Credit: © 2008 Landon Nordeman" /> Credit: © 2008 Landon Nordeman As a high school student trying to pick a college, Howard Hang was more interested in where he would be able to catch the best waves than academic programs. A native Californian, Hang looked at many of the University of California schools, finally choosing UC, Santa Cruz, which clearly had the best surf. It wasn't long before his surfboard was

Before therapies using human embryonic stem cells can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers will have to answer one key question: where do the cells go when they are injected into the patient? During an FDA meeting earlier this linkurl:month;http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/blog.jsp?type=blog&o_url=blog/display/54544&id=54544 on the safety of embryonic stem cell therapies, the agency grappled with the issues of tracking stem cells in vivo. Regardl

A medical publisher has changed its copyright policy to ease the process for authors to comply with the federal public access mandate. Starting today (May 1), authors will automatically retain copyright of manuscripts submitted to Rockefeller University Press journals, according to an linkurl:editorial;http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/jcb.200804037 published yesterday in the Journal of Cell Biology. Giving copyrights to authors streamlines the process of submitting articles to PubMed Centra

What keeps stem cells pluripotent? In the past six months researchers have linkurl:reprogrammed;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/53873/ human progenitor skin cells and linkurl:fully-differentiated;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54562/ Beta cells back into a pluripotent state. Despite these advances, little is known so far about how pluripotency is regulated. To find out, researchers have set their sights on a group of mammalian regulator genes known as the Polycomb Complex, t

A University of Georgia (UGA) microbiologist and whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency is suing the university Board of Regents, the university research foundation, and five faculty members for accepting federal grant money to publish fraudulent research, according to court documents. David Lewis, an adjunct professor in the university department of ecology, conducted EPA-funded research in the 1990s on the harmful effects of sewage sludge, and in 1996 wrote a commentary in Natur

Last week, the University of Nevada, Reno, fired and banned from campus an animal nutrition researcher, according to a university spokesperson. Hussein Hussein, associate professor in the department of animal biotechnology, told the linkurl:Reno-Gazette Journal:;http://www.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080415/NEWS02/804150342/1321/NEWS "I was fired by President (Milton) Glick and escorted from my office by campus police as if I were a criminal." Hussein also said he believed he

Partially or fully differentiated cells can acquire, or be reprogrammed for, stem cell-like pluripotency, according to two studies published this week. The research adds to a growing body of work on the subtleties of pluripotency, since last linkurl:November's;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/53873/ landmark somatic cell reprogramming achievement. The first group, led by linkurl:Rudolph Jaenisch;http://www.wi.mit.edu/research/faculty/jaenisch.html at the Whitehead Institute, demonstr

With biotech companies inching up on clinical trials for human embryonic stem cell-based therapies, the US Food and Drug Administration held a meeting yesterday to discuss scientific issues in properly deriving and characterizing the cells, as well as appropriate clinical trial monitoring. Three biotechs, Geron Corporation, Advanced Cell Technology, and Novocell presented some of their scientific work on spinal cord injury, vision impairment, and diabetes, respectively, at the meeting. Geron

Today (April 7) is the start day of the National Institutes of Health mandate requiring that all research funded by NIH dollars be deposited into PubMed Central within one year of publication. Any articles arising from NIH funds that are accepted for publication starting today must be submitted to the database. The policy is part of a mandate issued in January by the NIH in accordance with the Congressional linkurl:appropriations;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54028/ bill for 2008.

Hundreds of bacteria isolated from soil samples are able to live exclusively on antibiotics as a food source, according to a linkurl:report;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5872/100 published today (April 3) in Science. The researchers, led by linkurl:George Church;http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/ of Harvard Medical School, isolated bacteria from 11 distinct soil types. They showed that these bacteria could subsist in culture dishes exclusively on, in some cases, 13-17 of 18

Can the blogosphere work as well as the traditional peer review system? Over the past two months one researcher has been trying to linkurl:find out.;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54189/ Based on his and his publisher's early assessment of the experiment, using blog-based peer reviewing is only partially helpful, The Chronicle of Higher Education linkurl:reported;http://chronicle.com/free/2008/04/2332n.htm?rss today. The experiment was run by University of California, San Diego, com

Coming up with an entirely new approach to cancer therapy can be a headache, as Micromet's Christian Itin has learned.