Donating a kidney is a selfless act and it is going to save a life.

But even before the Affordable Care Act, it had pitfalls if you wanted to add or change health insurance. In the future, the only option could be state Medicare programs, which many doctors are refusing to accept now.   Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, insurance companies can no longer refuse health insurance to live kidney donors or charge them a higher insurance rate. But, as with 'If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor', the rules may change at any time, making donors stuck with nothing but government programs and the inability to get an appointment.

And insurance companies clearly penalize donors and have done so for decades.

Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, Robert Harding Chair in global child health and policy and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto says in BMJ that criminal sanctions are necessary to deter growing research misconduct.

ESA’s spaceplane is getting ready to showcase reentry technologies. Instead of heading north into a polar orbit, as on previous flights, Vega will head eastwards to release the spaceplane into a suborbital path reaching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Final tests are being done on ESA’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, IXV, launched in early November, to make sure that it can withstand the demanding conditions from liftoff to separation from Vega. IXV will flight test the technologies and critical systems for Europe’s future automated reentry vehicles returning from low orbit.


IXV tests. Credit: ESA

Neuroscientists have created mutant worms that don't get intoxicated by alcohol, by inserting a modified human alcohol target into the worms.

An alcohol target is any neuronal molecule that binds alcohol, of which there are many.

One important aspect of this modified alcohol target, a neuronal channel called the BK channel, is that the mutation only affects its response to alcohol. The BK channel typically regulates many important functions including activity of neurons, blood vessels, the respiratory tract and bladder. The alcohol-insensitive mutation does not disrupt these functions at all.

The work that could lead to new drugs to treat the symptoms of people going through alcohol withdrawal.  

Education is in something a Catch-22. If they have standards, there will be dropouts among people who don't want to do the work to reach the minimum levels. If they don't have standards, they are just an assembly line and that is bad for teacher morale.

Because who is going to get blamed if students don't succeed? Teachers.

A new assay is inexpensive, simple, and can tell whether or not one of the primary drugs being used to treat malaria is genuine – an enormous and deadly problem in the developing world.

The World Health Organization has estimated that up to 200,000 lives a year may be lost due to the use of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs. When commercialized, the new technology may be able to help address that problem by testing drugs for efficacy at a cost of a few cents.