A connection between persistent insomnia and increased inflammation and mortality from all causes has been identified by a group of researchers in The American Journal of Medicine.

The results apply to those with persistent insomnia, not intermittent insomnia. Persistent (chronic) insomnia affects up to 10 percent of U.S. adults. 

In the first U.S. study of urinary arsenic in babies, Dartmouth College researchers found that formula-fed infants had higher arsenic levels than breast-fed infants, and that breast milk itself contained very low arsenic concentrations.

The findings appear Feb. 23 online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. A PDF is available on request.

The researchers measured arsenic in home tap water, urine from 72 six-week-old infants and breast milk from nine women in New Hampshire. Urinary arsenic was 7.5 times lower for breast-fed than formula-fed infants. The highest tap water arsenic concentrations far exceeded the arsenic concentrations in powdered formulas, but for the majority of the study's participants, both the powder and water contributed to exposure.

A new film, Surviving Terminal Cancer (www.survivingterminalcancer.com) by director/writer Dominic Hill, had its premiere at Lincoln Center February 18, 2015. Through the personal stories of Ben Williams and a remarkable wave of other long-term glioblastoma survivors following in his path, the film offers for the first time some hope for an alternative to the certain death offered by the current medical establishment for what is ordinarily considered to be an invariably fatal disease.

Each year millions of infants, toddlers and preschool children require anesthesia or sedation for various procedures and a new review suggest caution about their use.

A team of anesthesiology investigators and toxicologists writing in the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed existing animal and human studies for the impact of anesthetics on developing brains. 

Observational studies of children have been weak, but they still suggested a correlation between children who had received anesthetics and long-term cognitive impairments such as learning disabilities. Children between the ages of one and three appeared to be at a higher risk of adverse effects.

Wheat is a critical staple crop that provides 20% of the calories and over 25% of the protein consumed by humans.

'Yellow rust' caused by the fungus Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (PST) is one of the plant's major diseases and is found throughout the major wheat-producing areas of the world. Infections lead to significant reductions in both grain quality and yield, with some rare events leading to the loss of an entire crop. New strains of the fungus have recently emerged that adapt to warmer temperatures.

The MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever 3-D view of the deep Universe - in just 27 hours.

By taking very long exposure pictures of regions of the sky, astronomers have created many deep fields that have revealed much about the early Universe. The most famous of these was the original Hubble Deep Field, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope over several days in late 1995. This spectacular and iconic picture rapidly transformed our understanding of the content of the Universe when it was young. It was followed two years later by a similar view in the southern sky -- the Hubble Deep Field South.