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American adults continue to put on the pounds. New data shows that nearly 40 percent of them were obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase from a decade earlier, federal health officials reported Friday. The prevalence of severe obesity in American adults is also rising, heightening their risks of developing heart disease, diabetes and various cancers. According to the latest data, published Friday in JAMA, 7.7 percent of American adults were severely obese in the same period. (Richtel and Jacobs, 3/23)

You know who you are: the person who had perfect attendance, the one who never gets the nasty cold going around the office. Some people seem to be immune to whatever’s taking hold of their friends and neighbors, while others move from one bout of cold to another with little reprieve. Two experts, Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Robert Atmar, a professor of medicine in the Section of Infectious Diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, explain how your family’s home ownership during early childhood may come into play and why loners may fare worse. (Mitchell, 3/24)

All around the world, parents talk differently to babies than they do to adults. With their young kids, parents switch into a mode of communication known to linguists as “motherese” or infant-directed speech, and known more commonly as baby talk, a form of speech featuring long pauses and a roller coaster of pitch changes. For example, picture the upward swing in pitch that our voices take toward the end of a question (“Do you want to go to the park today?”): It’s much more dramatic when we address young children than adults. (Piazza, 3/25)

Rachel Ralph works long hours at an accounting firm in Oakland, Calif., and coordinates much of her life via the apps on her phone. So when she first heard several months ago that she could order her usual brand of birth control pills via an app, and have them delivered to her doorstep in a day or two, it seemed perfect. She was working 12-hour days. "Food was delivered, dinner was often delivered," Ralph says. "Anything I could get sent to my house with little effort — the better." (McClurg and Lopez, 3/26)

What’s wellness?Sure, it involves your physical form and your ability to deal with disease and other challenges. But wellness also has a lot to do with how you approach the world. Your relationships, your physical surroundings and your habits all affect your body and mind. (Blakemore, 3/25)

Although state data on the deaths of Ohioans in 2017 is still incomplete, the department has recorded 111 suicides of young Ohioans during the year. That’s the most in any year since at least 2007, the earliest for which data is available in the department’s online data warehouse. (Viviano, 3/25)

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and five other lawmakers introduced a bill Thursday to beef up punishment for companies and their leaders that knowingly commit violations resulting in worker deaths or severe injuries. Citing dangerous conditions at a chain of barrel reconditioning plants, Baldwin said the bill would give the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration stronger tools to go after offenders and extend its jurisdiction to government workers and others currently not covered by OSHA. (Diedrich, 3/23)