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Spain may soon recover another of its most wanted expatriate scientists. If negotiations are fruitful, developmental biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa-Belmonte will return home in 2005 to lead a new Spanish National Center for Regenerative Medicine and Transplantation.Izpisúa-Belmonte is currently heading a high-profile research team working on vertebrate development at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. His lab recently identified genes that control how an embryo dist

EC to propose scientific visa for travel to and within EU

Ned Shaw Here at Snapshot Central, global headquarters of the Snapshot section of The Scientist, it's been a hectic year. After months of effort from the Statistics Department, the Survey Division, and the Graphics Group, we have analyzed a year's worth of results in our attempt to dissect, diagnose, and define the average scientist. And what have our efforts revealed? By combining responses of more than 10,000 scientists to 23 surveys conducted this year, we can safely conclude that the aver

Foundations | BLAST From the Past Courtesy of Warren Gish In late 1994, BLAST was fast, but it wasn't as sensitive as programs that produced gapped alignments, such as Bill Pearson's FASTA. To keep the statistics in sync with the new search algorithm, I conjectured that the statistics of Samuel Karlin and Stephen Altschul might be empirically applied to the interpretation of gapped alignment scores. By early 1995, Altschul at the NCBI [National Center for Biotechnology Information] h

"Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."--Winston Churchill Centrifuges, imaging systems, pipettes, PCR instruments, microscopes, and more--all indispensable components of the scientist's toolbox. They make science happen. Moreover, they make science compelling. Why else would television programs such as CSI and The X-Files devote so much screen time to such high-tech gadgetry? Most labs have these things, and naturally, researchers have their preferences. So, like last year, we

Stem cells weave a web of hope Courtesy of Duncan Stewart University of Toronto investigators showed that injecting endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) into the pulmonary circulation of rats results in microvasculature regeneration, a process they say might translate into therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension. Current treatment of PAH, a rare but deadly disease of largely unknown origin, is merely palliative. Team leader Duncan Stewart says that research to date has missed the point b

"A [student] ther was of oxenford also ... Ful thredbare was his [overcoat] ... For hym was [rather] have at his beddes heed Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, or [fiddle], or gay psaltry." --Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, circa 1386 "I can understand why the faculty would want to wear sandals, but do they have to be flip-flops?" --Caltech postdoc, 2003 True, we now have teraflop computers instead of parchment, but in on

Strict rules will mean a disaster for Italian research, say scientists

Science and Technology Committee to investigate issues around access to information

A much-anticipated breakthrough fails to materialize

US Senate delays vote on NIH, NSF funding until next January

Last-minute change to cut delay in talks from 2 years to 1 year angers UK