A shortage of donated brain tissue is hampering research into diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and dementia.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an independent organization established by the government in 1997 to fund research infrastructure, announced a new C$45.5 million ($38.2USD million) program last month aimed at providing equipment and attracting researchers to Canadian institutions. The scheme will jump start 251 projects across 44 universities under two funds: C$38.2 million ($32.1USD million) was awarded under the Leaders Opportunity Fund -- a scheme for universities to buy equipmen

Credit: Generated using Polyview-3D / A. Porollo, J. Meller (2007) Versatile Annotation and Publication Quality Visualization of Protein Complexes Using POLYVIEW-3D" /> Credit: Generated using Polyview-3D / A. Porollo, J. Meller (2007) Versatile Annotation and Publication Quality Visualization of Protein Complexes Using POLYVIEW-3D The paper: J. Villén et al., "Large-scale p

Credit: © Robert Karpa" /> Credit: © Robert Karpa When he was a child growing up in northern British Columbia, Leonard Foster's great aunt spread natural willow extract over her garden to promote plant root growth; when Foster and his three younger siblings came down with sore throats, his mother served hot tea spiked with a resinous mixture, called propolis, which is made by honey bees. These traditional customs seemed to work. But Foster wasn't entirely convinced. Star

Four British animal rights activists were found guilty today (Dec. 23) of blackmailing companies that supplied linkurl:Huntingdon Life Sciences;http://www.huntingdon.com/ (HLS), a contract animal-testing company based near Cambridge, England. The activists, part of a group called linkurl:Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC),;http://www.shac.net/ led a campaign from 2001 to 2007 to intimidate several companies with ties to HLS in an effort to shut down the laboratory. Their tactics involved pra

We at __The Scientist__ are all a-flitter because we're now on Twitter. Starting this week, you can sign up to receive our "tweets" at twitter.com/TheScientistLLC. Twitter is a simple messaging service that allows users to share brief text updates -- otherwise known as tweets -- of up to 140 characters. (The last sentence was exactly 140 characters.) Readers can receive Twitter posts on the Web, on their mobile phones, via instant messaging, RSS feeds, Facebook, and various Twitter-dedicated ap

A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct. The website -- called linkurl:Scientific Red Cards;http://www.scientificredcards.org/ -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim. The database might also prevent resear

D. Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist and anthropologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for his work on the infectious brain agents now known as prions, died last Friday (Dec. 12) in Tromso, Norway. He was 85. "He was a genius," linkurl:Robert Klitzman,;http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/bec/staff/klitzman.html a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York and Gajdusek's biographer, told __The Scientist__. "His brain was faster and at a higher level than anyone I've ever met." In the 1950s, link

University College London is offering new unorthodox research grants for its staff without peer review, deadlines, directives, or milestones. The funding, which is open to any UCL employee, is in in the ballpark of £100,000 ($150,000) per year for at least three years for each awardee, according to UCL visiting earth sciences professor linkurl:Don Braben,;http://www.braben.com/VentureResearch/DB.html the scheme's brainchild and the founder of Venture Research International, a company that

Officials have halted enrollment in more than 600 human research studies taking place in Seattle this week after a federal audit found shoddy paperwork in some consent forms. The Department of Veterans Affair's linkurl:Office of Research Oversight;http://www1.va.gov/oro/ determined in a November audit that the linkurl:VA Puget Sound Health Care System;http://www1.va.gov/pugetsound/ should be more careful in documenting that human subjects are competent enough to make reasoned informed consent.

Merck is planning to sell generic copies of blockbuster biotech drugs, the drug maker announced today (Dec. 9) at the annual business briefing at its New Jersey headquarters. Through the newly announced Merck BioVentures division, the company is setting its sights on biotech copycats, which still require their own clinical trials and cost millions to develop. As a result, these drugs are generally priced only marginally lower than branded versions and can still be a lucrative venture. The noti

Britain's largest ever single-shot investment in doctoral student training will be rolled out today (Dec. 5th) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with goodies in store for prospective applied biology PhD students. The £250 ($370) million initiative will create 44 centers across the UK that will train more than 2000 PhD students across five yearly cohorts starting in fall 2009. Most of the multidisciplinary centers -- which provide funding for three and a ha