Having relaxing music played just before eye surgery leads to patients feeling less anxiety and requiring less sedation, concludes a study presented at Euroanaesthesia 2016 (London, 27-30 May). The study is by Dr Gilles Guerrier, Cochin University Hospital, Paris, France, and colleagues.

Awake eye surgery is particularly stressful for patients. Music has long been known to reduce anxiety, minimise the need for sedatives, and make patients feel more at ease. The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the effect of music on anxiety in outpatients undergoing elective eye surgery under topical (local) anaesthesia.

It is not surprising that a good night's sleep improves our ability to remember what we learned during the day. Now, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have discovered a brain circuit that governs how certain memories are consolidated in the brain during sleep. Published in the May 26 issue of Science magazine, the study shows how experimentally manipulating the identified neural connection during non-REM sleep (deep sleep) can prevent or enhance memory retention in mice.

In our daily lives we constantly have to shift between habitual and goal-directed actions. For example, having to drive to a new place instead of driving home. Difficulties with stopping habits and shifting to goal-directed control underlie a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction.

Malnourished children are most likely to die from common infections, not starvation alone, and immune disorder may be part of the cause, according to a review led by Queen Mary University of London.

The paper, published in Trends in Immunology, also indicates that even with a healthy diet, defects in immune system function from birth could contribute to a malnourished state throughout life. These altered immune systems could be passed down from generation to generation regardless of the diet of any offspring.

Researchers speculate that targeting immune pathways could be a new approach to reduce the poor health and mortality caused by under- and overnutrition.

Medical societies recommend that patients with advanced cancer receive palliative care soon after diagnosis, and receive hospice care for at least the last three days of their life. Those recommendations don't match real-life practice, according to Risha Gidwani, DrPH, a health economist at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Economics Resource Center and colleagues who examined care received by all veterans over the age of 65 with cancer who died in 2012, a total of 11,896 individuals.

In the 1970s, current Obama administration science czar Dr. John Holdren wrote a book advocating various measures to stop global starvation, including a world government and mandatory birth control.

Food is no longer an issue, science took care of that despite the protestations of Holdren and fellow doomsday prophet Professor Paul Ehrlich, so culture moved onto something new that would require social engineering and selecting who gets to give birth: global warming.