Author: Ranveer Kumar

At the dawn of a new decade, we take stock of advances and unmet needs in the oncology pharmaceutical market. What will it take to deliver innovation to patients over the next ten years? Over the past 50 years, the outcomes for people diagnosed with cancer have transformed. In 1970, of those diagnosed with cancer in the United States, approximately half would have been alive five years later. For those diagnosed in 2009, the figure was closer to 70 percent.1 Such a transformation in outcomes has arrived through a combination of public-health measures (such as smoking education), improved healthcare (such as…

From the mid-20th century, the US’s Sugar Research Foundation launched an all-out offensive in defence of sugar, financing hundreds of studies that presented it in a favourable light. It caused untold damage to humanity. Some 67 years ago, at the beginning of February 1954, 52-year-old Dr Henry Bohn Hass, a specialist in organic chemistry who would in 1969 be awarded the gold medal of the American Institute of Chemists, attended the eighth general meeting of the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists, in Denver, Colorado. At the time, he was president of the US’s Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), a position he…

Adescription of a newly discovered species of carnivorous dinosaur, named the ‘one who causes fear’, or Llukalkan aliocranianus, has appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Vertebrate Paleontology. Around 80 million years ago, as tyrannosaurs ruled the Northern Hemisphere, this lookalike was one of 10 currently known species of abelisaurids flourishing in the southern continents. A fearsome killer, Llukalkan was “likely among the top predators” throughout Patagonia, now in southern Argentina, during the Late Cretaceous. This was due to its formidable size, as it could grow up to five metres long, extremely powerful bite, very sharp teeth, huge claws on their feet,…

By analyzing 25 years of pesticide use data from the United States, researchers have found that the toxicity of pesticides to nontarget invertebrates, including pollinators, has increased markedly, even though the volume of pesticides used has gone down. The study, published April 1 in Science, challenges the common assumption that the impacts of environmental pesticides have gone down over time. “The use of pesticide as interpreted in media and by politicians and by scientists is that they very often talk about the amounts that are used, and that these amounts go down, implying that the environmental risk is also reduced,”…

The FSOC focused on climate for the first time since Congress established the body in 2010. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday called climate change “an existential threat” and the biggest emerging risk to the health of the U.S. financial system, pledging to marshal regulatory forces to guard against its harmful effects. Yellen made the promise during her inaugural appearance as the head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of top regulators tasked with policing Wall Street behavior that has the potential to crash the entire economy. The council held its first public meeting under Yellen’s leadership Wednesday and focused…

The demise of the Aral Sea is a tragic tale often told. Less known is the peril facing Central Asia’s largest remaining lake, Balkhash in eastern Kazakhstan, a key source of drinking water in an arid region. Rapid development and expanding rice cultivation upstream in China pose a grave threat to the Balkhash basin, a new paper says, and Beijing is dodging the problem. The lake’s fate has quietly bedevilled Kazakhstan for decades. Just how bad it will get depends both on Chinese farming and the magnitude of climate change, which is all but certain to dispatch the last of the glaciers…

With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases. Extinction is now happening up to 100 times faster than the natural evolutionary rate, but the issue is about more than the loss of individual species. Everything in the natural world is connected in networks that support the whole of life on earth, including us, and we are losing many of the benefits that nature provides…

A new paper documents significant illegal trafficking of Javan leopards and Sunda clouded leopards in Indonesia. The research uncovered 41 seizure records, amounting to approximately 83 individual animals, from between 2011 to 2019. The authors say that these numbers likely represent only a fraction of the true trade. With both species facing significant population declines, any level of poaching and trading could tip the scales toward extinction. This is the story of how Indonesia is losing its spots. In a recent paper published in Nature Conservation, researchers found that the archipelagic nation has a significant illegal trade in two regional leopard species: the…

Julio Berdegué is the assistant director-general and regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The covid-19 pandemic has pummeled the globe, harming the health of the planet and its peoples. In Latin America, the economic blows have fallen with particular force. Across the region, resources that might once have been used to protect forests — which are among Latin America’s biggest contributions to fighting climate change — have been channeled into shoring up the economy and battling the disease. This means that Indigenous communities in these forests often are confronting not only…

Canada’s health agency announced Wednesday restrictions on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides in agriculture to protect aquatic insects, backtracking on a proposed outright ban prompted by a massive bee die-off. Health Canada had proposed in 2018 prohibiting the use of clothianidin and thiamethoxam, two of three neonicotinoid pesticides widely applied to crops in this country. But after a re-evaluation of scientific data including new water monitoring data, and 47,000 public submissions, the agency said in a statement it found “some uses do not pose a risk to aquatic insects, while other uses do pose risks of concern.” Pesticides makers will have two years…