The Affordable Care Act and data portability is forcing health care providers, and the vendors who service them, to accelerate development of tools that can handle an expected deluge of data and information about patients, providers and outcomes.

The volume of data is daunting - so are concerns about interoperability, security and the ability to adapt rapidly to the lessons in the data, writes Dana Gardner at Big Data Journal.

That is why Boundaryless Information Flow, Open Platform 3.0 adaptation, and security for the healthcare industry are headline topics for The Open Group’s upcoming event, Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow on July 21 and 22 in Boston, he notes.

Corticosteroid drugs used in inhalers by children with asthma may suppress their growth, suggest two new systematic reviews published in The Cochrane Library which focus on the effects of inhaled corticosteroid drugs (ICS) on growth rates.

The authors found children's growth slowed in the first year of treatment, although the effects were minimized by using lower doses.

What 'separates us from the animals'. as the saying goes?

Not a lot. We're all animals, of course, but among primates there is an easy-to-spot difference: Humans tend to walk in lateral sequences, a foot down and then a hand on the same side and then moved in the same sequence on the other side, while apes and other non-human primates walk in a diagonal sequence, in which they put down a foot on one side and then a hand on the other side, continuing that pattern as they move along. 

What does that mean? It means quadripedalism, such as among the five Turkish siblings profiled in the 2006 BBC2 documentary "The Family That Walks on All Fours", does not mean anyone is devolving or evolving backwards.

A new survey analysis finds that in just about about any field where there are academics and field work, there is going to be sexual harassment and even assault.

Yes, surveys, the bane of the scientific method. The authors analyzed survey results of 666 people (142 men, 516 women) with field experience in anthropology, archeology and more, and found that many respondents claimed to have suffered or witnessed sexual harassment or even sexual assault while at work in the field.

Paleontologists have discovered the exquisitely preserved brain in the fossil of one of the world's first known predators that lived in the Lower Cambrian, about 520 million years ago. The discovery revealed a brain that is surprisingly simple and less complex than those known from fossils of some of the animal's prey. 

As sea ice begins to melt back toward its late September minimum, it is being watched by researchers who have put sensors on and under ice in the Beaufort Sea. 

The international effort hopes to figure out the physics of the ice edge in order to better understand and predict open water in Arctic seas.

"This has never been done at this level, over such a large area and for such a long period of time," said principal investigator Craig Lee, an oceanographer at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory. "We're really trying to resolve the physics over the course of an entire melt season."