杏吧原创

The stay-alive virus

Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV) may improve survival rates for people with head and neck cancer, a study in Cancer Prevention Research suggests. HPV-negative patients had a median survival of 26.6 months, while the rate for HPV-positive patients could not be calculated because most were still alive.

Is your cat a southpaw?

Cats are right or left-pawed. A study showed that domestic felines performing complex, challenging tasks 鈥� like getting a tuna morsel out of a small jar 鈥� favoured one paw over the other. The preference depends on the cat鈥檚 sex: females tended to favour the right paw whereas males were mostly left-pawed ().

Flu vaccine haste

With winter approaching in Europe, the European Medicine Agency has accelerated approval for a swine flu vaccine by allowing preliminary trials to be skipped. Such trials are normally used to identify the right dose to induce immunity in vaccine recipients, meaning future doses may not be optimal.

First up the trees

Fossils from Russia have yielded complete skeletons of the earliest known vertebrate to live in trees, way before dinosaurs dominated the earth. Dating back 260 million years, the 50-centimetre-long lizard-like creature Suminia getmanovi even had elongated fingers and an opposable thumb, report researchers in Proceedings of the Royal Society B ().

Well done us

New 杏吧原创 has been named medical journal of the year by the UK Medical Journalists鈥� Association. The award is known as the 鈥減eer鈥� prize because it is voted on by the MJA鈥檚 420 members.