Though women are 20 percent of full-time faculty in medical schools, they are not rising to senior leadership positions in similar numbers, a situation strikingly different from the corporate world, where women have choices about how high they want to rise.

Mindfulness meditation practices resulted in improved sleep quality for older adults with moderate sleep disturbance in a clinical trial comparing meditation to a more structured program focusing on changing poor sleep habits and establishing a bedtime routine, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Sleep disturbances are a medical and public health concern for our nation's aging population. An estimated 50 percent of individuals 55 years and older have some sort of sleep problem. Moderate sleep disturbances in older adults are associated with higher levels of fatigue, disturbed mood, such as depressive symptoms, and a reduced quality of life, according to the study background.

Valium, one of the best known antianxiety drugs, produces its calming effects by binding with a particular protein in the brain. But the drug has an almost equally strong affinity for a completely different protein. Understanding this secondary interaction might offer clues about Valium's side effects and point the way to more effective drugs.

Tobacco use has plummeted in the past few decades, due to high taxes, bans on advertising and generous contracts for public relations companies to vilify smokers - but there are still more than a billion people worldwide who regularly use tobacco, including many who purchase the products illicitly.

Tens of thousands of pounds of methane leak per hour from equipment in three major natural gas basins that span Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, according to airborne measurements published today. But the overall leak rate from those basins is only about one percent of gas production there--lower than leak rates measured in other gas fields, and in line with federal estimates.

Cancer vaccines are designed to turn the body's own immune system specifically against tumor cells. Particularly promising are vaccines that are directed against so-called neoantigens: These are proteins that have undergone a genetic mutation in tumor cells and, therefore, differ from their counterparts in healthy cells. The tiny alteration - sometimes only a single protein building block has been changed - gives the protein on the tumor cell surface novel immunological characteristics that can be recognized as "foreign" by the immune system's T cells. Therapeutic vaccines using a short protein fragment, or peptide, specifically containing the mutated site can then direct immune cells specifically to the tumor.