NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 16th May 2008 08:42 PM GMT] There still may be hope for a boost to National Institutes of Health funding in 2008. Yesterday the US Senate snuck some $400 million into a bill approved by the House earlier this week for funding the Iraq war.
At the end of last year, President Bush vetoed a 2008 appropriations bill that would have raised NIH funding by about $1 billion. In order to get the bill approved, Congress slashed $760 million of proposed NIH funding,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th May 2008 03:57 PM GMT] Disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk has set up a biotechnology firm in Seoul for cloning animal pets and producing organs for transplant, according to Agence France Presse.
Hwang was banned from research using human eggs following claims that he cloned the first human embryo that were later shown to be Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th May 2008 03:41 PM GMT] The FDA has delayed approval of an application for the first human embryonic stem cell clinical trial by Geron Corporation, the company announced yesterday.
Geron's compound, GRNOPC1, is a cell-based therapy to treat spinal cord injury. Yesterday, the FDA told Geron verbally that they were placing the Investigational New Drug submission of the treatment under a clinical hold. The company is awaiting a formal letter.
Thomas Okarma,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 14th May 2008 10:07 PM GMT] Some potential cancer therapies may do more harm than good: A class of compounds intended to boost tumor suppressor p53 activity may actually promote mutant versions of the gene, a study published tomorrow in Genes and Development reports.
p53, the tumor suppressor found in roughly half of all human cancers, works by signaling cell death, thus keeping cell growth in check. But p53 can be deleted during transcription or... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 13th May 2008 06:56 PM GMT] A researcher in Canada has been living high on the government hog, spending thousands on toys and personal effects with federal money meant to fund his research.
According to a story from the Canwest News Service that ran in the Vancouver Sun yesterday, the scientist spent more than $20,000 on top-of-the-line ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 13th May 2008 04:48 PM GMT] British parliamentarians voted to allow the controversial human embryo bill to continue to the next stage of debate yesterday (May 12), according to Agence France Presse. Just nine members of the governing Labour party voted against the bill, which passed by 340 votes to 78.
On Sunday (May 11), it also emerged that a team at Cornell University's Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility led by Nikica... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 12th May 2008 05:57 PM GMT] Publishers are getting a new tool in the fight against plagiarism in scientific manuscripts.
The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters announced on May 1 that they would be offering their clients - the publishers of many well-read science journals - the option to employ iThenticate, a tool that checks submitted manuscripts for potential copy-catting against databases of previously published work.
According to Logan Hutchinson,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 12th May 2008 03:18 PM GMT] A former Congressman, speaking at a meeting of researchers, policy makers, and advocates last Friday (May 9), urged scientists to become intimately involved in the political process. And he encouraged the nation's scientists to do much more than just cast their votes for the candidates of their choice in upcoming elections.
"Get inside their campaigns and then press to get science in their messages to voters," said ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 9th May 2008 10:54 PM GMT] BrainCells, a company that stakes its existence on the once-heretical notion of adult neurogenesis, is finally taking its novel treatment for depression into a phase II trial, CEO Jim Schoeneck told me at a neurotechnology meeting in Boston yesterday (May 8).
Researchers have recently begun to suspect that treating depression requires neurogenesis. Drugs such as Prozac, though, stimulate nerve growth via the serotonin pathway, which... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 9th May 2008 10:49 PM GMT] The third annual Neurotech Industry meeting in Boston kicked off yesterday morning (May 8) with some big numbers:
- Two billion people each year are affected by brain-related illnesses, from stroke to depression to chronic pain, with an economic loss worldwide of about $2 trillion.
- Venture capital companies invested about $1.77 billion in neuroscience-related research last year.
- Worldwide, neuro-related industry profits hit $130.5 billion in 2007-- a growth of 8% from the previous... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 9th May 2008 09:24 PM GMT] A former postdoc at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) falsified and fabricated DNA sequences and methylation status in unpublished data about a tumor suppressor gene, a UNMC investigation, in conjunction with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), has found.
From 2002-2005, Lois Bartsch worked in James Shull's laboratory at UNMC, researching the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th May 2008 09:33 PM GMT] Victimless Leather, one of the works on show at the Museum of Modern Art's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, has claimed a victim: itself. Exhibition curator, Paola Antonelli, pulled the plug on the piece's life-support system last week, effectively "killing" the project, according to The Art Newspaper.
Victimless Leather was a miniature... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th May 2008 07:08 PM GMT] Microbes may have the capacity for a type of learning generally attributed to higher organisms, suggests a paper published online in Science today (May 8).
"We have to start to think about bacterial behavior in a more sophisticated way," said Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University, who led the study.
Researchers have long assumed that microbes respond to... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th May 2008 05:33 PM GMT] If you're thinking of buying flowers for mom this Sunday, beware of nature's seductive marketing. A new study published on-line this week in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology shows that flowers flutter in the wind to be attractive. But this floral advertising is not aimed at mother-loving children. Instead, researchers in the UK suggest, flower "waving" is a hitherto unrecognized way that plants entice... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th May 2008 05:04 PM GMT] New findings help resolve a long-standing debate in immunology over what type of cells are behind the progression of type-1 diabetes: attacker or protector cells.
Scientists found that autoimmune destruction is likely due to a defect in levels of a cytokine within insulin-producing islets that reduce the numbers of protector cells. The research was published in today's online issue of... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 8th May 2008 03:41 PM GMT] An Australian research group is proposing a surprising technique to alleviate the ecological damage that the invasive cane toad has caused to many regions of Australia.
Rick Shine at Sidney University suggested yesterday in a lecture to the Australian Academy of Sciences that researchers introduce tiny cane toads to areas where they have not yet been found, reasoning that it will help animals learn to avoid the toxic creatures, the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 7th May 2008 06:01 PM GMT] The platypus joins the ranks of fruit flies, rice, humans, and other subjects of intense genetic study with the publication of its genome sequence today (May 7) in Nature.
Researchers say that exploring the genome of the platypus, which sits at a... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 5th May 2008 03:17 PM GMT] The number of fat cells in a person's body is determined during childhood and stays constant throughout life, with about 10 percent of fat cells dying and being replaced annually, according to study published in Nature yesterday (May 4).
Understanding the hitherto poorly characterized dynamics of fat cell production and turnover may help researchers target key processes in obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes.
"We are... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 2nd May 2008 09:01 PM GMT] The discoverer of telomerase, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Joan Steitz, known for identifying small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) and elucidating their role in DNA transcription, were awarded the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize today (May 2). They are the first women to receive the prize, which has been awarded since the year 2000.
Blackburn, at the University of California, San Francisco, was recognized for her work on telomeres with the 2006 ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 2nd May 2008 07:37 PM GMT] The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has agreed to reassess controversial treatment guidelines for Lyme disease after an unprecedented antitrust investigation was launched against the group last year, according to the Wall Street Journal Health Blog.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 2nd May 2008 06:32 PM GMT] Botanists from all over the world have convened in New York City and are hammering out plans to assemble a DNA-based catalog of the Earth's tree species.
The scientists met yesterday (May 1) and are meeting today (May 2) at the New York Botanical Garden to discuss an effort to barcode - or identify using short, standardized stretches of genetic material - all 100,000 or so tree species on the planet. The project is called Tree-BOL, for the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 1st May 2008 07:07 PM GMT] A medical publisher has changed its copyright policy to ease the process for authors to comply with the federal public access mandate. Starting today (May 1), authors will automatically retain copyright of manuscripts submitted to Rockefeller University Press journals, according to an editorial published yesterday in the Journal of Cell Biology.
Giving copyrights to authors streamlines the process of submitting articles to... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 1st May 2008 03:32 PM GMT] Before therapies using human embryonic stem cells can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers will have to answer one key question: where do the cells go when they are injected into the patient?
During an FDA meeting earlier this month on the safety of embryonic stem cell therapies, the agency grappled with the issues of tracking stem cells in vivo. ... Click to continue
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