Blog Posts by Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

Smoking can shave 11 years off a woman's life -- but quitting before age 35 can get most of them back. (Photo: Getty Images)We already know the toll smoking can take on a our health. Women who smoke are at higher risk for stroke, cataracts, osteoporosis, early menopause, menstrual problems, and several different kinds of cancer. Now, a new study shows that smoking takes about 11 years off of a woman's life -- but if you quit smoking early enough, researchers have found, you could get most of that time back.

Related: 6 Ways Quitting Smoking Will Make You Prettier

According to study co-author Tim McAfee, director of the Office on Smoking at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking is the number one preventable cause of death in the United States.

25 Ways to Stop Smoking

"There's the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you," McAfee told the New York Times. "But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off - and that's just on average."

The study, published Wednesday in the New

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Are you paying more for fake food? (Photo: Thinkstock)Does that fish taste funny? A new report on food fraud shows that American consumers may be getting ripped off, since many of the items on their grocery lists -- including olive oil, honey, coffee, and fish -- may be full of fillers and fake ingredients.

WATCH: How to Spot Counterfeit Food

The report by the nonprofit United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) lists 1,300 incidents of "food fraud" going back to 1980 -- and 800 of them were added in the last two years alone.

Related: Is Your Ketchup the Real Thing?

"While food fraud has been around for centuries, with a handful of notorious cases well documented, we suspect that what we know about the topic is just the tip of the iceberg," Dr. Jeffrey Moore, senior scientific liaison for USP and the database's creator and lead analyst, said in the report.

According to the USP database at Foodfraud.org, spices like chili powder, saffron, and black pepper are often cut with cheaper spices in order to maximize profits. Less-expensive

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Your old friend Is Facebook making you feel bad about yourself? New research says: Probably. (Photo: Thinkstock)from high school just announced her engagement on Facebook. So why don't you feel happier for her? According to new research, it turns out that pouring over friends' vacation photos, gushing status updates, and career successes is making people miserable.

Related: Dumbest Facebook Post Ever?

In a study conducted by Humboldt University in Berlin and Technical University in Darmstadt, German researchers asked 600 Facebook users how they felt while navigating the social networking platform. More than a third of the respondents reported feeling negative, but it had nothing to do with Facebook's ever-changing privacy policies and advertisements—most of those bad vibes were rooted in jealousy.

Related: 10 Things We Learned From Facebook's Graph Search

"We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook, with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry," Hanna Krasnova of the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt University told

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While Kelly Clarkson and James Taylor performed live at President Barack Obama's second inauguration on Monday, Beyonce opted instead to lip sync her way through the National Anthem, offering up a flawless performance that many viewers were upset to discover had actually been recorded earlier.

"We all know Beyonce can sing," Master Sgt. of the U.S. Marine Band Kristin duBois told ABC News on Tuesday. "We all know the Marine Corps Band can play. We do not know why she decided to go with the pre-recorded music at the last minute."

All music for the inauguration ceremony is prerecorded "because there are so many eventualities and conditions that day," DuBois told the New York Post. The band had to fake it along with the singer, The Washingtonian reported, and Beyonce hurried off stage the instant the music ended.

Beyonce's performance wasn't the main event, and it's incredibly difficult to sing live in cold and windy weather, so why does everyone seem so betrayed? Big stars lip sync

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Why does real life feel like high school? (Photo: Thinkstock)If you've ever encountered a mean girl at work or spent time worrying about making the wrong impression, you may have felt a sense of deja vu along with all of the stress. Didn't you deal with this stuff in high school -- and weren't those years behind you already?

Related: What will you be like 10 years from now? You're probably guessing wrong

Yes -- and no. The reason life sometimes seems a lot like high school, research shows, is because life really is a lot like high school.

In American high schools, "People are in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status," Robert Faris, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis who studies high-school aggression, told Jennifer Senior at New York Magazine. "There's no natural connection between them." Kids are grouped by age, rather than by any other identifying characteristic or interest, and left to figure out their own hierarchy.

It ends up being a bit like "Lord of the Flies": social norms, values,

Read More »from If Life Seems like High School, That's Because it Is, Research Shows

Abortion opponents rally at the steps of the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka, Kan., Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that legalized abortion. And while the majority of Americans under age 30 support a woman's right to choose, new research from the Pew Forum finds that most of them don't know that Roe v. Wade was the landmark case that that a protects that right.

Related: What if Abortion Wasn't Legal?

"For 40 years, access to safe and legal abortion has been the law of the land," said Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards in a statement. "As the nation's leading women's health care provider and advocate, Planned Parenthood understands that abortion is a deeply personal and often complex decision for a woman to consider, if and when she needs it."

According to the Pew Religion and Public Life poll, 68 percent of men and women under age 30 do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, yet only 44 percent of that age group could correctly say what the case was about. Forty-one percent of respondents younger than 30 thought it had to do

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Someone took the time to leave a few words of encouragement to women who had shared their worst secrets. (Photo: Reddit.com)"What has been the worst day of your life?" read the question in a women's bathroom at Western University in Ontario, Canada. All around it, women had written their confessions on the walls of the bathroom stall. Some had suffered from eating disorders. Some had been raped. Others had lost a parent or lived through a crisis.

One person took the time to read them all, and left a life-affirming response taped to the wall. "In a girls' bathroom stall at my university, girls have written about some of their most horrifying life experiences," Reddit user chellylauren wrote as she shared the note. "This week, somebody replied."

The letter reads:

To the girl who was raped: You are so strong. I cannot fathom the pain you must have gone through. The fact that you have the bravery to write it (even on a bathroom wall) gives me hope.

To the girl with eating disorders: I promise you, although I don't know you, you are beautiful, you deserve your health. You deserve freedom from that hell.

Read More »from Woman Leaves Anonymous, Life-affirming Response to Sad Confessions

This 420-square-foot studio has a moveable wall that hides a guest bedroom. (Photo: By Matthew Williams for Life Edited)People who live in big cities are used to small spaces -- and to longing for larger ones. One green-minded entrepreneur may have found the perfect solution: He renovated a 420-square-foot studio in New York City to function like a 1,100-square apartment.

Related: Couple Lives Happily in a 240 Square Foot Apartment

"The main idea is to get double, triple, quadruple use from every space," Graham Hill, founder of the sustainable-living-focused media outlet TreeHugger.com and the design company Life Edited, told Fair Companies in a video interview.

Related: Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms

Hill, a trained architect, bought two studios in a 100-year-old tenement building in SoHo in 2009 and 2010 -- a 350-square-foot space for $280,000, and a 420-square-foot studio for $287,000, Life Edited Communications Director David Friedlander, told Yahoo! Shine. While camping out in the smaller apartment, he gutted the 420-square-foot studio -- which once housed an entire family for 40 years

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