British novelist Aldous Huxley in a bid to study perception supposedly taped his conversations after swallowing the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. During one such chat, a researcher asked him to describe how time felt. "There seems to be plenty of it," was all Huxley could offer.1 Silly as that sounds, few have done much better in explaining time or its sensation. Yet scientists are taking the first stabs at answering at least one part of the question: how the brain perceives time. For exam

US food agency finds that meat and milk from clones is safe for human consumption

Two US scientists receive highest presidential honor for groundbreaking work

Attorneys, scientists, and activists would have World Court rule against human experiments

Some proteins lead double or even quadruple lives. In 1994, researchers discovered the gene responsible for Wiskott Aldrich syndrome, an X-linked genetic disorder in which affected patients generally succumb to infections or cancer. Because of the observed immune dysfunction, the protein, called WASP, was believed to regulate lymphocytes or platelets.1 But, challenging the traditionally held one-protein-one-function notion, subsequent studies found that WASP had several jobs, among them orga

Click to view a PDF of antimicrobial peptides in various living organisms (141K) Living organisms produce a vast array of germ-killing peptides as their first-line of defense against infection. Scientists began to learn of these molecules in the 1980s from studies by Hans Boman and colleagues at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. They found that silkworm moth pupae secrete certain peptides that destroy invading bacteria. These controversial peptides (see Antibiotic Arms Race Heats Up) are

© 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.  AT DEATH'S DOOR: Negatively stained Pseu-domonas aeruginosa (A) untreated, (B) treated with amphipathic a helical lytic peptide dia-stereomer (containing both L- and D-amino acids), and (C) treated with with the all L-amino acid peptide. All were treated at 60% of their minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC). At or above the MIC, significant lysis occurs (not shown). (Y. Shai, "Mode of action of membrane active antimicrobial peptides," Biopolymers (Petp