Accuracy in Recounts It can take a pathologist, moving a micrometer across a slide under a microscope, days to measure 10 different layers in a skin tissue sample. It can also take days to count regrown or restenosed endothelial cells to gauge the effect of a drug on, say, ruptured coronary artery elastic lamina. And a second pathologist may get different results. But Mark Braughler of TissueInformatics, speaking at the Techvest Tissue Repair, Replacement, and Regeneration conference in New Yor

Image courtesy of Eyewire ©2000, Graphic: Cathleen Heard How do you make a neuron? Nowadays, that depends on how you like your neurons. Perhaps you're having problems expanding your neural stem cells (NSCs) to large numbers because after repeated passaging, they lose the phenotype or go into crisis. Read the June Nature Biotechnology, where National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke neurobiologist Ron McKay offers a recipe for making dopaminergic and GABAnergic neurons from rat

Four class 1 molecules are constructed around a fragment of protein from a virus to make a tetramer Which of the following comments are immunologists making about the tetramer assay these days? A) "It's changed our life." B) "It's just an assay." If you answered "both," you're up on your immunology. The tetramer is just an assay, but it's been making immunologists giddy in the last few years. Peter Doherty of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital made the first statement (wh

The word astronomical aptly describes current price estimates for a manned jaunt to Mars: $40,000 per pound. "That's an expensive can of Coke" for astronauts making the trip, says Brian Sauser of NASA's New Jersey Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT). So NSCORT's mission is not to figure out how to ship food, air, and energy to Mars, but to create and re-create it up there. Speaking at a recent meeting of Science Writers in New York, the New York science writer's associati