The NFL's schedule makers face a lot of uncertainty when they sit down every spring to put together the next season's Monday Night Football schedule. They want viewers and they want to give teams national exposure. 

Yet the games won't be played for several months, and all sorts of things can happen that make a game which seems compelling in April a viewership bust in October: Players might be traded, injured or leave in free agency, and there is often a great deal of parity so a playoff team from one season may take a nosedive the next. A Monday Night Football schedule that once appeared to be filled with ratings winners is riddled with games few fans are interested in watching.

Does a long travel time to a primary stroke center (PSC) offset the potential benefits of this specialized care?

In an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine, Kimon Bekelis, M.D., of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H., and coauthors analyzed data for a national group of Medicare beneficiaries and calculated travel time to evaluate the association of seven-day and 30-day death rates with receiving care in a PSC.

Stroke is a leading cause of death and long-term disability in the United States. To maximize patient outcomes, referral centers - PSCs certified by The Joint Commission are the backbone of this - have been established to ensure adherence to guidelines and the efficient delivery of disease-specific care.

Last week, a small group of people held a protest outside Channel Nine in Sydney. They were objecting to the network’s treatment of Adam Whittington, the Australian man whose company “recovered” Sally Faulkner’s children on the streets of Beirut.

It’s clear there is a high level of concern within the community. Some concerns relate to Nine’s treatment of Whittington and his colleagues, who remain imprisoned in Lebanon. Others include Nine’s apparent involvement in arrangements for what might constitute the criminal act of child abduction, the payment of A$115,000 by Nine to Whittington’s company, and the crew’s close involvement on the scene and afterwards in Beirut.

Since the early 1900s, a subset of wealthy elites with a Malthusian mindset have been convinced that the world is overpopulated. Rather than let poor people starve, as British policy in the home of Malthus advocated, later generations sought to breed out the poor with eugenics, and forced sterilization. After World War II made eugenics wildly unpopular, proponents reframed their ideas as "population control." Groups like Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund were all founded by former eugenics advocates. Their supporters, like Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, also advocated forced sterilization and abortion, to limit population. 

PHILADELPHIA -- In the era of precision medicine, targeting the mutations driving cancer growth, rather than the tumor site itself, continues to be a successful approach for some patients. In the latest example, researchers from Penn Medicine and other institutions found that treating metastatic thyroid cancer patients harboring a BRAF mutation with the targeted therapy vemurafenib -- originally approved for melanoma patients with the mutation -- showed promising anti-tumor activity in a third of patients. The results were published in this week's Lancet Oncology.

This is another of my articles to help the many people who come to my science blog saying how scared they are of a planet, which they think is hidden behind the sun and is about to fly past or hit Earth in the near future. What I'm going to describe here is beginner level astronomy, but of course many never study astronomy. Most know that the Earth orbits the sun, nowadays, but few stop to think through what this means for the night sky and where planets can appear in it.

So let's draw out some of those implications, and then, if you are one of those who worry about this, I hope you'll see for yourself why astronomers say the idea is just plain nutty. Maybe after reading this, you will be kicking yourself that you got so scared of such a nutty idea. I hope so, anyway.

WASHINGTON -- Is empathy the result of gut intuition or careful reasoning? Research published by the American Psychological Association suggests that, contrary to popular belief, the latter may be more the case.

"Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others - that is, to be empathically accurate. Some are better at this than others, a difference that may be explained in part by mode of thought," said Jennifer Lerner, PhD, of Harvard University, a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Until now, however, little was known about which mode of thought, intuitive versus systematic, offers better accuracy in perceiving another's feelings."