In 2009, there was concern that American health care costs were too high. Since the advent of the Affordable Care Act, there is now concern that costs are really too high, only it is not rich doctors and insurance companies being vilified, it is defensive medicine and doctors being willing to sign off on unnecessary things to keep patients happy which, along with lawsuits, was the problem the whole time.

A study in the American Journal of Managed Care finds that more than half of primary care providers reported that they made what they considered unnecessary referrals to a specialist because patients wanted it and many physicians gave into patient requests for brand-name drugs when cheaper generics were available.

While expanding a reservoir in Snowmass Village, Colorado, construction workers stumbled upon a big bone. And then another, and another, and another. 

Killer whales eat 375 pounds of food per day. Now imagine most of that is salmon, the food source they most often in the summer, and you can imagine how devastating that can be to the salmon population of the Pacific Northwest if such whales were higher population. That's equivalent salmon each day to what 200 Americans for a year (<300,000 metric tons per year total consumption.)

Salmon is currently the third most popular fish in the United States (behind shrimp and tuna) and one third of it comes from Pacific salmon, both farmed and in the wild. 

The determination about diets was made using an analysis of fish DNA in killer whale poop.

A new Cochrane Review published today shows that targeting exercises to muscles that support and control the spine offers another strategy to reduce pain and disability caused by lower back pain.

Lower back pain is one of the most common health conditions worldwide. It can have substantial health and economic costs as people experience disability and general ill health, leading them to need time off work.

It may not be sexism that keeps more women from top jobs, it may be less understanding of the role of social capital in reaching the top, according to graduate student Natasha Abajian of City University London at the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference in Nottingham.

In industrialized countries, a particularly high number of people suffer from arteriosclerosis -- with fatal consequences: Deposits in the arteries lead to strokes and heart attacks. A team of researchers under the leadership of the University of Bonn has now developed a method for guiding replacement cells to diseased vascular segments using nanoparticles. The scientists demonstrated in mice that the fresh cells actually exert their curative effect in these segments. However, much research remains to be done prior to use in humans. The results are now being published in the renowned journal ACS NANO.