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Come January, millions of low-income adults will gain health insurance coverage through Medicaid in one of the farthest-reaching provisions of the Obama health care law.

The likely deadline for Congress to prevent the government's first default will be later than earlier thought, a Washington think tank has found. The Bipartisan Policy Center said Friday that the government probably won't reach the brink of default until early September or early October. It had previously said default would come in July or August.

Chinese scientists have for the first time found strong evidence of how humans got infected with a new strain of bird flu: from chickens at a live market. In a small study of four patients who caught the new H7N9 virus, Chinese scientists compared swabs from birds at live markets in eastern China to virus samples from patients. The scientists found the virus from one patient was nearly identical to one found in a chicken. The research was published online Thursday in the journal Lancet.

Since insurers pay more for patients with surgical complications, some hospitals could actually lose money by improving care, researchers said Tuesday.

The most dangerous part of playing beer pong might not be drinking too much beer. A group of Clemson University students tested pingpong balls being used in beer pong games across campus one weekend last fall and discovered teeming bacteria. More research found that dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, listeria, e. Coli and staph on the balls end up in the beer when players make successful tosses into glasses.

A series of studies released today show that a long-extinct South African creature had an intriguing mix of human and apelike traits. But scientists say they still haven’t figured out where it fits on our evolutionary family tree. The human branch of the evolutionary tree, called Homo, is thought to have arisen from a group of ancient species called australopithecines. The newly studied species is a member of this group, and so its similarities to humans are enticing for tackling the riddle of how Homo appeared.

The summer heat waves over the past decade that killed thousands of people in Europe, scorched the Russian wheat crop, and sent Greenland's glaciers galloping to the sea are without parallel since at least 1400, according to a new study. The findings are based on a statistical analysis of summer seasonal temperatures inferred from tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments, and instrumental records.

You would think that people who were diagnosed with melanoma -- the most deadly form of skin cancer -- would be meticulously careful about using sunscreen, avoiding tanning salons and generally protecting their skin.

Scientists have found a way to read people's dreams using brain scans, a new study suggests.

Julia Shaw hit traffic pay dirt earlier this week when she took to Slate to argue that twenty-somethings should follow her lead and get married now. Shaw got married at 23, and it seems to have worked out well for her. Amanda Marcotte responded by throwing some cold hard data on that argument, noting that women who marry later are less likely to get divorced and earn more, on average, than their earlier-marrying counterparts.