The discovery of the mechanism that enables the enzyme Lecithin: retinol acyltransferase (LRAT) to store vitamin A, a process that is indispensable for vision, may provide a boost for designing small molecule therapies for degenerative eye diseases.

The same enzymatic activity of LRAT that allows specific cells to absorb vitamin A can be used to transport small molecule drugs to the eye. These drugs would accumulate in eye tissue, lowering the effective dose and reducing risk of systemic side effects. 

It's no secret that a happy worker is a productive worker and a new analysis by scholars at The University of Texas at Dallas finds that family-friendly policies are beneficial for increasing productivity of employees. Yet the benefit for employers is unclear, since that may be offset by the same turnover rates.

By Richard Gunderman, Indiana University-Purdue University

A multi-center, non-randomized phase-Ib clinical trial designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and antitumor activity of bi-weekly infusions of pembrolizumab (MK-3475, marketed as Keytruda®) found that  infusion of pembrolizumab produced durable responses in almost one out of five patients.

Patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer--a disease with no approved targeted therapies.

In a presentation at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium., the researchers discussed the study of 27 patients, aged 29 to 72 years, who had metastatic triple-negative breast cancer that either relapsed after treatment for early stage disease or progressed on therapy for advanced disease. 

Malaria is one of the most serious health problems worldwide, registering 200 million clinical cases and more than 600,000 attributable deaths per year, according to information from the World Health Organization in 2013.

Given the emerging resistance to the standard treatment most widely used throughout the world, which is based on artemisinin and its analogs, there is a need for new antimalarial compounds.

Do you have a right to high-speed Internet or can Internet Service Providers (ISPs) create different tiers for different customers?

In Florida and in Pennsylvania, there are toll roads. People pay the fee and get to a destination along the toll road quicker. Yet when it comes to pricing Internet connections, there is belief that everyone should have the same high-speed video streaming, regardless of what they pay. Can customers get something for nothing? 

In modern times, it seems a little strange to read claims in Europe and in U.S. cities like San Francisco that cell phone radiation is harmful to humans - but their reasoning is based on work in the 1970s which found an epidemiological association between increased risk of childhood leukemia and living near overhead power lines.

Like most epidemiology claims that find two curves going the same way and garner media attention, some skepticism is warranted, and later studies were unable to find the same connection, but the perception has held. Regardless,  groups like the International Agency for Research on Cancer have categorized low frequency magnetic fields as "possibly carcinogenic" even though a mechanism for this association has never been found.

By David Rothery, The Open University

Around 60 volcanoes erupt in the average year. On any particular day, there are usually about 20 volcanoes erupting somewhere in the world. Naturally, they can’t all make headlines. But when there are human tragedies involved, we need to question the priorities of the news media.

There are too many factors and combinations of genetic traits to have any definitive cause of autism today, along with a wide range of diagnoses that add to the pool, but a new analysis has found that the autopsied brains of people who had autism share a pattern of ramped-up immune responses.

Targeted therapy with radiopharmaceuticals - radioactive compounds used in nuclear medicine for diagnosis or treatment - has a lot of potential to more effectively kill cancer cells that have migrated from primary tumors to lymph nodes and secondary organs such as bone marrow.

Disseminated tumor cells can be difficult to treat with a single targeting agent because there are dramatic differences in the number of targetable receptors in each cell.