A review of six studies that evaluated the effects of meat and vegetarian diets on mortality involving more than 1.5 million people concluded all-cause mortality is higher for those who eat meat, particularly red or processed meat, on a daily basis.

The work by physicians from Mayo Clinic in Arizona published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association helps to affirm claims by the United Nations International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) claim that meat is a carcinogen as dangerous as plutonium or cigarette smoking. Despite variability in the data, they still conclude that increased intake of red meat, especially processed red meat, is associated with increased all-cause mortality.  

It's known as the cocktail-party problem: in the cacophony of sound made by insects in a spring meadow, how does one species recognize its own song?

Insects such as the tree cricket solve this problem by singing and listening at a single unique pitch.

But if that's the case, U of T Scarborough researchers wondered what happens when the temperature changes, because that affects the frequency of the tree cricket's song. The higher the temperature, the higher the pitch.

A male tree cricket (right) sings with his wings up, as a female standing next to him. Credit: Ken Sproule

Putting surgery one step closer into the realm of self-driving cars and intelligent machines, researchers show for the first time that a supervised autonomous robot can successfully perform soft tissue surgery. The robot outperformed expert surgeons and current robot-assisted surgical techniques in open bowel surgery in pigs. By taking human intervention out of the equation, autonomous robots could potentially reduce complications and improve the safety and efficacy of soft tissue surgeries, about 45 million of which are performed in the U.S. each year. Robot-assisted surgery currently relies on the surgeon to manually control it, and outcomes can vary depending on the individual's training and experience.

Vultures are often cartoon-ish characters in parched deserts. No one wants them around because in western films it means they are just waiting for you to die.

Cultural jokes aside, vultures in some parts of the world are in danger of disappearing. And according to a new report from University of Utah biologists, such a loss would have serious consequences for ecosystems and human populations alike. 

Nearly one in three British Columbia women over age 65 received inappropriate levels of prescription medicines in 2013, while only one in four men of the same age did, according to a new paper.

The work analyzed population-based health-care datasets to find out which medical and non-medical factors influence patients' risk of receiving prescription drugs on the American Geriatrics Society's list of drugs that should be avoided for older patients. The biggest non-medical risk factor was an individual's sex.

The authors found that, even when results were adjusted for all other risk factors, women were as much as 23 per cent more likely than men to be prescribed inappropriate drugs.