Snooping is not allowed. Credit: Paul Walsh, CC BY-NC-SA

By Grant Blank, University of Oxford

A 'less is more' approach is not only making 3-D printed parts lighter and stronger, but faster and more economical.

A new technique under development is high speed sintering (HSS). Unlike commercial 3-D printers that use lasers, HSS marks the shape of the part onto powdered plastic using heat-sensitive ink, which is then activated by an infra-red lamp to melt the powder layer by layer and so build up the 3-D part.

The researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered they can control the density and strength of the final product by printing the ink at different shades of grey and that the best results are achieved by using less ink than is standard.

Cigarette smoking is considered a leading cause of preventable death worldwide and implicated in as many as 440,000 deaths in the United States each year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the United States, about 20 percent of people still smoke cigarettes and half claim they try to quit each year, though only 10 percent do so and most change their minds within 48 hours. Learning about withdrawal and difficulty of quitting can lead to more effective treatments to help smokers quit and so a new study on nicotine addiction measured a behavior that can be similarly quantified across species like humans and rats; the responses to rewards during nicotine withdrawal. 

American cars didn't cause all climate change, no matter what you may have read. Around 13,000 years ago, a sudden, catastrophic event caused drastic climate change and much of the Earth was plunged into a period of cold climatic conditions and drought. This drastic climate change, now called the Younger Dryas, coincided with the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, such as the saber-tooth cats and the mastodon, and resulted in major declines in prehistoric human populations, perhaps including the termination of the Clovis culture in America.

Concerns about kidney transplantation are very high among kidney failure patients, particularly older adults and women, but why?

There are thousands of patients with kidney failure who lack access to kidney transplantation, and disparities persist in terms of race, age, sex, and other patient characteristics.  That gets a lot of attention but what gets less mention is those disparities are in large part self-created.

To improve access, it's important to understand the sources of the disparities. Are patients unaware of transplantation and clinicians don't explain it, clinicians don't give referrals, or are patient concerns causing them to avoid transplantation despite appropriate referrals?

Health systems aren't sexy. Credit: Truthout.org, CC BY-NC-SA

By Sophie Harman, Queen Mary, University of London

Almost 20 percent cancer patients wait to enroll in Hospice until their last three days of life. 

Their courage and determination is admirable, Hospice is palliative care, but it shortchanges both patients and their families and a new paper seeks to create a profile for people like to be late admissions.

The team examined de-identified data from electronic medical records of 64,264 patients in 12 hospices in the Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness network from January 2008 to May 2013. Hospices spanned 11 states, including Pennsylvania, with censuses ranging from 400 to 1,700 patients per day. Of those 64,264 patients, 10,460 had a hospice stay of 3 days or fewer.

Thiamine - vitamin B1 - can potentially cause a fatal brain disorder called Wernicke encephalopathy.

Wernicke encephalopathy typically occurs in people who have disorders such as alcoholism and anorexia that lead to malnourishment and is an example of the wide range of brain diseases called encephalopathies that are caused by metabolic disorders and toxic substances

Symptoms can include confusion, hallucinations, coma, loss of muscle coordination and vision problems such as double vision and involuntary eye movements. Untreated, the condition can lead to irreversible brain damage and death.

Acute encephalopathy has a rapid onset of between hours and days. It is commonly due to toxic and metabolic factors.