A comprehensive analysis of more than 1 million hospital admissions has found that over 50 percent of non-surgical patients were prescribed 
opioid pain medications
 during their hospitalizations, often at very high doses, and that more than half of those exposed were still receiving these medications on the day they were discharged from the hospital.

Opioids are narcotic pain medications including morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl. In recent years, the problem of opioid addiction and overdoses has grown more acute, with updated figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting that the rate of fatal overdoses from opioids nearly quadrupled over the last decade, with estimates of more than 14,000 deaths from opioid overdoses annually.

Regular, moderate coffee consumption may decrease an individual's risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to research in a report published by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee. 

More than 370 million people worldwide have diabetes making it one of the most significant health problems. To mark World Diabetes Day, 
the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee
 released an updated report outlining the latest research on coffee and type 2 diabetes. 
The updated report is based on a report from the World Congress on Prevention of Diabetes, held in 2012 and is updated with the latest research from this field published over the past year. 

Key research findings include:

Panthera blytheae is the oldest big cat fossil ever found and fills a significant gap in the fossil record, according to results announced today.

The Panthera blytheae skull was excavated and described by a team led by Jack Tseng, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York.

There's no mystery like the mystery of folk lore. Scientists will find the missing link and dark matter before historians will definitely figure out the phylogeny of ancient tales - but for only $1,200 you can write a paper and get it published in a journal.

An international team say they know what is inside the enigmatic jets emitted by black holes. Jets are narrow beams of matter spat out at high speed from near a central object, like a black hole.

If the spirit is willing the flesh is not so weak. 

In the 1990s, the US administration decided the best way to protect wages for American workers was by making it very difficult for those pesky foreign science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates living here to get work visas. Student visas remained easy to get, it was okay to spend money to live in the US, but getting paid was a no-no.

It's a common enough tale, told throughout the history of literature. A parent prefers their 'real' children and the life of the step-child is miserable as a result, compared to the biological child.

That "Cinderella effect" claims that it is biologically inevitable that parents care less for stepchildren because they do not spread their genes - as you might expect, actual biologists did not come up with it, anthropologists did. And the authors of a new paper recognize something you knew all along; in many cases, the value and personality of a step-child matters more than biological inheritance, just like with biological children. 

As someone who works on Silurian age fossils, I can't help but be jealous every time a new mammoth "fossil" is found in permafrost. I'm using quotation marks here around because these mammoth corpses can barely be considered to be fossils. My fossils are traces of rock on rock. Whereas, these mammoth corpses are so fresh, the discoverers have problems keeping their dogs from tucking in.

Trastuzumab and anthracyclines given concurrently are effective at treating HER-2-positive breast cancer but there is worry that this could lead to increased risk of cardiac toxicity.

New research shows these agents do not need to be given concurrently to achieve a high rate of complete pathological remission. The findings investigated the timing of trastuzumab administration with anthracycline and taxane chemotherapy.

The randomized phase III trial enrolled 280 women with operable HER-2 positive invasive breast cancer at 36 centers across the United States from September 2007 through December 2011.