Prosthetics may look better but they have not really changed much in the last 100 years. That could soon change. The next generation of hand prosthetics may be far more like a real hand - they could allow the wearer to reach for objects almost automatically, without really thinking, like real hands do now.

Current prosthetic hands are controlled via myoelectric signals - that is electrical activity of the muscles recorded from the skin surface of the stump.In the US there are 500,000 upper limb amputees a year.

In the many efforts to prevent people from taking up smoking, most initiatives have focused on kids.  As the consumer advocacy group the American Council on Science and Health has long phrased it, "smoking is a pediatric disease." Prevent uptake in the young, and addiction rarely occurs.

But that has led to governments with a big blind spot about young adults, according to a paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health by Thierry Gagné, a doctoral student at Université de Montréal's School of Public Health.

It's manna from heaven for sue-and-settle law firms; a new paper links common antibiotics, such as macrolides, quinolones, tetracyclines, sulfonamides and metronidazole, to an increased risk of miscarriage in early pregnancy.

The association was weak, but juries won't know that, because Dr. Anick Bérard, Faculty of Pharmacy, Université de Montréal, declared, "our investigation shows that certain types of antibiotics are increasing the risk of spontaneous abortion, with a 60% to two-fold increased risk." That's important, since baseline risk of spontaneous abortion is 30 percent, but the women who miscarried in this study were more likely to be older, living alone and to have multiple health issues and infections. 

Does the reality of mental disorders also cause depression, or is depression a harbinger of other disorders, a gateway as it were?

In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations propose using animals like pigs to study the best way of evaluating protein quality in foods eaten by children.

The researchers behind a new study calculated protein scores for eight sources of protein, derived from both plants and animals. Protein scores compare the amount of digestible amino acids in a food with a "reference protein," a theoretical protein which contains fully digestible amino acids in the proportions required for human nutrition at a particular stage of life.

Thiamethoxam is a compound in the class of targeted pesticides known as "neonicotinoids", because they are chemically similar to nicotine, which has natural insect repellent properties.

Neonicotinoids are used in crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton and have been controversial because of environmental campaigns claiming a "colony collapse disorder" was caused by them. Yet bee numbers have not declined so concern has migrated to wild bee populations and sub-lethal effects - bees not killed but changed. These two arguments are easier to maintain because there is no way to count wild bees, only a few species even have hives, and therefore one guess is as good as another. Sub-lethal effects could also mean anything - like the ability to fly.