While browsing facebook, I ran across a friend's posting of a link to a diagnostic test for autism and Asperger's that I hadn't run across before,The Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R). According to the abstract,

Even though arsenic is toxic for many organs in the human body, it is used in therapeutic medicine and the treatment of some forms of cancer, and is an active component of drugs against parasitic diseases.

James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, Ph.D, aged 92, is a chemist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. He is called the 'Godfather of Global Warming'. 

What he was, to most people, was an alarmist more on the order of President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, a doomsday zealot. And I don't mean 'alarmist' in the American political sense, i.e., anyone who accepts the science of climate change - I mean a real End Of The World Is Nigh prophet.  So silly even the hysterical poster child of Think Progress, Joe Romm, believed Lovelock was over the top.

Abbott announced that the European Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) has issued a positive opinion for HUMIRA (adalimumab) in adults with severe axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) who have no X-ray evidence of structural damage. Upon final decision from the European Commission, HUMIRA will be the first and only approved medication available for non-radiographic axSpA patients (nr-axSpA).

Wikipedia's user-generated content has made it the world's largest, and most derided, encyclopedia.

Part of the openness model has also led to 'edit wars' when the anonymous "editors" disagree with each other. The dynamics of these conflicts provide an interesting window into collaborative content production and the emergence and resolution of conflicts in an online environment, say researchers led by Taha Yasseri of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

As we near the first week of July, with the start of the International Conference of High-Energy Physics in Melbourne (July 2nd-8th) and the July 4th press release at CERN on the new results of Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS, the attention to new particle searches is understandably increasing. And the question is what the new 8-TeV data produced by the LHC this year will give.

Will the final word on the existence (or absence) of the Higgs boson be said ? Will there be new particle discoveries ? Will the LHC surpass the Tevatron precision on the measurement of the top quark mass ? Is the Standard Model going to show cracks from the result of other, off-the-spotlight  measurements ?

Using 160 high-resolution tungsten leaves and dramatically faster leaf movement, Elekta’s new Agility multi-leaf collimator (MLC) radiation therapy treatment for cancer patients recently received 510(k) clearance (K121328) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), enabling U.S. medical centers to use it for patients with cancer. 

An MLC is device made up of numerous, individual tungsten “leaves,” which shape beams of therapeutic radiation that are delivered from different angles around the patient. Using twice the number of leaves typical of many standard MLC’s, Agility precisely delivers radiation to the unique contours of the tumor, while reducing the risk of exposure to healthy tissue. 

A new study shows that ursolic acid, a natural substance found in apple peel, can partially protect mice from obesity and some of its harmful effects. 

Americans are being beat by Asians again.  Asians do better on international standardized tests, their economies are better; heck, they are even robbing us of that last stronghold of American dominance - obesity. The Chinese have gotten a level of fat in one generation that it took Americans 200 years to accomplish.  Typical overachievers.

Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited and AMAG Pharmaceuticals, Inc. today announced the granting of marketing authorization by the European Commission (EC) for ferumoxytol, a new intravenous (IV) iron therapy to treat iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in adult patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The marketing authorization follows a positive opinion issued on April 19, 2012, by the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA).