Culture

Public health officials stand poised to eliminate polio from the planet. But a new study shows that the job won't be over when the last case of the horrible paralytic disease is recorded.

In an article publishing June 19 in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology, graduate research fellow Micaela Martinez-Bakker and professors Aaron A. King and Pejman Rohani of the University of Michigan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology use disease-transmission models to show that silent transmission of poliovirus could continue for more than three years with no reported cases.

There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence.

That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.

A telecommunications law academic in Australia has recommended for laws to be enacted criminalising the application of face recognition technology to visual images online that enable the identity of a person or people to be ascertained without their consent.

A survey carried out earlier this year has found the first evidence of the 'superbug' bacteria Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in sausages and minced pork obtained from supermarkets in the UK. However, researchers stress that this does not pose a significant immediate risk to the public.

Renewable energy targets and other support policies now in place in 164 countries powered the growth of solar, wind and other green technologies to record-breaking energy generation capacity in 2014.

According to REN21's latest Renewables Global Status Report, policymakers continued to focus on adapting existing policies to keep pace with rapidly changing costs and circumstances.

Working women are "leaning in" and supporting more females in leadership roles, but a new study finds that having a female manager doesn't necessarily equate to higher salaries for female employees. In fact, women can sometimes take an earnings hit relative to their male colleagues when they go to work for a female manager.

Partnerships with multinational companies in child health programmes can work to help save lives, write the co-founders of charity ColaLife in The BMJ this week. But an academic argues that connections between multinational companies and child health projects present an ethical minefield.

The words 'yes' and 'no' may seem like two of the easiest expressions to understand in any language, but their actual behavior and interpretation are surprisingly difficult to pin down. In a paper published earlier today in the scholarly journal Language, two linguists examine the workings of 'yes' and 'no' and show that understanding them leads to new insights concerning the understanding of questions and statements more generally.

The prevalence of smoking among undergraduate nursing and physiotherapy students in Spain decreased from 29.3% in 2003 to 18.2% in 2013. Many of the students remained unaware of the link between smoking and diseases such as bladder cancer or the negative health effects of second-hand smoke, which points to a significant deficiency in undergraduate training.

The majority of nursing and physiotherapy students recognized that healthcare professionals were role models in society, noted Dr. Beatriz Ordás, lead author of the Journal of Advanced Nursing study.

New measures introduced by the UK government in April linking applications for residence permits to up-front payments for potential use of NHS hospital services, and proposals to further restrict access to NHS services for migrants, will not reduce the strain on NHS resources - and may end up costing more in the long run.

Writing in The BMJ this week, Lilana Keith and Ewout van Ginneken say such policies are "shortsighted and misleading."

In one of the first published studies using data from the Health eHeart Study, UCSF researchers have found that people are divided on the cardiovascular benefits of alcohol consumption. And, those who do perceive alcohol as "heart healthy" drink substantially more than their counterparts.

The study is in the Aug. 15 issue of American Journal of Cardiology.

Following a decade of steady growth, use of bisphosphonates—medications that are effective for treating osteoporosis—declined in the United States by more than 50% from 2008 to 2012.

Despite a prevalence of anonymous sperm donation in European countries, the use of the same sperm donor for subsequent conceptions is of paramount importance to those couples needing sperm donation to have children. "We found a marked tendency to favour full genetic bonds where possible," said midwife Sara Somers presenting study results today at the Annual Meeting of ESHRE.

Randomized controlled trials must be simplified to sustain innovation in cardiovascular diseases, which are still the biggest killer in Europe, according to the Cardiovascular Round Table (CRT).

The CRT is an independent forum established by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and comprised of cardiologists and representatives of the pharmaceutical, device and equipment industries. The group's views are published today in European Heart Journal 1*.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two closest living relatives of the human species - the ultimate tool-using ape. Yet, despite being so closely related on the evolutionary tree, wild chimpanzees and bonobos differ hugely in the way they use tools.