AACHEN, Germany, January 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The German pain specialist Grunenthal GmbH announces that a New Drug Application (NDA) has been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for tapentadol immediate release (IR) tablets by its co-development partner Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, L.L.C. (J&JPRD). Tapentadol is an oral centrally acting analgesic and will be the first new substance in its class for more than 25 years after successful registration. In the European Union, tapentadol is currently in phase 3 of the development program for severe acute pain, and the Company plans to submit it for approval later this year.

COX-2 inhibitors are having a tough year. Vioxx was withdrawn voluntarily a few months ago and now Celebrex, the arthritis drug that blocks pain by inhibiting the COX-2 enzyme, has been shown in laboratory studies to induce arrhythmia, or irregular beating of the heart, via a pathway unrelated to its COX-2 inhibition.

University at Buffalo researchers discovered this unexpected finding while conducting basic research on potassium channels.

Celebrex (Celecoxib) has been taken by over 27 million patients since its approval by the FDA in 1998. The new research found that low concentrations of the drug, corresponding to a standard prescription, reduced the heart rate and induced pronounced arrhythmia in fruit flies and the heart cells of rats.

Rapid evolution of a protein produced by an immunity gene is associated with increased antiviral activity in humans, a finding that suggests evolutionary biology and virology together can accelerate the discovery of viral-defense mechanisms, according to researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

These findings by Julie Kerns, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Hutchinson Center’s Basic Sciences Division, present a striking example by which evolutionary studies can directly lead to biomedically important discoveries in the field of infectious diseases.

GENEVA, January 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- Effort Focuses on Dangers of Parental Smoking in Homes and Cars

It's a staggering statistic: 700 million children - almost half of the world's youth - breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke. People who smoke in confined spaces like the home or the car subject others to a dangerous mix of toxins including nicotine, carbon monoxide, and cyanide, even when the windows are open. Second-hand smoke exposes children to chronic health risks:

An endoscope is a flexible camera that travels into the body's cavities to directly investigate the digestive tract, colon or throat. Most of today's endoscopes capture the image using a traditional approach where each part of the camera captures a different section of the image. These tools are long, flexible cords about 9 mm wide, about the width of a human fingernail. Because the cord is so wide patients must be sedated during the scan.

A fundamentally new design has created a smaller endoscope that is more comfortable for the patient and cheaper to use than current technology.

Since we can’t sample the deepest regions of the Earth, scientists watch the velocity of seismic waves as they travel through the planet to determine the composition and density of that material.

A new study suggests that material in part of the lower mantle has unusual electronic characteristics that make sound propagate more slowly, suggesting that the material there is softer than previously thought.

The results in the January 25, 2008, issue of Science call into question the traditional techniques for understanding this region of the planet.

Old people generally mellow with age. They are less likely to be confrontational and more likely to reflect on the world. They are also more likely to have families they care about and thus something to lose.

That goes for terrorists also, according to a new theory by Mark Haas of Duquesne University in the latest Public Policy & Aging Report (PP&AR). It says several hotbed areas in the world that offer the motive and opportunity for political violence are due to stabilize by the year 2030 because current young people will be old.

ESA’s orbiting gamma-ray observatory, Integral, has made the first unambiguous discovery of highly energetic X-rays coming from a galaxy cluster. The find has shown the cluster to be a giant particle accelerator.

The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster is one of brightest in the sky at X-ray wavelengths. The X-rays detected are too energetic to originate from quiescent hot gas inside the cluster and suggest instead that giant shockwaves must be rippling through the gas. This has turned the galaxy cluster into a giant particle accelerator.

Most of the X-rays come from hot gas in the cluster, which in the case of Ophiuchus is extremely hot, at 100 million degrees Kelvin. Four years ago, data from the Italian/ Dutch BeppoSAX satellite showed a possible extra component of high-energy X-rays in a different cluster, the Coma cluster.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina, January 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland, according to a new, comprehensive study by UC Irvine and NASA scientists.

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team led by Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at UCI and a scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., estimated changes in Antarctica’s ice mass between 1996 and 2006 and mapped patterns of ice loss on a glacier-by-glacier basis. They detected a sharp jump in Antarctica’s ice loss, from enough ice to raise global sea level by 0.3 millimeters (.01 inches) a year in 1996, to 0.5 millimeters (.02 inches) a year in 2006.