Today's Health/Science: surface tension, medical home, post-Vioxx skepticism, healthcare bridge builder

Surface tension -- the force that keeps cups from overflowing -- also helps birds eat. MIT's John Bush is working on applications for exploiting surface tension the way the shorebirds do, particularly when it comes to microfluidics - the motion of fluids at very small scales, prevalent in devices like the so-called "lab on a chip."

Across the nation, patients are so frustrated by lack of access to their doctors that they are going to drug-store clinics for basic care. And primary care doctors are so harried that they are abandoning their practices in droves. The "medical home" being created at Union Square Family Health (left) and at many doctors' offices across the nation is an attempt to provide an alternative.

"I am now more hesitant to prescribe newer medications that have been supported largely by industry-funded research," writes Dr. Michael Hochman, a second year internal medical resident at the Cambridge Health Alliance. "While I of course want to give my patients the best available therapies, I fear that many of these drugs are not all they're made out to be by the existing research."

As the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project (now known as the Black Women's Health Imperative) and the Boston-based Avery Institute for Social Change, Byllye Avery (left) has spent her career fighting to get people to look at problems through ethnic eyes, to consider cultural and social circumstances, such as race and class, as relevant factors in medical treatment.

Also, does singing in a chorus make you healthier and how is beeswax different from other waxes?