Yesterday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new therapy for patients with advanced melanoma. The treatment, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), proved so successful in a large Phase 1 clinical trial that the drug was granted breakthrough therapy designation by the FDA, meaning that it was fast tracked for approval. Melanoma is a type of... Continue Reading →

Remember the giant hole in the Earth's ozone layer? Scientists say it's shrinking a little, thanks in part to the elimination of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, beginning in the 1980s. For the first time in 35 years, scientists have confirmed a statistically significant increase in the amount of ozone, which shields us from skin cancer and... Continue Reading →

Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS), a small firm in Stockton-on-Tees, UK, has succeedin in synthesizing gasoline from water and carbon dioxide (CO2) extracted from air. The Independent reported on Friday that the company has manufactured five liters of gas since August using a small refinery at its demonstrator plant. While that is a small volume to... Continue Reading →

The Scandinavian nation of Sweden has set a new precedent in the world of recycling its trash, with a near zero waste amount of 99 percent. Sweden was already ahead of the game back in 2012, when they were recycling 96 percent of their trash, but the three percent jump in just two years is... Continue Reading →

If giving money to panhandlers makes you queasy but refusing them makes you feel like Ebeneezer Scrooge, one California city thinks it has a solution for you. There are now 14 bright orange parking meters scattered around Pasadena that will collect money for organizations that help the homeless, the Los Angeles Times reports. The goal... Continue Reading →

A 16-year-old from India has designed a device that converts breath into speech. High-school student Arsh Shah Dilbagi invented TALK as a portable and affordable way to aid people suffering from ALS, locked-in syndrome, and anyone else speech-impaired or paralyzed. Prototyped using a basic $25 Arduino microcontroller, Dilbagi’s invention costs only $80, or about a... Continue Reading →

Researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute have developed a spleen-inspired device capable of rapidly filtering out pathogenic organisms and deadly toxins from the blood of patients. It’s hoped that one day, this blood-cleansing tool could be used to help individuals suffering from a life-threatening condition called sepsis. Sepsis is the immune system’s overreaction to a bloodstream... Continue Reading →

Single Americans make up more than half of the adult population for the first time since the government began compiling such statistics in 1976. Some 124.6 million Americans were single in August, 50.2 percent of those who were 16 years or older, according to data used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its monthly... Continue Reading →

Seeing in the dark could soon be as easy as popping a pill or squeezing some drops into your eyes, thanks to some new science, an unusual deep-sea fish, and a plant pigment. In the 1990s, marine biologist Ron Douglas of City University London discovered that, unlike other deep-sea fish, the dragonfish Malacosteus niger can... Continue Reading →

Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, with 7,669 people per square kilometre, which means they don’t have a lot of space lying around on which to grow food. Because of this, they import 90 percent of their food from elsewhere around the globe, sometimes from places as far away as... Continue Reading →