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Consultation begins on proposals to shake up UK's approach to research assessment

Intellectual Property Owners Association honors Warren Zapol and Claes Frostell

Office of Research Integrity raises available funds from $200,000 to $750,000

Government rejects claims that MRC mismanaged funds, but MPs won't let matter lie

UK's Medical Research Council reconsiders plans after revolt by scientists

Eric Jakobsson becomes first director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

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