The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing to halt Amgen from acquiring Horizon Therapeutics. Amgen had announced in December that it would buy the Irish-headquartered biopharma company for almost $28 billion (£22 billion). The FTC is seeking a preliminary injunction from a federal court to stop the merger on the grounds that it would […]

A lot is hanging on the outcome of the presidential elections in the Turkey this weekend, many academics in the country are saying. At stake are issues like the governmental appointment of university rectors, the reinstatement of professors expelled during the 2016 state of emergency, control of academia by the Council of Higher Education (Yök) […]

Cereal and yeast proteins linked to beer production have been found, for the first time, in canvas paintings from the Danish Golden Age. The authors of the study said the discovery helped to unravel key links between Danish society and art. The researchers used protein sequencing by tandem mass spectrometry to characterise the protein residues […]

A new class of drugs for obesity, which suppress appetite by mimicking human hormones, are being developed by the pharmaceutical industry in its latest effort to access the lucrative potential market for weight loss treatments. Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro (tirzepatide) was approved for treating diabetes in the US, Canada and Europe in 2022, and brought in […]

China has supplanted the US as the world’s top contributor to natural science research published in the 82 high-quality research journals that the Nature Index tracks. As a fractional count of author affiliations in these publications, researchers from China had a share of more than 19,300 from January to December 2022, compared with about 17,600 […]

Renaissance Mathematicus friend, Michael Barton, expert for all things Darwinian, drew our attention to a new piece of history of science hot air from the HISTSCI_HULK’s least favourite windbag, Neil deGrasse Tyson. This time it’s a clip from one of his appearances on the podcast of Joe Rogan, a marriage made in heaven; they compete […]

An optical-microscopy technique has been created that can distinguish between tiny objects less than 1nm apart. The technique could enable living cells to be viewed in greater detail than ever before. The new method, dubbed resolution enhancement by sequential imaging (Resi), means the resolving power of fluorescent microscopy can now operate in the Ångström range […]

A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has achieved a remarkable feat by demonstrating that virtually any material can be transformed into a device capable of continuously harvesting electricity from the surrounding humidity. This groundbreaking discovery hinges on the ability to incorporate nanopores, each less than 100 nanometers in diameter, into the […]

Researchers in China have shown that one metallaaromatic framework can transform into another via a ring contraction reaction. Haiping Xia of Xiamen University, who led the work with Ming Luo of Southern University of Science and Technology, says this is the first aromatic framework rearrangement to be reported in an organometallic system. The framework starts […]

A promising new stroke drug that temporarily inhibits a key protein in the brain without causing lasting harm may significantly change the future treatment of cerebral and global ischemia, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The study appears in the May edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. “We are […]