The NFL's schedule makers face a lot of uncertainty when they sit down every spring to put together the next season's Monday Night Football schedule. They want viewers and they want to give teams national exposure. 

Yet the games won't be played for several months, and all sorts of things can happen that make a game which seems compelling in April a viewership bust in October: Players might be traded, injured or leave in free agency, and there is often a great deal of parity so a playoff team from one season may take a nosedive the next. A Monday Night Football schedule that once appeared to be filled with ratings winners is riddled with games few fans are interested in watching.

The legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado was associated with both increased hospital visits and cases at a regional poison center because of unintentional exposure to the drug by children, suggesting effective preventive measures are needed as more states consider legalizing the drug, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.

More than half of U.S. states allowed medical marijuana and four states allowed recreational marijuana use as of 2015. Colorado is one of those states, having allowed medical marijuana in 2000 and recreational marijuana becoming available for purchase in 2014.

Does a long travel time to a primary stroke center (PSC) offset the potential benefits of this specialized care?

In an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine, Kimon Bekelis, M.D., of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H., and coauthors analyzed data for a national group of Medicare beneficiaries and calculated travel time to evaluate the association of seven-day and 30-day death rates with receiving care in a PSC.

Stroke is a leading cause of death and long-term disability in the United States. To maximize patient outcomes, referral centers - PSCs certified by The Joint Commission are the backbone of this - have been established to ensure adherence to guidelines and the efficient delivery of disease-specific care.

Osteopaths have made their way into various aspects of medicine, primarily because they are still willing to be GPs at a time when MDs are running from government bureaucracy and paperwork, but their founding precepts are still vague. And if you want vague treatment, it is best to find vague conditions. There is no more vague condition than pain.

Last week, a small group of people held a protest outside Channel Nine in Sydney. They were objecting to the network’s treatment of Adam Whittington, the Australian man whose company “recovered” Sally Faulkner’s children on the streets of Beirut.

It’s clear there is a high level of concern within the community. Some concerns relate to Nine’s treatment of Whittington and his colleagues, who remain imprisoned in Lebanon. Others include Nine’s apparent involvement in arrangements for what might constitute the criminal act of child abduction, the payment of A$115,000 by Nine to Whittington’s company, and the crew’s close involvement on the scene and afterwards in Beirut.

As explained in the previous installment of this series, these questions are a warm-up for my younger colleagues, who will in two months have to pass a tough exam to become INFN researchers.

A disclaimer is useful here. Here it is:

Since the early 1900s, a subset of wealthy elites with a Malthusian mindset have been convinced that the world is overpopulated. Rather than let poor people starve, as British policy in the home of Malthus advocated, later generations sought to breed out the poor with eugenics, and forced sterilization. After World War II made eugenics wildly unpopular, proponents reframed their ideas as "population control." Groups like Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund were all founded by former eugenics advocates. Their supporters, like Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, also advocated forced sterilization and abortion, to limit population. 

From recycling to reusing hotel towels, consumers who participate in a company's "green" program are more satisfied with its service, finds a new study co-led by a Michigan State University researcher.

Doing good makes customers feel good, and that "warm glow" shapes opinion, said Tomas Hult, Byington Endowed Chair and professor of marketing in the Eli Broad College of Business. But it gets more complicated when companies throw incentives into the mix.

PHILADELPHIA -- In the era of precision medicine, targeting the mutations driving cancer growth, rather than the tumor site itself, continues to be a successful approach for some patients. In the latest example, researchers from Penn Medicine and other institutions found that treating metastatic thyroid cancer patients harboring a BRAF mutation with the targeted therapy vemurafenib -- originally approved for melanoma patients with the mutation -- showed promising anti-tumor activity in a third of patients. The results were published in this week's Lancet Oncology.

(Toronto - July 21, 2016) Since the discovery of their true nature 140 years ago, lichens have been the poster children for symbiosis. In the textbook definition of a lichen, the filaments of a single fungus provide protection for photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria, which in turn provide food for the fungus.

But 140 years after the term "symbiosis" was coined to describe lichen, it turns out there's a third party involved in the relationship - a yeast that may help provide the structure found in large "leafy" and "branching" lichens.