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Non-publication is more common among industry-funded trials, study finds.

A new analysis of 585 large, randomized clinical trials registered with ClinicalTrials.gov finds that 29 percent have not been published in scientific journals. In addition, nearly 78 percent of the unpublished trials had no results available on the website, either.

As a result, nearly 300,000 people who were enrolled in the 171 unpublished trials "were exposed to the risks of trial participation without the societal benefits which accompany the dissemination of trial results," said Christopher W. Jones, MD, a former resident physician at University of North Carolina School of Medicine who is now an attending physician at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, N.J. and lead author of the study published in the Oct. 29, 2013 issue of the British Medical Journal.

Non-publication of clinical trials has been a controversial issue in recent years. In particular, industry-funded clinical trials - such as those paid for by pharmaceutical companies - have come under fire on allegations that such trials are often not published when the results are not favorable to the drug or other product being tested.

Paris - Scientists said Wednesday they had found evidence that SARS-like coronaviruses can jump straight from a type of Chinese bat to humans without the need for an intermediary animal "host".

The find has "enormous implications" for public health control, with potentially pandemic viruses present, right now, in bats in China that could cause another outbreak, said the authors of the study published in the journal Nature.

"Even worse, we don't know how lethal these viruses would be if such an outbreak erupted," co-author Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based research group, said in a statement.

Even the United Nations is taking the threat of asteroids hitting our planet seriously. Last week, the U.N. General Assembly approved measures to coordinate detection and response to asteroid strikes that could level cities and possibly destroy our civilization.

Specifically, the agency voted to create an International Asteroid Warning Network made up of scientists, observatories and space agencies around the planet to share information about newly discovered asteroids and how likely they are to impact Earth. The group will also work with disaster relief organizations to help them determine the best response to an asteroid impact like the one that rattled the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February. The U.N. will also set up a space mission planning advisory group to look into how humans might deflect an asteroid heading our way -- the best options, the costs and the technologies needed. The results of that study will be shared with space agencies throughout the world.

The General Assembly also agreed that the existing U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space would monitor threats from asteroids and help plan and authorize a deflection campaign if necessary.

Skywatchers across the world are in for a treat Sunday (Nov. 3) as the final solar eclipse of 2013 takes on a rare hybrid form.

The eclipse will begin as an annular eclipse -- also referred to as a "ring of fire" eclipse, in which the Moon blackens all but the outer circumference of the Sun -- then, after about 15 seconds of annular eclipse, the Moon's orbit will be close enough to Earth to create a total solar eclipse, where Moon completely hides all direct rays of sunlight from the observer.

The annular period of the eclipse may be visible from the North American east coast at sunrise on Sunday, according to Space.com. But the majority of the eclipse action will occur over the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. Some parts of Europe, including Portugal, Spain and southern Italy will also be able to see the eclipse, as will the Arabian Peninsula.

For the US East Coast, clear skies down to the eastern horizon will be essential for good eclipse viewing. Residents in Washington, DC can expect the eclipse to begin at 6:38 a.m. and last for about 30 minutes.

Writing for Universe Today, David Dickenson nicely described the eclipse path:

A space rock the size of a tractor-trailer is set to fly harmlessly by Earth today (Oct. 29), zipping between our planet and the moon.

"Small asteroid 2013 UV3 will safely pass Earth Oct. 29," reads a Twitter post from NASA's Near-Earth Object Program (@AsteroidWatch), based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

The space rock was first observed just a few days ago, on Oct. 25, according to data from JPL. The asteroid's path, illustrated in this video animation, (below) will bring it inside the orbit of the moon, which typically circles Earth from a distance of about 239,000 miles (384,600 kilometers).

Imagine you order a delivery of several glass vases in different colors. Each vase is sent as a separate parcel. What would you think of the courier if the parcels arrive apparently undamaged, yet when you open them, it turns out that all the red vases are intact and all the green ones are smashed to pieces? Physicists from the University of Warsaw and the Gdansk University of Technology have demonstrated that when quantum information is transmitted, nature can be as whimsical as this crazy delivery man.

Experiments on individual photons, conducted by physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (FUW) and the Faculty of Applied Physics and Mathematics at the Gdansk University of Technology (PG), have revealed yet another counterintuitive feature of the quantum world. When a quantum object is transmitted, its quantum property - whether it behaves as a wave or as a particle - appears to depend on other properties that at first glance have nothing to do with the transmission. These surprising results were published in the research journal Nature Communications.

Wave-interference experiments are some of the simplest and most elegant, and can be conducted by almost anyone. When a laser beam is directed at a plate with two slits, we observe a sequence of light and dark fringes. It has long been known that the fringes are visible even when just individual particles - single electrons or photons - pass through the slits. Physicists assume that every individual particle exhibits wave properties, passing through both slits at once and interfering with itself.

Was the evolution of high-quality vision in our ancestors driven by the threat of snakes? Work by neuroscientists in Japan and Brazil is supporting the theory originally put forward by Lynne Isbell, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

In a paper published Oct. 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Isbell; Hisao Nishijo and Quan Van Le at Toyama University, Japan; and Rafael Maior and Carlos Tomaz at the University of Brasilia, Brazil; and colleagues show that there are specific nerve cells in the brains of rhesus macaque monkeys that respond to images of snakes.

The snake-sensitive neurons were more numerous, and responded more strongly and rapidly, than other nerve cells that fired in response to images of macaque faces or hands, or to geometric shapes. Isbell said she was surprised that more neurons responded to snakes than to faces, given that primates are highly social animals.

In a pair of landmark studies that exploit the genetic sequencing of the "missing link" cold virus, rhinovirus C, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have constructed a three-dimensional model of the pathogen that shows why there is no cure yet for the common cold.

Writing today (Oct. 28, 2013) in the journal Virology, a team led by UW-Madison biochemistry Professor Ann Palmenberg provides a meticulous topographical model of the capsid or protein shell of a cold virus that until 2006 was unknown to science.

Rhinovirus C is believed to be responsible for up to half of all childhood colds, and is a serious complicating factor for respiratory conditions such as asthma. Together with rhinoviruses A and B, the recently discovered virus is responsible for millions of illnesses yearly at an estimated annual cost of more than $40 billion in the United States alone.

The work is important because it sculpts a highly detailed structural model of the virus, showing that the protein shell of the virus is distinct from those of other strains of cold viruses.

"The question we sought to answer was how is it different and what can we do about it? We found it is indeed quite different," says Palmenberg, noting that the new structure "explains most of the previous failures of drug trials against rhinovirus."

It has baffled humans for millennia: how did life begin on planet Earth? Now, new research from a Texas Tech University paleontologist suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the bowels of hell.

Sankar Chatterjee, Horn Professor of Geosciences and curator of paleontology at The Museum of Texas Tech University believes he has found the answer by connecting theories on chemical evolution with evidence related to our planet's early geology.

"This is bigger than finding any dinosaur," Chatterjee said. "This is what we've all searched for - the Holy Grail of science."

Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth's surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.

He will present his findings Oct. 30 during the 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

As well as discovering how ancient animals flew, Chatterjee discovered the Shiva Meteorite Crater, which was created by a 25-mile-wide meteorite that struck off the coast of India. This research concluded this giant meteorite wreaked havoc simultaneously with the Chicxulub meteorite strike near Mexico, finishing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Ironically, Chatterjee's latest research suggests meteorites can be givers of life as well as takers. He said that meteor and comet strikes likely brought the ingredients and created the right conditions for life on our planet. By studying three sites containing the world's oldest fossils, he believes he knows how the first single-celled organisms formed in hydrothermal crater basins.

"When the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile planet inhospitable to living organisms," Chatterjee said. "It was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. One billion years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life - the ancestors to all living things."

Jack Gallant perches on the edge of a swivel chair in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley, fixated on the screen of a computer that is trying to decode someone's thoughts.

On the left-hand side of the screen is a reel of film clips that Gallant showed to a study participant during a brain scan. And on the right side of the screen, the computer program uses only the details of that scan to guess what the participant was watching at the time.

Anne Hathaway's face appears in a clip from the film Bride Wars, engaged in heated conversation with Kate Hudson. The algorithm confidently labels them with the words 'woman' and 'talk', in large type. Another clip appears - an underwater scene from a wildlife documentary. The program struggles, and eventually offers 'whale' and 'swim' in a small, tentative font.

"This is a manatee, but it doesn't know what that is," says Gallant, talking about the program as one might a recalcitrant student. They had trained the program, he explains, by showing it patterns of brain activity elicited by a range of images and film clips. His program had encountered large aquatic mammals before, but never a manatee.

Groups around the world are using techniques like these to try to decode brain scans and decipher what people are seeing, hearing and feeling, as well as what they remember or even dream about.