Adverse Drug Reactions are the biggest safety concern in the health field and they refer to harmful and unintended effects of drugs administered for the prevention and treatment of illness, both at normal dosages and in cases of incorrect usage or errors in medication. They are the fourth highest cause of death for patients in U.S. hospitals and  up to 15 percent of hospital expenses are due to drug-related complications despite the fact that clinical trials are larger, longer and more expensive than ever and pharmacovigilance area is high.

Light can be used to activate normal, non-genetically modified neurons through the use of targeted gold nanoparticles, report scientists from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The new technique, described in the journal Neuron on March 12, represents a significant technological advance with potential advantages over current optogenetic methods, including possible use in the development of therapeutics toward diseases such as macular degeneration.

Last week, prominent tech site Gigaom ceased operations with the terse note “Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time”.

Started in 2006 by Om Malik, the site had raised about $40 million over that period to create a technology news site, an IT analysis business and another business running IT events. None of them could make enough money to cover the $400,000 a month needed to keep the business going.

 Chitin is a molecule that forms hard structures like fungal cell walls and the exoskeletons of invertebrates such as insects and crustaceans. It forms a strong and pliable material that is made even stronger when complexed with other materials (such as proteins and minerals) to form the protective outer shells of insects and crustaceans.  

A generation ago, environmental activists declared war on yet another field of science - astronomy. A new telescope was going to disrupt a squirrel, they alleged, and so astronomy abandoned places in the U.S. like Arizona and began to move to Chile.

Environmentalists declared a victory against science but they don't understand systems, including ecological ones. Astronomy is a clean industry with people from all over the world and to keep it going means limiting light pollution - and another study has shown that light pollution is an unknown force. 

Why did the earliest side-scrolling games go left to right? From the 1980s on, they seemed to do that. And in the western world people write left to right. That is enough for psychologist Dr. Peter Walker of Lancaster University to speculate that there may be a fundamental bias in the way people prefer to see moving items depicted in pictures. 

Did video game developers in the early 1980s obey an evolutionary mandate in designing games? An analysis of thousands of items in Google Images led Walker to believe there is widespread evidence for such a left-to-right bias and that could a possible fundamental bias for visual motion. And it may be evidenced thousands of years ago also.

Dr. Harold Roy-Macauley, new Director General of AfricaRice, doesn't want to just improve rice science for Africa, he wants to make the continent a world leader in it.

The rice sector in Africa is going to be “evidenced-based and therefore very solid and powerful,” he says. At a time when the developed world agonizes over the value of science, Africa sees an opportunity to grab a lot of market share by using science to improve their food production and become a next exporter, and then the rest of the world can play catch up.

Mutations in the presenilin-1 gene are the most common cause of inherited, early-onset forms of Alzheimer's disease. In a new study, published in Neuron, scientists replaced the normal mouse presenilin-1 gene with Alzheimer's-causing forms of the human gene to discover how these genetic changes may lead to the disorder. Their surprising results may transform the way scientists design drugs that target these mutations to treat inherited or familial Alzheimer's, a rare form of the disease that affects approximately 1 percent of people with the disorder.

Where you receive medical care impacts many things - including whether or not you receive inappropriate medical tests, according to a new study.

Researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center, in a new retrospective study publishing online March 12th in JAMA Oncology, conclude that patients with low-risk prostate or breast cancer were more likely to receive inappropriate imaging during treatment, based on the region of the country in which they received medical care.