The University of North Carolina biology department treats its guest speakers like rock stars. And they've got the sweet posters to prove it.

Two senior senators reintroduced a Senate bill yesterday (Feb. 26) that would lift the US ban on federal funding for stem cell research. Senators Tom Harkin (left), ArlenSpecter and Orrin HatchImage: A.C. Glenn/UPI/Newscom/APThe bipartisan measure by Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) would permit research on human embryonic stem cell lines regardless of the date the tissue was obtained and allow new cell lines to be derived from human embryos left over from fertility trea

Thirty years after the toppling of the Shah in Iran, the nation is undergoing another revolution of sorts. Iran is investing heavily in stem cell research, and despite researchers working with limited access to laboratory equipment and resources, the country may emerge as a scientific force to be reckoned with in the stem cell field. Image: flickr/youngrobvEven with their limited infrastructure, Iranian scientists have managed to isolate linkurl:six human;http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/jour

Love hurts -- especially for the female fruit fly. A new linkurl:study;http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122208568/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 published online in the __Journal of Evolutionary Biology__ shows that after fruit flies mate, females ramp up their immune systems in roughly the same fashion as they do when fighting bacterial and fungal infections. "Of course the immune system is there to fight pathogens, but it might be there to protect you against members of your own species

Free online availability of scientific articles increases the likelihood of papers getting cited, especially in the developing world and in the biomedical sciences, according to a new linkurl:study;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5917/1025 published today in __Science__. The question of whether open access drives citations has been hotly contested among scientists, policymakers, and editors, with several recent studies coming down on different sides of the debate. In the most

Rather than funding new grants, the NIH's Office of the Director will spend the vast majority of its $8.2 billion stimulus check to finance grants that have already been reviewed and to supplement existing grants. A smaller sliver -- some $100 million to $200 million -- will fund new two-year "challenge grants," which will support cutting-edge short projects, and will require researchers to report the number of jobs created or preserved by the grant to show that the money is boosting local econ

A Japanese researcher falsified figures in three published papers while working as a visiting postdoc at the NIH's National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) linkurl:reported;http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Tanaka.shtml last week. Kazuhiro Tanaka, a cancer researcher formerly at Kyushu University in Japan, fidgeted with Western blots, Northern blots, and gel shift assay images by duplicating bands in the results of three papers pu

A University of California, San Francisco, postdoc ripped off images from a colleague and jiggered data files, the NIH's Office of Research Integrity (ORI) recently linkurl:reported.;http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Afshar.shtml Nima Afshar, a postdoc working with UCSF molecular biologist linkurl:Joachim Li,;http://cancer.ucsf.edu/people/li_joachim.php falsified microarray scans related to the molecular mechanism of yeast replication initiation. Specifically, she fudged images from another

An open access advocate discusses why she feels that overturning an NIH policy would be a big mistake

The warp and weft of weaving yarn into brains

A bill aimed at undoing the NIH's mandate to make federally-funded research manuscripts freely available on PubMed Central within a year of publication was re-introduced in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday night (Feb. 3). The legislation claims that the NIH policy breaches existing copyright laws that protect academic publishers. If passed, the bill would stop federal agencies from requiring the transfer of copyright as a stipulation of investigators receiving taxpayer-backed grants.

In the latest milestone on the road toward reprogramming cells to pluripotency without permanent genetic modification, researchers have successfully turned the clock back on adult stem cells using only a single transcription factor, according to a study published today (Feb. 5) in__ linkurl:Cell.;http://www.cell.com/ __Ever since Kyoto University's linkurl:Shinya Yamanaka;http://www.frontier.kyoto-u.ac.jp/rc02/kyojuE.html showed in 2006 that the overexpression of just four genes -- c-Myc, Sox2,