Articles by Katherine Bagley

Techniques for simpler, cheaper, and better antibody purification

When it comes to studying cephalopod brains and behavior, it helps to have a philosopher around.

Starving brain cells can stimulate hunger through a common cannibalistic act, possibly explaining why some dieters can’t resist temptation.

A stem cell homing signal may explain why so many cancers spread to bone tissue

Mice lacking normal gut bacteria show differences in brain development and behavior

By Katherine Bagley Guerilla science Armed with a master’s degree in chemistry from Oxford University, Richard Bowdler did the unexpected—he took a break from the lab, started work as a memory consultant, and took a gig dreaming up eccentric games for a British music and arts festival. For 3 years, Bowdler organized wheelchair races and set up driving ranges for golfers who hit eggs and fruits rather than balls at the annual Secret Garden Party, hel

By Katherine Bagley Darwin to Joseph Hooker, 1844 Researchers and historians have collected approximately 15,000 letters written both to and by Charles Darwin in an effort to better understand his life and science. One of his most frequent contacts was Joseph Dalton Hooker, a botanist who helped identify many of the plant specimens collected during Darwin’s HMS Beagle journey, including his famed stop at the Galapagos Islands. Their discourse, which spann

Working and living at TRUDEAU After not even making the top 40 lists the past 3 years, the Trudeau Institute shot to The Scientist’s number one spot in 2010. Postdocs there attribute this accolade to the institute’s specialized research focus on infectious and inflammatory diseases, collaboration between labs, and idyllic location on Saranac Lake in the heart of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Related Articles

NOVARTIS—Postdoc play money Another newcomer to the Best Places to Work survey—Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research’s campus in Horsham, United Kingdom—takes top honors among international institutions this year. With only nine postdocs, Horsham is the smallest group on the list, but the postdocs say they prefer it that way. “Being a postdoc is incidental most of the time,” says Ian Craig, a computational

A new life for research in PORTUGAL In an effort to become scientifically competitive with the rest of Europe, Portugal has dedicated significant financial and administrative resources to improving its research infrastructure over the past 2 decades—a movement that helped breed five times the number of life science PhDs and boost publication rates 17-fold. In the past 2 years, Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology has turned

Who pays top dollar? To the disappointment of postdocs, many institutions set their salaries according to the pay scale recommended by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or lower. Surprisingly, however, many government research centers reported higher postdoc salary caps than those in industry or academia, with the highest paid postdocs making twice the $51,552 paycheck recommended by the NIH in 2009 for those with 7 or more years of experience.

Survey Methodology Survey Form: A web-based survey form was posted from September 9 to November 30, 2009. Results were collected and collated automatically. Invitations: E-mail invitations were sent to readers of The Scientist and registrants on The Scientist web site who identified themselves as non-tenured life scientists working in academia or other non-commercial research institutions. The survey was also publicized on The Scientist web site and through new

By Katherine Bagley Sweet relief Courtesy of LactoPharma In the fall of 2009, a group of New Zealand scientists were putting the finishing touches on a new therapeutic to help cancer patients recover from chemotherapy, in preparation for a clinical trial. All they had left to do was choose a flavor. “It was no easy task,” says Arie Geursen, general manager of LactoPharma, the entity developing the therapeutic, presented in the form of an ic

By Katherine Bagley Seeds of Conflict New research unearths the secrets of the antagonistic forces that shape seedling development. Courtesy of Cristina Martinez / Deng Lab, Yale University Every seed begins its life as the subject of a war—between light and gibberellins, a type of plant hormone, which work antagonistically to guide seedling development. In short, gibberellins promote the early elongation of a plant’s stem, while light inhi

By Katherine Bagley Biofuel breakdown The paper: T. Searchinger et al., “Use of U.S. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land-use change,” Science, 319:1238–40, 2008. (Cited in 204 papers) The finding: Fossil fuel energy systems are one-sided: emitting carbon, but not sequestering it. Crops, on the other hand, help sequester carbon as they grow, a fact that led most prior research to conclude