DURHAM, N.C. -- A new study from Duke Health suggests that patients who need to have their thyroid gland removed should seek surgeons who perform 25 or more thyroidectomies a year for the least risk of complications.

Thyroidectomy is one of the most common operations performed in the U.S, often due to cancer, over-activity, or enlargement of the gland, which is located at the base of the throat and produces hormones that regulate metabolism. But most consumers would be surprised to learn that about half (51 percent) of surgeons who perform thyroidectomy do so just once a year, according to the study published in the Annals of Surgery.

Brides and the bereaved beware: You, like many shoppers, may have a tendency to reject thriftiness when your purchase is a matter of the heart, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

People are reluctant to seek cost-saving options when buying what they consider sacred -- such as engagement rings, cremation urns, or even desserts for a birthday party -- for or to commemorate loved ones. The paper, published in the most recent volume of Judgment and Decision Making, is the first to examine the implications of this phenomenon.

Smokers who try to cut down the amount they smoke before stopping are less likely to quit than those who choose to quit all in one go, Oxford University researchers have found. Their study is published in journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Most experts say that people should give up in one go, but most people who smoke seem to try to stop by gradually reducing the amount they smoke before stopping. This research helps to answer the questions 'Which approach is better?', and 'Are both as likely to help people quit in the short and long term?'.

PASADENA, Calif., March 14, 2016 -- Surgical patients who received the flu vaccine during their hospital stay did not have an increased risk of emergency department visits or subsequent hospitalizations in the week following discharge, compared with surgical patients who did not receive the vaccine. The new study from Kaiser Permanente, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also found that compared with unvaccinated surgical patients, vaccinated surgical patients did not have an increased risk of fever nor did they have an increased number of laboratory tests checking for infection.

Plant cell walls are comprised of many complex polymers that require multiple different enzymes to fully break down, such as cellulase to digest cellulose and xylanase to digest xylan. For decades scientists thought only microbes could produce cellulase, until cellulase genes were found in wood-feeding insects. Now, new research from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, overturns another old theory. The scientists discovered that stick insects (Phasmatodea) produce cellulases that can handle several types of cell wall polymers equally (Insect Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, February 2016).

A recent observational campaign involving more than two dozen optical telescopes and NASA's space based SWIFT X-ray telescope allowed a team of astronomers to measure very accurately the rotational rate of one of the most massive black holes in the universe. The rotational rate of this massive black hole is one third of the maximum spin rate allowed in General Relativity. This 18 billion solar mass heavy black hole powers a quasar called OJ287 which lies about 3.5 billion light years away from Earth. Quasi-stellar radio sources or `quasars' for short, are the very bright centers of distant galaxies which emit huge amounts of electro-magnetic radiation due to the infall of matter into their massive black holes.