The Check-Up: Today’s Top Health Headlines

• Researchers from Ohio State University delved into the murky world of couples and weight gain, and found that women tend to gain more weight after marriage and men gain more weight after divorce. They didn’t get too far into the why, TIME.com reports, but they theorized that after walking down the aisle, wives encourage men to take up healthier lifestyles, “helping men maintain their weight or even lose a few excess pounds. After divorce, however, men may return to their pound-packing habits.” Any other theories you’d like to toss in the ring, Be Wellers?

• Since we’re already on the subject, another recent study found that a happy marriage may actually be good for your heart. University of Rochester researchers looked at data from 225 heart-bypass patients between 1987 and 1990; 55 percent were alive 15 years after their surgery, including 61 percent of the married patients and 30 percent of the single ones. “The survival rates were even starker when parsed by marital satisfaction and gender,” TIME reports. “Fully 83 percent of men and women who said they had happy marriages were alive 15 years later, compared with 27 percent of women and 36 percent of men who were single. But among the unhappily married, only 29 percent of women had survived, compared with 60 percent of men.”

• And completely unrelated to wedding bells, brainiacs at Penn State may have found a way to treat malaria by—wait for it—”sticking the patient into a microwave,” reports the New York Times. The fascinating new research, which is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is still in its super early stages, but makes for an interesting read nonetheless.