Given the choice between a great doctor and a nice doctor, most people would choose great, but for those who prefer nice, a new tool evaluates and helps medical residents improve their communication and other soft skills to become better doctors. 

The study is the first to look at the medical residents' collaboration, communication and other soft skills, or what are known as CanMEDS competencies, in orthopedic surgical training.

Rangeomorphs were unlike any modern organism, which has made it difficult to determine how they fed, grew or reproduced, and therefore difficult to link them to any particular modern group.

They looked like plants but evidence points to the fact that rangeomorphs were actually some of the earliest animals.

Starting 541 million years ago, the conditions in the oceans changed quickly with the start of the Cambrian Explosion – a period of rapid evolution when most major animal groups first emerge in the fossil record and competition for nutrients increased dramatically.

Recent papers have suggested that women improve small working groups and so adding women to a group is a surefire way to boost team collaboration and creativity.

A new study from Washington University in St. Louis says that is only true when women there is no competition. Force teams to go head to head and the benefits of a female approach evaporate.

"Intergroup competition is a double-edged sword that ultimately provides an advantage to groups and units composed predominantly or exclusively of men, while hurting the creativity of groups composed of women," said Markus Baer, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School.

Researchers have come up with a promising method of treating male infertility; a synthetic version of the sperm-originated protein known as PAWP. PAWP has been shown to be required, they write, and their synthetic version was sufficient to initiate the fertilization process.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2013 Annual Report on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, only about 37 percent of treatment cycles lead to successful pregnancy. This low success rate may be due to a variety of factors in the male and female including the inability of sperm cell to initiate fertilization and trigger embryo development upon egg entry. 

Our immunosensory system detects virus such as influenza via specific characteristics of viral ribonucleic acid - and the immune system's ability to prevent viruses from using molecular camouflage to escape detection is quite good.

But how that works has been a mystery. Researchers have discovered that our immunosensory system attacks viruses on a molecular level to keep rotaviruses, a common cause of diarrheal epidemics, at bay. The results have been published in the renowned journal Nature.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court forced California to deal with the massive overcrowding in its prison system. The resulting reform shifted administrative and budgetary responsibility for low-level criminals from the state prison system to county jails. As a result, local California jails now face more overcrowding than ever, and local law enforcement is saddled with additional costs for imprisoning arrestees.

That is going to lead to higher crime rates, according to a new paper in the Journal of Public Economics which evaluated prison reform in Israel.