BBCWe are now in the era of weight-loss drugs.

Several federal agencies are investigating whether the large chain of psychiatric hospitals held patients without medical justification.The Veterans Affairs Department is investigating whether Acadia Healthcare, one of the country’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals, is defrauding government health insurance programs by holding patients longer than is medically necessary, according to three people with knowledge of the inquiry.The investigation, led by the agency’s inspector general, comes three weeks after Acadia told investors that it was facing scrutiny for its admissions practices from several other federal investigators, including prosecutors in Manhattan and a grand jury in Missouri. The company, which relies on government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid for much of its revenue, said it was also expecting to receive inquiries from the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies.Acadia told investors that it was “fully cooperating with authorities and, at this time, cannot speculate on whether the outcome of these investigations will have any impact on its business or operations.” The company has denied claims that it was improperly holding patients and has said that all decisions about care are made by licensed medical professionals.The Veterans Affairs Department did not immediately respond to questions about the new investigation.The New York Times reported in September that Acadia was holding patients against their will in ways that appeared to violate state laws. The Times reported that some patients arrived at emergency rooms seeking routine mental health care but then were sent to Acadia facilities and locked in. The company’s employees often held patients until their insurance coverage ran out, even when there was no medical justification.The Times article was based on official complaints, court records and interviews with patients, as well as more than 50 current and former Acadia employees.Last month, Acadia agreed to pay almost $20 million to settle Justice Department claims that the company had defrauded government health insurers by holding patients longer than medically necessary and admitting people who didn’t need to be there. Acadia did not acknowledge wrongdoing in that case, which covered conduct from 2014 through 2017.The fresh round of investigations are focused on recent events. The veterans agency is looking into whether Acadia billed insurance programs for patients who were stable enough to be released and did not need intensive inpatient care, according to two of the people with knowledge of the investigation, who requested anonymity because it has not been made public.Several former Acadia employees in Georgia and Missouri have also recently been interviewed by agents from the F.B.I. and the inspector general’s office of the Health and Human Services Department.

Jeannie AmbroseMore than a thousand patients with advanced breast cancer are being denied a drug that can keep them alive for longer. It is already available in 19 countries in Europe – including in Scotland – but not in the rest of the UK.

GettyThe government has suggested weight-loss drugs could boost the economy by helping obese people in England get back to work.

When scientists win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, they typically thank family and colleagues, maybe their universities or whoever funded their research.This year, as the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun accepted the most prestigious award of his career, he spent a few minutes lauding his experimental subject: a tiny worm named Caenorhabditis elegans, which he called “badass.”“No one ever thought to use that term for a worm,” he said during a news conference. “We are asserting ourselves now, and I was asserting this before the Nobel-stinking-Prize.”This isn’t the worm’s first brush with international stardom, nor is it the first time C. elegans has been thanked for aiding award-winning work. Dr. Ruvkun’s award was actually the fourth Nobel Prize resulting from C. elegans research, cementing the lowly soil worm’s outsize role in scientific discovery.The one-millimeter nematode has helped scientists understand how healthy cells are instructed to kill themselves and how the process goes awry in AIDS, strokes and degenerative diseases. (That work was the subject of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.)Self-proclaimed “worm people” were recognized by the Nobel committee in 2006 for discovering gene silencing, which became the basis for an entirely new class of drugs. Two years later, the chemistry prize went to scientists who used nematodes to help invent cellular “lanterns” that allowed biologists to see the inner workings of a cell.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Using Google’s AlphaFold, researchers identified the bundle of three sperm proteins that seem to make sexual reproduction possible.They’re the original odd couple: One is massive, spherical and unmoving. The other is tiny, has a tail and never stops swimming. Yet the union of egg and sperm is critical for every sexually reproducing animal on Earth.Exactly how that union occurs has long been a mystery to scientists. A study published Thursday in the journal Cell that relied on Nobel Prize-honored artificial intelligence technology shows that an interlocked bundle of three proteins is the key that lets sperm and egg bind together. That crucial bundle is shared by animals as distantly related as fish and mammals, and most likely including humans.For nearly all animals on Earth, life begins with a sperm cell making its way to an egg’s cell membrane. Somehow, the two cells recognize each other and bind together. Then, in a flash, the sperm head passes into the egg, as if stepping through a door. Now the fused cell is a zygote and ready to grow into a new animal.In earlier research, scientists had found four proteins on mammal sperm that are also present on fish sperm and are needed for fertilization. But no one knew whether they might work as a team to enter an egg, or how.In the new study, Andrea Pauli, a molecular and developmental biologist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, and collaborators across several institutions asked how sperm proteins might team up during fertilization.The researchers relied on AlphaFold, a technology that shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week. It uses A.I. to predict the shape of a protein. With AlphaFold, the team could compare the four sperm proteins shared across mammals and fish against a library of about 1,400 other proteins found on cell surfaces in zebrafish testes, looking for potential partners.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Getty ImagesThe NHS has had a bumper year for offering hormone replacement therapy (HRT),

Students at the University of Cambridge have been offered heart screenings after a 20-year-old undergraduate suffered a sudden cardiac arrest.

BBCA new study will seek to identify changes in the brain when teenagers experience period pain and whether it is linked to developing chronic pain in later life.

Dr. Sam Yoon and a collaborator duplicated images across their research studies over many years. The collaborator has left Columbia.The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and a sixth tagged with an editor’s note, underscoring concerns about research misconduct that have lately bedeviled Columbia as well as cancer labs at several other elite American universities.With the latest retractions, the Columbia lab, led by Dr. Sam Yoon, has had more than a dozen studies pulled over suspicious results since The New York Times reported in February on data discrepancies in the lab’s work.The retracted studies were among 26 articles by Dr. Yoon and a more junior collaborator that a scientific sleuth in Britain, Sholto David, revealed had presented images from one experiment as data from another, a tactic that can be used to massage or falsify the results of studies.Dr. Yoon’s more junior collaborator, Changhwan Yoon, no longer works in the lab, Columbia said in response to questions on Wednesday. But the university has said little else about what, if anything, it has done to address the allegations.Since the Times article in February, Dr. Yoon’s name has been changed from Sam Yoon to S. Sunghyun Yoon on a Columbia website advertising surgical treatment options. Because of the change, the Columbia surgeon who is being promoted to many patients has a name that no longer matches the one Dr. Yoon used to publish his retracted studies. A Columbia hiring announcement from several years ago was also recently edited to change the rendering of Dr. Yoon’s name, according to web page archives.Columbia said that faculty members were responsible for any name changes on departmental web pages. The university declined to comment on the retractions. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the questionable research was done, also declined to comment, saying only that it reviews such cases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.