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Richard Merritt Credit: Photo by G.L. Kohuth / Michigan State University" />Richard Merritt Credit: Photo by G.L. Kohuth / Michigan State University Two years ago, entomologist Richard Merritt from Michigan State University pulled an all-nighter in a Toronto hotel room to prepare for seven hours of testimony about a court case so controversial it precipitated the abolition of Canada's death penalty. As part of his te

The experimental chamber used in space. Credit: Courtesy of BioServe Space Technologies / University of Colorado" />The experimental chamber used in space. Credit: Courtesy of BioServe Space Technologies / University of Colorado This spring, the Space Shuttle Discovery carried some interesting cargo: Salmonella bacteria separated by a thin seal from their target host, C.elegans. The cargo came courtesy of SPACEHAB, a Texas-based

Inverted tubes of gelled macrophage supernate (left) and water (right) for comparison. Credit: © Stossel, T.P., and J.H. Hartwig originally published in J Cell Biol 68:602-619, 1976." />Inverted tubes of gelled macrophage supernate (left) and water (right) for comparison. Credit: © Stossel, T.P., and J.H. Hartwig originally published in J Cell Biol 68:602-619, 1976. It w

A new book explores the science of sight - past and present

A new book explores the challenges of balancing motherhood and a career in science

Student filmmakers vie for top prize at the Ecological Society of America's film fest

A band of doctor-musicians travels to the UK to make collaborative connections

Clusters of beta islet cells engrafted under a mouse's cornea, showing some vascularization of the implanted cells. Credit: Courtesy of Stephan Speier" />Clusters of beta islet cells engrafted under a mouse's cornea, showing some vascularization of the implanted cells. Credit: Courtesy of Stephan Speier Looking through the lens of his confocal microscope, Per-Olof Berggren peers at the colonies of beta cells

Kirsty Spalding never expected to start her biology postdoc standing in a Swedish slaughterhouse, dressed in white overalls and rubber boots amidst blood and gore and stink, while smashing the teeth out of decapitated horses' heads with a hammer. But that's exactly where the young Australian scientist found herself, every second Tuesday in 2002 for two months at the beginning of her postdoc in the l

It was 1994, and Scott Simonet of Amgen's molecular genetics department in Thousand Oaks, Calif., was looking at some strange X-rays. He had engineered five transgenic mouse lines to overexpress a mysterious secreted protein. The mice looked and behaved normally, but that ordinariness was only skin-deep. "On the X-rays, it was pretty obvious that the long bones had higher bone mineral density," says

Chimps testing the Ebola vaccine bait Credit: Courtesy of IDT Biologika. Credit: Andrea Schaenzler" />Chimps testing the Ebola vaccine bait Credit: Courtesy of IDT Biologika. Credit: Andrea Schaenzler At the Leipzig zoo's Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center last summer, a 3-year-old female gorilla named Kibara was going berserk. She had just been given a new type of food, deep-red colored candies with a rich mango scent. Kib

Samples of the correspondence Credit: Courtesy of the Mendelianum, Brno, Czech Republic." />Samples of the correspondence Credit: Courtesy of the Mendelianum, Brno, Czech Republic. On New Year's Eve, 1866, Gregor Mendel wrote to the prominent Swiss botanist Carl Nägeli to tell him about his now classic experiments with Pisum peas. In the margins of the letter, Nägeli scribbled a note: "only empirical and not rational."