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When Russell Snell and his colleagues at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, were recently designing a study to test a candidate Alzheimer's gene, they ran up against a roadblock: How to put together a control group? "It's a problem," says Snell. "How do you identify a person who is not going to develop Alzheimer's?" Need 100-year-old research subjects? Try Medicine. The obvious answer was to find a group of healthy people who had passed the usu

Ticks feeding on a yellow necked mouse. Credit: COURTESY OF DAMIAMO ZANOCCO" />Ticks feeding on a yellow necked mouse. Credit: COURTESY OF DAMIAMO ZANOCCO If you thought it made sense to decrease disease-carrying ticks in your area by removing the deer that harbor ticks, Sarah Perkins has some news for you. Perkins, a postdoc in the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University, recently looked at studies in which researchers removed deer from large areas, ca

Ari Handel Credit:   2006 NIKO TAVERNISE" />Ari Handel Credit:   2006 NIKO TAVERNISE It's 11:30 on a Wednesday morning in November, and I'm sitting in a café in lower Manhattan with Ari Handel. About 50 blocks uptown, the first paid showing of The Fountain, the film based on a story Handel cowrote with Darren Aronofsky, has been underway for an hour. The film - which features a scientist, played by Hugh Jackman, and his wife, played by Rachel Weisz - is the first with w

The black 6 mouse, above, was developed around 1920 by Clarence Cook Little (1881-1971), below. Credit: COURTESY OF THE JACKSON LABORATORY ARCHIVES" />The black 6 mouse, above, was developed around 1920 by Clarence Cook Little (1881-1971), below. Credit: COURTESY OF THE JACKSON LABORATORY ARCHIVES As a boy, Clarence Cook Little kept mice as pets, but his hobby became serious inquiry when he began studying Mendelian inheritance of mouse coat color under William Castle at Harvard Univer

A DIRTY JOB: Alexander Friend observing activity in a window at the rhizotron." />A DIRTY JOB: Alexander Friend observing activity in a window at the rhizotron. Alexander Friend walks up to a stainless steel door, twists some latches holding it into the wall, and lifts the 7-kg rectangle out of its hole and onto the floor, revealing a sideways 152 x 101 cm window into the earth. This is window 17 of the 24 in the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service's Houghton, Michigan rhizotr

Officials retaliated after publication of a paper supporting intelligent design, a Congressional report claims

Authors of an article critical of mammography believe a scientific opponent forced the retraction

Co-author of controversial paper denies ghostwriting, demands paper be republished

Mutations leading to identical amino acid sequences can change protein folding and function

Government won't have its desired stockpile of recombinant-based vaccine for at least another three years

A novel form of progeria shows aging has both DNA damage and genetic components

Novel microarray detects 1,800 microbial species in the air above Austin and San Antonio