Credit: JASON VARNEY/http://www.varneyphoto.comVARNEYPHOTO.COM" /> Credit: JASON VARNEY/http://www.varneyphoto.comVARNEYPHOTO.COM As a medical student at Catholic University in Rome, Enza Maria Valente remembers helping her genetics professor, a priest in his sixties, as he struggled to calculate probabilities for passing on a genetic disorder. "I would just pick up the answer even before he finished the calculations," she says.Despite her pedigree predilection, Va

An ancient scourge, tuberculosis has made a comeback in recent years.

Just before the holidays, Kenneth Casey's young grand-daughter accidentally slammed the tip of her finger in a car door.

New methods of generating pluripotent cells may placate critics, but may not work, say scientists

Scientists at Purdue University, led by Graham Cooks, professor of analytical chemistry, recently reported a novel method for processing samples for mass spectrometry (MS) analysis.

Joelle BoltAfter garnering data on the harmful effects of dust from sewage sludge used as fertilizer on US and Canadian farms, David Lewis, former microbiologist with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), spoke out in Nature articles.12 The ensuing confrontation with his superiors would get him terminated from the EPA. "I never thought of myself as a whistleblower," he says. To Lewis, whistleblowers pointed fingers at people who fraudulently spent government money to buy things like private

Agriculture interest groups support idea, provided that it's funded with 'new' money

Courtesy of Roland BroschThe regions absent from the attenuated vaccine strain Mycobacterium bovis BCG Pasteur relative to the M. tuberculosis H37Rv genome are shown as gray boxes. Open reading frames (ORFs) are represented as pointed boxes showing the direction of transcription, with colors reflecting the functional classification of the ORFs similar to the ones on the TubercuList server http://genolist.pasteur.fr/TubercuList/.Not long after the genome sequence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis was

A SINGLE-SPIN MRFM EXPERIMENT© 2004 Nature Publishing Groupcan probe spins as deep as 100 nm below the sample surface. The magnetic tip at the end of an ultrasensitive silicon cantilever is positioned 125 nm above a polished SiO2 sample containing a low density of unpaired electron spins. The resonant slice represents those points in the sample where the field from the magnetic tip (plus an external field) matches the condition for magnetic resonance. (Reprinted with permission from Nature,

Still, despite press coverage of vocal opponents, there are Bush supporters among scientists

MUTAGENS AND MITOSIS:Courtesy of Thea GoepfertSection cut through the mammary gland of a rat that had been treated with the carcinogen MNU. Centrosomes (green) are arranged at the base of each nucleus (red), and 45% of cells show amplified chromosomes.Comments from journal article reviewers often surprise or frusrate. But the reviewer response that cell biologist William Brinkley received six years ago left him stunned.Brinkley and his collaborator, Subrata Sen at the University of Texas M.D. An

Two recent reports offer a taste to the little-known underlying immunological mechanisms of celiac disease, a digestive autoimmune disorder triggered by gluten protein, which affects as many as 1 in 100 people in the United States.Working ex vivo, a University of Chicago group found that interleukin-15 overexpression helps convert antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) into rogue lymphokine-activated killers (LAKs) via the CTL receptor NKG2D.1 The LAK cells provoke a more general immune