U.S. health regulators have approved the first new type of flu drug in two decades. Wednesday’s approval of Xofluza for people age 12 and older comes ahead of the brunt of this winter’s flu season. Xofluza is a pill that can reduce severity and shorten duration of flu symptoms after one just dose. It was developed by the Roche Group…
Prior to his death on Monday, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen invested large sums in technology ventures, research projects and philanthropy, some of it eclectic and highly speculative. What happens to those commitments now? Outside of bland assurances from his investment company, no one seems quite sure. Allen died in Seattle from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to his company…
ResearchGate, a popular networking platform where scientists can post their published work, has a complicated relationship with academic publishers. A number of them have accused the site of illicitly disseminating copyrighted work, and two of these—Elsevier and the American Chemical Society—filed a lawsuit in Germany last year to try to force ResearchGate to change its practices. The pair has now escalated the…
The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive review of all research that involves fetal tissue, reopening an issue that has galvanized anti-abortion activists but worried scientists who fear their work could be under threat. Fetal tissue has been used for a wide range of research in the U.S. since the 1930s, including the development of several vaccines and studies of genetic…
Jason Schmitt was working at Atlantic Records when the online site Napster disrupted the music industry by making copyrighted songs freely available. Now, the communications and media researcher at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, is pushing for a similar disruption of academic publishing with Paywall, a documentary about the open-access movement that debuts today in a Washington, D.C., theater. “I don’t…
Google has unveiled a search engine to help researchers locate online data that is freely available for use. The company launched the service on 5 September, saying that it is aimed at “scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else”. Dataset Search, now available alongside Google’s other specialized search engines, such as those for news and images — as well…
The US Senate passed a spending bill last week (August 23) allotting $39.1 billion to the National Institutes of Health for the 2019 fiscal year starting on October 1. This is 5.4 percent or $2 billion more than fiscal year 2018. The boost to the biomedical research agency is part of an $854-billion funding “minibus” to support defense, labor, education, and health…
By many standards, and certainly by the way the media covers it and industry promotes it, immuno-oncology therapies using CAR-T are revolutionizing cancer treatments. But what if, as the saying goes, they threw a revolution and nobody came? Or more precisely, what if they threw a revolution and no one was willing to pay for it? Because CAR-T seems to…
For years now, experts have hammered this message home to students: If you want your pricey college degree to pay off, you should major in a STEM field— science, technology, engineering or math. A fresh release of higher-education data for Washington state shows just how well students have listened. The information from Washington’s Education Research & Data Centerreleased this month shows that the…