The Nutshell

Developing a vaccine for HIV may be harder than researchers thought, according to linkurl:a study;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07746.html published online in Nature. Just as the virus develops resistance to antiviral drugs, it also evolves to evade the human immune system on a population-wide level, the researchers report.Human Immunodeficiency Virus Image: NIAID Previous studies have examined the interaction of viral evolution with the human immune system in s

Giving birth to live young is thought to mainly occur in mammals and sharks, but a new study suggests that it was once a common mechanism for reproduction. A large group of ancient fish carried its embryos internally and bore live offspring, says a study published in Nature this week. Reconstructed Arhtrodira anatomy Image: Peter Trusler A team led by John Long, a paleontologist at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, identified embryos in extinct, jawed fish from a group called Arthro

The National Institutes of Health -- the happy recipient of about $10 billion from the recently-passed economic stimulus bill -- is staring down the barrel of another year of flat funding, according to the draft linkurl:FY2009 budget;http://appropriations.house.gov/FY2009_consolidated.shtml released yesterday by the House of Representatives. Image: linkurl:flickr/borman818;http://www.flickr.com/photos/dborman2/ The FY2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act includes a paltry 3% increase to NIH's FY200

The FDA issued a warning yesterday confirming that another patient taking the psoriasis drug Raptiva developed a rare form of brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). The warning came after Genentech reported that a 47 year old man in Germany had been hospitalized for the infection. Two other patients--a 70 year old and a 73 year old--died of PML in October and November of last year. All of the patients who developed PML were taking the psoriasis drug for more th

Thirty years after the toppling of the Shah in Iran, the nation is undergoing another revolution of sorts. Iran is investing heavily in stem cell research, and despite researchers working with limited access to laboratory equipment and resources, the country may emerge as a scientific force to be reckoned with in the stem cell field. Image: flickr/youngrobvEven with their limited infrastructure, Iranian scientists have managed to isolate linkurl:six human;http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/jour

A UK ethics organization that focuses on fairness and honesty in scientific publication has lent some support to researchers who complained that a 2008 __Cell__ linkurl:paper;http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(08)00680-6 failed to adequately recognize their work and includes substandard experimentation. But the gesture seems unlikely to result in any concrete action regarding the researchers' complaints. The London-based Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has weighed in on the row invo

FBI agents have nabbed four people suspected of harassing University of California life science researchers over the past two years. Federal agents arrested twenty-somethings Adriana Stumpo, Nathan Pope, Joseph Buddenberg, and Maryam Khajavi late last week and charged them with using "force, violence, or threats to interfere with the operation of the University of California in violation of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act," according to an FBI linkurl:release.;http://sanfrancisco.fbi.gov/pr

Love hurts -- especially for the female fruit fly. A new linkurl:study;http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122208568/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 published online in the __Journal of Evolutionary Biology__ shows that after fruit flies mate, females ramp up their immune systems in roughly the same fashion as they do when fighting bacterial and fungal infections. "Of course the immune system is there to fight pathogens, but it might be there to protect you against members of your own species

The National Institutes of Health received a 3% increase in funds in the draft 2009 budget, released today (Feb 23) by the US House of Representatives, giving the agency a total of $30.3 billion, linkurl:ScienceInsider;http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/02/2009-budget-win.html reports. Adjusted for inflation, the sum essentially leaves the agency's funding flat. The announcement comes after last week's decision to provide a two-year infusion of $10 billion for the NIH as part of t

A single antibody may soon provide a one-size-fits-all antiviral for multiple strains of influenza. Researchers in the online version of Nature Structural and Molecular Biology have identified a human antibody that disarms the flu virus by jamming the machinery it uses to fuse with host cells. Hemagglutinin and antibody in complex Image: William Hwang Genes that code the influenza surface protein hemagglutinin are constantly reshuffled and tweaked, helping the virus hide from the immune syst

Free online availability of scientific articles increases the likelihood of papers getting cited, especially in the developing world and in the biomedical sciences, according to a new linkurl:study;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5917/1025 published today in __Science__. The question of whether open access drives citations has been hotly contested among scientists, policymakers, and editors, with several recent studies coming down on different sides of the debate. In the most

Rather than funding new grants, the NIH's Office of the Director will spend the vast majority of its $8.2 billion stimulus check to finance grants that have already been reviewed and to supplement existing grants. A smaller sliver -- some $100 million to $200 million -- will fund new two-year "challenge grants," which will support cutting-edge short projects, and will require researchers to report the number of jobs created or preserved by the grant to show that the money is boosting local econ

The formation of fingers and toes in mice depends on multiple, interlocking signaling pathways, researchers in this week's Science report. These linked pathways protect the process of digit formation from mutations that could make it go awry. A team led by Rolf Zeller, a developmental biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, wanted to understand why the complicated business of limb formation in a developing embryo turns out okay most of the time. Signaling in the mouse embryo limb

A neural stem cell transplant from fetal cells performed in Russia led to a brain tumor in a teenage boy, researchers in this week's PLoS Medicine report, raising concerns about the safety of neural stem cells treatments. MRI of brain lesion, courtesy of PLoS MedicineThe researchers confirmed that the cancer originated from the donor tissue, not the boy's own cells. This is the first report of cancer following fetal neural stem cell transplant. However, outside experts raised concerns about th

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology has moved its 2011 meeting from New Orleans to Utah in protest of Louisiana's decision to allow religious materials in science class, but it's too late for the Experimental Biology meeting to do the same, according to organizers. The April Experimental Biology meeting--which includes organizations like the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, and the American Physio

A Japanese researcher falsified figures in three published papers while working as a visiting postdoc at the NIH's National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) linkurl:reported;http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Tanaka.shtml last week. Kazuhiro Tanaka, a cancer researcher formerly at Kyushu University in Japan, fidgeted with Western blots, Northern blots, and gel shift assay images by duplicating bands in the results of three papers pu

Most colleges and universities across the US are facing cuts in state funding of up to 20%, and many are preparing by cutting administrative costs, hiring fewer faculty, and focusing their resources on already strong programs. Proposed state budgets aren't final yet; however, despite the fact that it only gets 4% of its $2.9 billion budget from the state, the University of Washington is bracing itself for hard times. The expected 13% cut in state funding, said President Mark Emmert, is "the w

A University of California, San Francisco, postdoc ripped off images from a colleague and jiggered data files, the NIH's Office of Research Integrity (ORI) recently linkurl:reported.;http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Afshar.shtml Nima Afshar, a postdoc working with UCSF molecular biologist linkurl:Joachim Li,;http://cancer.ucsf.edu/people/li_joachim.php falsified microarray scans related to the molecular mechanism of yeast replication initiation. Specifically, she fudged images from another

Willem Kolff with artificial heart courtesy of the Willem J. Kolff Collection at the University of Utah Marriott Library Willem Kolff, a University of Utah physician who invented the precursor to kidney dialysis and the first artificial heart, died last week a few days shy of his 98th birthday. Kolff received the 2002 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. He died of natural causes, the New York Times reported. The artificial heart that he helped develop "has now been used in ov

The popular press was a-buzz this week with reports of a technique that could allow an amputee to move her prosthetic arm with linkurl:her mind.;http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/health/research/11arm.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=todd%20kuiken&st=cse But in fact, the technology, developed by Todd Kuiken and his group at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, doesn't attempt to read a patient's thoughts -- at least not directly. The type of control Kuiken's group is working on is one step removed. In a w