A new estimate says that microplastic and macroplastic pollution could consist of as much as 269,000 tons floating in the world's oceans.

Though there has been no sufficient data to truly estimate the amount of plastic in the oceans, there has been no limit to guessing and speculation so Marcus Eriksen, from Five Gyres Institute, and colleagues set out to build a better model.

For their paper in PLOS ONE, they gathered data from 24 expeditions collected over a six-year period (2007-2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, coastal Australia, Bay of Bengal, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Two compounds appear to block the cardiac damage caused by the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, according to a report in Science Translational Medicine which indicates that inhibiting the action of the enzyme MDH2, which is key to the generation of cellular energy in mitochondria, could prevent doxorubicin-induced damage to cardiac cells without reducing the drug's anti-tumor effects. 

By Elizabeth Englander, Bridgewater State University

Reductions in government healthcare spending in the European Union (EU) increase maternal mortality rates, suggests a new paper in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG).

Maternal mortality is defined as the death of a woman during pregnancy, childbirth, or within 42 days of delivery from direct obstetric causes.  The new analysis looked at the association between reductions in government healthcare spending and maternal mortality across the European Union (EU) over a 30 year period, from 1981 to 2010, based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO) database. Data were available for 24 EU countries, a population of 419 million people (2010). 

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?