India is facing a severe crisis in the availability of skilled healthcare professionals, finds a study by the Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH).

Researchers from Panjab University, Chandigarh and Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, have discovered a link between selenium and colitis in mice. The findings of this study hint at the possibility of selenium relieving symptoms of ulcerative colitis.

In this digital age, ruled by smartphone apps, how about one to tell you how fresh your milk is? Although there are stringent safety rules concerning the quality of milk, almost 68% of what is available in the country does not conform to them. In a recent study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati have come up with a paper-based detection system to detect if a sample of milk is pasteurised and fresh. This technique, they say, is cost-effective, rapid, user- and environment-friendly.

An international collaboration of researchers have studied the trends in tobacco use in China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and India. The study, which included a million participants, is a meta-analysis of 20 cohort studies in these countries that collected data on tobacco habits from representative individuals above 35 years of age. The results reveal region–specific tobacco smoking patterns and the resulting mortality.

Researchers at IIT Delhi develop a portable hardware system to detect malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites and cervical cancer.

A team of Indian scientists, working with collaborators from Singapore, Australia and France, have shown how clusters of circulating tumour cells—cancer cells that have sloughed off the tumour and are circulating in the blood—could help monitor the response to cancer treatments and predict a patient's survival chances using a simple blood test. 

Researchers from the Desert Research Institute, USA and Urban Emissions, New Delhi, India, have investigated the emission levels of multiple pollutants in twenty Indian cities, other than Delhi.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar,  Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and the University of Southampton, UK have tried to understand the effects of changes in land use and land cover on regional temperatures in Odisha, which frequently experiences heatwave, cyclones, droughts and floods.

Researchers from the USA and Canada estimated the incidence of asthma among children across the world that is triggered by nitrogen dioxide—a major constituent of the vehicular exhaust. 

Researchers use a data-driven approach to identify bat species that could be carriers of the Nipah virus in Kerala.