect wasn't profound.

The study tested something called transcranial random noise stimulation, a technique that sends a tiny current to the brain.

The current, generated by a small electronic device, is delivered through two electrodes attached to the temple. The electricity seems to affect the brain's neurons, which themselves use electrical signals to communicate with each other.

The results are preliminary, and alpha parents seeking an edge for their children shouldn't risk electrocution. "Do not try this at home," says Jackie Thompson, a psychologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

Some studies suggest that up to 1 in 5 of us has difficulty learning basic math, according to Thompson. Thompson and her colleagues thought that very slight electrical stimulation could help. Electrical stimulation has sometimes been shown to boost basic cognitive skills, Thompson says.

To find out if it could help with more complex brain functions, the team tried mathematics. They took 25 students and asked them to memorize a series of made-up mathematical equations. For example, 4 # 12 = 17. The idea was to test their ability to memorize sums that they hadn't seen before.

EDITOR'S ADD NOTE, Friday, May 17, 10:48 a.m.

The team also had the students execute problems with several arithmetic steps, such as 12 - 4 + 10 + 12 = 30. The idea was to test their ability both to calculate math problems and to memorize sums that they hadn't seen before.

And the original post continues...

All the students had two electrodes stuck to their foreheads, but only half received the tiny electrical signal. The signal was too small to be felt, and even the researchers conducting the tests didn't know who had received a signal and who hadn't.

When they went back and checked, they found that those who had received the stimulation appeared to memorize their sums faster and better than those who hadn't. Moreover, the effect seemed to last for six months after the stimulation. But it wasn't as strong.

Researchers aren't quite sure how it works, but co-author author Thompson says that the electrical signal may get brain cells synchronized: "Kind of like if you have eight rowers in a boat, if they're all rowing together they go faster," she says.

Researchers hope that their new technique could eventually be developed into a tool to help those with learning disabilities, or anyone who finds they are severely math challenged. But Thompson says that more research is needed to see what method of stimulation works best.