UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

Royal Society celebrates 350th anniversary

LONDON, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- The Royal Society of London says is celebrating its 350th anniversary year by starting a unique, interactive historical Web site.

Called "Trailblazing," the Web site focuses on iconic moments in the history of science by offering public access to some of the most influential and intriguing papers published by the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660.

Officials said papers available for public access include:

--The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion in 1666.

-- Captain James Cook's explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution in 1776.

-- Benjamin Franklin's account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning in 1752.

Officials said leading scientists and historians selected 60 articles to make available online from among the 60,000 published in the Royal Society's journal, Philosophical Transactions, which began in 1665 and is the world's oldest continuously published scientific journal.

"The scientific papers on Trailblazing represent a ceaseless quest by scientists over the centuries, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, to test and build on our knowledge of humankind and the universe," said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society. "Individually they represent those thrilling moments when science allows us to understand better and to see further."

The Web site is available at http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org.

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Burnout, depression link to medical errors

ROCHESTER, Minn., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Medical errors self-reported by U.S. surgeons are strongly related to both burnout and depression, researchers found.

In a study that promised confidentiality, nearly 9 percent of U.S. surgeons responding said they made a major error in the three months prior to being surveyed.

The study, published online in the Annals of Surgery, found more than 70 percent of the surgeons attributed the error to themselves rather than a systemic or organizational cause.

Lead author Dr. Tait Shanafelt of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and colleagues at Johns Hopkins and the American College of Surgeons, said the results showed the components of surgeon burnout -- emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and the perception of personal accomplishments -- were related to medical errors as was surgeons' "mental quality of life" including depression.

Of the 7,905 surgeons participating in the survey, 8.9 percent reported making recent medical errors they considered major. The researchers said they found no relation between errors and the work setting, method of compensation, number of nights on call per week or number of hours worked.

The finding suggests reducing work hours for surgeons may have little impact on limiting errors unless burnout is also addressed, the researchers said.

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Saturn's orbit alters Titan's topography

PASADENA, Calif., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- NASA says the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit might have produced the unusually uneven pattern of lakes over the polar regions of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other institutions suggest Saturn's oblong orbit around the sun exposes different parts of Titan to different amounts of sunlight, which affect cycles of precipitation and evaporation in those areas.

The researchers say imaging data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show liquid methane and ethane lakes in Titan's northern high latitudes cover 20 times more area than lakes in the southern high latitudes. The Cassini data also show significantly more partially filled and now-empty lakes in the north.

The researchers say that asymmetry is not likely to be a statistical fluke because of the large amount of data collected by Cassini in its five years surveying Saturn and its moons.

A paper describing the research appears in the early online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

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When you eat as important as what you eat

LA JOLLA, Calif., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say they've determined when people eat might be just as vital to their health as what they eat.

Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say experiments with mice revealed the daily waxing and waning of genes in the liver is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body's circadian clock, as conventional wisdom had it.

"If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism," said Assistant Professor Satchidananda Panda, who led the research.

"Our study represents a seminal shift in how we think about circadian cycles," Panda added. "The circadian clock is no longer the sole driver of rhythms in gene function, instead the phase and amplitude of rhythmic gene function in the liver is determined by feeding and fasting periods -- the more defined they are, the more robust the oscillations become."

Panda said he has stopped eating between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. and says he feels great. "I even lost weight, although I eat whatever I want during the day," he said.

The study that included Christopher Vollmers, Luciano DiTacchio, Sandhyarani Pulivarthy, Shubhrox Gill and Hiep Le is to appear in a future issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.