Belimumab (trade name Benlysta ®) has been approved since July 2011 as an add-on therapy for adult patients with the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). This monoclonal antibody is only considered as treatment when the disease is still active in spite of standard therapy. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has now examined the added benefit of this drug pursuant to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG). According to the findings, there is no proof that belimumab provides added benefit ...

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified the genetic cause of a rare and fatal bone disease by studying frozen skin cells that were taken from a child with the condition almost fifty years ago. Their study, which details how the MT1-MMP gene leads to the disease known as Winchester syndrome, appears in the August 23, 2012 online edition of The American Journal of Human Genetics. In 1969, Patricia Winchester, MD, a pediatric radiologist in New York City, was asked to diagnose two young sisters who were losing bone in their hands and feet, developing ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 29, 2012--Biomass recalcitrance--the problem of how to break down complex plant-based cellulosic feedstock into sugars that can be fermented to produce sustainable biofuels and other renewable biobased products—can be overcome through improved methods of biomass characterization. IB IN-DEPTH, a collection of articles from leading research laboratories describing advanced tools and techniques for analyzing the chemistry, structure, and interaction of biomass components, is published in Industrial Biotechnology, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann ...

A research collaboration between the Gonzaga University and the Max Planck Institute shows that the way in which chimpanzees groom each other depends on the community to which they belong. Specifically, it is the unique handclasp grooming behaviour that reveals this local difference. The specific behaviour that the researchers focused on was the 'grooming handclasp', a behaviour where two chimpanzees clasp onto each other's arms, raise those arms up in the air, and groom each other with their free arm. This behaviour has only been observed in some chimpanzee populations. ...

A University of Central Florida assistant professor has developed a new material using nanotechnology, which could help keep pilots and sensitive equipment safe from destructive lasers. UCF Assistant Professor Jayan Thomas, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor Rongchao Jin chronicle their work in the July issue of the journal Nano Letters. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nl301988v) Thomas is working with gold nanoparticles and studying their properties when they are shrunk into a small size regime called nanoclusters. Nanoparticles are already ...

Solar panels, like those commonly perched atop house roofs or in sun-drenched fields, quietly harvesting the sun's radiant energy, are one of the standard-bearers of the green energy movement. But could they be better – more efficient, durable and affordable? That's what engineers from Drexel University and The University of Pennsylvania are trying to find out, with the aid of a little nanotechnology and a lot of mathematical modeling. A three-year grant from the National Science Foundation has set the team on a track to explore ways to make new photoelectric cells more ...

WASHINGTON –- U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Tactical Satellite-4 successfully completes three weeks of intense testing, June 28, as part of the Navy's annual Trident Warrior Experiment 2012 (TW12). TacSat-4 is a Navy-led Joint mission that provides Ultra High Frequency (UHF) satellite communications (SATCOM). Sponsored by Navy Warfare Development Command, Trident Warrior is an annual fleet experiment focused on gaining valuable insights to improve future capability investments. This year's agenda included at-sea experimentation of critical maritime initiatives, and ...

The first scientific analysis of nutrient levels in edible microgreens has found that many of those trendy seedlings of green vegetables and herbs have more vitamins and healthful nutrients than their fully grown counterparts. A report on the research appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Qin Wang, Gene E. Lester and colleagues point out that microgreens have gained popularity as a new culinary trend over the past few years, especially in upscale markets and restaurants. Those seedlings of spinach, lettuce, red cabbage and other veggies are usually ...

The famous warship, Vasa, displayed in a museum that gets 1.2 million visitors every year and ranks as one of Sweden's most popular tourist attractions, is deteriorating despite ongoing preservation efforts, scientists are reporting. Their study, citing a "significant" loss of strength in the ship's wood, appears in ACS' journal Biomacromolecules. Ingela Bjurhager, Lars A. Berglund and colleagues explain that the Vasa sunk in the Stockholm harbor in 1628 on its maiden voyage after sailing less than a nautical mile. The ship was rediscovered in 1958, raised in 1961, treated ...

Responding to an urgent need for better antibacterial coatings on surgical sutures, scientists are reporting the discovery of a new coating that is almost 1,000 times more effective than the most widely used commercial coating. Their report appears in ACS' journal Langmuir. Professor Gregory Tew, who is from UMass-Amherst, and colleagues explain that infection at the site of surgical incisions is one of the most common post-surgical complications that keep patients hospitalized longer and boost hospital bills. The most common antibiotic coating contains triclosan, but ...

A potentially powerful new approach for limiting health care costs — which account for almost $1 out of every $5 spent in the U.S. each year — is the topic of the feature story in this week's edition of Chemical & Enginering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. C&EN Senior Correspondent Marc S. Reisch explains that one until-now neglected way to reign in health care spending involves providing patients and doctors with better diagnostic tests. Such tests could save money by providing greater ...

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – August 29, 2012 -- Estimates of the total mass of all life on Earth should be reduced by about one third, based on the results of a study by a team of scientists at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography and colleagues in Germany. The research was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. According to previous estimates, about one thousand billion tons of carbon is stored in living organisms, of which 30 percent is in single-cell microbes in the ocean floor and 55 percent reside in land ...

The use of newer drugs, a greater number of effective drugs, and a longer treatment regimen may be associated with improved survival of patients with multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TR), according to a large study by a team of international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Global efforts to control tuberculosis are being challenged by the emergence of strains that are resistant to several antibiotics including isoniazid and rifampicin, the two most powerful, first-line (standard) anti-tuberculosis drugs—so-called multidrug resistant tuberculosis ...

Increasingly humanitarian organizations will find themselves responding to health emergencies provoked by the adverse effects of mining and other extractive industries, setting up a potential clash to do with the core principles and values at the heart of humanitarian medicine, writes Philippe Calain from the humanitarian medical organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), in this week's PLOS Medicine. "A pragmatic approach of engagement with the corporate sector for the delivery of aid, or an implicit support to mainstream development agendas could compromise the ...

In their August editorial, the PLOS Medicine Editors reflect on a recent Policy Forum article by Jason Corburn and Alison Cohen*, which describes the need for urban health equity indicators to guide public health policy in cities and urban areas. The Editors focus on the need for better air quality data for the world's cities because many cities with the worst airborne particulate levels are in low- and middle-income countries and often have limited data. Worryingly, the World Health Organization estimates that 1.34 million premature deaths were at attributable to outdoor ...

Child mortality is a key indicator not only of child health and nutrition but also of the implementation of child survival interventions and, more broadly, of social and economic development. Millennium Development Goal 4 calls for a two thirds reduction in the under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015. With the renewed focus on child survival, tracking of progress in the reduction of child mortality is increasingly important. A sponsored collection of new articles on the methodology for estimation of child mortality was published today in the open-access journal ...

Researchers at the University of Hawaii – Manoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) made a discovery that challenges a major theory in the field of coral reef ecology. The general assumption has been that the more flexible corals are, regarding which species of single celled algae (Symbiodinium) they host in coral tissues, the greater ability corals will have to survive environmental stress. In their paper published August 29, 2012, however, scientists at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) at SOEST and colleagues documented that the ...

Scientists have taken a step closer to solving one of life's mysteries – why family size generally falls as societies become richer. Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over this because natural selection is expected to have selected for organisms that try to maximise their reproduction. But in industrialised societies around the world, increasing wealth coincides with people deliberately limiting their family size – the so-called 'demographic transition'. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers from the London ...

Astronomers at the International Astronomical Union meeting announced the discovery of the first transiting circumbinary multi-planet system: two planets orbiting around a pair of stars. The discovery shows that planetary systems can form and survive even in the chaotic environment around a binary star. And such planets can exist in the habitable zone of their stars. "Each planet transits over the primary star, giving unambiguous evidence that the planets are real," said Jerome Orosz, Associate Professor of Astronomy at San Diego State University and lead author of the ...

Fort Davis, Texas — NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory in West Texas. The finding, which proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star, is published in the August 28 issue of the journal Science. "It's Tatooine, right?" said McDonald Observatory astronomer Michael Endl. "But this was not shown in Star Wars," he said, referring to the periodic changes ...

There are more than 400,000 species of beetles and only two species of the tuatara, a reptile cousin of snakes and lizards that lives in New Zealand. Crocodiles and alligators, while nearly 250 million years old, have diversified into only 23 species. Why evolution has produced "winners" — including mammals and many species of birds and fish — and "losers" is a major question in evolutionary biology. Scientists have often posited that because some animal and plant lineages are much older than others, they have had more time to produce new species (the dearth of crocodiles ...

Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time indirectly, using radio signals from a pulsar-neutron star binary system. The find, which required exquisitely accurate timing of the radio signals, garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Now a team of astronomers has detected the same effect at optical wavelengths, in light from a pair of eclipsing white dwarf stars. "This result marks one of the cleanest and strongest detections of the effect of ...

VIDEO: An animation of satellite observations from August 26-28, 2012 shows Tropical Storm Isaac moving past the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico, nearing landfall in the U.S. Gulf... Click here for more information. NASA satellites have been providing valuable data to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center watching the development and progression of powerful Tropical Storm Isaac as it heads for landfall. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ...

Eyewitness identification evidence is often persuasive in the courtroom and yet current eyewitness identification tests often fail to pick the culprit. Even worse, these tests sometimes result in wrongfully accusing innocent suspects. Now psychological scientists are proposing a radical alternative to the traditional police lineup that focuses on eyewitnesses' confidence judgments. In a new article forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Neil Brewer of Flinders University and colleagues report a new type of lineup ...

Tampa, FL (Aug. 28, 2012) -- A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn't work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men, the research team said. Scientists at the University of South Florida (USF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported that the low activity form of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women. No such association was found in men. The findings appear online ...