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Surveys say that women collaborate less than men, find balancing work and family difficult

Under what conditions should GM crops be deployed?Readers rank the importance of their objectionsGM crops may cause environmental disruption, 63%.Developing GM crops could solidify the control that a few large corporations have on agriculture, 59%.Consuming GM crops may create unrecognized hazards to human health, 39%.Creating transgenic animals and plants is ethically wrong, 10%.Of the 302 readers who responded, nearly 100 of them commented passionately on this subject. You can see some of thei

Courtesy of David McKay, NASAIt weighs only 1.9 kilograms and is an estimated 4.5 billion years old. Yet the ALH84001 meteorite is probably the most argued-about rock in the universe (or at least in our solar system.) The anonymous member of an Antarctic geological field survey who found the rock in 1984 wrote in the field ticket's margins, "Yawza yawza!" Twenty years later, scientists are still making exclamations about the rock's innards. Some suspect that the ghostly forms in this scanning el

Give a postdoc an environment that encourages collegial work, and not competitive strife, and that person will respond with ample praise. At least, that's the lesson of The Scientist's Best Places for Postdocs 2004 survey; it's the magazine's largest yet, with 3,529 usable responses from postdoctoral researchers in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States.Postdocs rated access to publications and journals as the most important attribute of a university. High-quality research tools attracted

Institutions that nurture postdocs' scientific development dominated this year's Best Places for Postdocs survey. Participants ranked five federally funded research facilities among the top 15 institutions, all of which earned high marks for scientific development and resources.US government labs have become fertile greenhouses for some of the country's best and brightest researchers. Because government labs also dole out grants to institutions and scholars, they have become exemplars for other

The University of Alberta's pre-eminence in The Scientist's postdoc survey came as little surprise to many of the institution's researchers. These scientists cited as particularly important the April 2003 opening of a campus postdoc office, which provides a wide range of training and support services. The new office has encouraged postdocs to attend sessions on teaching, communication, and leadership, with which science graduates all too often lack experience, says postdoc Sheryl Gares.Carlos Fl

Courtesy Sidarta RibeiroSleep, to the joy of nappers everywhere, appears to be a building time for memories. Researchers at the Duke University Medical Center successfully recorded the electric signature of individual neurons firing during the two types of sleep, slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.The team, led by postdoc Sidarta Ribeiro, implanted microscale probes into rat forebrain to determine the firing patterns of individual neurons "resonating" with recently captured memor

James King-Holmes/Science Photo LibraryIn the world of life-extending therapies, a lobotomy doesn't sound like an attractive option, but for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, destruction of particular sensory neurons can extend, or reduce, lifespan by as much as 30%. Joy Alcedo and Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco, have used a laser to kill individual neurons; they suggest that what may be happening to modify the lifespan of worms may also be at play in higher org

These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool http://www.facultyof1000.com.Q.L. Ying et al., "BMP induction of Id proteins suppresses differentiation and sustains embryonic stem cell self-renewal in collaboration with STAT3," Cell, 115:281–92, Oct. 31, 2003.Embryonic stem (ES) cells can be derived and propagated in the presence of bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4) and leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) without serum or

Would popping daily citaloprams, I wonder, have restrained Jackie Kennedy's celebrated spending sprees and prevented the purported ensuing marital discord? How about a fluvoxamine prescription? Or natrexone? And what about publisher William Randolph Hearst who, at the peak of his purchasing power in the 1920s, spent $15 million a year? Even after achieving near bankruptcy, Hearst continued feeding his mania for antiquities, tapestries, oriental rugs, paintings, and other collectibles. Would medd

Genetics researchers welcome a decision that will make the gene freely available in Europe

Nat'l Institute of Standards and Technology director Arden Bement to be acting director