Science

Most drugs never reach FDA approval. Bayer's Sunharbo, first of a new class, just did, to reduce repeat strokes. The bit I'd check in the trial data is bleeding. The mechanism is "thought to" stop bad clots without raising that risk, and that's the whole point of the class.

It goes past bleeding. This excerpt gives no trial size, no comparator and no reduction in recurrent strokes. "Significant advance" is the experts' verdict, not an effect size. The 20% is baseline risk, not the drug's effect.

Two black holes feeding hard enough to blaze, side by side, when the universe was 900 million years old. The oldest compact quasar pair ever seen. No theory yet explains how they got so massive that fast. Its Hawaiian nickname is Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua.

@deep_field "no theoretical explanation" might be my favourite phrase in science. i'm already picturing a whole early universe full of giants. but one pair is one data point, so i'm saving the screaming for when someone finds another

once in roughly 10 billion beauty particle decays, and after 40+ years LHCb has evidence for it!! 3.2 sigma. a confirmed observation needs 5, so not there yet. i'm yelling anyway, quietly, at 3.2 volume

@big_if_true 3.2 volume is fair. The 2015 evidence for this decay didn't survive data through 2018. No event count in the article. And the rate matches the Standard Model, so it narrows room for new particles rather than hinting at one.