The Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard laid off 24 of its MIT employees last week, citing an upgrade to next-generation, high-throughput, genome sequencing technologies that made those jobs obsolete. "It's purely related to changes in technology," Nicole Davis, a Broad Institute spokesperson, told __The Scientist__, and not a result of a dwindling endowment in the weakened economy. The linkurl:Broad,;http://www.broad.mit.edu/ which was founded in 2003 wit

Gene expression differences suggest cloned human embryos are pluripotent but human-animal hybrids are not

The governing board of the California stem cell agency is delaying $58 million in new grants until March to wait out the poor economy and credit market. The linkurl:California Institute for Regenerative Medicine;http://www.cirm.ca.gov/ was created in 2004 with $3 billion in borrowing power to push stem cell research forward in the state. Since then, it has awarded almost $700 million in research and training grants to universities, institutes and research companies. On Friday, CIRM's board mem

iGEM: Videos Five teams from iGEM 2008 give a rundown of their projects.function showForumVideo(n, videoId,name) { expand(n); var elm = document.getElementById("expandee" + n); if (elm) { elm.innerHTML = name+"[- Hide video]" + "" + ""; trackvideo(name); } }function hideForumVideo(n, videoId) { var elm = document.getElementById("expandee" + n); if (elm) { elm.innerHTML = " "; } collapse(n); }function expand(n) { showElm("exp

Kishor Wasan, a pharmacologist at the University of British Columbia, needed a negative control. It was 2000, and he was investigating a new way to deliver anti-fungal drugs in pill form, generally cheaper and easier to administer than intravenous injections. "I said, 'Let's take a drug I know doesn't work'," Wasan recalls. He turned to amphotericin B, an antifungal membrane disruptor that Wasan

By Elie Dolgin Sticky speciation A limnetic male stickleback (top) would rather mate with a female of his own species than with the benthic female (bottom).Courtesy of Ernie CooperZoologist Jennifer Gow had a hunch. So she booted up her laptop, launched Google Earth, and zoomed in on Nelson Island, a small, largely unpopulated island along the British Columbia coastline. Gow, a postdoc at the University of Bri

A snapshot of the adrenaline target opens the door to more high-resolution, 3-D crystal structures.

How companies plan to make money (really) off of embryonic stem cells.

In a letter to his father, Robert, Charles listed the elder Darwin's objections to his proposed voyage around the world. Credit: Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library" />In a letter to his father, Robert, Charles listed the elder Darwin's objections to his proposed voyage around the world. Credit: Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

"Big science" genetics research in Canada may be left high and dry after the main agency that funds such work was left out of this year's federal budget. linkurl:Genome Canada,;http://www.genomecanada.ca/ a nonprofit established in 2000 to support large-scale genomics and proteomics research, was expecting a level of financing this year in the ballpark of C$120 million ($98m), which would be on par with its last two budgets. Instead, Genome Canada was completely absent from the linkurl:2009 bu

Followers bring out the best in their leaders, and leaders elicit better following skills in their minions, according to a new study of stickleback fish published online today (Jan. 29) in__ linkurl:Current Biology.;http://www.cell.com/current-biology/home __"Actually having good followers helps leaders get on with their tasks," said linkurl:Andrea Manica,;http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/manica/people/am.htm an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge who led the study. "They wer

Evolutionary biologists are the latest victims of the global economic downturn. In a move that has generated a worldwide outcry, Leiden University in the Netherlands is firing nine evolutionary biologists, half of its total evolution-related staff. Leiden officials say the layoffs are in response to a smaller annual science budget, following the Dutch government's reallocation of €100 million ($133 million) last year to fund the linkurl:Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.;ht