With warming summer temperatures across Alaska, white spruce tree growth in Interior Alaska has declined to record low levels, while the same species in Western Alaska is growing better than ever measured before.

The findings are the result of a study led by University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Natural Resources and Extension researcher Glenn Juday, Claire Alix of the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, and Tom Grant, formerly an adjunct faculty member at UAF. Their findings were recently published online by the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

Political partisanship is rooted in affective, physiological processes that cause partisans to toe the party line on policies and issues, regardless of policy content, according to a new paper.

Social psychologists have said that party identifiers are more inclined to agree with policy proposals that are proposed by their own party, independent of the content of the proposal. If the same proposal is issued by a competing party, they will be inclined to respond negatively to it. In other words, liberals and conservatives don't care about what is best for society, it has to be filtered through their beliefs to be legitimate.

Partnerships with multinational companies like Coca-Cola in child health programs can work to help save lives but decades of well-funded public relations campaigns against corporations by NGOs has turned letting companies fund programs into an ethical minefield.

ColaLife, a charity formed by British couple Simon and Jane Berry, worked with Coca-Cola to learn about the distribution channels the company uses in developing countries. With this knowledge, they devised a system to ensure life saving treatments reach children with diarrhea in remote parts of Zambia.

In a new study, older women who lived in places with higher air pollution had significantly reduced white matter in the brain. For the study, a research team took brain MRIs of 1403 women who were 71 to 89 years old and used residential histories and air monitoring data to estimate their exposure to air pollution in the previous 6 to 7 years.

The findings suggest that ambient particulate air pollutants may have a deleterious effect on brain aging.

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.

Some of the nation's largest businesses encourage employees to travel to large U.S. medical centers for complex elective surgical procedures. As part of these medical travel programs, companies negotiate lower prices for patients to receive high-quality surgical care at some of the nation's premier hospitals.

But many participants must travel long distances - sometimes hundreds of miles from home - to reach destination hospitals, meaning it can be difficult to return should complications arise.

Using Twitter and Google search trend data in the wake of the very limited U.S. Ebola outbreak of October 2014, a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University have found that news media is extraordinarily effective in creating public panic.

Because only five people were ultimately infected yet Ebola dominated the U.S. media in the weeks after the first imported case, the researchers set out to determine mass media's impact on people's behavior on social media.

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.

The sudden drop seemed to occur after media reports highlighted safety concerns, such as the development of certain fractures that occurred rarely in long-term users, despite the fact that the US Food and Drug Administration and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research did not recommend any specific safety restrictions on bisphosphonates. The findings are published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

Put down that honey. Fructose, often in the form of table sugar, is not less harmful than glucose, according to Wilhelm Krek, professor for cell biology at ETH Zurich's Institute for Molecular Health Sciences. 

Pet dogs may be humans' best friends in a new arena of life: cancer treatment, said University of Illinois veterinary clinical medicine professor Timothy Fan. Physiological similarities between dogs and humans, and conserved genetics between some dog and human cancers, can allow pet dogs to serve as useful models for studying new cancer drugs, he said.

In a meeting sponsored by the National Cancer Policy Forum of the National Academies' Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., Fan and 15 other experts in the field described the benefits of using pet dogs with naturally occurring (rather than laboratory-induced) tumors in early cancer drug trials.