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From 2006 through 2014, there was a decrease in newly registered NIH-funded trials, whereas industry-funded trials increased substantially, based on trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov. The study appears in the December 15 issue of JAMA.

Since 2006, the number of industry-sponsored clinical trials studying the benefits and harms of medical treatments has risen dramatically, while the number of clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has fallen substantially, according to new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research.

People are much more concerned about sharing their own private information with third-party app developers than they are about revealing their friends' data, according to Penn State researchers.

However, as social media makes data increasingly interconnected, preserving one's own privacy while ignoring the privacy rights of others may make everybody's data more vulnerable, said Jens Grossklags, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State.

AUGUSTA, Ga. - A class of drugs used increasingly to help fight cancer may have the additional benefit of protecting the kidneys when packaged with the powerful chemotherapy agent cisplatin.

The nearly 40-year-old cisplatin can be a strong opponent against aggressive cancers, such as head and neck, ovarian and lung cancers.

Scientists have developed a quick and simple diagnosis method, similar to a dipstick pregnancy test, to fight a deadly sleeping sickness.

The test to diagnose Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) just requires a pin-prick blood sample and will remove the need to take complex equipment into remote areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

Since first identified in 1976, Ebola virus has caused a total of 24 outbreaks involving 1,716 cases according to the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics. The current outbreak in West Africa, with the first case notified in March 2014, is the largest and most complex Ebola outbreak and has more than 28,000 infection cases and over 11,000 deaths as of December 2015.

Scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Paris Descartes University, Sainte-Anne Hospital and the CNRS have recently published a paper in Nature Communications in which they reveal mayor players in the severe muscle damage caused by sepsis, or septicemia, which explains why many patients suffer debilitating muscle impairment long-term after recovery. They propose a therapeutic approach based on mesenchymal stem cell transplantation, which has produced encouraging results and has proved successful in restoring muscle capacity in animals.

University of Queensland research has pinpointed artificial light as a threat to coral reproduction, in a discovery that will help guide reef and marine ecosystem protection plans.

UQ Global Change Institute researcher Dr Paulina Kaniewska said work at UQ's Heron Island Research Station revealed that the Great Barrier Reef's annual coral spawning was dependent on an intricate mix of conditions, with moonlight playing a vital role.

"The introduction of artificial light competes with moonlight and can prevent corals from spawning," she said.

Conventional measures of age usually define people as 'old' at one chronological age, often 65. In many countries around the world, age 65 is used as a cutoff for everything from pension age to health care systems, as the basis of a demographic measure known as the 'old-age dependency ratio,' which defines everyone over 65 as depending on the population between ages 20 and 65.

In new study in the journal Population and Development Review, IIASA researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide new measures to replace the old-age dependency ratio.

Serianthes nelsonii, a large, handsome tree found only in the Mariana Islands was federally listed as endangered on Feb. 18, 1987. Since that time there has been relatively little research published on this rare tree.

The University of Guam has studied recruitment limitations of the endangered Serianthes nelsonii tree, and the studies have resulted in a new publication in issue #3 of this year's volume of the international science journal Tropical Conservation Science.

In much the same way PAC-MAN® gobbles through an intense maze of dots eating and destroying its aggressors, researchers from the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University have revealed for the first time how a similar mechanism in the eye lens does exactly the same thing. They have discovered that cells in close proximity to each other can sense when a cell is dying due to environmental stressors like UV light, smoke and other pollutants, and eat the cell before it becomes toxic.

Many animals gravitate towards heat, most often to regulate their own body temperatures. In rare cases, certain species--ticks, bedbugs, and some species of mosquitoes--seek out heat for food. For female mosquitoes, finding heat is essential for survival, as they need to feast on warm-blooded prey to produce eggs. At the same time, mosquitoes have to know when something is too hot, so they won't get scorched on an over-heated blacktop, for instance.

Israeli and Australian scientists have found that coral exposed to artificial light cannot detect moonlight and therefore fail to spawn. Their findings are published in the journal eLife.

An association between light pollution and the health of coral reefs has been suspected since the 2007 discovery that moonlight triggers the mass release of eggs and sperm. The current study led by Bar-Ilan University, in collaboration with the University of Queensland, is the first to confirm the effect with field trials during a spawning event.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (DEC. 15, 2015). Researchers have found little or no 'July effect' in the field of neurosurgery.

The 'July effect' is the theory that more medical and surgical errors, and, consequently, greater levels of morbidity and mortality occur during July, the month during which fourth year medical students become interns and residents advance to higher levels of training where they face greater challenges and more responsibility.

PITTSBURGH, Dec. 15, 2015 - A new system that facilitates data and biospecimen sharing among cancer centers may speed cancer research findings from the laboratory to patient care, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The study was published December 15 in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.