Month: February 2016

(credit: ep_jhu)

Mixing prescription drugs is exceedingly common—one in five Americans takes three or more prescription medicines, and one in ten people take five or more. But, every now and then, the results can be unexpectedly harmful—and sometimes deadly. Adverse drug-drug interactions are estimated to put tens of thousands of people in the hospital each year, but they’re difficult to predict and even trickier to track. Only a relatively small number of patients may take a specific, harmful cocktail of drugs, and only a subset of those will have a notable reaction.

To get around the problem, a team of researchers (working with journalists at the The Chicago Tribune) created a computer model to create side-effect profiles for prescription drugs. Then, they mined a massive database of drug-reaction complaints sent to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as 380,000 electronic health records. The results of the analysis so far suggest that four drug combinations—including the combination of the common antibiotic, ceftriaxone, with the over-the-counter heartburn medication, Prevacid (lansoprazole)—may cause a potentially fatal heart rhythm. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Drug Safety.

The results are only preliminary and need to be backed up with more data. But in lab tests with living cells, researchers found that the combination of lansoprazole and ceftriaxone blocked an electrical channel crucial for a heart beat.

Google has won a High Court battle brought by StreetMap.EU Ltd, which had claimed in its lawsuit that the multinational's alleged search dominance had destroyed the UK-based online mapping company's business.

StreetMap alleged that Google's arrival in the online mapping market in 2007 was calamitous for the company. Its commercial director Kate Sutton told Ars that—at its height—StreetMap had a healthy turnover, five million users, and 20 staff members at its offices in Milton Keynes.

The British firm, founded in 1997, claimed StreetMap had been squished by Google when the multinational started displaying a map at the top of its search results. Google's map contained a thumbnail image directly generated from its own mapping service—known then as "Maps OneBox."

(credit: Shutterstock)

Microsoft-backed lobby group ICOMP's long-running fight against Google's search dominance in the European Union has collapsed, amid accusations that its members have been silenced.

Ars has learned that members including UK-based price comparison site Foundem—the original complainant in the antitrust case against Google—resigned from ICOMP, after Microsoft backed away from what had been a dogged campaign against its search rival in Europe. ICOMP was founded in 2008 to fight for an "online competitive marketplace."

One source told us that Microsoft had agreed to prop up ICOMP's food, travel, and accommodation expenses without having any active involvement in the group.

Enlarge / The Enterprise, caught in the wake of a temporal vortex, witnesses the Earth, assimilated long ago, in the altered timeline. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

To continue our celebration of Star Trek's 50th anniversary, we've decided to resurface a few of our favorite Trek stories from the Ars archives. Contributor Xaq Rzetelny explored how time travel works across the various series in February 2016, so today his piece travels forward through the space-time continuum.

We're at the start of what should be a big year for Star Trek. The franchise will celebrate its 50^th anniversary this fall, but 2016 also brings a new movie (Star Trek Beyond), the recovery of long-lost documents belonging to Gene Roddenberry, and the development of (finally!) a new series set to launch in January 2017.

It’s no secret that we here at Ars love (and sometimes hate) our Star Trek. With so much time having elapsed since the original series first aired—and with so much time spent watching/reading/thinking through it all—we felt it was about, well, time to thoroughly explore one of our favorite Trek staples: time travel.

Detail from a front plate in the hardback of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, by Lois McMaster Bujold. (credit: Dave Seeley)

If you're already a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's award-winning Vorkosigan Saga novels, then this month's release of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen will bring much rejoicing. If you're new to the series, this novel is an excellent excuse to start reading. It's one of the most realistic and funny novels you'll ever read about space colonization. Somehow it manages to be gripping, despite its focus on balancing military budgets, dealing with defense contractors, and the weirdness of long-term marriage.

Mild spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga follow.

Meet the Vorkosigans

Bujold began her galaxy-spanning series in the 1980s with a pair of novels, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, about a young starship captain named Cordelia Naismith from the planet Beta. A peaceful, politically progressive planet—basically, Copenhagen in space—Beta sends out scientist-explorers like Cordelia to gather data for its exoplanetary "geological survey." While studying a supposedly uninhabited planet, Cordelia meets the military officer Aral Vorkosigan, from the patriarchal, conservative planet Barrayar, where women tend to be housewives and men destroy themselves on the battlefield. Against all odds, and in the midst of a deadly war, the two fall in love.