The health benefits of the Mediterranean diet are well-known. As well as being healthier, a recent article concludes that the menu traditionally eaten in Spain leaves less of a carbon footprint than that of the US or the United Kingdom.

The consequences of climate change range from species extinction to sea-level increases and the spread of diseases. For this reason, researchers have been struggling for years to alleviate its effects, even limiting the pollution caused by food consumption.

Health information exchanges are supposed to improve the speed, quality, safety and cost of patient care, but there is little evidence of that in existing health information exchange benefit studies, according to a research paper published this month in the prestigious journal Health Affairs.

Researchers synthesized and quantitatively assessed 27 health information exchange benefit studies, said Nir Menachemi, a professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and one of the authors of the paper. He was at the University of Alabama at Birmingham while the review of the health information exchange studies study was conducted.

Shakespeare said "to be or not to be" is the question, and now scientists are asking how life forms grow to be the correct size with proportional body parts.

Probing deeply into genetics and biology at the earliest moments of embryonic development, researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report March 26 in Nature Communications they have found new clues to explain one of nature's biggest mysteries. Their data from fruit flies show the size and patterning accuracy of an embryo depend on the amount of reproductive resources mothers invest in the process before an egg leaves the ovary.

3 percent of younger children and 17 percent of 9-13 year olds skip lunch on a given school day and 23 percent of 9-13 year olds skip lunch on the weekends - yet obesity is a growing problem.

They may be eating more junk food instead. Lunch skippers had lower intakes of nutrients, including calcium and fiber, than lunch consumers. In addition, the data show that for some children, the lunch meal was primarily responsible for the higher essential nutrient intakes of vitamin D, potassium and magnesium, as well as a nutrient of concern, sodium. 

Cigarette smoking is down, thanks to fines and taxes on cigarette companies that fund anti-smoking campaigns - but hookah (water pipe) use is up. A new paper in Cancer Causes and Control worries that almost one in four high school seniors may try smoking hookah and 78,200 youth are current water pipe users.

Water pipes work by bubbling tobacco smoke through water, leading some users to believe that they carry less risk than cigarettes. The study, which analyzed data from the national 2012-2013 Youth Smoking Survey, found that over a third of youth believe it is less harmful to smoke tobacco in a water pipe than smoking a cigarette. 

Verbal abuse, aggressive behavior, criminal damage to objects are expected in certain professions but hardly anyone includes doctors, although they are exposed to such incidents - and not just in dictatorships or the developing world. 

Florian Vorderwülbecke and colleagues writing in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 159-65) investigate how often acts of violence and aggression against primary care physicians are committed in Germany. They surveyed 1500 doctors, asking which assaults they had been exposed to, and where these took place, among other questions. 

NASA has sent an astronaut to the International Space Station to stay there for a year.