News Articles

It's statistical polling...for science. 
A paper in Nature Climate Change uses structured expert elicitation and mathematically pools experts' opinions to forecast future sea level rises from melting ice sheets. Soliciting and pooling expert judgments is used in eruption forecasting and the spread of vector borne diseases - with questionable accuracy - and in their paper Professor Jonathan Bamber and Professor Willy Aspinall from the University of Bristol try to model the uncertainties in the future response of the ice sheets. 

Planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them, according to a new paper.

While diet and exercise are guaranteed to eliminate obesity, there can sometimes be a biological issue that arises, making it harder to lose fat. 
Pop culture diet doctors selling books have done a lot of damage by recommending people not just diet because they claim the metabolism 'slows down' and stores more fat and burns less energy. It happens, but not enough for most people to not simply diet.  

On the Kelvin Scale, the absolute temperature used by physicists, it is not possible to get colder than zero degrees kelvin. The physical meaning of the temperature of a gas is determined by chaos, the disordered movement of its particles. The colder the gas, the slower the particles and at zero kelvin (-459.67 F,  -273 C) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. That is why it is called absolute zero.

Genomic research will transform medicine but progress has been slower than expected, leading critics to charge that the promise of genomics was hyperbole to get funding mandates and that while research should continue, the bulk of the money earmarked because of its applied science potential might instead be better spent elsewhere.
Proponents argue that the slowness shows the complexity of the relationship between medicine and disease and argue for more funding.

Kareus Therapeutics SA has announced the start of a Phase I clinical study following the Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for the development of KU-046, a first-in-class disease modifying new chemical entity discovered for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease using Kareus' proprietary bioenergetics and KARLECT platforms. 
 The Phase I clinical trial is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled two-part study to assess the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of single ascending oral doses and of multiple ascending oral doses of KU-046 in 54 healthy young volunteers. The study is being conducted by Quintiles at its Phase I Unit at Overland Park in Kansas. 

A researcher at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History has reported the discovery 33 new trapdoor spider species from the American Southwest.
These newly described species all belong to the genus Aptostichus and the paper revises it to discuss all 40 species, which get attention for being named after celebrities – Aptostichus stephencolberti and Aptostichus angelinajolieae for Stephen Colbert and Angelina Jolie, 

Dipexium Pharmaceuticals, LLC today announced that it has reached an agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on a Special Protocol Assessment for an upcoming Phase 3 registration trial in mild infections of diabetic foot ulcers with Locilex (pexiganan acetate cream 1%), an antibiotic peptide formulated as a topical cream. 

Experiments psychologists from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford say that the color of the cup matters in the flavor of hot chocolate - it tastes better in an orange or cream colored plastic cup than in a white or red one. 
Our senses perceive food in a different way depending on the characteristics of the container from which we eat and drink, they say.  They conducted an experiment in which 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four different types of plastic cup. They were the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red and orange with white on the inside. 

Merck Serono, a division of Germany's Merck, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Rebif(R) Rebidose(R) (interferon beta-1a), a single-use auto-injector for the self-administration of Rebif, a disease-modifying drug used to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS). 

A saying goes, "as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools", but they meant that students would look for help wherever they could get it.  But a subset of people felt it also reflected a fairly uniform view about school prayer: though federal law does not endorse a national religion, schools are funded and controlled by school districts and religious Americans generally approved of it.
Not so much any more; over the last two generations sharp differences in school-prayer support between different generations and their religious denominations are evident, according to survey results. 

A new study, believed to the largest randomized trial to directly compare changes in body composition induced by comparable amounts of time, has found that aerobic training is better than resistance training for weight- and fat loss. 
They measured time spent doing aerobic and resistant training, or both in combination, among previously inactive overweight or obese non-diabetic adults.  
Methodology