There are 15 million people living with cancer in just the United States and it is painful. The huge downside to CDC claiming that recreational fentanyl use is an opioid epidemic is that they have stigmatized legitimate pain patients and their care - and so cancer patients end up in Emergency Rooms suffering from pain, nausea, and shortness of breath.

Though cannabinoids in marijuana are touted by salespeople and supplement marketing as therapies for almost anything, anecdotes are not evidence, and the evidence from a meta-analysis of 83 studies (3,000 people) for six mental health conditions shows cannabinoids do not work. Not for depression, anxiety disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Tourette syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), or psychosis. And since there are known risks of cannabinoids they may be doing harm.

A National Academy of Medicine report released today says that a third to a half of physicians and nurses say they feel burned out, and that is even higher for medical students and residents at nearly 60 percent.

That could obviously affect patient care and, with lawyers waiting in the wings to sue, health care costs. 

The report says key issues will be:

Tackling clinician burnout early in professional development.

Fixing electronic health care record systems that increase frustration and stress.

Lowering administrative burdens and distracting clinicians from the care of patients.

ESO’s X-shooter spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope in Chile has detected a freshly made heavy element, strontium, in space, in the aftermath two merging neutron stars. 

That sounds obscure but it means that the heavier elements in the Universe can form in neutron star mergers, a clue in the puzzle of chemical element formation.

A new study has found that the switch from coal to natural gas hasn't just reduced greenhouse gas emissions from energy, it has reduced water usage. That is even factoring in water used during hydraulic fracturing - fracking - and shale gas generation.

It's a surprise for Americans to learn that the U.S. has more open land than the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is 3X the size of the U.S., and it is an even bigger surprise when people learn that, of all the area not covered by ice, half of the world's land remains wilderness. 

The inventory of open land was conducted in 2017 and 2018 by the National Geographic Society but a new study says that the wilderness is getting more fragmented. That makes sense, but it's not a bad thing. If a new housing development goes up and a city designates a lake and surrounding marsh as protected, it can be called fragmented but it's better than being gone.