CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (DEC. 15, 2015). Researchers have found little or no 'July effect' in the field of neurosurgery.

The 'July effect' is the theory that more medical and surgical errors, and, consequently, greater levels of morbidity and mortality occur during July, the month during which fourth year medical students become interns and residents advance to higher levels of training where they face greater challenges and more responsibility.

When we speak, we "leak" information about our social identity through the nuanced language that we use to describe others, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This research shows that people can infer a speaker's social identity (e.g., political party affiliation) from how the speaker uses abstract or concrete terms to describe someone else's behavior.

As most of you already know, today at 3PM two back-to-back talks by Jim Olsen (CMS) and Marumi Kado (ATLAS) at CERN will disclose the latest results of physics analyses performed on 13 TeV proton-proton collisions recorded this year by the two experiments. (To follow the talks see here).

The fine gentlemen who run Quebec-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals are probably thanking some deity or other for Martin Shkreli, the vile little creep who is the founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. 
In case you do not have a "vile little creep" Google News alert, Shkreli won the hearts of millions of Americans when he paid $55 million to Impax—the sole maker of Daraprim, a niche drug for treating toxoplasmosis—and raised the price of the 60-year old drug by 55-times. Because... he could. 

EUGENE, Ore. -- Dec. 14, 2015 -- Evolution is usually thought of as occurring over long time periods, but it also can happen quickly. Consider a tiny fish whose transformation after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake was uncovered by University of Oregon scientists and their University of Alaska collaborators.

The fish, seawater-native threespine stickleback, in just decades experienced changes in both their genes and visible external traits such as eyes, shape, color, bone size and body armor when they adapted to survive in fresh water. The earthquake -- 9.2 on the Richter scale and second highest ever recorded -- caused geological uplift that captured marine fish in newly formed freshwater ponds on islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska south of Anchorage.

Stories about lap dogs are everywhere, but researchers at the Virginia Tech College of Engineering can tell the story of dog lapping.

Using photography and laboratory simulations, researchers studied how dogs raise fluids into their mouths to drink. They discovered that sloppy-looking actions at the dog bowl are in fact high-speed, precisely timed movements that optimize a dogs' ability to acquire fluids.

Their discovery appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It has been estimated that if every nutritional measure known to be helpful were applied to every child in the world, global malnutrition would be decreased by only a third. New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, the University of Vermont and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh sheds light on why: Damage to the gut from infection explains why food alone is not a solution to malnutrition. To be effective, nutritional therapy will need to include measures to prevent or treat the damage to the gut of infants.

Role of Gut Health

While prescriptions for opioid pain relievers were concentrated in specialties for pain, anesthesia, and physical medicine and rehabilitation, it was general practitioners who dominated total prescriptions among Medicare prescribers based on sheer volume, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Researchers have suggested small groups of prolific prescribers and pill mills drive the opioid overdose epidemic. Medicare data provide an opportunity to examine prescribing patterns across a national population.

What is a catalyst? A material that facilitates (increases the speed and likelihood of) a chemical reaction. In general, catalysts are rare metals (platinum, for example), which are often used in the form of nanoparticles. In the field of renewable energy, catalysts are crucial, and scientists are striving to maximize their efficiency (in part also to avoid wasting these precious materials).

Contrary to claims by vegetarians and the activist groups that promote their world view, eating a vegetarian diet could add to climate change rather than reduce it.