Posts

When President Trump delivered his much-ballyhooed address on drug prices in May, even supporters conceded there were more question marks among his policy ideas than concrete proposals. But over the past week, the Trump administration has begun to put some periods at the ends of the sentences. Top health officials are exploring the idea of importing drugs from other countries, despite broad and long-standing opposition from drug makers. There’s a new pitch to lower the prices Medicare pays for new drugs, at least for the first few months they’re on the market....

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke landed in Alaska last year for a trip that would foreshadow the rest of his public career. About three months after winning one of the most comfortable confirmation votes of President Trump’s Cabinet, Zinke arrived at an oil and gas conference in Alaska with a delegation of Senate Republicans and one red-state Democrat. He laid his hand on a pipeline and vowed to fill it with oil....

According to the Institute of Medicine, a whopping 100 million Americans—that’s one in three—suffer from some sort of chronic pain. And if you’re one of them, chances are at least one doctor has told you, “It’s all in your head.” The trick is that chronic pain wears many disguises. Sometimes chronic pain is psychosomatic, which does not mean it’s all in your head or that you’re faking (that’s another term: malingering), but does mean that your very real pain is caused by psychological factors, like stress or depression....

Everyday products like beef, soy and palm oil already are widely blamed for spurring massive losses of the world’s tropical forests. These products are also frequently linked to clearing that takes place in spite of local laws enacted to protect these forests. But a new report from the environmental nonprofit Forest Trends for the first time attempts to quantify exactly how much of the world’s illegal deforestation takes place to make way for palm oil plantations, cattle ranching, soy cultivation and other agricultural commodities....

Investing $1.8 trillion globally in climate change adaptation could result in $7.1 trillion in benefits, according to a new report. The report released yesterday by the Global Commission on Adaptation calls for investment in five areas of adaptation between 2020 and 2030. The areas include early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, improved agriculture, mangrove protection and improvements in making water resources more resilient. Mangrove forests alone account for more than $80 billion per year in avoided losses by helping reduce flooding....

Every day an average of 18 people die waiting for an organ transplant in the United States. Donated organs are tough to come by, which is why many scientists have spent the last two decades trying to create new livers, kidneys, hearts or lungs from scratch. One potential way to craft such delicate structures is 3-D printing with biologically compatible materials, or bioprinting—which has now reportedly produced functional models of lung and liver tissues, with a little help from an unconventional ingredient: food dye....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Don’t skip that second dose of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine, advises a 4/29/21 story by Tara Parker-Pope at The New York Times, even if you already have had COVID-19. With new variants evolving and spreading globally, as well as to get all the protection possible from your vaccination, it does matter whether you get your second dose, the story states....

The push to make a coronavirus vaccine is moving at breakneck speed. This week, the first of a few dozen healthy volunteers in Seattle, Washington, received a vaccine in a phase 1 safety trial sponsored by the US government. Similar safety trials of other coronavirus vaccines will also begin soon. Even as these ‘first in human’ trials get going, key questions about how our immune system fights off the virus — and how to safely trigger a similar immune response with a vaccine — remain unanswered....

WASHINGTON—The scion of an Indian pharmaceutical family claims to have crafted a liver-friendly vodka—and wants to tout that health benefit on the bottle. But does it work? And, if so, would the US officials who regulate the alcohol industry permit a company to make such a claim? The entrepreneur behind the spirits is Harsha Chigurupati, whose relatives are majority owners of Granules India, a major supplier of acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and other drugs....

President Biden took a math problem to Glasgow. He and his advisers have spent the first two days of the international climate conference known as COP 26 trying to persuade world leaders that U.S. actions will add up to a 50 percent emissions reduction over nine years. “There are a number of paths to get to where we need to go in terms of our 2030 commitment,” White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said in an interview with NPR....

From Nature magazine US regulators took a step into the unknown this week when they approved the first drug to prevent HIV infection. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Margaret Hamburg hailed the pill, Truvada, as a tool for reducing the rate of infection in the United States, where 50,000 people are diagnosed each year. But the drug combines low doses of two anti­retroviral agents normally used to treat infection, and some researchers fear that its use in healthy people could have unacceptable side effects and spark the emergence of resistant viruses....

The Large Hadron Collider may be up and running outside Geneva, but the particle accelerator it supplanted as top dog in the particle physics community appears to have a few surprises left to deliver. Data from the workhorse Tevatron collider at Fermilab in Illinois show what appears to be a preference for matter over antimatter in the way an unusual kind of particle decays, according to a new analysis in a Tevatron research collaboration....

Is depression contagious? The short answer is: yes—it’s not called the common cold of mental illness for nothing. But like most things, it’s complicated. Depression is contagious, but it’s not as if you get infected when your depressed friend cries on your shoulder. Instead, your own susceptibility or immunity depends on lots of things–your genetics, history, stress, and more. It’s been known for almost a decade that both healthy and unhealthy behaviors are contagious—if your friends quit smoking or become obese, you’re more likely to do so, too....

Electric buses are hitting Los Angeles streets. Low-income residents can access discounted electric car-sharing. And electric vehicle charging stations are multiplying. Those changes are part of LA’s effort to cut the number of gas-fueled vehicles from its streets. The region, famous for its traffic, wants to get more people in EVs, trains and buses and on bikes before the Summer Olympics come to LA in 2028. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti touted the first zero-emissions bus produced for the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, known as Metro, earlier this week....

By turning off a lone gene, researchers have extended the lives of three different kinds of stem cells in mice, staving off some of the ravages of old age. In return, however, one ravage was greatly boosted–the animal’s rate of cancer–suggesting that stem cells shut themselves down as they age to ward off the disease. One hallmark of aging is the inability to heal as fast or maintain tissues and organs as well as in youth....

When a dense stellar core called a white dwarf acquires enough material from a companion star orbiting nearby, it burns up in the nuclear fusion blast of a Type Ia supernova. This ejects freshly synthesized elements that mix with interstellar gas and eventually form stars and galaxies. But astrophysicists still don’t know the specific conditions that ignite these explosions. Ivo Seitenzahl, an astrophysicist at University of New South Wales Canberra, and his colleagues used the upgraded Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to build unprecedented 3-D chemical maps of the debris left behind by these supernovae....

A new, highly efficient process for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen has been demonstrated by researchers in Switzerland. The process combines a stable catalyst with a highly efficient perovskite solar cell. The perovskite solar cells do have a major drawback in that they breakdown after a few hours, but the researchers believe further advances in solar cell technology should take care of this problem. As the most abundant energy source on the planet, solar energy is extremely attractive for weaning the human race off fossil fuels, but making the switch is problematic....

The Kepler space telescope isn’t dead yet. Kepler, which has discovered about 70 percent of the 3,800 known exoplanets to date, woke up from a four-week hibernation yesterday (Aug. 2) and has begun beaming data home, just as planned, NASA officials announced today (Aug. 3). Kepler had been sleeping in an attempt to save thruster fuel, which is running very low. Mission team members wanted to make sure the spacecraft had enough propellant left to orient its antenna toward Earth for yesterday’s data dump....

Alzheimer’s disease has long been characterized by the buildup of two distinct proteins in the brain: first beta-amyloid, which accumulates in clumps, or plaques, and then tau, which forms toxic tangles that lead to cell death. But how beta-amyloid leads to the devastation of tau has never been precisely clear. Now a new study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham appears to describe that missing mechanism. The study details a cascade of events....

The current issue of Scientific American revisits the promise, peril and controversy of race-based medicine. In an article written by Jonathan Kahn, the primacy of the introduction of BiDil as a specific therapy for heart failure in African Americans is passionately challenged more as a commercial advantage for a pharmaceutical company rather than as a breakthrough in medical science. The concerns which have been previously raised and vetted by many authors include the appropriateness of race as a construct in medicine, the integrity of the supporting science, the absence of a true proprietary compound as opposed to a convenient ‘repackaging’ of generic drugs and the targeting of one group of patients as the sole benefactor of this therapy....