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Credit: © AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY" /> Credit: © AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY Leading into World War II, American scientists scrambled for a way to determine what vitamins, particularly vitamin A, were in food in order to keep US soldiers well-nourished. But state-of-the-art ultraviolet and visible (UV-vis) spectrophotometry, which measures electronic transitions of a wide range of molecules as they absorb light, was cumbersome and expensive. In July 1941, Arnold

Credit: COURTESY OF SCREEN SIREN PICTURES" /> Credit: COURTESY OF SCREEN SIREN PICTURES If you're trying to impress the nuances of genetics research upon an unknowing public, featuring half-naked, singing deliverymen who shimmy their way up DNA-shaped "ladders of love" might not be the most obvious way to go. But that's what you get in The Score, a stylized laboratory drama that switches at will between goofiness and artful poignancy.The play-turned-film was the brainchild of

For more than two decades, Evan Balaban has honed his skills at manipulating embryonic tissue samples using tiny instruments of his own making. He can cut a small access window into a quail's egg, and using a scalpel no wider than a human hair, excise a few hundred thousand cells from the bird's developing central nervous system. This is only the first step of the intricate process required to place this minuscule brain into another animal's head. Some of these surgeries end in untimely

In the early days of January, the deep and chilly waters off the coast of Antarctica played host to a bitter confrontation between two old foes. As storm clouds rolled overhead, the crew of Japan's scientific whaling fleet found themselves battling once again with members of the environmental group Greenpeace, who had tracked them down with the intention of doing everything they could to stop their killing of whales.Videos of the encounters show the Japanese ships - two obs

Late last year, following the Kansas State Board of Education's decision to treat evolution as a disputed theory in elementary and middle school classrooms, Paul Mirecki, a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, announced plans to teach a counter-course: "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and other Religious Mythologies." Soon after that, the trouble started.After comments Mirecki made about the course on a privat

To intramural scientists at the US National Institutes of Health whose endgame is being published, scrawled notations, E-mail exchanges and antiquated lab instruments are the flotsam and jetsam of research. But to Victoria A. Harden, founder of the Office of NIH History, these materials are gold. "The American people were putting billions of dollars into the NIH and they were getting a tremendous product for the money, and nobody knew about it," says the 62-year-old Ha

Six months later, New Orleans's battered life science community is struggling to recover

Two editors leave the journal one week after publisher fires top editors

Are we so sure wild birds aren?t the culprit with avian flu? And why dedicate years of work to exposing a suspected fraud?

An international group of scientists produce global guidelines for research, but not all are impressed

Some researchers focus on promising vaccine to stem largest recorded outbreak of chikungunya

Findings help explain why populations with low levels of the active form of the vitamin are more at risk