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By Shefali Luthra, Kaiser Health News.Promoting her much-discussed plan to create a single-payer “Medicare for All” health system, Sen. Elizabeth Warren emphasized a striking figure.“If we make no changes over the next 10 years, Americans will reach into their pockets and pay out about $11 trillion on insurance premiums, copays, deductibles and uncovered medical expenses,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in an Instagram video posted Monday.

Though activists oppose Golden Rice, essentially a vitamin-fortified food staple, on ideological and economic grounds, Vitamin A deficiency affects hundreds of thousands of kids each year, and a progressive tool that feeds people and prevents disease is welcome. 

We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust. These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility.In fact, we don’t trust enough.

Scholars analyzing the performance at a large technology firm examined the productivity in a 25-foot radius around their best performers and found that these workers did inspire better performance in coworkers - by 15 percent. Poor workers impacted their neighbors also, and even more. While “positive spillover” translated into an estimated $1 million in additional annual profits, "negative spillover" from so-called toxic workers was even more pronounced—sometimes having twice the magnitude of impact on profits as positive spillover. And toxic spillover happens fast. The good news for your team as that its effect dissipates almost immediately once that worker is either fired or relegated to the far physical reaches of the company.

In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that the diagnosis of a terminal illness came as an unpleasant surprise, how could he only then discover the fact of his mortality? But that is Ivan’s situation. Not only is it news to him, but he can’t fully take it in:

There are 15 million people living with cancer in just the United States and it is painful. The huge downside to CDC claiming that recreational fentanyl use is an opioid epidemic is that they have stigmatized legitimate pain patients and their care - and so cancer patients end up in Emergency Rooms suffering from pain, nausea, and shortness of breath.

Though cannabinoids in marijuana are touted by salespeople and supplement marketing as therapies for almost anything, anecdotes are not evidence, and the evidence from a meta-analysis of 83 studies (3,000 people) for six mental health conditions shows cannabinoids do not work. Not for depression, anxiety disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Tourette syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), or psychosis. And since there are known risks of cannabinoids they may be doing harm.

A National Academy of Medicine report released today says that a third to a half of physicians and nurses say they feel burned out, and that is even higher for medical students and residents at nearly 60 percent.That could obviously affect patient care and, with lawyers waiting in the wings to sue, health care costs. The report says key issues will be:Tackling clinician burnout early in professional development.Fixing electronic health care record systems that increase frustration and stress.Lowering administrative burdens and distracting clinicians from the care of patients.

ESO’s X-shooter spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope in Chile has detected a freshly made heavy element, strontium, in space, in the aftermath two merging neutron stars. That sounds obscure but it means that the heavier elements in the Universe can form in neutron star mergers, a clue in the puzzle of chemical element formation.

A new study has found that the switch from coal to natural gas hasn't just reduced greenhouse gas emissions from energy, it has reduced water usage. That is even factoring in water used during hydraulic fracturing - fracking - and shale gas generation.

It's a surprise for Americans to learn that the U.S. has more open land than the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is 3X the size of the U.S., and it is an even bigger surprise when people learn that, of all the area not covered by ice, half of the world's land remains wilderness. The inventory of open land was conducted in 2017 and 2018 by the National Geographic Society but a new study says that the wilderness is getting more fragmented. That makes sense, but it's not a bad thing. If a new housing development goes up and a city designates a lake and surrounding marsh as protected, it can be called fragmented but it's better than being gone.

A new study finds that if the United Kingdom did as The Guardian routinely advocates and abandoned modern agricultural science, people would starve. Or diets would change to where the rich had a variety while the poor suffered on subsistence fare.