Public health measures to reduce smoking would have more success if policy makers intervened to curb the vast profitability of the tobacco industry, say University researchers.

The lucrative nature of the cigarette market, dominated by a small number of large shareholder-owned companies, results in a vigorous fight against any new public health measures that may disrupt their profit-making.

The researchers from the University of Bath and University of Ottawa say governments should look to the success of past policies that have transitioned other industries towards products that are less harmful to health, such as the switch from leaded to unleaded petrol.

LIFE ON EARTH - Reconstructing the emergence and evolution of life on our planet is tightly linked to the questions as to when and to what extent Earth's atmosphere became oxygenated. New geological studies based on data from Western Greenland indicate that small levels of atmospheric oxygen developed already 3.8 billion years ago, some 0.7-0.8 billion years earlier than previously thought.

People diagnosed with depression are about twice as likely to smoke as the general population. A survey of 6811 participants from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the USA, published today in the scientific journal Addiction, found that although depressed smokers tried to quit smoking more often than other smokers, they were more likely to return to smoking within a month. This tendency seemed to be stronger for women than men.

Washington, DC - February 17, 2016 - Researchers from Maryland and New York have identified a novel herpes virus in cells taken from a bat. The work, published this week in mSphere, the American Society for Microbiology's new open access journal, could lead to better understanding of the biology of these viruses and why bats serve as hosts for a number of viruses that can potentially transfer to humans.

Eight new whip spider species have been found in the Brazilian Amazon, almost doubling the number of known charinid whip spider species in Brazil, according to a study published Feb. 17, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alessandro Ponce de Leão Giupponi and Gustavo Silva de Miranda from Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil and the Center of Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), respectively.

An analysis of scientific reports and comments on the health effects of a salty diet reveals a polarization between those supportive of the once-popular belief that population-wide reduction of salt intake is associated with better health and those that content it has been more hype than science. They used a citation analysis method of reviews, a little different from a traditional method, which basically just averages out other studies and attempts to control for differences.

In all, 54 percent were supportive of the hypothesis; 33 percent, not supportive; and 13 percent inconclusive, finds the article in the International Journal of Epidemiology.