A survey asking if people took a flu vaccine revealed some interesting statistics - if their physician specifically recommended it, they were far more likely to have gotten one and vaccination rates among African-Americans was a low 62 percent.

90 percent of patients received vaccination if their physician advocated for it compared to 58 percent of patients whose physician did not, the results showed. Vaccination rates in European-Americans were 93 percent and in Asian-Americans 84 percent. Vaccination rates were 4X higher among patients who believed vaccination protected them than those who thought otherwise.

Just about everyone in the developed world has taken an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection and the instructions are well-known; don't stop after you start to feel better, even though you know they are killing machines.

Yet the picture may be more complex, according to a new paper, and it might change our understanding of why bacteria produce antibiotics in the first place. 

"For a long time we've thought that bacteria make antibiotics for the same reasons that we love them - because they kill other bacteria," said  Elizabeth Shank, an assistant professor of biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "However, we've also known that antibiotics can sometimes have pesky side-effects, like stimulating biofilm formation." 

A new paper based on a series of theoretical calculations using applied physics says that if you smoke 15 cigarettes in a sealed car in just over an hour, you could lose consciousness.

So crack a window. Or don't smoke in a car. Or don't smoke.

Why create the estimate? Starting this October, drivers in England will be banned from smoking in their cars if they are carrying children as passengers and the reason was not just because of vague epidemiological claims about second-hand or even third-hand smoke, but because of the real threat of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Like sports, want to play into old age without the injury risk? Walking football - or basketball, or lots of other things - might be the answer.

Football - soccer in the United States - is running and kicking. If you change the running to walking, the skill is the same but the injury risk is reduced. Although coaches have long forced players to walk, the same way guitar teachers force players to play a fast piece slowly, as a popular movement Walking Football began in 2011, as a way  to help keep older players involved in football for longer. Players can walk, they can even walk fast, just not run. 

The health benefits of walking are well-established and Walking Football just makes it more fun. 

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.

The paper to read today is one from the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider -my competitors, as I work for the other experiment across the ring, CMS. ATLAS has just produced a new article which describes the search for the CP-odd A boson, a particle which arises in Supersymmetry as well as in more generic extensions of the Standard Model called "two-higgs doublet models". What are these ?

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.