Eating less may keep the mind young, according to Italian scientists who reported Monday they have discovered the molecular process by which a strict diet may save the brain from the ravages of age.

The research, published in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on a study of mice that were fed a diet of about 70 percent of the food they normally consumed.

The highly-contagious Novovirus has forced the closure of manyhospital beds across Britain, prompting warnings from health officials about the serious threat posed by the bug, best known as the winter vomiting virus.

Maurice Madeo, deputy director of infection prevention and control at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, where wards have been closed to new admissions, said the condition could be fatal.

They are already calling it the "widow village." In the space of just a few short days, the close-knit community of Sangrampur in eastern India -- along with a number of smaller surrounding villages -- has been devastated by a case of mass poisoning from toxic, home-brewed alcohol.

So far 170 people have died, almost exclusively men, most of whom were the sole bread-winners in families that were already struggling with life on the poverty line.

Conjoined 10-month-old twin girls separated by a Chilean medical team are in critical condition after the surgery, and one is close to death, hospital officials said Friday.

"Their condition is grave, but it is very important that we point out that their recovery has not been equal," said Osvaldo Artaza, director of the Hospital Luis Calvo Mackenna where the twins were separated in a grueling operation that began Tuesday.

A Hong Kong school was closed on Friday after a dead bird found in the southern Chinese city was tested positive for the deadly H5 strain of the bird flu virus, health officials said.

The closure came after the school clerk, a 48-year-old woman, picked up the sick black-headed gull at the school on Tuesday, which died the next day and was tested positive for the H5 strain, a health department spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Cigarette and alcohol use by U.S. teenagers are at their lowest point since the mid-1970s, but marijuana use remains steady, according to the findings of a national survey released Wednesday.

Some 18.7 percent of grade 12 high school students, typically aged 17 or 18, reported smoking cigarettes in the latest Monitoring the Future, well down from a peak of 36.5 percent in 1997.

A batch of home-brewed liquor possibly laced with a lethal dose of the highly toxic chemical methanol has killed more than 100 people in eastern India, according to an official.

Hospitals near the impoverished district of 24-Parganas, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the West Bengal state capital Kolkata, have been overwhelmed by victims, many of them laborers and rickshaw drivers too poor to afford branded alcohol.

Chilean doctors successfully separated conjoined twin girls early Wednesday after a marathon 18-hour surgery widely followed in the South American country on television and the Internet.

The 10-month-old twins Maria Paz and Maria Jose are in stable condition even after losing a lot of blood and they are resting in the intensive care unit at Luis Calvo Mackenna Hospital, chief surgeon Francisco Ossandon said.

Women's health advocates said they will sue the U.S. government for allegedly violating the constitutional rights of young teens by denying them over-the-counter access to emergency contraception.

The suit is a new escalation in the decade-long battle over whether young teens should be able to get the morning-after pill without seeing a doctor first, and comes a week after the U.S. government blocked access without a prescription to those under 17.

Stillbirth is often caused by pregnancy complications such as problems with the placenta or preterm labor, said U.S. research published on Tuesday aiming to shed light on the causes and risks.

Ten years ago, little was known about the causes of stillbirth, a term that describes when a baby dies at or after the 20th week of pregnancy.