Posts

A new report published by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) pegs the cost of developing a prescription drug that gains market approval at $2.6 billion, a 145% increase, correcting for inflation, over the estimate the center made in 2003. CSDD’s finding, a bellwether figure in the drug industry, is based on an average out-of-pocket cost of $1.4 billion and an estimate of $1.2 billion in returns that investors forego on that money during the 10-plus years a drug candidate spends in development....

More than a century ago, a need for a community hospital spawned what is now New York-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital. In 1909 in the Village of Bronxville, NY — about 15 miles north of midtown Manhattan — real-estate and pharmaceutical-business entrepreneur William Van Duzer Lawrence’s son needed a long ride to a hospital to be treated for appendicitis. After that, Lawrence bought land and donated funds to build the local hospital, which is now a 288-bed facility with a community cancer center....

This year’s Olympic Games may be closed to most spectators because of COVID-19, but the eyes of the world are still on the athletes thanks to dozens of cameras recording every leap, dive and flip. Among all that broadcasting equipment, track-and-field competitors might notice five extra cameras—the first step in a detailed 3-D tracking system that supplies spectators with near-instantaneous insights into each step of a race or handoff of a baton....

Transgender people face up to 25 times greater risk of abuse, assault and suicide compared with other Americans. And some political groups continue to push to repeal existing local protections or enact further discrimination against transgender persons into law. Now new research published in Science today has found that a simple 10-minute directed conversation can have a significant and lasting effect on reducing that prejudice. The study was conducted in Miami neighborhoods that had supported an earlier anti-LGBT ballot initiative, and it used a process called “deep canvassing” as a way to interact with people to change attitudes....

Australia’s summer of 2012 was known as “the angry summer,” with record heat, extreme bush fires and flooding striking the nation in quick succession. Those heat extremes, the hottest in the country’s observational record, were likely caused by man-made climate change, according to a new study accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The study shows, with 90 percent confidence, that such extreme summers in Australia are five times more likely due to an increase in greenhouse gases, said paper co-author David Karoly, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Climate System Science....

Show up an hour late in Brazil, and no one bats an eyelash. But keep someone in Switzerland waiting for five or 10 minutes, and you have some explaining to do. Time is elastic in many cultures but snaps taut in others. Indeed, the way members of a culture perceive and use time reflects their society’s priorities and even their own worldview. Social scientists have recorded wide differences in the pace of life in various countries and in how societies view time—whether as an arrow piercing the future or as a revolving wheel in which past, present and future cycle endlessly....

Soon after Noah turned a year old, his parents, Leslie and Paul, noticed something was not quite right with their son. At 10 months Noah had learned to say “Mama” and “Dada,” but at 14 months he no longer uttered any discernible words. Music had a powerful and strange effect on Noah: when he heard it, he would stop what he was doing and “zone out,” according to Leslie. Four months later Noah’s parents brought up their concerns about their son with his pediatrician....

PATENT NO. 7,806,310 A Remote That Shatters Glass “In Case of Fire Break Glass.” The instructions are simple enough to follow when they apply to a fire alarm, especially when there is a tiny hammer attached to the alarm box. But victims trapped inside burning buildings or totaled cars would have a much harder time shattering a full-size window to make their escape. Giuseppe Longobardi, a researcher at IBM in Castellammare di Stabia, Italy, recently patented a device that would allow a disaster victim to press a button on a remote control and safely shatter a window several feet away, or engineers could install a sensor to the window that would make it break automatically in case of smoke or extreme heat....

President Obama delivered his budget request for fiscal year 2011 to Congress on Monday, proposing sweeping changes to NASA’s spaceflight program while increasing the agency’s overall budget. As had been rumored for days, Obama’s blueprint for NASA would cancel the Constellation program, the family of rockets and hardware now in development to replace the aging space shuttle, and would call instead on commercial vendors to fly astronauts to orbit. Since 2005 the U....

LIVERMORE, Calif. – In the dark early morning hours, scientists conduct an almost daily ritual out here at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: a countdown. In a NASA-style control room, researchers and technicians huddle around LCD monitors on semicircular desks facing a wall of five projection screens. The countdown reaches zero, the world’s most powerful laser fires silently for a fraction of a second at a fuel target, and results pour in....

Photovoltaic cells can generate electricity without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but solar power is significantly more expensive than the electricity produced by coal- and gas-fired plants. To boost the competitiveness of solar energy, researchers have striven to make solar cells convert sunlight into electricity more efficiently. Inspiration may come from the most basic scientific research. Investigators are starting to delve into the intricacies of photosynthesis, which converts sunlight into chemical energy with almost 100 percent efficiency....

The stress and suffering of combat are known to leave a lasting impact on military veterans, in some cases triggering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Researchers have now found an even more serious and debilitating mental condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), in veterans, particularly those injured by the concussive force of bomb blasts. Whereas PTSD is a mental illness, marked by unwelcome flashbacks and anguish, CTE is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disorder characterized by abnormal protein deposits that eventually kill brain cells and thus cause cognitive declines, including loss of memory and the ability to learn as well as depression....

The next time humans set foot on the moon, they may well plant a five-starred red flag there. The Chinese space program is developing rapidly, and further progress should come this year when taikonauts, a colloquial term for Chinese astronauts, visit the Tiangong-1 space module. The president’s chief science adviser John Holdren has said the U.S. would benefit from cooperation with China. The two countries could tackle the problem of space debris and, possibly, lay groundwork for a joint mission to Mars....

Jessica Watkins spent her PhD studying landslides on Mars. Now she is among the few humans with a shot at being the first to walk on the red planet. In January, Watkins graduated as a member of NASA’s newest astronaut class. As a planetary geologist, she is a leading candidate to participate in the agency’s Artemis programme, which aims to send people back to the Moon by the end of 2024....

Adapted from The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion, by Wendy Williams, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), HarperCollins (Canada), Oneworld (UK). Copyright © 2015 by Wendy Williams. Some time around 35,000 years ago, when much of Europe was locked up in sheets of ice, an artist acquired a bit of mammoth ivory and began carving. A masterpiece emerged in the form of a two-inch-long horse....

This year hurricanes have rocked America and the Caribbean. Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria have caused billions of dollars of damage and so far, left 103 people dead in the US alone. In addition to the carnage wreaked along the way, natural disasters such as hurricanes, cyclones and tsunamis leave many struggling to rebuild their lives and homes years after the initial hit. As the rescue workers begin to depart, the scale of the damage hits home....

Debates between the political left and right—whether in Congress or at the dinner table—can turn so acrimonious it becomes hard to believe the two sides can ever come together and agree on anything, let alone work as a cohesive team. A new paper in Nature Human Behavior suggests when people from opposing political parties sit down and hash things out on a project, the outcome is superior to when members of a team all share the same viewpoint....

It was not just a knee pinned to George Floyd’s neck that killed him. Or gunshots that killed Breonna Taylor. Or a choke hold that killed Eric Garner. It was also centuries of systemic racism that have festered in U.S. society and institutions, including our overly punitive, adversarial system of policing. And videos of the recent police-involved killings do not show the broader toll that stop and frisk, arbitrary arrests and other aggressive law-enforcement actions have taken on Black and other minority communities....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

One of the most intriguing mysteries in physics is the “Pioneer anomaly,” the slowing down of two spacecraft by an unknown force. NASA launched Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1972 and 1973, respectively, and the craft returned stunning images of Jupiter and Saturn. But as both spacecraft continued their voyages at speeds of roughly 27,000 miles per hour, astronomer John Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., noticed anomalies in telemetry data dating from as far back as 1980....