Critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation had a higher prevalence of prior psychiatric diagnoses and an increased risk of a new psychiatric diagnosis and medication use after hospital discharge, according to a study in the March 19 issue of JAMA.

With recent advances in medical care, more patients are surviving critical illness. Critically ill patients are exposed to stress, including pain, respiratory distress, and delirium, all of which may impact subsequent mental health. The extent of psychiatric illness prior to critical illness, as well as the magnitude of increased risk of psychiatric illness following critical illness, is unclear, according to background information in the article.

Did the Polynesians beat Columbus to South America?

Not according to  archaeological
evidence. The new tale of migration was uncovered by analysis of ancient DNA from...chicken bones.

The ancient DNA has been used to study the origins and dispersal of ancestral Polynesian chickens, reconstructing the early migrations of people and the animals they carried with them.

Among the copious species of poultry in China, quail and chickens are the likely sources of infection of H7N9 influenza virus to humans, according to a paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Virology.

"Knowing the likely poultry species lets us target our interventions better to prevent human infections," says corresponding author David Suarez, of the United States Department of Agriculture.

The body clock's natural rhythm could be utilized to improve current therapies to delay the onset of chronic lung diseases.

Scientists at The University of Manchester have discovered a rhythmic defence pathway in the lung controlled by our body clocks, which is essential to combat daily exposure to toxins and pollutants.

Internal biological timers (circadian clocks) are found in almost all living things driving diverse processes such as sleep/wake cycles in humans to leaf movement in plants. In mammals including humans, circadian clocks are found in most cells and tissues of the body, and orchestrate daily rhythms in our physiology.

Identifying biomarkers could lead to earlier detection of preeclampsia, which in turn can lead to healthier mothers and children, according to a collaborative study from the Centre of Molecular Inflammation Research (CEMIR) and the MR Cancer Group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Their findings, "Metabolomic Biomarkers in Serum and Urine in Women with Preeclampsia," will be published in PLOS ONE on 17 March.

Small wind turbines tend to be located in areas where wind conditions are more unfavourable. "The control systems of current wind turbines are not adaptative; in other words, the algorithms lack the capacity to adapt to new situations," explained Iñigo Kortabarria, one of the researchers in the UPV/EHU'sAPERT research group. That is why "the aim of the research was to develop a new algorithm capable of adapting to new conditions or to the changes that may take place in the wind turbine," added Kortabarria. That way, the researchers have managed to increase the efficiency of wind turbines.

Lewis Owen has been scraping out icy fragments of history's truth from one of the most glaciated regions on Earth for the past 25 years.

His frequent excursions to Tibet and the Himalayas have led the University of Cincinnati professor of geology to some cold, hard facts.

Owen knows climate change is immortal – fluctuating across millennia, patiently building toward moments when circumstances are ripe for apocalypse. It was true thousands of years ago, when rapid climate change had profound effects on landscapes and the creatures that lived on them. That scenario could be true again, if the past is ignored.

Mathematicians are not created equally. Some people are just better at it, just like Usain Bolt runs faster than, well, everyone.

But a new psychology paper says that some people may be at greater risk to fear math, not only because of negative experiences but also because of genetic risks related to both general anxiety and math skills.

There has long been a hypothesis that a starvation diet can extend lifespan.

The only way it was really shown was by weaning mice on such a diet - and that isn't really ethical for human babies. And it doesn't work in the wild, because dietary restriction compromises the immune system’s ability to fight off disease and reduces the muscle strength necessary to flee a predator. Most animals don't live long enough to catch 'old age' diseases like cancer and the late-life pathologies that humans do.

What do you think about computer-generated news articles? Would you even know?

Recently, Google has tried to penalize 'content farms' - especially companies that look for keywords, terms and trends in searches and automatically generate articles that will show up in search results but are just copied and pasted.