Articles by Karen Heyman

The atomic-force microscope (AFM) was developed 20 years ago, but only recently has it become a significant tool for biologists.

Brian Fisher, curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, has such enthusiasm for ants, he can make you feel guilty over spraying the little devils in your kitchen.

When an oscilloscope's audio monitor starts to screech rhythmically in a neurophysiology lab, its waves hint at one of the most puzzling patterns in biology.

Although arguments remain over whether autism is genuinely on the rise to the astonishing degree reported in places like California, there is general agreement among scientists that the condition has a genetic basis.

, you might have been momentarily forgiven for thinking you were reading a celebrity magazine.

Shortly after the invention of the laser, Bell Labs physicist Arthur Ashkin began exploring the range of the new devices.

Three decades and 6,000 papers since the term was first coined, scientists are still debating the mechanisms of long-term potentiation (LTP).1 Defined in 1973 as an increase in synaptic strength following experimentally induced high-frequency stimulation,2 LTP has been consistently controversial. Now at last, "There is a consensus beginning to emerge," says Columbia University Nobel laureate, Eric Kandel, as years of research have begun to make sense of what once seemed irreconcilable contradict

The story goes like this: At a 1976 Biophysical Society meeting, Erwin Neher presented the technique that would win a Nobel Prize for him and Bert Sakmann.

For all the hype about nanotechnology, sometimes small isn't quite small enough.

made history in 1995 when it became the first free-living organism to have its genome completely sequenced.

Premieres on PBS, April 17.

With inquisitive minds and tools as simple as a Waring blender, the work of early phage researchers such as Max Delbruck, Seymour Benzer, and Alfred Hershey generated much of the knowledge underlying contemporary molecular biology.

On a coffee break from the Methods in Computational Neuroscience class he codirects at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass., Bard Ermentrout is chatting with a student. It's unusually difficult to follow the conversation, because Ermentrout, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, is talking entirely in equations – in near parody of most biologists' worst fears of a field populated largely by physicists and mathematicians. But de

TRANSLATING THE RIBOSOME:© 2003 Nature Publishing GroupJoachim Frank and colleagues used cryo-electron microscopy to generate this image of the ribosome bound to release factor RF2 in the presence of a stop codon and a P-site tRNA (left). Then the team overlaid an atomic model of RF2, derived from X-ray data (right; colored orange, purple, red, and green to distinguish domains I, II, III, and IV, respectively). (Reprinted with permission, U.B.S. Rawat et al., Nature, 421:87–90, 2003.)

Reuben Kaufman and graduate student Brian Weiss have found that for females, the secret to staying slim is staying virginal. Fortunately for males, human and otherwise, this works only if you're a special type of tick. Kaufman and Weiss have isolated the engorgement factor protein (EF) in the semen of the tick family ixodidae; this protein inspires gluttony in inseminated females. They have dubbed it "voraxin," from the Latin vorare, to devour.Tick blood lust is ghastly: Some can consume up to 4