A new study has found that the eye's optical quality deteriorates after alcohol consumption. Not just how the images are interpreted, the way some unemployed guy who is 'getting his band together' looks more attractive at 2 AM after a few shots of Jägermeister, but the physical eye itself.

The authors say ethanol in the tear-film is one of the causes: it covers the surface of the eye, disturbs the outer layer and favors evaporation of the aqueous content of the tear, deteriorating the optical quality of the image we see. The deterioration in vision is significantly greater in subjects with breath alcohol content over the legal limit for driving, which is another obvious reason to call Uber and not drive yourself.

While probiotics don't do much of anything except make companies rich, fecal microbiota transplantation --- the process of delivering stool bacteria from a healthy donor to a patient suffering from intestinal infection with the bacterium Clostridium difficile --- has been shown to work by restoring healthy bacteria and functioning to the recipient's gut, according to a new study.

One and a half years ago ATLAS produced measurements for the Higgs boson mass using their selected sample of H->gamma gamma and H->ZZ*-> 4-lepton decay candidates, based on data collected in 2011 and 2012. That preliminary measurement was rather surprising as the two independent determinations appeared to disagree with one another at the 2.5-sigma level. The matter even spurred some online debate (see e.g. my blog entry) and a few gambling addicts waged $100 on the fact that those might be two distinct particle states.

Harrisvaccines has been granted United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) conditional licensure of the company's Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus (PEDv) Vaccine. 

 PEDv is a highly contagious swine disease that entered the United States in April 2013. PEDv causes vomiting and diarrhea in older animals and extreme dehydration and mortality of up to 100 percent in piglets that are less than one week of age. Since entering the U.S. a year ago, PEDv has spread to nearly 30 states and throughout North America, causing the death of millions of piglets. PEDv is not a zoonotic disease, and therefore cannot spread to humans, but it has cost the pork industry and consumers hundreds of millions of dollars.  

Amgen announced that it will collaborate with the National Cancer Institute and other public and private sector partners on the Lung Master Protocol (Lung-MAP), a clinical trial program that will use biomarker-driven research and genomic profiling to match squamous cell lung cancer patients to investigational treatments based on their individual cancer profiles.

Wind energy advocates were pressing Ohio Governor John Kasich to use his line-item veto to remove what they called an anti-wind-energy provision from a tax-cutting budget bill – a requirement that new installations be built further away from property lines.

Critics of wind energy believe wind turbines nearby cause headaches, insomnia and other maladies. Environmental groups and wind energy corporations dismiss the claims as anecdotal evidence. The budget bill bring $400 million in tax cuts.

For decades, the conventional medical wisdom has been the lower the better for blood pressure, with 120/80 being the goal and even lower if possible. But does that approach result in reduced risk for dangerous heart events for the approximately one in three people in this country who have high blood pressure? 

Perhaps not, according to an article in JAMA Internal Medicine, where researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center found that lowering systolic blood pressure below 120 does not appear to provide additional benefit for patients. Systolic pressure is the top number in a standard blood pressure reading (e.g., 120/80).

An analysis of e-cigarette uptake across 27 European countries published in Tobacco Control finds that they are mostly used by current smokers or would-be quitters - approximately 29 million people.

Some basic biology may need revising. It's broadly assumed that cells degrade and recycle their own old or damaged organelles, but researchers writing in PNAS say that some neurons transfer unwanted mitochondria, the tiny power plants inside cells, to supporting glial cells called astrocytes for disposal.  

The researchers looked specifically at the axons of retinal ganglion cells in mice, a type of neuron that transmits visual information from the eye to the brain. The investigation was prompted by observations while studying a mouse model of glaucoma that protein products from the retina were accumulating in the optic nerve head (ONH) just behind the eye. 

A new poll by The Boston Globe and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds, eight years into the state's universal health insurance legislation enacted in 2006, 63% of Massachusetts residents support the law and 18% oppose it, while 7% are not sure, and 12% have not heard or read about the law. The percentage of residents supporting the law remains unchanged since a 2011 Boston Globe/HSPH poll. Support for the law varies by party affiliation, with 77% of Democrats, 60% of Independents, and 49% of Republicans saying they support the legislation. The poll was conducted May 27-June 2, 2014.