The molecular orientation of compounds brought to Earth by meteorites could have determined the world's chemistry long before life began, according to a new linkurl:study;http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811618106 published online today (Mar. 16) in the __Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences__. Artist's impression of the origins ofleft-handedness (click to enlarge)Image: NASA/Pat RawlingsAmino acids come in left-handed and right-handed forms, which, like a pair of human hand

Facing budget cuts of around $34 million, linkurl:Roswell Park Cancer Institute;http://www.roswellpark.org/ in Buffalo, NY, laid off 24 of its staff scientists last week. Roswell Park Cancer CenterImage: flickr/Roswell ParkThe fired researchers -- who fall under three titles: research affiliate, lab technician and research associate -- were "physically walked out of the building" last Friday (Mar. 6) with "no warning," Darcy Wells, a spokesperson for the linkurl:New York State Public Employees

Britain's top universities have asked the government for £1 billion ($1.4 billion) to finance university spin-off companies, a measure that could help bolster the faltering UK economy and prop up the biotech industry, according to__ linkurl:Education Guardian.;http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/research-funding Image: flickr/a.drian__The call was spearheaded by Imperial College London with backing from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, as well as the linkur

Cornell University's linkurl:Weill Medical College;http://www.med.cornell.edu/ has agreed to pay the federal government $2.6 million to settle civil claims that it defrauded the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense in connection with research grants between 1991 to 2007. The dispute related to allegations that an unnamed Weill researcher failed to disclose all of his or her financial support in grant applications and annual reports. Funding agencies regularly use this inf

Spraying plants with nitrogen-rich fertilizers does more than just make crops grow bigger; it also molds the chemical composition of their genomes and proteomes, according to a linkurl:study;http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/msp038 published online last week (Mar. 2) in the journal __Molecular Biology & Evolution__. "This tells us how modifications in the environment can have a big effect on a species and its genome, and how quickly it can happen," said linkurl:Sudhir Kumar,;ht

A long-defunct gene that is now involved in Crohn's disease was resurrected over the course of human evolution after being "dead" for millions of years, according to a linkurl:report;http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000403 published online today (Mar. 5) in __PLoS Genetics__. "This is probably the first example of a gene coming back from the dead after being gone for 25 million years," linkurl:Evan Eichler,;http://www.gs.washington.edu/faculty/eichler.htm a gen

With the current system of scholarly publishing in a state of flux -- some might even say in crisis -- several institutions are experimenting with innovative ways of ensuring that their researchers can continue to effortlessly publish, read, and disseminate their work. Image: linkurl:flickr/wakingtiger;http://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3157622608/ The problems in publishing aren't new, but are getting worse: Journal subscription costs are far out-stripping library budgets and research in

All Systems Go Some peculiar microorganisms are showing systems biology can color in what's missing from models of biochemical and cellular networks. By Elie Dolgin n April 22, 2006, Nitin Baliga, a microbiologist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, was spending a lazy Saturday afternoon at home, when he noticed an enticing email in his inbox from his ISB collaborator Richard Bonneau. The subject line: "woooooohoooooo!" Baliga'

THE LEDOUX STRATEGY for finding the brain circuits involved in emotional memory (inspired by Kandel and Mishkin) By Joseph LeDoux Step one:Create a memory: pair an electric shock with a loud noise, so that the noise is remembered as the beacon for imminent shock. Step two: Identify the neural circuits that form and store the memory: make lesions in the brain by applying electrical current locally and testing if the animal can still learn to associate the tone

Using the bacterium Streptococcus thermophilis, a team led by Philippe Horvath at the Danish food ingredient company Danisco, integrated bacteriophage sequences into "clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeat" (CRISPR) regions to generate phage-resistant bacterial strains. "They directly confirmed the prediction," says Eugene Koonin, a computational biologist at the US National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Credit: WAPMC" /> Credit: WAPMC The paper: S. Lavergne and J. Molofsky, "Increased genetic variation and evolutionary potential drive the success of an invasive grass," Proc Natl Acad Sci, 104:3883–8, 2007. (Cited in 37 papers) The finding: To compare genetic diversity between invasive and indigenous plants, University of Vermont evolutionary ecologists Sébastie

Researchers have for the first time reprogrammed human skin cells to a pluripotent state without using viruses, according to twin studies published online today in __Nature__. The approach "is truly epigenetic," linkurl:Richard Young,;http://web.wi.mit.edu/young/ a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the research, told __The Scientist__. "You introduce a set of master regulators, they're expressed, they reprogram the cell, and then you successfully