US drug approvals are on track to drop by more than half in 2016 compared to 2015, according to a December 14 presentation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The agency had approved 19 new drugs this year as of December 9, putting it on track for its lowest yearly tally since 2007. The decline is made more dramatic by 2015’s bumper crop of approvals. The FDA approved 45 new drugs last year — the highest total in nearly 20 years....
While the Spirit and Opportunity rovers this summer soldiered on after more than five years on Mars (despite a number of glitches), an intrepid bot called the benthic rover created by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) showed its chops as a remote research vehicle by spending most of July traveling over the Pacific Ocean floor about 40 kilometers off the California coast, some 900 meters below sea level....
My parents thought I would make a good doctor or engineer. I excelled at science and math, after all. Instead I chose to pursue journalism, even though it seemed better suited for a “creative person” than for me. I had a passion for writing but not necessarily a flair, and my early efforts were not pretty. Fortunately, as this special newsstand edition shows, creativity is not just something you’re born with....
It was clear relatively early in the pandemic that a handful of risk factors dramatically impacted the severity of COVID-19. Among them were advanced age and obesity. Both appeared to reduce the body’s ability to fight off the infection, leaving people more prone to acute illness, hospitalization and death. As we age, our immune system weakens, rendering us more susceptible to illness. The pandemic has highlighted the fact that obesity can trigger and exacerbate similar immunologic changes even in younger individuals....
It started with a simple message from Internet billionaire Yuri Milner: Let’s meet up. Before responding to that e-mail in April, Jacob Lurie, a Harvard University mathematics professor, decided to look up Milner and found that the venture capitalist, along with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, had started awarding a $3-million prize in mathematics this year. Lurie figured Milner wanted his advice on whom to pick. “I was surprised,” Lurie says, “when he offered me the prize....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Aristophanes wrote in the 5th century BCE about coin hoards in Athens. He joked about the common saying, “No one knows but the birds where I hid my money,” which led buffoons in his play to follow birds around with a shovel, hoping to excavate a treasure....
Our homes and offices account for more than one third of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activity—the bulk of it for heating in winter and air-conditioning in summer, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Taking simple steps such as caulking windows, installing thicker insulation and double-paned windows, and using energy-efficient appliances can cut the energy used in a given building by as much as 50 percent....
For a comprehensive overview of all types of mental illness, visit Psych Central. Launched in 1995, the site is one of the longest-running mental health outposts online, and it was named one of Time.com’s 50 Best Websites in 2008. You will find places to network with peers, a medication library and quizzes, such as “Do I need therapy?” Mental Help Net is nearly as old and also award-winning. The amount of information here is staggering, but do not miss “Depression: A Primer” by a blogger and illustrator named “Ellen” who has struggled with the disease....
Warning: just reading this article might make your skin crawl. Thinking about itching, seeing people scratch, looking at pictures of bedbugs or other itch inducers—all can bring on an irresistible urge to flick away that irksome feeling. But itching—“pruritus,” to physicians—is more than an occasional nuisance. The sensation, which arises from an irritation of the nerve cells along the skin, serves as a helpful warning about potential hazards such as insects or foreign materials—and scratching is often a simple and effective method for dealing with them....
What took us so long? Only in 1998 did astronomers discover we had been missing nearly three quarters of the contents of the universe, the so-called dark energy—an unknown form of energy that surrounds each of us, tugging at us ever so slightly, holding the fate of the cosmos in its grip, but to which we are almost totally blind. Some researchers, to be sure, had anticipated that such energy existed, but even they will tell you that its detection ranks among the most revolutionary discoveries in 20th-century cosmology....
Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok. Doubleday, 2007 The big bang theory holds that space and time sprang into existence 14 billion years ago from a hot, dense fireball. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok (well-known physicists at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge, respectively) contend that the evolution of the universe is cyclic; big bangs occur once every trillion or so years, producing new galaxies, stars, planets and, presumably, life....
Scientists have long known that veins of gold are formed by mineral deposition from hot fluids flowing through cracks deep in Earth’s crust. But a study published today in Nature Geoscience has found that the process can occur almost instantaneously — possibly within a few tenths of a second. The process takes place along ‘fault jogs’ — sideways zigzag cracks that connect the main fault lines in rock, says first author Dion Weatherley, a seismologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia....
This must be one of the more bizarre videos to accompany a scientific paper this year: an electric eel leaping out of a tank to shock a fake alligator head. The experiment, which demonstrates how eels react to half-submerged predators by leaping up out of water and administering defensive volleys of high-voltage electricity, is the brainchild of Kenneth Catania, a biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Catania first spotted the behaviour during earlier laboratory experiments with electric eels (Electrophorus electricus), when they would leap upwards to attack a metal-rimmed net as he was trying to fish them out of their tanks....
“What’s in a name?” asked Juliet of Romeo. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” A real-life Juliet probably would have spoken to Romeo in an obscure medieval Italian dialect rather than Shakespeare’s English. Nevertheless, her word for the sweet-smelling flower would have shared the same linguistic root (rosa, in modern Italian) as the English version does and indeed as many other languages spoken throughout Europe do—Rose, capitalized in German fashion, or the lowercase French rose....
Third of a four-part series. For the first two parts, click here and here. HOARFROST RIVER, Canada—Burning taiga changed everything for the Olesens on July 4, 2014. David and Kristen Olesen, their two daughters, and 44 sled dogs lived at a homestead at the edge of the boreal forest on a sandy peninsula at a spot where the Hoarfrost River meets the Great Slave Lake near the Arctic Circle. In the wintertime, fog rises off the river and coats spruces in moisture that crystallizes to ice in a phenomenon called “hoarfrost....
We rely on trillions of bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses in our mouth, on our skin and in our gut to get through the day and to stay healthy. Scientists had no way to study most of these microbes, which do not seem to want to grow in laboratory cultures. Rapidly improving, low-cost genetic-sequencing technologies are finally making it possible, however. By working with our microbes instead of against them, scientists are coming up with intriguing approaches to tackling persistent diseases and improving our overall health....
Graphene currently sits atop engineering’s list of wonder materials. The single layer of carbon atoms exhibits incredible physical strength and flexibility, as well as unique electrical properties. These characteristics have enabled researchers to use it in everything from phone chargers to water filters. But along one dimension, it disappoints: graphene is not a natural semiconductor. Although engineers are forging ahead to find ways to manipulate it so that it works in transistors—devices that modify electric currents to power gadgets—they are also now turning to a promising alternative with a similar structure: a single layer of black phosphorus atoms, called phosphorene....
Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that palm oil, common in snack foods and health & beauty products, is destroying rainforests? If so, what can consumers do about it? – Emma Miniscalco, via e-mail It’s no wonder that worldwide demand for palm oil has surged in recent years. Long used in cosmetics, palm oil is now all the rage in the snack food industry, since it is transfat-free and therefore seen as healthier than the shortening it replaces....
The shallow bafflegab of such positive-thinking pioneers as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937) or the “prosperity gospel” preachings of such contemporary “pastorpreneurs” as Frederick “Reverend Ike” Eikerenkoetter, Robert H. Schuller and Joel Osteen are predictably data-light and anecdote-heavy. But one expects better of respected experimental psychologists such as Martin E. P. Seligman, who almost single-handedly launched the positive-psychology movement in academia that is, according to the Positive Psychology Center Web page (www....
A new catalog of earthquake lights—mysterious glows sometimes reported before or during seismic shaking—finds that they happen most often in geological rift environments, where the ground is pulling apart. The work is the latest to tackle the enigmatic lights, which have been described by eyewitnesses for centuries but are yet to be fully explained by scientists. The study, published in the January/February issue of Seismological Research Letters pulls together several strands of research to propose a mechanism by which earthquake lights form....
