On bmj.com today, Angela Coulter, Associate Professor at Oxford University and colleagues argue that this is "unethical" and call for a coordinated approach to use the information to help improve services.

Their views follow recent news of hospital trusts "helping" patients to write favourable reports of their experience of their services – and a report by Healthwatch England warning that the complaints system for the NHS in England is "hopelessly complicated" and needs an overhaul.

Although the targeted cancer treatment drug crizotinib is very effective in causing rapid regression of a particular form of lung cancer, patients' tumors inevitably become resistant to the drug. Now a new drug called ceritinib appears to be effective against advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), both in tumors that have become resistant to crizotinib and in those never treated with the older drug. The results of a phase 1 clinical trial conducted at centers in 11 countries are reported in the March 27 New England Journal of Medicine.

The architecture of the autistic brain is speckled with patches of abnormal neurons, according to research partially funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 27, 2014, this study suggests that brain irregularities in children with autism can be traced back to prenatal development.

By reptile standards, alligators are positively chatty. They are the most vocal of the non-avian reptiles and are known to be able to pinpoint the source of sounds with accuracy. But it wasn't clear exactly how they did it because they lack external auditory structures.

In a new study, an international team of biologists shows that the alligator's ear is strongly directional because of large, air-filled channels connecting the two middle ears. This configuration is similar in birds, which have an interaural canal that increases directionality.

Significant progress toward creating "homo minutus" - a benchtop human - has gotten a little closer, thanks to successful development and analysis of a liver human organ construct that responds to exposure to a toxic chemical much like a real liver.

At the Society of Toxicology meeting in Phoenix, Vanderbilt University Professor John Wikswo said the achievement is the first result from a five-year, $19 million multi­-institutional effort led by he and Rashi Iyer, Senior Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Until now, rings of material in a disc have been associated with giant planets like Saturn.

Chariklo, located two billion kilometers away, between Saturn and Uranus,  is the first miniature planet with two rings of ice and pebbles. Chariklo was located in the Kuiper Belt, a collection of thousands of dwarf planets and comets in orbit beyond Neptune on the edge of our solar system, but at some point it must have been thrown out of this belt and is now between Saturn and Uranus, where there is a collection of small objects, called Centaur.