Iceland biotech linkurl:deCODE Genetics;http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/4/1/20/1/ is taking a hit from the global financial downswing. The company's stock price has plunged 54% since September to $0.45 a share. According to NASDAQ's s regulations, companies must keep their share prices over $1. DeCODE dipped below $1 on September 10, and has 180 days to bounce back to maintain a NASDAQ listing. (The company's net worth, $27.88 million, puts it above the $5 million -- not $50 million, as lin

A diseased mammalian embryonic heart boosts its production of heart muscle cells to spur its own regeneration, according to a linkurl:study;http://www.developmentalcell.com/content/article/abstract?uid=PIIS1534580708003882 appearing tomorrow in Developmental Cell. "The mammalian heart has a phenomenal capacity to fix itself," linkurl:Timothy Cox;http://depts.washington.edu/chdd/iddrc/res_aff/cox.html at the University of Washington, the study's lead author, told The Scientist, "which is importa

Will BioMed Central, the publishing house that's been the flagship for open access for nearly a decade, be in good hands with Springer? Yes, say some open access advocates, as long as the BioMed Central (BMC) publishing model is allowed to persevere. Indeed, the linkurl:acquisition this week;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55074/ of BMC by Springer may send the signal to other commercial groups that open access works. "I think it's a good sign for open access," Heather Joseph, execut

The cell biologist discovered the ribosome and other cell components, earning him a Nobel, a Lasker, and a National Medal of Science

Researchers in the UK should report more details than they currently do about how much their lab animals are suffering, according to recent recommendations by a UK working group. But one prominent pain researcher thinks such requirements are useless. Last week, a working group made up of research scientists, veterinary surgeons, and animal care technicians, representing the Animal Procedures Committee and Lab Animals Science Association, released a report calling for more stringent reporting o

The world's largest open access publisher, BioMed Central, has been sold to Springer. BioMed Central (a former sister company of The Scientist) publishes 180 peer-reviewed journals under the open access publishing model, meaning that anyone can read articles for free once they are published, and authors pay a per-page fee to publish in the journals. There are no plans to change the journal publishing costs or fees, Matt McKay, director of public relations at BioMed Central, told The Scientist.

A former member of a high profile stem cell biology research team at the University of Minnesota has been found guilty of falsifying data, a university investigatory panel has ruled. Morayma Reyes, a former PhD student in the lab of prominent stem cell biologist linkurl:Catherine Verfaillie,;http://www.kuleuven.be/cv/u0048658e.htm was under investigation by the university for fabricating data in a linkurl:2002 Nature paper;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?orig_db=PubMed&db=pubmed&cmd=Se

Two years ago, whenever members of Jon Lundberg's team at Karolinska University wanted to get near their lab mice, they donned sterile gloves and reached into a steel isolator box. Not typical research rodents, these creatures had been bred to be completely germ-free. The technicians in the animal lab delivered the baby mice by cesarean section and kept them in complete isolation to eliminate the

In the last several years, stem cell banks and registries have begun springing up across the country and internationally. But are all these facilities helping research, or just duplicating efforts? The latest addition to the list of such facilities is the stem cell registry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, launched earlier this month. That school also has a human embryonic stem cell (HESC) core facility to store and distribute the cell lines. There are plenty of others: the N

Until now, reprogramming fully differentiated cells into a pluripotent state has had a major drawback: the use of genome-integrating linkurl:retroviruses;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54750/ to do the job. But a new study published tomorrow in Science reports on the creation of reprogrammed cells without such integrating viruses. "The number one priority for labs working on iPS translation is to alleviate this problem of integration of viruses into the human genome," linkurl:Ali Bri

Big pharma's interest in linkurl:stem cell research;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54900/ is picking up speed. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is expanding its research into the technology and plans to open a second regenerative medicine unit in Cambridge, UK, this November, Reuters linkurl:reported;http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE48MBY020080923?sp=true yesterday. Pfizer isn't the only one. In July, GlaxoSmithKline entered a linkurl:5-year, $25 million collaboration;ht

Were animals with four limbs the first to evolve fingers and toes-- or did such digits evolve long before? A linkurl:study published today;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature07339.html (September 21) in Nature claims to resolve this long-standing question. For many years, most paleontologists debated whether digits arose 380 million years ago as a novel evolutionary trait in tetrapods, or four-footed creatures. The new study, led by Catherine Boisvert, at Uppsala Unive