(Boston) - For salt marshes, hurricanes are just another day at the beach.

These coastal wetlands are in retreat in many locations around the globe--raising deep concerns about damage to the wildlife that the marshes nourish and the loss of their ability to protect against violent storms. The biggest cause of their erosion is waves driven by moderate storms, not occasional major events such as Hurricane Sandy, researchers from Boston University and the United States Geological Survey now have shown.

A new analysis indicates that many patients continue working after being diagnosed with metastatic cancer, but a heavy burden of symptoms may prevent them from doing so. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study illustrates the need to treat difficult symptoms so that patients can maintain their employment.

Improved treatments have helped to prolong the lives of patients with metastatic cancer. Because individuals diagnosed with metastatic cancer may wish to continue to work, understanding how their illness affects their employment may help patients make adjustments.

Many people in Russia know about the Dima Rogachev Centre - particularly those who have faced the challenge of child cancer. The centre is Europe's largest pediatric cancer care facility and is named after a boy with advanced cancer who wrote a letter to President Putin inviting him to visit; the invitation was accepted, and after the visit, the decision was made to build a state-of-the-art Centre for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, based in the Research Institute of Pediatric Hematology. The new centre was named after Dmitry 'Dima' Rogachev who died two years later at the age of 12 while the centre was still under construction.

Both acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease were common in patients undergoing major vascular surgical procedures and were associated with an increase in long-term cardiovascular-specific death compared with patients with no kidney disease, according to a study published online by JAMA Surgery.

Azra Bihorac, M.D., M.S., of the University of Florida, Gainesville, and colleagues examined the association between acute kidney injury (AKI), chronic kidney disease (CKD) and long-term cardiovascular-specific mortality among patients who underwent inpatient vascular surgery between January 2000 and November 2010 at a tertiary care teaching hospital. Final follow-up was completed July 2014 to assess survival through January 2014.

The discovery of exceptionally well-preserved, tiny fossil seeds dating back to the Early Cretaceous corroborates that flowering plants were small opportunistic colonizers at that time, according to a new study.

Angiosperms, or flowering plants, diversified during the Early Cretaceous, about 100 to 130 million years ago. Based on evidence from living and fossil plants, the earliest angiosperms are usually thought to have had small stature. New data from the fossil record presented here strongly support this notion, but also indicates key differences from modern flowering plants.

The small seed embryos -- less than 0.3 millimeters in size -- and their surrounding nutrient storage tissues in well-preserved seeds were found in eastern North America and Portugal. 

In recent years, a complicated discussion over which direction solar cells should face -- south or west -- has likely left customers uncertain about the best way to orient their panels. Now researchers are attempting to resolve this issue by developing solar cells that can harvest light from almost any angle, and the panels self-clean to boot. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano.

Commercial solar panels work best when sunlight hits them at a certain angle. Initially, experts had suggested that solar panels face south to collect the most energy from the sun. But an influential 2013 report by Pecan Street, an energy-research organization, advised that systems tilt westward to maximize efficiency.