Sunday 2 June 2019

Prescription drug costs steadily soar, yet price transparency is lacking

After reviewing tens of millions of insurance claims for the country's 49 most popular brand-name prescription drugs, a team from Scripps Research Translational Institute found that net prices rose by a median of 76 percent from January 2012 through December 2017—with most products going up once or twice per year.

* This article was originally published here

Lab-grown diamonds: Technology is disrupting the diamond business

Forget what you know about cubic zirconia, crystals and any simulated diamonds. This isn't about that.

* This article was originally published here

App Store in crosshairs as Apple courts developers

Apple is set to court software savants at its annual developers conference beginning Monday while contending with criticism that the iPhone maker has made its App Store a walled garden.

* This article was originally published here

Climate change is already affecting global food production—unequally

The world's top 10 crops— barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat—supply a combined 83 percent of all calories produced on cropland. Yields have long been projected to decrease in future climate conditions. Now, new research shows climate change has already affected production of these key energy sources—and some regions and countries are faring far worse than others.

* This article was originally published here

More opioids given than prescribed in emergency department

(HealthDay)—The rate of emergency department visits with opioids only given during the visit is higher than the rate for visits with opioids only prescribed at discharge and for visits with opioids given and prescribed, according to a May data brief published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics.

* This article was originally published here

Physicists create stable, strongly magnetized plasma jet in laboratory

When you peer into the night sky, much of what you see is plasma, a soupy amalgam of ultra-hot atomic particles. Studying plasma in the stars and various forms in outer space requires a telescope, but scientists can recreate it in the laboratory to examine it more closely.

* This article was originally published here

An approach to enhance machine learning explanations

Researchers at IBM Research UK, the U.S. Military Academy and Cardiff University have recently proposed a new approach to improve the sensitivity of LIME (Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanations), a technique for attaining a better understanding ofthe conclusions reached by machine learning algorithms. Their paper, published on SPIE digital library, could inform the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that provide exhaustive explanations of how they reached a particular outcome or conclusion.

* This article was originally published here

Astrocytes protect neurons from toxic buildup

Astrocytes are overtaxed neurons' pit crew.

* This article was originally published here