As expected, the FDA recently announced approval of a second drug for obesity within a month, Vivus’ Qnexa, now renamed Qsymia. This approval is less of a surprise, as the data appeared somewhat stronger than that for Arena’s lorcaserin (Belviq). What was rather curious is that USA Today broke news of the drug’s approval before [...]

The FDA has just announced approval for the OraQuick In-Home HIV test, by OraSure Technologies. That’s great news on some fronts, but the test raises new questions, as well. As I’ve just been catching up on my vacation reading with Marya Zilberberg’s helpful new book, “Between the Lines,” the first thing that caught my eye [...]

Today’s news starkly juxtaposed this countries’ priorities. First was news of the approval of yet another look-alike drug for erectile dysfunction, avanafil (Stendra). Then “From First Cold To Grave: How Two-Month-Old Brady Died Of Pertussis.” Brady was too young to have been protected by receiving immunizations, but there are strategies for protecting newborns from pertussis, [...]

The chicken pesto pasta on your plate is more than just tasty fuel to keep you going. The dish has carbohydrates, fats and proteins to be sure, but it also contains other nutrients and chemicals that send subtle cues and instructions to your cells. More and more researchers are arguing that to better grasp how [...]

The PTAB 2.5M anti-armor bomblet has a cylindrical body with a dome-shaped ballistic cap at its front and it terminates in a four-fin tail unit that is structured in a drum configuration. In its Aug. 2, 2012 online posting, Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons noted that the tail unit comes in both short and long versions. The [...]

It doesn’t matter where you look: the U.S., Mexico, Malaysia or Portugal, the more high fructose corn syrup consumption, on average, the more diabetes. A new study of 43 countries in Global Public Health, published online November 27, found that adult type-2 diabetes is 20 percent higher in countries that consume large quantities of high [...]

Health care spending increases have slowed over the past couple years. Still, we are spending some $2.6 trillion—that’s trillion with a “T”—a year on health costs, which is a higher percentage of our GDP than any other developed country. And we don’t seem to be getting that much healthier. So economists and policy researchers are [...]

How do you know that a real-live human being is behind the past 14 weeks of blog posts exploring the individual questions posed to presidential candidates by ScienceDebate.org? Because people make mistakes. Last week I inadvertently posted the vaccine answers to the analysis about rare earth elements. Thanks to sijodk for politely pointing out the [...]

In the U.S. it can be difficult to avoid getting an MRI, laboratory analysis or at least an X-ray in any given year. But in poor areas, medical technologies—from expensive screening machines to simple devices—are often as rare as specialists who know how to work them. So, in an effort to improve health the world [...]

After months of contentious debate, the journal Science is publishing a controversial study on Friday about H5N1 avian influenza‘s ability to spread among mammals. The report faced a tortuous path to publication as some researchers sought to censor the study’s findings for fear that they could be replicated and put to nefarious use. In a [...]

This September, cigarette packs in the U.S. will be getting a lot more colorful. And a lot more disturbing. By then, tobacco companies will be required to display one of nine graphic health warnings on each pack, to comply with the Tobacco Control Act of 2009. The U.S. has followed dozens of other countries in [...]

Diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other afflictions that once primarily plagued wealthier, western countries are now accelerating in poorer nations. A new study reveals that risk factors for heart disease in Indian cities are now more prevalent than they are in the U.S. or Western Europe per capita. And with a population of more than [...]

Humanity has weathered many a climate change, from the ice age of 80,000 years ago to the droughts of the late 19th century that helped kill between 30 and 50 million people around the world via famine. But such shifts have transformed or eliminated specific human societies, including the ancient Sumerians and the Ming Dynasty [...]

On May 3, the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report showing that suicide among middle-aged Americans has risen substantially. Perverse coincidence perhaps, but that document arrived about a week after Hyundai Europe pulled an ad that sparked sustained outrage because it shows a guy trying to commit suicide with fumes from his [...]

Barack Obama talked on Sunday night about how the children who died in Newtown could have been from Anytown America. His words hit a resonant chord. Both of the given names of my two kids—Benjamin and Madeleine—were mentioned among the list of the dead children. “Madeleine,” spelled the same way as my daughter’s name, not [...]

The nation’s oldest public hospital—and the premier emergency institution in New York City—is the go-to place in the aftermath of a plane or train wreck, an all-out gunfight or a commercial airliner slicing through a skyscraper. Its staff has spent enormous time in preparation for the numerous scenarios—chemical, biological, nuclear—for which New York is the [...]

Conventional wisdom has it that the only thing that will unite races, religions and political factions will be the landing of a hostile Martian space ship. It’s a little hard to plan for the exact moment of the next Mars attack. So invoking global terror from extraterrestrials might not be such a great strategy for [...]

José Mujica is the Uruguayan Bloomberg. Like the mayor of New York, the president of Uruguay is a social engineer, convinced to the core that he knows best by getting citizens to do the right thing. Bloomberg and Mujica even have a mutual fan club going. Bloomberg donated $500,000 and called the Uruguayan leader nearly [...]