When it comes to urine, it's all relative. We can't prove Sir Isaac Newton was thinking about how animals urinate when he was developing his laws of gravity but he can't prove he wasn't either. What we can prove is that they are connected – by the urethra, to be specific.

A new study investigated how quickly 32 animals urinate. It turns out that it's all about the same. Even though an elephant's bladder is 3,600 times larger than a cat's (18 liters vs. 5 milliliters), both animals relieve themselves in about 20 seconds. In fact, all animals that weigh more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) urinate in that same time span.

Jill Abramson was recently ousted from her position as the executive editor of The New York Times. Her defenders said it was because of her gender (yet she got the job) and her demand for more compensation (she was paid more than her predecessor and the New York Times is hemorrhaging money) while critics called her polarizing and brusque. Some used the term 'pushy' which was codespeak for sexism, it was said.

She was not the first difficult person to end up running a newsroom and the response her firing got from subordinates and other media leaders likely surprised her - difficult people never know they are difficult, according to a new paper from the Columbia Business School .

Recently findings could help to reduce health care charges while also protecting childhood cancer survivors from heart ailments caused by drug therapy. 

The paper reviewed data from patient histories to show that current standard medical guidelines for protecting childhood cancer survivors from drug treatment-related heart disease and heart failure later in life through periodic heart scans (echocardiographs) are overly cautious.

According to the data, the frequency of such post-cancer screenings can be safely reduced for low-risk patients – with large cost-savings and little reduction in overall quality of patient care.

The Jacobi iterative method, a 169-year-old math strategy, may soon get a new lease on life.

In a recent study, researchers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center used video observation to assess 
anesthesia provider
hand hygiene compliance.

They observed an average of 149 hand hygiene opportunities per hour of anesthesia time. Hand hygiene compliance was lowest during the first and last 20-minute time periods. The low hand hygiene compliance rates at case start and case end corresponded with sharp peaks in bacterial contamination of the 20 most frequently touched objects during these same time periods. 

It's unclear why there is a natural medicine craze in the modern era. Real medicine was invented because natural medicine didn't help people. If natural medicine survived double-blind clinical trials, it became regular medicine.