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India’s Supreme Court today rejected efforts by the Swiss drug major Novartis to patent the anticancer drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), in a ruling that signaled India’s determination to support affordable medicines. The court rejected the Basel-based company’s challenge to India’s patent law, which limits drug firms’ ability to extend patent life beyond 20 years by making minor modifications to drugs, a tactic known as ‘evergreening’. Novartis’s patent claim on a modified version of Gleevec (marketed in some countries as Glivec) “fails in both the tests of invention and patentability”, the court said....

A heat-seeking missile bearing down on an aircraft zeros in on the infrared signature of its exhaust. In the past the aircraft might deploy flares or, if the plane was large enough, it might use a rudimentary laser to disrupt the incoming missile’s guidance system. Neither of these approaches has proved reliable enough for the U.S. military’s liking, which is why the Army is considering new type of infrared countermeasure (IRCM) system that uses a smaller, more nimble solid-state laser designed to better protect helicopters and other low-flying aircraft from small arms and shoulder-fired missile attacks such as those that are so prevalent in Afghanistan and Iraq (pdf)....

Neutrinos, some of nature’s weirdest fundamental particles, are nearly massless—emphasis on nearly. They were predicted to be completely massless, but experiments roughly 20 years ago found they surprisingly do have some mass. Just how much has remained a mystery. Now a new calculation based on cosmological observations places an upper limit on how heavy the lightest kind of neutrino can be. There are many strange things about neutrinos: their unexpected heft, for one thing, and that they rarely interact with other matter and are passing through our bodies by the billions each moment....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineGiven the current political climate, it did not come as much of a surprise when the chief executive of one of the largest utility companies in the U.S. addressed the tenth annual Conference on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) in Pittsburgh, Penn., this week with a talk questioning the viability of carbon-storage ventures in the next few years.Michael Morris, chief executive of American Electric Power (AEP), headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, said that the energy industry needs a signal from politicians in Washington, D....

POLITICAL CURRENCY In “Breaking the Bank” [The Future of Money], Alexander Lipton and Alex “Sandy” Pentland argue that a particular approach toward digital currency would make global financial systems more transparent, accountable and equitable. Their article and the others in this report somehow seemed to avoid the issues of the creation and distribution of real wealth: the production of goods and services that are valuable to people, of which currencies are only the medium of exchange....

Saturn was known to the ancients only as a point of light. The planet started to give up its secrets when Galileo Galilei turned his new invention, the telescope, toward it in 1610. In 1655 Christiaan Huygens described the rings correctly and found Titan, the planet’s largest moon. As the resolving power of telescopes improved, patient astronomers gleaned more information about the moons and rings of this remarkable planet. By 1878, astronomers were attempting to imagine what kind of creatures might inhabit the planet....

Meet Zika, the latest virus that turns out to be a sexually transmitted disease. The mosquito-borne pathogen is getting a little extra help from humans who are passing it among themselves via sexual contact. And it is happening a lot more often than scientists previously knew. Earlier this week the World Health Organization announced that transmission of the virus via sexual contact is “more common than we thought.” The U.S. is now feeling that reality firsthand....

Three spatial dimensions are visible all around us–up/down, left/right, forward/backward. Add time to the mix, and the result is a four-dimensional blending of space and time known as spacetime. Thus, we live in a four-dimensional universe. Or do we? Amazingly, some new theories of physics predict that one of the three dimensions of space could be a kind of an illusion–that in actuality all the particles and fields that make up reality are moving about in a two-dimensional realm like the Flatland of Edwin A....

What causes cancer? Tobacco smoke, most people would say. Probably too much alcohol, sunshine or grilled meat; infection with cervical papillomaviruses; asbestos. All have strong links to cancer, certainly. But they cannot be root causes. Much of the population is exposed to these carcinogens, yet only a tiny minority suffers dangerous tumors as a consequence. A cause, by definition, leads invariably to its effect. The immediate cause of cancer must be some combination of insults and accidents that induces normal cells in a healthy human body to turn malignant, growing like weeds and sprouting in unnatural places....

Black holes are regions of space where the gravity is so thick that not even light can force its way out. As we discussed in a previous episode, black holes can form as a result of stellar death. Once a star runs out of fuel to burn, and thus can no longer support itself via radiation pressure, the layers of metals fused up to that point will all come crashing down towards the center....

Politicians ask their supporters for a lot, from monetary donations to holding campaign signs near busy intersections – often in frigid weather. Such big asks would seem to call for strong, cogent pitches. After all, who’d volunteer for a candidate who couldn’t even explain her positions on the issues? As it turns out, lots of us. In fact, recent research suggests that in some cases, providing weak arguments in favor of a candidate or cause leads supporters to engage in greater advocacy than providing strong ones....

The mysteries surrounding ‘Oumuamua, our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor, are many: How did it get here, and from where? What gave rise to its extremely elongated (circa 250 meters long), potentially cigar-like shape, which so starkly distinguishes it from any natural object ever seen orbiting the sun? And most of all, what caused it to “hit the gas” after it swooped by our star, accelerating away like a passenger-filled car that accidentally entered a bad neighborhood?...

American’s four National Airborne Operations Center planes, each a militarized Boeing 747-200 called an E-4B, offers senior military leaders the most complete and sophisticated airborne communications platform in the world.(Credit:Daniel Terdiman/CNET)OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. – I’ve always loved 747s and just about everything about them. But the one I’m on right now, known as the Doomsday plane, has a very different – and very somber – purpose than most of Boeing’s iconic jumbo jets....

From Alaska to Antarctica, thousands of glaciers flow over the land and out to the ocean. These tidewater glaciers are rapidly retreating and melting, like much of Earth’s ice, continually adding to rising sea levels. But to date, scientists have struggled to pinpoint where on the face of a glacier’s terminus the most intense melting occurs—and exactly how fast it is happening—because of the difficulty and danger involved in getting close enough to these frozen behemoths....

A defining characteristic of alcoholism is compulsive drinking despite negative consequences. Thirty percent of Americans experience clinically defined alcohol use disorder (AUD) at some point in their lives. More than half recover, but that still leaves millions of people struggling with lifelong alcoholism in the U.S. alone. “Alcohol use disorders and excessive drinking kills more people than opiates,” says neuropharmacologist Kimberly Nixon, of the University of Texas at Austin. “People tend to forget that....

Add U.S. coal to the list of industries threatened by the novel coronavirus. Part of its problem is conditions that precede the pandemic. U.S. coal plants are an aging bunch. Weak electricity demand has only intensified competition with gas and renewables. The weather has been a drag on American miners, too; a warm winter helped push coal generation in the first quarter down by roughly a third, year over year, according to S&P Global Platts....

Global warming is leaving trees behind, according to a new study in Science. An analysis of forest species in six French mountain ranges (the western Alps, northern Pyrenees, Massif Central, western Jura, Vosges and the Corsican range) shows that more than two thirds of them moved at least 60 feet (18.5 meters) higher on the mountainsides per decade during the 20th century. “Among 171 species, most are shifting upwards to recover temperature conditions that are optimum,” says ecologist and lead study author Jonathan Lenoir of AgroParisTech in Nancy, France....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Doctors may have biases for or against people of different races and social statuses, but those unconscious views don’t overtly affect the care they deliver to their patients, a new study finds. When tested with sample scenarios, most doctors showed some unconscious racial or social bias, but those biases largely did not influence their decisions about what care they would give the fictitious patients....

CLIMATEWIRE | Less than six months before world leaders gather in Egypt for the next round of global climate talks, officials have made little progress in addressing one of the most contentious points of negotiations — support for countries that have contributed the least to global warming but stand to suffer significantly. The inaction has been particularly frustrating for a coalition of small island nations. For years, countries such as Antigua and Barbuda have raised the issue with little success as rising sea levels lapped at their shores....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. On April 19 of this year, five major wildlife protection groups petitioned the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to list the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) as an endangered species. As the petition asserted, “the giraffe has suffered a major reduction in population size across its range primarily due to habitat loss, commercial overutilization, and severe poaching, and such decline continues unabated....