On Tuesday, the world met "Ida" -- a 47-million-year-old primate fossil touted as a "REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING," according to a press release. The media went berserk.__ linkurl:Google News;http://news.google.com/news/more?um=1&ned=us&cf=all&ncl=d7C9QQwOhm44kwMjlfMWOc4TlTr4M __now lists more than 750 articles relating to little ol' __Darwinius masillae__ -- and the search engine itself even changed the lettering on its linkurl:logo;http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/wp-cont

Researchers have discovered the basis for the magnetic personalities of migratory ants. These social insects integrate magnetic soil nanoparticles into their antennae to help them navigate the forests of South America, according to a study published online today (May 20) in the __Journal of the Royal Society Interface__. A Pachycondyla marginata antattacking a termiteImage: Alex WildThe study is a "great integration of physics and biology," linkurl:Robert Srygley,;http://www.ars.usda.gov/pandp/

The retroactive nature of the NIH's proposed guidelines on human stem cell research will exclude funding for many existing stem cell lines that were ethically created yet don't meet the stringent criteria of the proposal's technical requirements, according to a new linkurl:report;http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(09)00210-0 published online today (May 14) in __Cell Stem Cell__. The proposed regulations outline nine distinct elements to be documented in written informed cons

The open ocean is teeming with microbial small RNAs that regulate a multitude of environmental processes ranging from carbon metabolism to nutrient acquisition, according to a linkurl:paper;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/abs/nature08055.html published in tomorrow's (May 14) issue of __Nature__. Particle traps like these were usedto collect water column samplesImage: SOEST/University of Hawaii"What makes this study quite exciting is the access to novel and previously unidentifie

Strong sales to academic researchers are helping companies that provide mice, rats, and other model organisms for research weather the global economic crisis, despite a downturn in demand from pharma and biotech. Image: Understanding Animal Research/Wellcome ImagesAt the linkurl:Jackson Laboratory,;http://www.jax.org/ a non-profit mouse supplier in Bar Harbor, Maine, overall demand is down by "single digits," Auro Nair, associate general manager of linkurl:JAX Mice & Services,;http://jaxmice.ja

Researchers have discovered a new category of cancer caused by chromatin recognition gone awry. 

Many top tier science journals are going into overdrive to publish data about the emerging swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus epidemic, compressing what is often a multi-month process into just a few days or weeks. Influenza virusImage: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory,Florida State UniversityAn international research team led by linkurl:Neil Ferguson;http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/people/neil.ferguson/ of Imperial College London published a linkurl:report;http://www.sciencemag.

Research involving non-human primates was given the go-ahead today (May 5) in an initial vote by the European Parliament, although legislators called for most basic testing on great apes to be outlawed. Image: Understanding Animal ResearchThe new parliamentary directive "strikes a compromise between ensuring that research can continue in the EU and improving animal welfare," linkurl:Neil Parish,;http://www.neilparish.co.uk/ a Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the UK, sai

Apparently APP By Elie Dolgin Axons lose surface APP in the absence of trophic factors. Images Courtesy of A. Nikolaev and M. Tessier-Lavigne Ten years ago, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neurobiologist then at the University of California, San Francisco, saw an image he's never forgotten. His postdoc Zhigang He (now at Harvard) showed him a picture of stained mouse embryos indicating that the beta-amyloid precursor protein (APP), a known "bad acto

Now Showing: RNA Activation RNA is supposed to silence genes, not boost gene expression. So why are scientists seeing just that? By Elie Dolgin Modified from original photo. © 2009, The Ann Arbor News. All Rights Reserved. reprinted with permission. fter getting the data back from the very first experiment at her new job, Rosalyn Ram, a lab technician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, wa

The Women That Stay Thinking about leaving science? Here are programs that helped keep women in research careers in the United States and abroad. By Elie Dolgin © Images.com / Corbis In February 1999, evolutionary biologist Ashleigh Griffin defended her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Then, one month later, she gave birth. For the next three years, she stayed home caring for her daughter while writing up her

Hints of a Helix, circa 1947 By Elie Dolgin Nondegraded DNA from calf thymus. Appearing by Permission of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. MHS inv. 37391 Nearly four decades after biochemist Phoebus Levene first postulated his "tetranucleotide hypothesis" in 1910, most scientists still believed that DNA was made up of equal numbers of the four nucleotide bases in a repeating tetrameric structure, with ea