The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, where a group of gunmen killed 165 and injured 304 people, the May 2012 shooting of five people by a gunman in Seattle and the recall of four million cars by Toyota in 2009 and 2010 because of a faulty accelerator pedal show the power of social media - and the problems.

When the online community is creating and exchanging the news rather than official news channels, credibility is unknown and it can not only exaggerate the unfolding situation, but also turn it into misinformation, diverting attention from the real problems.

Anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills have been linked to an increased risk of death, according to a large study published in BMJ which shows that several anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) drugs or hypnotic drugs (sleeping pills) are associated with a doubling in the risk of mortality.  

The findings are based on routine data but need to be interpreted cautiously.

The study accounted, where possible, for other factors such as age, smoking and alcohol use, other prescriptions and socioeconomic status. Crucially, the team controlled for contributing risk factors such as sleep disorders, anxiety disorders and other psychiatric illness in all participants.

American farmers lead the world in productivity coupled with environmental responsibility, producing far more food on far less land than was even imagined decades ago. If the world had America's efficiency in agricultural dematerialization, an area the size of Amazonia could be reverted back to its natural state.

The Moon formed nearly 100 million years after the start of the solar system, according to a paper based on measurements from the interior of the Earth combined with computer simulations of the protoplanetary disk from which the Earth and other terrestrial planets formed.

The team of researchers simulated the growth of the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) from a disk of thousands of planetary building blocks orbiting the Sun.

By analyzing the growth history of the Earth-like planets from 259 simulations, the scientists discovered a relationship between the time the Earth was impacted by a Mars-sized object to create the Moon and the amount of material added to the Earth after that impact.

Sweden, the country with the second highest prevalence of type 1 diabetes in the world, could actually have 2-3 times more adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes than previously estimated, according to new findings in Diabetologia.

Current estimates in Sweden are based on the Diabetes Incidence Study in Sweden (DISS), which has been around since 1983. The DISS is one of very few registers to record data on adolescents and young adults and therefore findings from the DISS study have had implications for diabetes research and care in many countries.  Dr. Araz Rawshani of the Swedish National Diabetes Register, Gothenburg, and colleagues found that the DISS had very low coverage which discards previous findings.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Blood transfusions are one of the most common procedures patients receive in the hospital but the more red blood cells they receive, the greater their risk of infection, says a new study led by the University of Michigan Heath System and VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.

Researchers analyzed 21 randomized controlled trials for the study that appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Elderly patients undergoing hip or knee surgeries were most susceptible, with a 30 percent lower risk of infection when fewer transfusions were used. Overall, for every 38 hospitalized patients considered for a red blood cell transfusion (RBC), one patient would be spared a serious infection if fewer transfusions were used.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Childhood obesity comes with an estimated price tag of $19,000 per child when comparing lifetime medical costs to those of a normal weight child, according to an analysis led by researchers at the Duke Global Health Institute and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. When multiplied by the number of obese 10-year-olds in the United States, lifetime medical costs for this age alone reach roughly $14 billion.

An alternative estimate, which takes into account the possibility of normal weight children gaining weight in adulthood, reduces the cost to $12,900 per obese child. The findings appear online April 7, 2014, in the journal Pediatrics.

Endurance sport does not only change the condition and fitness of muscles but also simultaneously improves the neuronal connections to the muscle fibers based on a muscle-induced feedback. This link has been discovered by a research group at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. The group was also able to induce the same effect through raising the protein concentration of PGC1α in the muscle. Their findings, which are also interesting in regard to muscle and nerve disorders such as muscle wasting and ALS, have been published in the current issue of the journal Nature Communications.

The dose makes the poison, it is often said. And that can be the case even with beneficial products like Acetaminophen.

Acetaminophen is a commonly used pain reliever that is available in over-the-counter products (Tylenol®) and prescription medications, where it is combined with opioid analgesics (i.e., fixed-dose combination products).  For example, acetaminophen in combination with the opioid hydrocodone (Vicodin^® and its generic formulations) was the most prescribed medication in the U.S. each year from 2007 through 2011, according to a report by the IMS Institute of Healthcare Informatics.¹ 

Evidence collected over a period of 16 years by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a satellite in low-earth orbit equipped with instruments that measured variations in X-ray sources, has led to a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society showing huge clouds of gas orbiting supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

Picture a single cloud large enough to span the solar system from the sun to beyond Pluto's orbit. Now imagine many such clouds orbiting in a vast ring at the heart of a distant galaxy, occasionally dimming the X-ray light produced by the galaxy's monster black hole.