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CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Massive great white shark weighing over 1,600 pounds detected about 50 miles off Nantucket
A great white shark weighing 1,653 pounds was recently detected about 50 miles off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. Research group OCEARCH says "Contender" is the largest white shark it's ever tagged in the western North Atlantic Ocean. At nearly 14 feet long, OCEARCH calls Contender "a true ocean giant." The latest ping from Contender came on Friday in the waters east of Massachusetts, between Nantucket Shoals and Georges Bank. Researchers have been tracking the adult male since January 2025 when they tagged Contender and took biological samples from him off the coast of Georgia. From there, he traveled down to Florida before heading up to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He had last been pinged off the coast of Cape Hatteras in early June. OCEARCH said at the time he was likely headed to the "cooler and more prey-dense waters" of the northeast and Canada. Shark season has been underway in Massachusetts since May when a great white was seen hunting a seal on a Nantucket beach. On Memorial Day, a 20-foot shark that has invited "Jaws" comparisons was caught on camera swimming around Rhode Island's Block Island. And up in Maine, beachgoers and swimmers are urged to be cautious after two documented sightings of great whites off Bailey Island in Casco Bay. The tag placed on Contender will allow OCEARCH to track him for about five years. Researchers are hoping it will help them learn more about the migration patterns of great whites. Click here to see the latest pings for Contender and the location of other sharks tagged by OCEARCH.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Alkermes narcolepsy drug headed for late-stage testing
This story was originally published on BioPharma Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily BioPharma Dive newsletter. A potential multibillion-dollar drug is advancing to late-stage testing now that its developer, Alkermes, has in hand positive results from a smaller study focused on a certain kind of narcolepsy. According to Alkermes, the study found all three doses of its drug under evaluation were significantly better than a placebo at improving scores on a test that places participants in a quiet, dark, peaceful room and monitors how awake and alert they are. Alkermes described the results as clinically meaningful, and said all the drug-treated groups achieved 'normative wakefulness' — in this case, taking more than 20 minutes to fall asleep. All doses of the drug, previously dubbed ALKS 2680 and now named alixorexton, were also generally well tolerated. Alkermes said there were no so-called serious treatment-emergent adverse events. Nor were there any treatment-related safety signals seen in participants' vital signs, or on liver, kidney and eye exams. The clinical trial specifically enrolled people with narcolepsy type 1, which, along with excessive sleepiness, is characterized by sudden loss in muscle control. Alkermes intends to present more detailed data at a medical meeting in Singapore in September. In the meantime, an extension study in which all participants from the main trial receive alixorexton is still running. So are a couple other experiments assessing the drug in adults with narcolepsy type 2, or a sleep disorder known as idiopathic hypersomnia. Craig Hopkinson, who serves as Alkermes' chief medical officer while also leading the company's research and development, said in a statement that his team is 'moving forward expeditiously' to start a global Phase 3 testing of the drug. The fresh data are an 'important stride forward' for the alixorexton program, he said, as well as for Alkermes' broader portfolio of therapies that amplify orexin 2 proteins. These results arrived just a week after Takeda announced its own orexin drug, oveporexton, hit the main goals of two late-stage trials, giving the Japan-based pharmaceutical giant the confidence to plan to file for marketing approval in the U.S. and elsewhere by the end of March. Jefferies analyst Stephen Barker wrote in a note to clients that oveporexton could reach $3 billion in peak yearly sales just as a treatment for narcolepsy Type 1. Trailing Takeda are Alkermes and several other companies, including Eisai, Jazz Pharmaceuticals and Centessa Pharmaceuticals. They're each trying to break what Wall Street expects to be a lucrative market, with some estimates holding that between 135,000 and 200,000 people in the U.S. alone have narcolepsy. Johnson & Johnson has an experimental, orexin 2-targeting medicine as well, though it's being developed as a therapy for adult and elderly patients who have major depressive disorder with insomnia symptoms. Joseph Thome, an analyst at TD Cowen, last month reported that his team expects annual sales of Alkermes' drug to peak at $2 billion. That estimate factors in approvals for both narcolepsy type 1 and 2. Whether Alkermes shareholders will be as bullish remains to be seen. Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat wrote that many investors 'were on the sidelines' regarding the company's orexin program ahead of Monday's disclosure. They may still be. Alkermes' share price was down by as much as 10% Monday morning, before rebounding somewhat to trade down around 5%. Recommended Reading Takeda to seek approval of new kind of narcolepsy drug after study data
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Just Witnessed the Birth of a Solar System for the First Time
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Observations of the young HOPS-315 star system show an environment analogous to what our own nascent Solar System would have looked like billions of years ago. The star is surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, and this disk is the first evidence of debris condensing into what will eventually become planets and other objects. Observing this early phase of evolution around a protostar will allow scientists to learn more about the formation of our own Solar System. If our Solar System had baby pictures from over 4.5 billion years ago, they would look something like the otherworldly swirls of dust and gas surrounding the young star HOPS-315. Nascent planets forming around young stars have been observed before, but until now, what hasn't been seen is the phase of star system formation before that, when mineral particles condense at extreme temperatures from a protoplanetary disk to form what will later become those new planets. The enormous surrounding clouds of gas and dust tend to obscure what was going on. But NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (by making observations at infrared and millimeter wavelengths) has finally revealed chemical signals that are, for a star system, what ultrasound images are for human pregnancies. The sources for these signals were crystalline minerals floating in hot silicon monoxide (SiO) gas in the inner region of the protoplanetary disk around HOPS-315. The star and its disk are located 1,300 light-years away, which means we are seeing them as they existed during humanity's year 700. And because a thousand years is a blink of an eye in cosmic terms, HOPS-315 is probably still a developing protostar. When an international team of researchers found out about the Webb observations, they zeroed in with ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and captured the moment that minerals (which had sublimated in the intense heat, meaning that they evaporated without turning liquid) started to condense into planetary embryos. 'The first high-temperature minerals to recondense from this gaseous reservoir start the clock on planet formation,' said the team (led by astronomer Melissa McClure of Leiden University in the Netherlands) in a study recently published in the journal Nature. This is what McClure goes on to call a 't=0 moment' in the creation of a new planetary system. When she and her team compared their findings with models of how our Solar System came into being, they found that the formation of solids from cooling gases and mineral dust in the HOPS-315 system mirrored what is thought to have happened in our own stellar territory. The materials that form from the early phases of this process are known as refractory solids, which can survive intense heat without degrading. When our Solar System was forming, the temperature around proto-Earth is thought to have been around 327 degrees Celsius (620 degrees Fahrenheit). Remnants of the first solids that ever condensed in this region of our Solar System can be found embedded in primordial meteorites that have crashed to Earth, taking the form of flecks of minerals. Some of these flecks are even older than the Solar System itself—the presolar grains in the Murchison meteorite, for instance, go back 7 billion years. They are thought to have come from the remains of ancient stars that were swept through the interstellar medium, forming a new nebula that eventually flattened into the protoplanetary disk from which our Solar System emerged. 'Comparison with condensation models with rapid grain growth and disk structure models suggests the formation of refractory solids analogous to those in our Solar System,' McClure said. And if the HOPS-315 system continues to evolve as our own system did, minerals will collide and stick to each other until they form larger and larger rocks, which will accrete into planetesimals and, eventually, actual planets. We'll just have to keep watching and learning. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life? Solve the daily Crossword
