Other

Seven body organs you can live without

The human body is incredibly resilient. When you donate a pint of blood, you lose about 3.5 trillion red blood cells, but your body quickly replaces them. You can even lose large chunks of vital organs and live. For example, ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

PTSD in children quickly and effectively treatable within hours

Children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be successfully treated with only a few hours of EMDR or cognitive behavioral writing therapy (CBWT). This is the finding of a new research paper by the ...

Health

Boys reach sexual maturity younger and younger

(Medical Xpress) -- Boys are maturing physically earlier than ever before. The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century. Joshua Goldstein, director ...

Obstetrics & gynaecology

Mothers of twins are not more fertile, just lucky

Are women who have twins more fertile? While previous studies concluded they are, a detailed analysis of more than 100,000 births from pre-industrial Europe by an international team of scientists shows they are not. The results ...

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Accident

An accident or mishap is an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance, often with lack of intention or necessity. It implies a generally negative outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence.

Experts in the field of injury prevention avoid use of the term 'accident' to describe events that cause injury in an attempt to highlight the predictable and preventable nature of most injuries. Such incidents are viewed from the perspective of epidemiology - predictable and preventable. Preferred words are more descriptive of the event itself, rather than of its unintended nature (e.g., collision, drowning, fall, etc.)

Accidents of particularly common types (crashing of automobiles, events causing fire, etc.) are investigated to identify how to avoid them in the future. This is sometimes called root cause analysis, but does not generally apply to accidents that cannot be deterministically predicted. A root cause of an uncommon and purely random accident may never be identified, and thus future similar accidents remain "accidental."

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