In the UK, pharmaceutical innovation seems to be dying. The supply of new medicines has conspicuously dwindled in recent decades but that is not due to innovation issues, it is because regulations have caused the costs of drug development to soar, along with the time it takes to bring a new drug to market: from 3 years in 1960 to 12 in 2000. 

The UK is historically the second largest source of new drug development, generating more than 10% of all new medicines around the globe. The US has historically been the runaway leader though output looks bleak in America as well, for similar reasons.

The hypothesis that tomato fruits from organic farming and greater stressing conditions associated with organic farming leads to more nutritional compounds, such as phenolics and vitamin C, recently got tested.

The Sun's eruptive events can change even more radically than the weather in Kentucky. Some eruptive events come just with a solar flare, while some provide additional ejection of solar material, a coronal mass ejection (CME). Some even involve complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere, the corona.

On July 19th, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun's lower right limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays – a phenomenon known as coronal rain.

Sunspots on the surface of the Sun happen when magnetic fields rearrange and realign, forming dark spots Over the course of the last 48 hours, scientists watched a giant sunspot form - it has grown to over six Earth diameters across but its full extent is hard to judge since the spot lies on a sphere, not a flat disk.

The spot quickly evolved into what's called a delta region, in which the lighter areas around the sunspot, the penumbra, exhibit magnetic fields that point in the opposite direction of those fields in the center, dark area. This is a fairly unstable configuration that scientists know can lead to eruptions of radiation on the sun called solar flares.

By recording the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds, researchers found that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest readers encoded it with the greatest inconsistency.

Decades of research from laboratories worldwide have shown that reading ability is associated with auditory skills, including auditory memory and attention, the ability to rhyme sounds and the ability to categorize rapidly occurring sounds.

Understanding how and why diversification occurs is important for understanding why there are so many species on Earth.  A new study found that similar, or even identical, mutations can occur during diversification in completely separate populations of E. coli evolving over more than 1,000 generations.