Posts

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a controversial drug to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare disease that confines boys to wheelchairs and condemn them to an early death. The decision came after months of protracted debate about whether drug maker Sarepta Therapeutics had provided enough evidence to demonstrate that its medication, called eteplirsen, had a meaningful impact on patients. In reaching its decision, the agency essentially overruled its own medical staffers, who earlier this year questioned the effectiveness of the drug over concerns about a small clinical trial....

CONAKRY (Reuters) - Guinea’s government has authorized the wider use of an experimental drug to treat Ebola in treatment centers after successful initial trials, officials said on Saturday. The expansion of the treatment comes as the number of people with Ebola in Guinea has doubled in the past week, reversing a broader trend of decline across the three worst-hit West African states - Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The experimental Japanese drug - Avigan, or favipiravir - developed by Toyama Chemical, a subsidiary of Japan’s Fujifilm, has been tested by French and Guinean teams in southern Guinea since mid-December....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Last week I covered the steps to go through when trying to remove a nasty piece of malware from your computer. If you haven’t yet checked out last week’s episode, I recommend you do so now. Also, brush up on your virus knowledge with my episodes on the Anatomy of a Virus and how to Easily Remove a Virus....

Methane is being emitted from a natural gas field in Utah at a rate of 6.2 to 11.7 percent of production, according to research accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The research adds one important data point to the ongoing question of how much methane, a greenhouse gas with a warming potential 25 times that of carbon dioxide, is emitted in the life cycle of natural gas production, transport and use....

On election night last year, testosterone levels dropped rapidly among male voters of losing parties. After the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was declared, neuroscientists at Duke University found that although male voters for Barack Obama, the winner, had stable levels of testosterone, the hormone’s levels rapidly dropped in males who cast ballots for John McCain or Robert Barr, the losers. In a questionnaire, the McCain and Barr voters reported feeling significantly more controlled, submissive, unhappy and unpleasant after the loss than the Obama backers....

British police have arrested 24 people allegedly linked to a plot to blow up multiple flights across the Atlantic from the U.K. to the U.S. Although details of the plot remained sketchy, officials revealed that the plan included the construction of bombs onboard using liquid explosives. Terrorists and other malefactors have known about liquid explosives for a long time. The hijackers of 9/11 knew that the jet fuel in the airplanes would act as an incendiary, and even gasoline could deliver a devastating explosion if packaged properly....

By Nate Raymond NEW YORK (Reuters) - Martin Shkreli, a lightning rod for growing outrage over soaring prescription drug prices, was arrested by the FBI on Thursday after a federal investigation involving his former hedge fund and a pharmaceutical company he previously headed. The securities fraud probe of Shkreli, who is now chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals and KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc, stems from his time as manager of hedge fund MSMB Capital Management and CEO of biopharmaceutical company Retrophin Inc, a person familiar with the matter said....

Music surrounds us–and we wouldn’t have it any other way. An exhilarating orchestral crescendo can bring tears to our eyes and send shivers down our spines. Background swells add emotive punch to movies and TV shows. Organists at ballgames bring us together, cheering, to our feet. Parents croon soothingly to infants. And our fondness has deep roots: we have been making music since the dawn of culture. More than 30,000 years ago early humans were already playing bone flutes, percussive instruments and jaw harps–and all known societies throughout the world have had music....

NASA has cut ties with a private group that intends to launch an asteroid-survey mission. The decision clouds the prospects of the only large-scale space telescope being developed to seek space objects that have the potential to wreak havoc on Earth. NASA said Tuesday that it has ended its commitment to provide analytical and data-downlink support to Sentinel, a US$450-million satellite designed to spot 90% of near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than 140 metres....

Wilczak is a 23-year-old pilot and researcher for Scientific Aviation, a Boulder, Colo., company that tracks air quality for clients such as the United Nations, government agencies, environmental groups and private companies. We were flying about 48 kilometers north of Odessa, a city in the heart of the Permian Basin, a Kansas-size expanse that straddles West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Hundreds of millions of years ago this region was covered by a wide, shallow sea populated by tiny organisms that built vast reefs....

There may be a bit more room at the bottom, after all. In 1959 physicist Richard Feynman issued a famed address at a meeting of the American Physical Society, a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” It was an invitation to push the boundaries of the miniature, a nanotech call to arms that many physicists heeded to great effect. But more than 50 years since his challenge (pdf), researchers have begun to run up against a few hurdles that could slow the progression toward ever-tinier devices....

By Zoë Corbyn of Nature magazine People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions, researchers report today in PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict....

In the six years since Scientific American Mind began, I’ve learned a lot about how the mind and brain work. No surprise there. What is startling is how some articles can still make me completely rethink things that I thought I knew. One such piece is this issue’s cover story, “Get Attached,” by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller. The importance of attachment—a sound emotional relationship—between a child and a parent has long been well understood....

From Nature magazine The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) this week granted a licence to allow construction of a plant that uses a controversial uranium enrichment process — one that critics fear could pose a serious nuclear-proliferation risk. The plant, which would be built through a partnership between General Electric (GE) and Hitachi in Wilmington, North Carolina, could be used to enrich uranium to make fuel for nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply using a process that involves a laser....

Now that we’ve been held hostage by a virus for seven months that feel like seven years, many of us could use some good old-fashioned retribution. Well, it turns out there is a satisfying place where the viruses are the ones that have to worry about social distancing, and that place is the ocean. In seawater, viruses massively outnumber cellular life. There are an estimated 1030 virions there. Their victims are usually bacteria or other microbes....

Washington state, the leading US producer of farmed shellfish, today launched a 42-step plan to reduce ocean acidification. The initiative — detailed in a report by a governor-appointed panel of scientists, policy-makers and shellfish industry representatives — marks the first US state-funded effort to tackle ocean acidification, a growing problem for both the region and the globe. The state governor Christine Gregoire, says she will allocate $3.3 million to back the panel’s priority recommendations....

The cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization last week announced that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, is probably carcinogenic to humans. But the assessment, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, has been followed by an immediate backlash from industry groups. On March 23, Robb Fraley, chief technology officer at the agrochemical company Monsanto in St Louis, Missouri, which sells much of the world’s glyphosate, accused the IARC of “cherry picking” data....

In a geologic instant, the K-T extinction event about 65 million years ago left Earth’s skies empty of pterosaurs, extirpated the mosasaurs and their ammonite prey from the seas, and, of course, denuded the land of non-avian dinosaurs. But what if, by some fluke of evolutionary history, this catastrophe never happened and the global summer of the dinosaurs was allowed to continue? What might life on the planet look like today?...

Fame came quickly for Gonzalo Moratorio during the COVID-19 pandemic. People recognize him on the streets of Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. They buy him a beer every now and then when he goes to a bar. They even approach him on the water, whenever he goes out surfing with friends. And they thank him. They are grateful because Moratorio helped Uruguay dodge the worst consequences of the pandemic. He was named one of Nature’s 10: 10 people who helped shaped science in 2020....

If you take two crossed polarizers (for example, a horizontal and vertical one), no light will get through them. Yet when you insert a third polarizer between the two, oriented diagonally, then some photons make it through. How does adding that polarizer (which will block some photons) cause photons to get through? Say that the first polarizer is horizontal. Any photons that make it through that one are then horizontally polarized....