From Alaska to Mexico-and all along the B.C. coast-an iconic animal is disappearing. For reasons that remain baffling to scientists, starfish are dying by the millions, in the grips of a mysterious wasting disease that dissolves their bodies into goo. ‘I’d do beach walks along a 50-m stretch of shoreline, and count 500 or 1,000 of them,” says Chris Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia who’s been monitoring sea stars (as scientists call them) for nearly two decades at sites around Vancouver, West Vancouver and White Rock. Revisiting one of these sites recently, he found a single sea star.

The Vancouver Aquarium, which has been tracking the outbreak of sea-star wasting syndrome, warns that the B.C. creatures are experiencing a ‘mass mortality event,” with some species like the big sunflower stars (which Harley calls ‘glorious things the size of manhole covers”) particularly affected. On June 4, an Oregon State University (OSU) team warned of an ‘epidemic of historic magnitude” that threatens to wipe out the state’s entire population of purple ochre sea stars: in the intertidal zone, which is covered by water at high tide and uncovered at low, between 30 to 50 per cent of the […]

No Comments

Tesla may already be reaping the rewards of freeing up its patents.

Four days after CEO Elon Musk offered most of his company’s patents to rivals in hopes of cultivating a bigger electric car market, Nissan and BMW are ‘keen on talks” to cooperate on charging networks, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

That pretty much validates why the Silicon Valley company freed up its patents in the first place: Tesla wants its superchargers to become the industry standard.

That way, other companies will use and enlarge Tesla’s existing network of 97 charging stations that currently dot a path across the continental United States, making it more and more feasible to swap fuel-burning cars for battery-electric ones, even for long-distance travel.

No Comments

In the U.S., rising prescription drug prices are the law — at least that’s the way it looks to Leonard Saltz, MD, chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

“We have several arms of the government, working in different areas, that are creating the problem,” Saltz told MedPage Today during the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

The FDA, he said, approves drugs on the basis of efficacy and safety, but is not allowed — by law — to consider price, which in any case is not usually set until after the regulatory OK.

“They may approve a drug that has an extremely small incremental benefit with no input on what sort of price is going to be charged,” he said.

On the other hand, once a drug is approved, Saltz said, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) must cover it, but is not allowed to negotiate lower prices.

“That’s very strange,” Saltz said. “Where else in a free market society do you see the largest customer unable to negotiate for a better price?”

Those two factors combine to skew the market so that prices rise inexorably, Saltz argued.

Other experts reached by […]

No Comments

Executive Summary

The United States health care system is the most expensive in the world, but this report and prior editions consistently show the U.S. underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance. Among the 11 nations studied in this report-Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States-the U.S. ranks last, as it did in the 2010, 2007, 2006, and 2004 editions of Mirror, Mirror. Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last or near last on dimensions of access, efficiency, and equity. In this edition of Mirror, Mirror, the United Kingdom ranks first, followed closely by Switzerland (Exhibit ES-1).

Expanding from the seven countries included in 2010, the 2014 edition includes data from 11 countries. It incorporates patients’ and physicians’ survey results on care experiences and ratings on various dimensions of care. It includes information from the most recent three Commonwealth Fund international surveys of patients and primary care physicians about medical practices and views of their countries’ health systems (2011-2013). It also includes information on health care outcomes featured in The […]

No Comments

Visitors to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science can stand beside an enormous rotating drill bit, take a virtual ride down a fracking well and run their fingers along the smooth, dark surface of the Barnett Shale, the natural gas-rich rock that has fueled Texas’ energy boom.

But as several reviews have pointed out, the Perot Museum makes only a few subtle references to one of the most pressing issues in science: how human activities, primarily emissions from coal, oil and gas plants, are contributing to a rapid warming of the planet.

‘Some [of the museum’s] choices are scientifically questionable,” wrote James S. Russell for Bloomberg. ‘In displays on water and weather I could find no consideration of climate change – the defining natural-science challenge of our time.”

Museums across the country face challenges in presenting climate change to the public at a time when the issue has become politically fraught.

A series of interviews with museum experts revealed that many factors stand in the way of an institution’s complete and accurate portrayal of global warming: the difficulty of presenting a complex subject in a clear, engaging way; the rapid pace of new findings about the effects of climate change vs. the amount […]

No Comments