A few years ago there was concern that poor people did not have access to the best health care because of high cost, but two new papers find that spending is actually too high.

The first study examines recent trends in spending and use of oral cancer drugs. They find that average spending on the 47 available oral oncolytics — cancer medication taken specifically by mouth — increased from $940 million in the first quarter of 2006 to $1.4 billion by the third quarter of 2011. 

Our fat contains a variety of cells with the potential to become bone, cartilage, or more fat if properly prompted. This makes adipose tissue a key potential resource for regenerative therapies such as bone healing if doctors can get enough of those cells and compel them to produce bone.

In a new study, scientists at Brown University demonstrate a new method for extracting a wide variety of potential bone-producing cells from human fat. They developed a fluorescent tag that could find and identify cells expressing a gene called ALPL. Expression of the gene is an indicator of bone-making potential.

The way neurons are interconnected in the brain is very complicated. This holds especially true for the cells of the hippocampus. It is one of the oldest brain regions and its form resembles a see horse (hippocampus in Latin).

The hippocampus enables us to navigate space securely and to form personal memories. So far, the anatomic knowledge of the networks inside the hippocampus and its connection to the rest of the brain has left scientists guessing which information arrived where and when.

Signals spread through the brain

Sexting may be a new "normal" part of adolescent sexual development and not strictly limited to at-risk teens, according to a paper in Pediatrics, which the authors say is the first survey to address the relationship between teenage sexting, or sending sexually explicit images to another electronically, and future sexual activity. 

The  results indicate that sexting may precede sexual intercourse in some cases and further cements the idea that sexting behavior is a credible sign of teenage sexual activity. Further, the researchers did not find a link between sexting and risky sexual behavior over time, which may suggest that sexting is becoming a part of growing up. 

A team of engineers have built a new system that protects Internet users' privacy while increasing the flexibility for web developers to build web applications that combine data from different web sites, dramatically improving the safety of surfing the web.

The system, Confinement with Origin Web Labels, or COWL, works with Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome web browsers and prevents malicious code in a web site from leaking sensitive information to unauthorized parties, while allowing code in a web site to display content drawn from multiple web sites – an essential function for modern, feature-rich web applications.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory have created a new simulator to more accurately estimate the greenhouse gases likely to be released from Arctic peatlands if they warm.

Their model is based on how oxygen filters through soil and it estimates that previous models probably underestimated methane emissions and overrepresented carbon dioxide emissions from those regions. 

Peatlands, common in the Arctic, are wetlands filled with dead and decaying organic matter. They are the result of millions of years of plants dying and breaking down into rich soil, so they contain a massive amount of carbon.

By Anson Mackay, University College London

The Aral Sea has reached a new low, literally and figuratively; new satellite images from NASA show that, for the first time in its recorded history, the largest basin has completely dried up.

In modern times, doctors in medical school and residency are steeped in a 'teach to the protocol' environment, mandated by the government and the threat of lawsuits if bold efforts don't work. With the gradual takeover of health care by governments, creativity and and initiative are going to decline even further but some hospitals still engage in high hospital care intensity (HCI) and they have lower rates of patients dying from a major complication, called failure to rescue.