The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get with the Guidelines -- Stroke successfully measured the quality of stroke prevention and care in a nationwide stroke registry in Taiwan and identified important areas for improvement. Get with the Guidelines -- Stroke quality improvement program, modified to accommodate diverse cultures, could be applied in other countries to assess and improve quality of stroke care and outcomes.

Biological clocks play a major role in affective disorders. Synchronizing impaired circadian rhythms, improving sleep, or paradoxically staying awake most of the night can be extremely helpful to treat patients with depression and bipolar disorder. Chronotherapeutic combinations of light and wake therapy achieve fast results and also minimize relapse over many months. Chronotherapeutics seem to be a major facilitator of drug response, and, in combination with antidepressants, a promising method to stabilize patients over the long term.

The warming that following the last Ice Age was interrupted by a cold snap that killed off megafauna such as the giant ground sloth and the woolly mammoth. Could this crisis have been caused by an asteroid impact or a comet breaking up in the atmosphere? Unfortunately the geological evidence for such a dramatic event has not stood up to scrutiny. In PNAS a group of scientists challenges the catastrophists last, best hope: shock-synthesized nanodiamonds.

Paleontologists have discovered that a close relative of Velociraptor hunted the dwarfed inhabitants of Late Cretaceous Europe, an island landscape largely isolated from nearby continents.While island animals tend to be smaller and more primitive than their continental cousins, the theropod Balaur bondoc was as large as its relatives on other parts of the globe and demonstrated advanced adaptations including fused bones and two terrifyingly large claws on each hind foot.

Community feasting is one of the most universal and important social behaviors found among humans. Now, scientists have found the earliest clear evidence of organized feasting, from a burial site dated about 12,000 years ago. These remains represent the first archaeological verification that human feasting began before the advent of agriculture.

New research introduces a relative of Velociraptor. The new species, Balaur bondoc has strange morphology including double-clawed feet and fused bones. It lived in Europe during the Late Cretaceous.

Canada should follow the lead of Quebec, Australia and the United Kingdom by publicly funding smoking cessation pharmacotherapies, states an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

For people suffering chronic pain, smoked cannabis reduces pain, improves mood and helps sleep, according to new research published in CMAJ.

Despite medical research that indicates Vancouver's supervised injection facility, Insite, reduces needle-sharing and overdose deaths, the facility's fate is uncertain, states an analysis article in CMAJ.

New research shows that multiple sclerosis activity can increase during spring and summer months. The research is published in the Aug. 31, 2010, issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

An international team of scientists funded by the US Department of Agriculture has published a draft sequence of the domestic apple genome in the current issue of Nature Genetics.

As any nine-to-fiver will testify, a new paycheck brings with it a familiar sense of freedom, albeit one that dwindles in lockstep with the balance in one's checking account. But it's not the checking account size that influences consumer behavior; rather, it's the time that has elapsed since payday, according to a new study published in the September issue of the Journal of Marketing.

New findings by McMaster University researchers contradict earlier reports that people with a certain genetic make-up don't benefit from the blood-thinner clopidogrel, also known as Plavix.

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg together with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen have recently developed and tested a technique exploiting imperfections in quantum cryptography systems to implement an attack. Countermeasures were also implemented within an ongoing collaboration with leading manufacturer ID Quantique.

Many children are being put at risk by parents' overuse of widely available over-the-counter medicines for fever, coughs and colds, Australian researchers say. Dosing errors and inappropriate use of such medicines lead to a large number of calls to poison centers as well as emergency hospital admissions.

A team of researchers led by Dr. Hernan Makse, professor of physics at The City College of New York, has shed new light on the way that information and infectious diseases proliferate across complex networks. Writing in Nature Physics, they report that, contrary to conventional wisdom, persons with the most connections are not necessarily the best spreaders.

Much like snowflakes, no two neurons are exactly alike. But it's not the size or shape that sets one neuron apart from another, it's the way it responds to incoming stimuli. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have discovered that this diversity is critical to overall brain function and essential in how neurons process complex stimuli and code information. The researchers published their findings, the first to examine the function of neuron diversity, online in Nature Neuroscience.

A new method for genome analysis unravels the genetic effect of a rare disease. Max Planck scientists identifies a missing protein anchor as the cause of mental retardation in Mabry syndrome.

Even today psychotic disorders remain highly stigmatized, and despite the young age of the patients and the long-term service dependence often are not prioritized in the agenda of public health.

Recent research findings in psychiatry indicate that genes are likely to influence disorder mostly indirectly, via their impact upon physiological pathways, and work by increasing the likelihood of developing a psychiatric disorder, rather than as direct causes of disorder per se. The current model of gene-environment interaction is nurturing promising approaches to understand the symptoms of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders and improve treatment.