A Pennsylvania university is causing quite a commotion after it announced that it will offer the Plan B emergency contraceptive pill at a vending machine in its health center.

Shippensburg University will offer the pill for $25 in a machine located in a private room in the health center. The pill is only legal for those over 17-years-old, but the school determined that all of is 8,300 are over that age.

University spokesman Peter Gigliotti says that anyone can't just walk in from the street and purchase the pills:

"The machine is in a private room in our health center, and the health center is only accessible by students. In addition, no one can walk in off the street and go into the health center. Students proceed to a check-in desk located in the lobby and after checking in are granted access to the treatment area."

Since the school doesn't have any students aged 17 or younger, they're safe for now. But should any younger students enroll in the future, they may legally be required to remove the vending machines. As many other larger universities and colleges across the country do have younger students, Shippensburg's vending machine policy couldn't be perfectly duplicated everywhere.

Pfizer Inc. has issued a recall of one million packets of birth control pills because of a packaging error that could raise the risk of an accidental pregnancy by leaving women with an inadequate dose.

14 lots of Lo/Ovral-28 tablets and 14 lots of generic Norgestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol tablets are affected by the problem. Both products are manufactured by Pfizer, and are marketed in the U.S. by Akrimax Rx Products.

Pfizer discovered that some of the packets had too many active tablets, while others had too few.

The risk of pregnancy depends on how many doses a patient misses in a pill cycle.

Women may get more than more than just a pick-me-up from their morning cup of coffee. According to new research, caffeine may alter women's estrogen levels, and the changes differ according to race.

The study looked at more than 250 women aged 18 to 44, and found that in white women, caffeine appeared to lower estrogen levels, while in Asian women it seemed to raise them.

Women involved in the study were analyzed one to three times per week over the course of two menstrual cycles. Exercise, eating, and smoking behaviors were recorded and reviewed along with blood samples. Participants, on average, consumed about 90 milligrams of caffeine daily, which is the equivalent of one cup of coffee.

Asian women who consumed 200 milligrams of caffeine or more per day had higher estrogen levels than those who drank less. Among white women, however, the opposite was true: those who drank at least 200 milligrams of caffeine daily had lower levels of estrogen. Among black women the results were similar to those of Asian women, but did not reach statistical significance.

The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Do women or men hurt more? According to a new study out of Stanford University that examined patients' medical records, women report higher levels than men across the board.

Researchers reviewed patients electronic medical reports (EMRs). Patients at the participating hospitals reported their feelings of pain, usually in the form of scores on a 0 to 10 scale, with 0 meaning "none at all" and 10 meaning "the most imaginable."

Dr. Atul Butte, a Stanford pediatrics professor, along with his colleagues, reviewed 160,000 pain reports from more than 72,000 patients. After looking over all the data, a clear gender gap was seen.

In Stanford's Scope journal, Butte said:

"In many cases, the reported difference approached a full point on the 1-to-10 scale. How big is that? A pain-score improvement of one point is what clinical researchers view as indicating that a pain medication is working

"We actually use these numbers," Butte said. "We use these as a kind of threshold - when do we start pain medicine? Are we treating someone with enough pain medicine? We need to have that understanding that there is a sex difference here."

Most pregnant women are able to find out the gender of their unborn baby between 18 and 22 weeks during a routine, mid-pregnancy ultrasound, and invasive testing can reveal gender even earlier at around 11 weeks. But women may soon be able to find out whether they are carrying a boy or a girl as early as five weeks, after scientists have developed a pioneering, new non-invasive test.

A team at Chenil General Hospital in Seoul, South Korea, found that various ratios of two enzymes, which can be extracted from a pregnant mother's blood, indicate the baby's gender as early as five or six weeks.

Dr. Hyun Mee Ryu, the study's lead author, said that knowing the sex early is important if the mother is a carrier of a X-chromosome gene that can cause a disease such as hemophilia or muscular dystrophy. Female fetuses are either carriers of the disease or are free from it, but a male fetus has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease and parents could choose to abort the pregnancy.

The researchers also warn:

"This method might promote the potential for sex selection. Therefore, there should be careful consideration about the use of this analytical tool in clinical situations."

While drinking regularly during pregnancy is known to increase the odds of children having fetal alcohol syndrom, scientists have now discovered that the risk to a woman's baby is highest if they consume alcohol in the seventh to 12th week of pregnancy.

Haruna Sawada Feldman from the University of California, San Diego, lead a research team studying nearly 1,000 women during their pregnancies over three decades. They found that drinking during the second half of their first trimester was linked to growth deficiencies in weight and height, as well as facial deformities that are the tell-tale signs of fetal alcohol syndrom disorders (FASD).

For each daily drink, a woman's baby was found to be 25 percent more likely to have an abnormally shaped lip, 12 percent more likely to have a smaller-than-normal head, and 16 percent more likely to have a low birth weight.

Study co-author Professor Philip May of the University of North Carolina said:

You're not imagining things: there are more twin babies born each year than ever before. In the United States, one out of every 30 babies born is a twin.

The U.S. twin birth rate rose by 76 percent in 2009 since 1980, when just one in 53 babies was a twin. Experts attribute the climb to older mothers and fertility treatments.

Joyce Martin, an epidemiologist who co-authored the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that was released on Wednesday, says:

'When people say it seems like you see more twins nowadays, they're right."

Some increase was expected as more women than ever are waiting until they are over the age of 30 to have babies, and for some unknown reason, mothers in their 30s are more likely to have twins than younger or older women. Martin said that as much as one-third of the increase can be attributed to that. The rest of the rise is said to be due to fertility drugs and treatments.

Martin said:

'You have a double whammy going on. There are more older moms and more widespread use of fertility-enhancing therapies."

According to the results of new research, babies born to mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), a type of diabetes brought on by pregnancy, and who is poor is at a much greater risk for eventually developing childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children of mothers who had GDM during pregnancy were found to be at 14 times greater risk of developing childhood ADHD than to children exposed to neither poverty nor GDM.

Researchers compared the offspring of mothers both with and without GDM in an economically diverse sample of 212 parents of either "at risk" children or "typically developing" children. At the time of the study, the children were between 3 and 4 years of age. Comparisons were done using an ADHD rating scale.

What the researchers found was that "at risk" children had at least six inattention or six hyperactive and impulsive symptoms as rated by parents, teachers, or both. The "typically developing" children had less than three symptoms in each domain.

Children exposed to both gestational diabetes mellitus and low socioeconomic status showed compromised neurobehavioral functioning, including lower IQ, poorer language abilities and diminished behavioral and emotional functioning

The average American is now 20 pounds heavier than they were in the 1990s. The annual Gallup Health and Healthcare Survey found that on average men reported they weight 196 pounds and women say they weight 160 pounds.

Both the 196 for men and 160 for women are 20 pounds heavier than reported 20 years ago. The poll also showed that as American's actual weight has increased, so has their ideal weight. For men, the ideal weight is now 181, which is up from 177 pounds. For women, the ideal weight is 138 pounds, up from 137 pounds.

Researchers say that this not only means that Americans are getting fatter, but they are also moving further away from their ideal weight. The average man now weights 15 pounds more than his ideal, compared to 9 pounds more in the 90s. The average woman weighs 22 pounds more than her ideal now, compared to 13 pounds in 1990.

The current figures for both men and women are the highest that Gallup has ever measured to date. Gallup has asked Americans to report on how much they weigh each year since 2001, and in 1990 and 1999.

The average American woman can expect to have 2.1 children, right? That's what we've been told for the past few years, but in 2010, the U.S. birth rate declined and now 1.9 children what U.S. women are expected to have, if current birth rates continue. Teens and women in their 20s experienced the most dramatic dip in birth rates, having the lowest birth rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s. This is the third straight year that U.S. births have dropped, and experts believe that the economy and financial worries are to blame.

Experts suggest that the economy helped discourage Americans from procreating, driving down birth rates in 2008 and 2009 as women put off having children. It had been suspected that money was the reason behind the decline, but with 2010's figures coming in even lower, there's little doubt that financial worries have impacted birth rates in the U.S.

U.S. births hit an all-time high in 2007 at more than 4.3 million. The number dropped to 4.2 million over the next two years, and then dropped further to 4.1 million. In 2010, it dropped to just slightly over 4 million, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.