NIH-funded postdocs won't be getting a raise this year. The agency linkurl:announced;http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-036.html last week that it would freeze National Research Service Award (NRSA) stipends for linkurl:postdocs;http://www.the-scientist.com/2007/3/1/49/1/ and trainees in 2008. Because the NIH froze NRSA funding last year also, first-year postdocs will get $36,996 in stipends, the same they received in 2006. These budget amounts fall short of the 2001 NIH

linkurl:Alzheimer's;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/home/53215/ disease researchers have long tried to address a linkurl:key question:;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15006/ Do amyloid plaques cause the disease, or do other disease mechanisms come first? A new linkurl:study;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/abs/nature06616.html published today (February 6) in Nature reports that plaques form immediately before neurite damage, suggesting that amyloids do play a dir

The less-than-reputable entrepreneur at the helm of a company peddling hypo-allergenic cats is under scrutiny again -- this time for fraudulent "designer cats." But now he's taking the offensive by making allegations against journalists who have covered his company. In January of last year, The Scientist staff writer Kerry Grens investigated a company called Allerca that claimed to have created the world's first hypoallergenic cat. Grens uncovered a string of shady dealings and questionable

Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist who shaped the field of bacterial genetics, and served as chair of The Scientist's advisory board since 1986, died on Saturday (February 2). He was 82. Lederberg shared a linkurl:Nobel Prize;http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1958/index.html in physiology and medicine in 1958 for the discovery that certain strains of bacteria reproduce by mating, thereby exchanging their genetic material. This overturned the idea held

Mendel Upended? How the behavior of an Arabidopsis gene could overturn the classical laws of genetics. By Andrea Gawrylewski 1 She had found that a mutant Arabidopsis plant could "fix itself" back to the wild-type and take on the genetics of its grandparents. That seemed to contradict the laws of Mendelian inheritance. Since the late 1990s, Lolle, then at Harvard University, had been collaborating with Purdue University's Robert Pruitt, to study how the plant cuti

Surprising Observations By Andrea GawrylewskiMendel upended? Slideshow: Images from the lab of Susan LolleLolle and her colleagues observed an inheritance pattern in hothead plants that didn't match what classical genetic laws would predict. Instead of first generation progeny inheriting their parents' alleles, 10% had wild-type alleles.

One day last summer, a customer service representative for a company called Crystalite Salt received a phone call from Jennifer Lardge, a physicist. Lardge was curious about the science behind one of their products: lumps of salt, called lamps, that are meant to improve your health when they are heated. "I was looking at your Web site and I was just wondering about how salt lamps actually work," Lardge said. "Right," responded the Crystalite Salt customer service representativ

While researchers agree that the birth of new neurons plays an important role in the adult brain, they have long linkurl:debated;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23351/ to which aspects of learning, memory and behavior the process contributes. A new linkurl:study;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature06562.html published today (January 30) in Nature has used a gene knockout approach to link adult neurogenesis to spatial learning. The paper showed that adult mice

A linkurl:story;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7208768.stm by the BBC last week reporting that a treatment of infrared light through the scalp could reverse Alzheimer's disease has scientists -- and skeptical science writers -- scratching their heads. Gordon Dougal, director of a UK-based company called Virulite, is leading a study that tests whether infrared light, beamed on the head from a special helmet, might boost cell growth in the brain (Virulite currently sells a product also based i

In his linkurl:State of the Union;http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/01/20080128-13.html address last night, President Bush asked Congress to double the funding of basic research in the physical sciences, but asked life scientists to keep their work "ethical," reiterating his stance on the need for legislation banning human cloning. To bolster his call to ban human cloning, the President cited recent research by Yamanaka and Thomson, who both reported last November that stem cell-lik

The National Institutes of Health is asking that the University of Connecticut return $65,005 in grant money for not complying with animal welfare laws, according to an Email sent to the university health center by the National Eye Institute. The bulk of the money had been award to the university for research performed by neurologist linkurl:David Waitzman.;http://grad.uchc.edu/phdfaculty/waitzman.html Between the fall of 2005 and summer of 2006, Waitzman received several citations from the US

With few approved drugs available to treat Alzheimer disease, researchers are working on new compounds that block amyloid formation. But many potential drugs in the pipeline for the disease and other amyloid-associated illnesses may not be as promising as thought, according to a new linkurl:study;http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nchembio.65.html published today (January 27) in Nature Chemical Biology. The research, led by linkurl:Brian Shoichet;http://ucsf.edu/dbps/facu