The Scientist - Home

Gates' $30 million for tuberculosis diagnostics causes controversy

Agency leans on researchers to be generous with laboratory mouse strains

International stem cell researchers discuss ways to cooperate rather than compete

Foundations | The Genesis of Prozac  Click for larger version (71K) Fifty-plus years ago, Julius Axelrod and his colleagues discovered the phenomenona of neurotransmitter inactivation by reuptake into the nerve terminal, a finding that led to the development of antidepressant drugs. By increasing the neurotransmitter amount in the synaptic cleft, this allowed greater amounts of the neurotransmitter to act on postsynaptic receptors more intensely. "This is an example of basic important

Image courtesy of Magnus Stark The Broad Center for the Biological Sciences, at the California Institute of Technology, designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners James Spudich, a Stanford University biochemist, likens the cell to a city. It incorporates roads and pathways, he says, and houses large structures, akin to buildings, such as the mitochondria and nucleus. But unlike the city, the cell can completely transform its own structure according to its needs. The right signals can convert t

In April, the Department of Energy announced that it will give a $9 million (US) grant to a private, nonprofit institute in Maryland to decode the genome of every organism found in the Sargasso Sea, a body of water covering two million square miles in the North Atlantic. Covered by algae, encased by numerous currents that keep it relatively immobile, the Sargasso is essentially a sea unto itself. It's a good thing that the DOE is awarding this project. As proteomics and systems biology nudge

 Click for larger version (51K) Many of our readers have a musical bent. More than half of the 392 people who responded to our latest survey play a musical instrument. One-third play the piano, and another third play the guitar. Twenty-six other instruments round out the band, which includes bagpipes, didgeridoo, glockenspiel, and bouzouki. The vast majority, 74%, play alone; 17% perform in informal groups; and 9% play in a band or orchestra. They consider themselves so-so musicians, rat

Future of university's aggressive research expansion in question after chief executive's sudden departure

A conversation with the US official in Baghdad trying to help Iraqi scientists pick up the pieces

Scientists starting out at the US patent office have a bright future, just not the same one it used to be

Scientist warns that pharma industry's castoffs could be source of new chemical weapons

Survey finds life science patents raking in hefty profits for some academic institutions