For more than two decades, Evan Balaban has honed his skills at manipulating embryonic tissue samples using tiny instruments of his own making. He can cut a small access window into a quail's egg, and using a scalpel no wider than a human hair, excise a few hundred thousand cells from the bird's developing central nervous system. This is only the first step of the intricate process required to place this minuscule brain into another animal's head. Some of these surgeries end in untimely

FEATUREIs This Life? BY JACK LUCENTINI Hordes of green, sub-microscopic balloons float in a watery mixture in Jack Szostak's laboratory at Harvard Medical School. They come in a variety of shapes: spheres, blimps, worms. And as Szostak examines magnified images of them, he can't help but notice a striking resemblance to bacterial ecosystems, puls

FEATUREIs This Life?Just What Is Synthetic Biology? The term "synthetic biology" appears in the title of a 1913Nature article but then disappears until the 1980s, at which pointits use seems interchangeable with recombinant DNA technology.today, the term is used to describe the wholesale engineering of geneticcircuits, entire genomes, and even organisms and has appea

Scientists and journals say fired MIT researcher's misconduct raises concerns about multiple papers

Recent results are as puzzling as they are beguiling, dredging up debates about the nature of language and the ability of a single gene to affect it so greatly.

Effects on the field are still unknown, researchers say, but one advance may be in jeopardy

Understanding the mechanisms that underlie aging remains a bedeviling problem, but not because of a lack of answers.

Photo: Nils Kroger, Regensburg UniversityLast summer's publication of the first diatom genome provided insight into the workings of a tiny organism with huge potential for environmental, industrial, and research applications.1 A growing appreciation of the sequence, however, has begun to divulge one of nature's wilder and most productive experiments.Diatoms, a diverse division of one-celled ocean algae with gemlike silica casings, are thought to collectively absorb as much carbon dioxide through

Researchers are approaching a new level of understanding for the neuropathic pain-relief mechanisms of gabapentin.

Neuroscientists today are peering into the brain to understand the drive of romantic love, and they are finding evidence backing the 19th-century philosopher's observation: Love has a striking neural kinship with drug addiction.

The first published study linking gene to disease is often far from the last word on the subject.

Deciphering genetic relationships in cognitive function takes serious effort.