Culture
When new rules capped training hours for medical residents at 80 hours per week in 2003, critics worried that the change would leave physicians-in-training unprepared for the challenges of independent practice.
Now, new research published July 11 in BMJ and led by scientists in the Department of Health Care Policy in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, shows that these dire warnings were largely unjustified.
An epigenetic change, a form of DNA control, that deactivates some genes linked to cancer late in human development has been conserved for more than 400 million years, new research led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research suggests.
EPFL scientists have created the first world map of regions with the highest prevalence of the hepatitis E virus (HEV). They hope that their map - freely available online - will help governments and NGOs design more effective prevention campaigns based on reliable data, particularly when it comes to setting up refugee camps. The scientists' research has just been published in Scientific Reports.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Many parents, potential players and medical providers are increasingly wary of youth contact sports participation. The concern over the potential short- and long-term effects of head impacts experienced by youth football players has likely driven decreasing participation, according to a group of researchers.
A newly described form of stress called chromatin architectural defect, or chromatin stress, triggers in cells a response that leads to a longer life. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Houston Methodist Research Institute report in the journal Science Advances that moderate chromatin stress levels set off a stress response in yeast, the tiny laboratory worm C. elegans, the fruit fly and mouse embryonic stem cells, and in yeast and C. elegans the response promotes longevity.
Scientists have developed an animal model that may provide a path toward improving the diagnosis and treatment of the devastating brain disease chronicled in the bestselling autobiography "Brain on Fire." The book, along with a 2017 movie by the same name, traces newspaper reporter Susannah Cahalan's harrowing descent into the throes of the disease.
Bottom Line: The 1978 novel "The House of God" is a fictional account of the internship experience of Samuel Shem, the pen name of Stephen Bergman, at Beth Israel Hospital in 1973-1974. Funny, angry, honest, and absurd, the book spotlighted the injustices of medical training and the patient care of that era and was pilloried by establishment medicine for years after publication for its razor-sharp version of the truth. This short documentary, produced on the 40th anniversary of the novel's debut, details the book's origins and the people and events that inspired its stories.
What The Study Did: This randomized clinical trial of 143 men tested a short-term treatment for internet and computer game addiction.
Authors: Klaus Wölfling, Ph.D., of the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in Germany, is the corresponding author
(doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.1676)
Editor's Note: The article contains funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
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What The Study Did: This observational study of nearly 5,700 hospital employees who used the workplace cafeteria reports on whether food placement and traffic light labeling (green for healthy, yellow for less healthy and red for least healthy) was associated with a reduction in calories in the food purchased by employees.
Authors: Anne N. Thorndike, M.D., M.P.H., of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.6789)
What The Study Did: Veterans Affairs data for 355,121 patients undergoing ambulatory, elective, noncardiac surgery were used to compare the risk of death and complications in patients with and without heart failure.
Authors: Sherry M. Wren, M.D., of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2019.2110)
A multifunctional device that captures the heat shed by photovoltaic solar panels has been developed by KAUST and used to generate clean drinking water as a way to simultaneously generate electricity and water using only renewable energy.
Nearly 10 years ago, a group of Israeli clinical researchers emailed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) geneticist Len Pennacchio to ask for his team's help in solving the mystery of a rare inherited disease that caused extreme, and sometimes fatal, chronic diarrhea in children.
Now, following an arduous investigative odyssey that expanded our understanding of regulatory sequences in the human genome, the multinational scientific group has announced the discovery of the genetic explanation for this disease. Their findings are published in Nature.
Antibodies are the biomolecules our immune systems deploy to find, tag, and destroy invading pathogens. They work by binding to specific targets, called epitopes, on the surfaces of antigens - like locks to keys.
A kit made from everyday objects is bringing the blockchain into the physical world.
The 'BlocKit', which includes items such as plastic tubs, clay discs, padlocks, envelopes, sticky notes and battery-powered candles, is aimed to help people understand how digital blockchains work and can also be used by innovators designing new systems and services around blockchain.
Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes headed for a collision.
Each black hole's mass is more than 800 million times that of our sun. As the two gradually draw closer together in a death spiral, they will begin sending gravitational waves rippling through space-time. Those cosmic ripples will join the as-yet-undetected background noise of gravitational waves from other supermassive black holes.