Minimal access hip arthroscopy surgery has become the treatment of choice for hip pain in young adults, but a team surgeons believe the procedure is a sham, more like acupuncture than helpful. 

In North America, arthroscopic hip surgeries have replaced open surgeries as the go-to cure for femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), a common source of hip pain in young adults, where abnormal femurs lead to damaged cartilage in the hip joint. The number of such procedures increased 18-fold in the U.S. within a decade, especially with athletes.

Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat for the first time, and life was no organic picnic 1.8 million years ago. Nature was out to kill us and the struggle our ancestors face, as all creatures do, is survival. Rather than the myth of ecological balance, if you were going to survive, you got there earlier and were more fit to last. 

How did Madagascar once slot next to India? Where was Australia a billion years ago?

Cloud-based virtual globes developed by a team led by University of Sydney geologists mean anyone with a smartphone, laptop or computer can now visualise, with unprecedented speed and ease of use, how the Earth evolved geologically.

Reported today in PLOS ONE, the globes have been gradually made available since September 2014. Some show Earth as it is today while others allow reconstructions through 'geological time', harking back to the planet's origins.

An international team of researchers, with the participation of the University of Granada (UGR), has revealed new data on why breast cancer has a higher incidence and is more aggressive in obese people. The reason is that peritumoral fat (the fat around the tumor) facilitates the expansion and invasion of cancer stem cells (CSCs), which are responsible of the onset and growth of the tumor.

Often patients undergo procedures without real informed consent being achieved due to technical language, jargon and time pressure, with up to half of patients finding it difficult to understand what their doctor tells them [1, 2]. Now a group of Australian doctors has prepared patients for surgery using iPads, and found that patients' understanding was much better than after a face-to-face consultation.

It is vitally important that patients understand what medical procedures they face, both so that they can cope better with the procedure, and so that they can give fully informed consent to the treatment. However, many patients come out of critical face-to-face interviews with doctors not really understanding what to expect or what they might have agreed to.

The use of meldonium--the substance taken by tennis star Maria Sharapova--is widespread among elite athletes, reveals research published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The findings, which draw on information volunteered by athletes and individual medical teams, and lab data on anti-doping tests from the Baku 2015 European Games, indicate that up to 490 athletes may have been taking meldonium during the competition.

The research, which was carried out on behalf of the European Olympic Committees, contributed to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) taking the decision to ban the use of meldonium in competitive sport as of January 1 this year.