Consumer advertising for prescription drugs had a negligible impact on sales of products studied by Harvard Medical School researchers — in a finding that may confound both advertisers and their opponents. The study may undercut the arguments of opponents of such ads, which have been allowed almost nowhere outside the U.S. Critics say they lead to drug overuse and misuse by impressionable patients pressing their doctors to prescribe what is seen on TV. But the study also raises the question of whether the pharmaceutical industry’s $4.8 billion annual spending on such ads is a waste of shareholders’ money. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which loosened its regulations to widely permit such ads in the 1990s, is under pressure to tighten its rules and has announced it will study the issue. Meanwhile, the European Union, which bans consumer ads, is considering a proposal to loosen its rules. In Canada, where ads are also banned, a court battle could lead the government to allow them. Other studies have found that direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs does raise sales. But the new study will draw some attention because it is among the first to compare the behavior of people […]
Print scientific journals are becoming less relevant in the Internet Age. Arxiv, a Web site where physicists post their research papers before they are published in print, has grown to contain more than 430,000 articles as of July 2007. Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future. The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists – allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue. But no one agrees yet on whether this extreme sharing among scientists and even the public is ultimately good for science or undermining it. ‘It scares people,’ says biochemist Cameron Neylon, an open science advocate who works at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and posts […]
A study reported in the August 8th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, reveals the complete mitochondrial genome of a 38,000-year-old Neandertal. The findings open a window into the Neandertals’ past and helps answer lingering questions about our relationship to them. ‘ For the first time, we’ve built a sequence from ancient DNA that is essentially without error,’ said Richard Green of Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. The key is that they sequenced the Neandertal mitochondria-powerhouses of the cell with their own DNA including 13 protein-coding genes-nearly 35 times over. That impressive coverage allowed them to sort out those differences between the Neandertal and human genomes resulting from damage to the degraded DNA extracted from ancient bone versus true evolutionary changes. Although it is well established that Neandertals are the hominid form most closely related to present-day humans, their exact relationship to us remains uncertain, according to the researchers. The notion that Neandertals and humans may have ‘mixed’ is still a matter of some controversy. Analysis of the new sequence confirms that the mitochondria of Neandertal’s falls outside the variation found in humans today, offering no evidence of admixture between the […]
Researchers confirm that surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1300 years, and, if the climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous for at least 1700 years. ‘Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study,’ says Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology and geosciences and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. ‘Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called ‘proxies’ to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record.’ The proxies used by the researchers included information from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, coral cores and tree rings. ‘We looked at a much expanded database and our methods are more sophisticated than those used previously,’ says Mann. In today’s (Sept. 2) online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers note, ‘Conclusions are less definitive for the Southern Hemisphere and globe, which we attribute to larger uncertainties arising from the sparser available proxy data in the Southern Hemisphere.’ The research team included Mann; Ray Bradley, university distinguished professor, […]
Bipolar disorder: People with bipolar disorder fluctuate between intense depression and mania, interspersed by periods of relative calm. The exact causes of bipolar disorder aren’t known, but it appears to run in families. About 1 in every 100 people develop bipolar disorder in their lifetime Older fathers are more likely to have children with bipolar disorder, research suggests. The risk goes up when men are older than 29 before they start their family, and is highest if they are over 55. Increasing paternal age has already been linked with schizophrenia and autism, but not bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression. The Swedish study, in Archives of Psychiatry, suggests the risk may, in part, be explained by ageing sperm. DNA errors Unlike women who are born with all their eggs, men make new sperm throughout their adult life. The process of making sperm involves copying DNA, and this is prone to error, particularly as men age, say the Karolinska Institute researchers. Lead researcher Emma Frans explained: ‘Women are born with their full supply of eggs. Therefore, DNA copy errors should not increase in number with maternal age.’ Consistent with this notion, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
