Sometimes it’s nice to browse through the morning’s science news report without looking for occasions for darts or laurels, but merely for the pleasure of catching up on the news. In that spirit, here are some of the nice pieces I found this morning, when I happened to get an early start:
For starters, I ran across Extending healthy life by getting rid of retired cells, By Ed Yong, (or @edyong209, as he’s known in some circles) on his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog for Discover. He’s not talking about longer lifespan, but longer healthspan, in the current coinage. “Note that the mice in this study didn’t live any longer; they just spent more of their life being healthy,” he writes.
Duff Wilson at The New York Times writes about a $3 billion settlement that Glaxo reached with the U.S. over illegal marketing of drugs. That’s more money than I make in a week, but is it enough to deter Glaxo, or other pharmaceutical companies, from committing the same sins again? Wilson asks, and some say it isn’t.
Carey Goldberg at the CommonHealth blog reports on another drug-company problem. I’d read about the shortage of cancer drugs in recent weeks, but now it turns out that Ritalin and other drugs for ADHD are in short supply. That’s a little like running out of antibiotics for penicillin. There’s nothing rare or exotic about ADHD or the drugs used to treat it. Where Have All the ADHD Drugs Gone? makes for unsettling but illuminating reading. Goldberg’s answer to the question posed in the hed? Everyone she asks–and she asks more than one or two–has a different answer. So much for “the best health care system in the world,” as many in Washington would have it.
Who knew? Some of the great Renaissance cathedrals seem to be wildly inappropriate places to play or listen to the music being written at the time. The reverberation time is so long that the complex melodies would have bounced around until they were musical mush. Now “acoustical archaeologists” have concluded, according to a post by Veronica Greenwood on Discover’s 80Beats blog, that when certain Venetian cathedrals were hung with draperies and packed with the faithful, “the reverberation time at the Doge’s throne was reduced to a mere 1.5 or 2 seconds, which is the gold standard for modern concert halls.” Whew; that’s a relief. Play “Misty” for me…
Andrew Pollack reports in the New York Times that another drug has been found effective against prostate cancer–so effective that researchers halted the trial and gave it to test subjects and controls alike. The drug prolonged survival from 13.6 months to 18.4. Question: That doesn’t sound like much; do researchers think the drug would provide longer survival if given to patients earlier in the course of the illness?
And now that we’ve highlighted a story by Golberg at CommonHealth, we’d better do the same for her partner there, Rachel Zimmerman, lest we create Tracker envy disruptive enough to ruin a beautiful (working) relationship. (And what’s worse–drugs to treat Tracker envy are apparently out of stock all over the country.) Zimmerman picks up a story from the Boston Herald about a retired pressman at the paper, whose co-pay for an arthritis drug jumped to the point where he can no longer afford it. “When your co-pay for a critical medication jumps from $42 to $600 a month, you know something’s gone wrong,” is how the post begins. (Cf. pvs. point re: best health care system in world.)
And while Master Tracker Petit usually covers the physical sciences here, I can’t resist a mention of Phil Plait‘s Bad Astronomy blog post at Discover, where he shows us a photo of the birth of a new iceberg (see above), along with a NASA video of the same phenom.
Time to stop reading and get to work. But it was a nice way to start the day.
– Paul Raeburn
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