What happens when a patient with multiple sclerosis (MS) who is clinically stable stops taking their medication?

An international, multi-site study found almost 40 percent of patients had some disease activity return after they stopped, according to research presented at the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting last week.

"Despite long periods of disease stability while taking medication, we found a large minority of patients who stopped experienced relapses or disability progression," says lead study author Ilya Kister, MD, an assistant professor of neurology at the NYU Langone Multiple Sclerosis Comprehensive Care Center. "We need to identify situations when it is safe for patients with MS to stop taking these medications."

You may find these remarks cynical. You may find them helpful.

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Can earthquakes ever be predicted? This question is timely after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal recently. If authorities had more warning that the earthquake was coming, they may have been able to save more lives.

While Nepal is a documented area of previous seismic activity, at the moment there is no technique that provides predictions of sufficient clarity to allow for evacuations at short notice. So if we cannot predict these events now, are there avenues of research to provide useful predictions in the future?

Married people have better overall health and longevity than single people, say epidemiologists, but more is not always better. 

A recent prospective multicenter observational study assessed the effect of polygamy on cardiovascular health and found a significant association between number of wives and the presence of coronary artery disease (CAD), left main disease (LMD) and Multivessel disease (MVD). Risk increased with the number of wives. After adjusting for baseline differences, the researchers showed that men who practiced polygamy had a 4.6-fold increased risk of CAD, a 3.5-fold increased risk of LMD and a 2.6-fold elevated risk of MVD. 

That was even for men with up to four concurrent wives who didn't reside in the same house. 

First collisions of protons at CERN's Large Hadron Collider are expected to start the first or second week of June. The LHC was restarted in early April after a two-year pause to upgrade the machine to operate at higher energies for a second three-year run . At higher energy, physicists may see new discoveries about the laws that govern the universe and SUSY diehards - physicists who support the hypothesis of space and time called SuperSymmetry - maintain hope new discoveries bolster them and change the current accepted theory of physical reality, the Standard Model.

The U.S. won't change the predominately white-male face of its science and technology workforce until higher education addresses the attitudes, behaviors and structural practices that undermine minority students' access and success at college, a new study suggests.

Hot vents on the seabed could have spontaneously produced the organic molecules necessary for life, according to a model which shows how the surfaces of mineral particles inside hydrothermal vents have similar chemical properties to enzymes, the biological molecules that govern chemical reactions in living organisms.

This means that vents are able to create simple carbon-based molecules, such as methanol and formic acid, out of the dissolved CO2 in the water. This would explain how some of the key building blocks for organic chemistry were already being formed in nature before life emerged - and may have played a role in the emergence of the first life forms.

A team of researchers have found 38 genes and molecules that most likely cause HER2+ cancer cells to spread.

The HER2+ subtype accounts for 20 to 30 percent of early-stage breast cancer diagnoses, which are around 200,000 new diagnoses each year in the United States, leading to approximately 40,000 deaths annually. Several cancer chemotherapy drugs do work well at early stages of the disease, destroying 95 to 98 percent of the cancer cells in HER2+ tumors, but patients can develop resistance and the tumors begin to grow again. 

In the ongoing conflict between science and young Earth creationism, evolution is usually a main point of contention. The idea that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor is a major problem for young Earth creationists. 

As a geologist, though, I think that the rocks beneath our feet offer even better arguments against young Earth creationism. For the young Earth creationist model doesn’t square with what you can see for yourself. And this has been known since before Darwin wrote a word about evolution.

Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand now have birth rates that are relatively close to replacement, which means that the 'decline of the West', where developed nations birth control and abort themselves out of existence, isn't happening.

It's certainly a more optimistic demographic narrative of the future of the West than we usually get, where declining birth rates and population aging will reduce Europe and the US while Asian superpowers, such as China and India, see huge populations and economies to match.