Patient capacity at British hospitals has dropped to the second-worst level in Europe, maintains an international report. The maximum occupancy rate was exceeded last year, and waiting for a bed seems to have become commonplace.

The palpable shortage of hospital beds in Britain mirrors the general trend of world's healthcare spending stagnation, the 'Health at a Glance, 2014' report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) maintains.

According to the report, Britain has lost 50,000 hospital beds since 2001, a 5,000-bed annual loss equivalent to the closure of several hospitals.

On one hand, this decline is due to the fact that these days patients do not need to stay hospitalized because surgical interventions have become much more delicate.

"The NHS is treating people quicker than ever, and more care is being delivered in the community, so far fewer need to stay overnight – which is often better for patients who prefer being at home," a Department of Health spokesman said.

Ambulatory medical care has also being on the rise in decades.

Yet the reverse side of the coin explains the reduction by trivial budget cuts in healthcare spending. The growth of government health spending has collapsed worldwide since 2009, the OECD claimed last June.

The current situation in UK's National Health System brings specific risks for the patients.

First of all, experts warn that people undergoing institutional treatment, including the elderly, could be forced to waits for a bed to become free, sometimes on trolleys after surgery, as it is already happening in some hospitals. The very surgical operations could be postponed or even canceled as there may be no beds available.

"It is consistent with stories we hear such as people being moved from one ward to the other to create bed space, patients being left waiting in corridors for hours, or being cared for on the trolleys while waiting for a bed leading to unsafe and undignified care," shared Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association lobby group operating in the UK, as cited by the Telegraph.

Another problem of overcrowded hospitals is the growing risk of infections such as superbug outbreaks.

The occupancy rate in Britain reached 87.6 percent in 2013 and remains firmly above 85 percent ever since.

"There is overcrowding in the wards and corridors, which increases the risk of infections," Murphy said, adding that sometimes people are "being discharged inappropriately," in the middle of the night, for sole reason of freeing up beds.

The OECD presents data for 40 most industrialized nations worldwide. With per capita initial hospital admission in Britain at 2.95 beds for 1,000 citizens, the country occupies the 29th position. The data represents the situation in 2011, the most recent available.

Among other developed European economies, only Sweden has smaller nationwide hospital bed capacity, but the OECD notes that Stockholm has been heavily investing in community healthcare and decreased the necessity of hospitalization in the country in general.

The United Kingdom still has larger hospital potential than Canada or Ireland, yet in China, where hundreds of millions of people can hardly make ends meet, the number of hospital beds is practically the same as in the UK, 2.75 per capita.

"These figures are shocking. This again shows a system stretched to breaking point," Murphy said.

Comparison with other developed European nation is even more staggering. If Britain felt the need to catch up with France (6.37 per capita), or Germany (8.27), the investment needed to at least double hospital capacity would be immense.

There is little wonder that, with its ageing population, Japan is the world's leader in the index, at 13.4 hospital beds per capita.

Even in Russia, which has been passing through hard economic times over the past quarter of a century, the ratio is three times higher, 9.37 beds per 1,000 people. The average ratio for the index calculated by the OECD is 4.83.

The regulations maintain that bed occupancy in hospitals should not rise higher than 85 percent so that beds could be cleaned and prepared properly. When there is less that 15 percent of unoccupied beds, the personnel do not have enough time to prepare a bed for the next patient, thus the risk of infection surges.

"The figures are indicative of how poorly the UK is prepared for the needs of its ageing population. This situation must change and we cannot put the safety of patients at risk. It is ultimately the patient who suffers," Murphy said.

READ MORE: Britain among worst hospital bed supply in EU

France's lower house of parliament adopted a law on Tuesday prohibiting the cultivation of any variety of genetically modified maize, saying it posed a risk to the environment.

France adopted a decree last month to halt the planting of Monsanto's insect-resistant MON810 maize, the only GM crop allowed for cultivation in the European Union.

The law also applies to any strain adopted at EU level in future, including another GM variety, Pioneer 1507 developed jointly by DuPont and Dow Chemical, which could be approved by the EU executive later this year after 19 out of 28 member states failed to gather enough votes to block it.

The law adopted by the French National Assembly is similar to one rejected by the Senate, upper house, in February when it was deemed unconstitutional.

The Socialist government, like its conservative predecessor, has opposed the growing of GM crops because of public suspicion and widespread protests by environmentalists.

"It is essential today to renew a widely shared desire to maintain the French ban," Jean-Marie Le Guen, the minister in charge of relations with parliament, told the National Assembly.

"This bill strengthens the decree passed last March by preventing the immediate cultivation of GMO and extending their reach to all transgenic maize varieties," he said.

French farmers and seed firms have challenged the decree at the top administrative court, which has twice struck down similar measures, in 2011 and 2013, saying there was insufficient justification.

A debate on the future of GM policy is going on at EU level, with the European Commission suggesting an opt-out that would allow individual countries to ban such crops.

Le Guen called for a stable EU system that would ensure member states' decisions could not be challenged legally.

The ban on GM maize will head back to the Senate for approval, but even if it is rejected again, the National Assembly would have the final say.

READ MORE: French parliament bans cultivation of GM maize

The existence of exotic hadrons — a type of matter that doesn't fit within the traditional model of particle physics — has now been confirmed, scientists say.

Hadrons are subatomic particles made up of quarks and antiquarks (which have the same mass as their quark counterparts, but opposite charge), which interact via the "strong force" that binds protons together inside the nuclei of atoms.

Researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland — where the elusive Higgs boson particle was discovered in 2012 — announced today (April 14) they had confirmed the existence of a new type of hadron, with an unprecedented degree of statistical certainty.

"We've confirmed the unambiguous observation of a very exotic state — something that looks like a particle composed of two quarks and two antiquarks," study co-leader Tomasz Skwarnicki, a high-energy physicist at Syracuse University in New York said in a statement. The discovery "may give us a new way of looking at strong-[force] interaction physics," he added.

The Standard Model of particle physics allows for two kinds of hadrons. "Baryons" (such as protons) are made up of three quarks, and "mesons" are made up of a quark- antiquark pair. But since the Standard Model was developed, physicists have predicted the existence of other types of hadrons composed of different combinations of quarks and antiquarks, which could arise from the decay of mesons.

In 2007, a team of scientists called the Belle Collaboration that was using a particle accelerator in Japan discovered evidence of an exotic particle called Z(4430), which appeared to be composed of two quarks and two antiquarks. But some scientists thought their analysis was "naïve" and lacked good evidence, Skwarnicki said.

A few years later, a team known as BaBar used a more sophisticated analysis that seemed to explain the data without exotic hadrons.

"BaBar didn't prove that Belle's measurements and data interpretations were wrong," Skwarnicki said. "They just felt that, based on their data, there was no need to postulate existence of this particle."

So the original team conducted an even more rigorous analysis of the data, and found strong evidence for the particle.

Now, the LHCb team has studied data from more than 25,000 meson decay events selected from data from 180 trillion proton-proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. They analyzed the data using both the Belle and BaBar teams' methods, and confirmed the particle was both real and an exotic hadron.

The results of the experiment are "the clincher" that such particles do exist, and aren't just some artifact of the data, Skwarnicki said.

His colleague, Sheldon Stone of CERN, also praised the achievement. "It's great to finally prove the existence of something that we had long thought was out there," he said.

READ MORE: Exotic hadron particles detected at CERN: Bizarre matter defies known physics

Seems like we're always hearing about Saturn's moons; their weird features, unexplained mysteries and, of course, their possibility of hosting life.

Now, we could have a new chunk of Saturn rock to speculate about. Scientists think they may have just witnessed a tiny moon being born in the planet's rings.
They noticed a bump toward the outer edge of the rings in a photo snapped by the Cassini probe last year. The working theory is that the bump is a dust cloud clumping around a half-mile wide baby moon.

The study's lead author said: "We hadn't seen anything like this before. ... We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right."

The new moon joins at least 60 brothers and sisters orbiting Saturn, all with unique characteristics. Not much is known about the new moon, but it does have a unique nickname: Peggy.

If confirmed, Peggy could help scientists understand how Saturn's moons form, which in turn could help them understand how the planets formed back at the dawn of the solar system. It's thought the two processes are similar.

But here comes the splash of cold water on the story: Slate's astronomer Phil Plait points out later pictures of that area of the ring show the tiny moon may have crumbled apart already. And at any rate, Saturn's rings are pretty much done making moons at this point. There's just not enough material left.

Another possibility is that the baby moon just drifted out of the Cassini probe's field of vision. We won't know for sure until the probe gets a closer look in 2016.

READ MORE: New baby moon 'Peggy' spotted in Saturn's rings

Chile poured firefighters and police into the battle against a wildfire that swept through hundreds of homes in the Pacific coastal city of Valparaiso, leaving at least 12 dead, according to an official.

Interior Minister Rodrigo Penailillo reported at least 2,000 homes had been destroyed by the blaze, leaving some 8,000 people without a place to live.
Earlier, Chile's National Emergency Office's website, citing police, had said that at least 16 people were dead. It was not immediately clear why the reported death tolls were different.
More than 1,200 firefighters worked to control the wind-whipped blaze in Valparaiso and the suburb of Vina del Mar, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said Sunday.
The wind hampered firefighters' ability to create firebreaks, and the blaze had spread to more than 2,000 acres, Penailillo said.
"It's been one of the worst fires in history," said Fernando Reseio, the fire superintendent in Vina del Mar.
Bachelet said the firefighters were backed up by 17 aircraft and that additional police were being brought in to prevent looting in the areas abandoned by their residents. Many of the survivors suffered burns, and the most seriously burned patients were being transferred to hospitals in the capital, Santiago, about 75 miles away, the president said.
In images broadcast by CNN sister network CNN Chile, residents could be seen fleeing the flames overnight. The network reported that the sweeping fire is endangering thousands more homes.
In addition, plans were being drawn up to evacuate inmates at Valparaiso prison as a preventive measure, Mayor Jorge Castro said. The city is under a red alert, said emergency office spokesman Ricardo Toro.

12 dead in Chile wildfire; 2,000 homes consumed

No enthusiastic skywatcher misses a total eclipse of the moon, and if weather permits tonight, neither should you.

The spectacle is often more beautiful and interesting than one would think. During the time that the moon is entering into and later emerging from out of the Earth's shadow, secondary phenomena may be overlooked. You can also watch the eclipse live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, the Slooh community telescope and the Virtual Telescope Project.

Observers that know what to look for have a better chance of seeing the stunning eclipse, weather permitting. This first total lunar eclipse of 2014 is set to begin tonight (April 14) into the wee hours of Tuesday morning (April 15). The lunar eclipse is set to begin at about 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT), and it should last about 3.5 hours. The eclipse should be visible, weather permitting, through most of North America and part of South America.

First Total Lunar Eclipse of 2014: The Complete Skywatcher's Guide