A generation ago, there were awareness campaigns to tell people with an irregular heartbeats to go to the emergency room to prevent possible heart attacks.

It worked. People now go to the emergency room as they have been told but with the gradual government takeover of health care there is sudden concern about the costs of these visits. Atrial fibrillation is the most common kind of arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat and can lead to blood clots, stroke, heart failure and other heart-related complications. 

At the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014, researchers analyzed patients from the Nationwide Emergency Department Data who visited the emergency department with AF listed as the first diagnosis in 2006-11. They found:

Since the year 2000, mortality rates for heart disease declined by almost 4 percent even as higher blood pressure and obesity role, according to a new paper in JAMA.

Matthew D. Ritchey, D.P.T., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, and colleagues examined the contributions of heart disease subtypes, such as coronary HD (CHD) mortality, to overall heart disease (HD) mortality trends during 2000-2010. 

Up to 50 percent of patients with heart failure have normal or near-normal ejection fraction, termed heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFPEF).

The risk of death in HFPEF may be as high as in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFREF), but there is no proven therapy.

Beta-blockers improve outcomes in HFREF and may be beneficial in HFPEF, but data are sparse and inconclusive, and beta-blockers are currently not indicated for treating HFPEF, according to background information in the article.

You might never know that you're hard of thinking. Robin Zebrowski/Flickr, CC BY-NC

By Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol and Richard Pancost, University of Bristol

It is an unfortunate paradox: if you’re bad at something, you probably also lack the skills to assess your own performance. And if you don’t know much about a topic, you’re unlikely to be aware of the scope of your own ignorance.

Nationals MP George Christensen told Parliament that the hot temperatures of 1896 have been "wiped from the official record". It's a bit more complicated than that. AAP Image/Lukas Coch

By Neville Nicholls, Monash University

Breathing secondhand marijuana smoke could damage your heart and blood vessels as much as secondhand cigarette smoke, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014.

Pfizer's evergreening tactics have made it the target of protests. Michael Fleshman/Flickr, CC BY-SA

By Hazel Moir, Australian National University and Deborah Gleeson, La Trobe University

Efforts by pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. In some cases they also mean people are subjected to unnecessary clinical trials.

From 2000-2013 the global ocean surface temperature did not rise in spite of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. This Global Warming Hiatus generated a lot of public and scientific interest and no small amount of skepticism about the accuracy of the numerical models created by climate scientists. But data is another matter entirely and as of April 2014 ocean warming has picked up speed again, according to a new analysis of ocean temperature datasets.  

When two
giant LIGO detectors
are switched on in the US next year, they will help scientists pick up the faint ripples of black hole collisions millions of years ago, known as gravitational waves. 

Black holes cannot be seen, but scientists hope the revamped detectors, which act like giant microphones, will find remnants of black hole collisions - and theoretical physicists hope experimentalists will give validation for their numerical model.

I am quite happy to report today that the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider has just published a new search which fills a gap in studies of extended Higgs boson sectors. It is a search for the decay of the A boson into Zh pairs, where the Z in turn decays to an electron-positron or a muon-antimuon pair, and the h is assumed to be the 125 GeV Higgs and is sought for in its decay to b-quark pairs. 

If you are short of time, this is the bottomline: no A boson is found in Run 1 CMS data, and limits are set in the parameter space of the relevant theories. But if you have a bit more time to spend here, let's start with the beginning - What's the A boson, you might wonder for a start.