In a letter to the Annals of Internal Medicine, a group of nutritionists object to all of the studies finding supplements are well-marketed but unnecessary costs for most Americans.  

Their rebuttal: they don't harm anyone, they are relatively cheap and science can't prove they don't work. 

Hardly a great endorsement, but the nutritionists from the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University and three other institutions can't really argue for the benefits of supplements, so they instead argue that the case is not 'closed', as an editorial in the same publication last year argued. 

It sounds positively un-American to have government picking winner and losers in the drug marketplace, but the writing is on the wall for our health future: taxpayer-funded Medicare is going to be the economic driver in medical decision-making and policy sooner or later.

And if all eye doctors were told to prescribe the less expensive of two drugs to treat two common eye diseases in older adults, it could save taxpayers $18 billion over a 10-year period, say scholars in a new paper. And the rest of the U.S. health care system could save $29 billion also, according to the findings of a team led by David Hutton, assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan.

A new study in
Nature Climate Change challenges the assumption in climate models that climate is the primary driver of how quickly organic matter decomposes in different regions. 

A long-term analysis conducted across several sites in the eastern United States found that local factors — from levels of fungal colonization to the specific physical locations of the wood — play a far greater role than climate in wood decomposition rates and the subsequent impacts on regional carbon cycling.

Because decomposition of organic matter strongly influences the storage of carbon, or its release into the atmosphere, it is a major factor in potential changes to the climate.

A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that metformin, the world's most widely used anti-diabetic drug, slows aging and increases lifespan. 

In their experiments, the researchers tease out the mechanism behind metformin's age-slowing effects: the drug causes an increase in the number of toxic oxygen molecules released in the cell and this, surprisingly, increases cell robustness and longevity in the long term.

Mitochondria – the energy factories in cells – generate tiny electric currents to provide the body's cells with energy. Highly reactive oxygen molecules are produced as a by-product of this process.

A recent analysis of voting trends of physicians has found that political contributions have gone up a lot and more of them have become Democrats; no surprise given Democratic efforts to increase federal presence in medicine.

The percentage of physicians making campaign contributions in federal elections increased to 9.4 percent in 2012 from 2.6 percent in 1991, and during that time physician contributors shifted away from Republicans toward Democrats. That trend was greater among lower paying specialties, such as pediatrics, and among women. 

Obesity often is associated with increased health related complications and death but some studies have found an 'obesity paradox' - people who are obese but otherwise healthy. Concern has been that may cause some to question striving for a normal weight.

Christian Dehlendorff, M.S., Ph.D., of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues sought to determine whether the obesity paradox in stroke was real or an artificial finding because of selection bias in studies. To overcome selection bias, authors only studied deaths caused by the index stroke using a Danish register of stroke and a registry of deaths.

A team of researchers has developed sperm-inspired microrobots which can be controlled by oscillating weak magnetic fields. 

The 322 micron-long robots consist solely of a head coated in a thick cobalt-nickel layer and an uncoated tail. When the robot is subjected to an oscillating field of less than five millitesla – about the strength of a decorative refrigerator magnet – it experiences a magnetic torque on its head, which causes its flagellum to oscillate and propel it forward. The researchers are then able to steer the robot by directing the magnetic field lines towards a reference point.

To some, it might seem that you can patent anything these days. Last week a weird story appeared in my Facebook newsfeed: Amazon has somehow been able to patent photography against a white background. The story was originally reported on DIY Photography. It has been making the Internet rounds since. The Electronic Freedom Foundation points out that the story made it onto the Colbert Report. But things aren’t always as they appear.

Imagine this as a business model: You own a large potato farm. You have workers who grow and process the potatoes, you hire people to pay them, you have a sales force to sell them and then you pay trucks to ship them and have people to collect the money. You have fixed and variable costs and you charge enough money to pay those and make a profit. You have created jobs.

The government decides that it wants to encourage everyone to grow potatoes. So they pass a law saying that if people will grow their own potatoes, they will subsidize it using tax dollars generated by other companies and workers. Then they mandate that in order to make growing potatoes appealing to more people, you will have to buy potatoes from individuals at the same price you sell them.

In our solar system, there are two basic kinds of planets- smaller, rocky terrestrials like Earth and Mars and then large gas giants like Neptune and Jupiter.

Though a middle ground between those two is missing locally, NASA's Kepler mission has discovered that these types of planets are very common around other stars. The aliens worlds of other systems - exoplanets - include terrestrials and gas giants, like we have, but also mid-sized "gas dwarfs" - based on how their host stars tend to fall into three distinct groups defined by their compositions.