One day my adviser asked me to accompany him to an unoccupied lab whose former occupant had retired. It was like entering a well-appointed haunted house: glassware on the shelves, awaiting use; chemicals in the hood, fuming; gel boxes idling on the bench. It was a lab, but its eeriness was unsettling; it felt somehow wrong to be there without the owner. I was snapped out of my thoughts by my adviser, who turned suddenly and asked, "What do you think of this centrifuge?" Now I understood why we h

Erica P. JohnsonTo bring scientific concepts into the mainstream, sometimes explaining popular culture helps. Inspired by TV's Sex and the City and its heroine, Carrie, who often wobbles around in designer shoes, Paul Stevenson at the UK-based Institute of Physics developed a formula to determine the maximum "safe" height for such footwear. Stevenson, of the University of Surrey, wanted to see just how high Carrie could go. "As you get up in a high heel," Stevenson says, "your base of support is

As a young postdoc, I accidentally stumbled upon the secret to getting my protein preps to work; unfortunately, my solution is unpublishable. It's an unnamed, hand-sized, stuffed purple dragon with a fuzzy mane and shiny wings. I got it at a museum gift shop on a particularly bad protein-prep day. Something, I have no clue what, told me to buy it. When I returned to the lab, magic started happening. I had thought all my protein had precipitated, but it was back in solution. My column, which I ha

Not only that, he controls our DNA