Scientific American Online

Since its passage in 1983, the Orphan Drug Act (ODA) has led to the approval of 357 drugs for rare diseases and a pipeline of more than 2,100 additional products. Before the ODA, just 10 such drugs existed. Considering that some 7,000 rare diseases affect 20 million to 30 million Americans, federal overseers and patient advocates are anxious to ramp up efforts even more.

But finding a way to give the act a second wind is kicking up dust both scientific and financial. The U.S. passed the ODA as a way to encourage pharmaceutical firms to develop treatments for uncommon illnesses--those affecting no more than 200,000 Americans. The act hinges on financial incentives, including federally funded grants and contracts for clinical trials, a 50 percent tax credit on trial costs and, above all, seven years of market exclusivity starting from the date of drug approval. (Nonorphan drugs receive patent protection, a more cumbersome and potentially less profitable arrangement.) The law has enabled researchers and manufacturers to invest in drugs otherwise unlikely to turn a profit because of the limited need.

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - An overhaul of world farming and more vegetarianism should be top priorities to protect the environment, along with curbs on fossil fuel use, a U.N.-backed study said on Wednesday.

By Janelle Weaver

Freeloading crows start to contribute to group efforts when hardworking birds become handicapped, a study shows.

Carrion crows ( Corvus corone ) form stable groups that share the responsibilities of breeding and caring for the young. [More]

At least 12,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes ( Saiga tatarica ) have been found dead in Kazakhstan in the past two weeks, victims of a mysterious epidemic. The deaths represent about 15 percent of the species' worldwide population.

Saiga antelopes used to number above one million, but the breakup of the Soviet Union led to rampant poaching throughout the species' range and 95 percent of the animals were killed off. Just 81,000 of the antelopes remained in five isolated populations in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Until this outbreak, the Kazakh population numbered 26,000 animals, almost half of which have now died.

BP et al. have burned through more than five weeks and at least as many failed attempts to get control of the Mississippi Canyon 252 well spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Now the arrival of hurricane season--officially June 1 to November 30--threatens to make the difficulties worse. [More]

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

In the first installment of this post, Arnold Mckinley of Xslent Energy Technologies described how "reactive power" -- that is, power stored momentarily by electrical appliances and then released -- destabilizes the electrical grid. Here he explains how home solar arrays can help.

Wyoming's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions stands above a geological formation considered one of the nation's best potential carbon storage sites, but because of technological hurdles, coal-fired power plants like PacifiCorp 's Jim Bridger facility remain decades away from rerouting their emissions into the ground.

The Rock Springs Uplift geological formation has enough capacity to accommodate 100 years' worth of carbon dioxide from the Rock Springs, Wyo., power plant, which produces about 18 million tons of the greenhouse gas each year. But because current carbon capture technology would consume about 20 percent of a pulverized-coal plant's power and would produce a substantial amount of waste materials, that geographical proximity is currently nothing but a coincidence.

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Mmm, sticky rice. It’s a glutinous side dish that’s perfect for practicing your chopstick skills, for sopping up curry sauce and, amazingly, for building really strong pagodas. [More]

The world cannot afford to dump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Yet it is not cutting back. All indications are that the concentration of CO 2 will continue to rise for decades. Despite great support for renewable energy, developed and developing countries will probably burn more oil, coal and natural gas in the future.

For transportation, the alternatives to petroleum appear especially far off. Onboard energy storage for electric vehicles is difficult; for a given mass, batteries hold less than 1 percent of the energy stored in gasoline. Carrying hydrogen on vehicles requires 10 times the storage volume of gasoline, and the high-pressure tank needed to hold it is very heavy. Although a few maiden flights of airplanes powered by jet fuel derived from biomass have taken place, it is unclear that biofuels can be produced at the quantities and low prices required by airliners ... or by ships for that matter.

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What can a handful of old oyster shells reveal about the trials some of the New World's early European settlers? A lot, it turns out. [More]

By Richard A. [More]

By Ed Stoddard and Sarah Irwin

JUNE 1960 STUNT MAN -- “‘Putting a man in space is a stunt: the man can do no more than an instrument, in fact can do less.’ So said Vannevar Bush, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a statement to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. ‘There are far more serious things to do than to indulge in stunts. As yet the American people do not understand the distinctions, and we in this country are prone to rush, for a time, at any new thing. I do not discard completely the value of demonstrating to the world our skills. Nor do I undervalue the effect on morale of the spectacular. But the present hullabaloo on the propaganda aspects of the program leaves me entirely cool.’”

BOSTON--As most of us learned in school, fruit is delicious because it evolved to be eaten--if plants can entice animals to eat their seeds, they'll be spread far and wide in handy packets of fertilizer. But spices are different. Spices and herbs such as thyme, oregano, turmeric and cinnamon get their singular flavors from compounds that are actually toxic in concentrated doses--and plants probably evolved to express these toxins so their leaves and berries would not be eaten. So why do we humans cultivate them and put them all over our food? Nobody knows for sure, but as explained today in a presentation here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists are starting to discover a whole host of health benefits from common herbs and spices--and it's possible that we humans evolved a taste for these toxic compounds because they help our bodies function better.

Spices top the list of foods rich in antioxidants , explained Marianne Gillette, a vice president at McCormick & Company, whose background is in experimental taste research. One half teaspoon of ground cinnamon has as many antioxidants as a half cup of blueberries; a half teaspoon of dried oregano rivals three cups of raw spinach.

Research on acupuncture just got a shot in the arm. Well, a needle near the knee, actually. Because a study in the journal Nature Neuroscience [Maiken Nedergaard et al, http://bit.ly/auzHwx ] has uncovered a mechanism that could explain how this traditional healing process can help reduce pain. [More]

A pond is a rich ecosystem, full of nutrients and life (and lots and lots of beetles). Each pond often has a unique array of species, from plankton to fish--even if it was created by scientists.  

Biologist Jon Chase and his colleagues at Washington University in Saint Louis had noted that it was nigh impossible to make the ecosystems in 300 gallon plastic pools exactly the same--even if all the starting conditions were identical. So he spent seven years trying to figure out why.  

By Ed Stoddard and Mary Milliken

VENICE, La./HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc said on Saturday its complex "top kill" maneuver to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil well has failed, crushing hopes for a quick end to the largest oil spill in U.S. history already in its 40th day.

Despite golf balls, tires, 30,000 horsepower of pumps and 30,000 barrels of dense drilling mud chock full of barite, BP's so-called " top kill " operation failed to stop the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and was abandoned on the afternoon of May 29. The idea was to muscle the oil back into the well with a steady stream of mud--a technique that has worked on land. [More]