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

It's Carl Sagan like you've never heard him: his digitized, remixed voice sounds more like something emanating from a radio tuned to a pop music station than from a TV playing a public television documentary. Footage of the scientist in his award-winning PBS series linkurl:Cosmos;http://www.hulu.com/cosmos mingles with stunning computer animations depicting complex scientific concepts. This is all part of a novel project called linkurl:Symphony of Science,;http://www.symphonyofscience.com/index.

By Katherine Bagley A mossy renaissance Protonema cells of Physcomitrella patens The world’s top moss researchers—all eight of them—were gathered in a college lecture hall in Freiburg, Germany when they found out they had been granted funding to sequence a common moss (Physcomitrella patens) genome. It was September 2004, just a year after the group had made a joint decision to increase the moss field’s visibility. The moss field

By Katherine Bagley Stress signal The paper: E. Baena-González et al., “A central integrator of transcription networks in plant stress and energy signaling,” Nature, 448:938–42, 2007. (Cited in 66 papers) The finding: Research on how plants tolerate stress has largely been focused on studying the mechanisms and pathways of how plants respond to specific, isolated sources of stress, such as drought, salt, or temperatu

Early last year, linkurl:Anna Hepler,;http://www.annahepler.com/ a Portland, Maine installation artist, filled a gallery with undulating layers of woven plastic. The rich, latticed structure hung from the walls in the shape of a ship's hull, the blue and white material's translucence highlighted by the room's huge sunlit windows. Anna Hepler Image: Doug Jones But the structure -- so large that visitors of the linkurl:Center for Maine Contemporary Art,;http://www.artsmaine.org/ where the exhibit

New findings challenge researchers' understanding of how the Y chromosome evolved -- rather than being the slowest component of the genome to change, as generally believed, it might just be the fastest. Image:Thomas Lersch, Wiki Commons Despite the close evolutionary link between human and chimpanzees, a comparison of the two species' Y chromosomes show a surprisingly vast number of differences between the two genetic sequences, according to an analysis published linkurl:online;http://www.nat

It's not just the growth rate of biomedical funding that's slowing; the total number of dollars seems to be decreasing as well, says a linkurl:study;http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/303/2/137?home in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association. Image: Refracted Moment's, Flickr To make matters worse, the funding downturn also corresponds to one of the biomedical industry's most stagnant periods in productivity, measured by the number of new drugs approved by the US Food a

By Katherine Bagley Tricky T Cells A new lymphocyte behind autoimmunity has created feverish excitement—and raised as many questions as it answers. TGF-β-Stimulated T cells; stained with a DNA-specific fluorochrome (blue), anti-RORγ (red) and anti-Foxp3 (green) monoclonal antibodies. Courtesy of Liang Zhou As the number of people suffering from autoimmune and inflammatory diseases continues to grow, scientists are

By Katherine Bagley Moss makeup © Jeremy Burgess / Photo Researchers, Inc. The paper: S. Rensing et al., “The Physcomitrella genome reveals evolutionary insights into the conquest of land by plants,” Science, 319: 64–69, 2008. (Cited in 126 papers). The finding: Seventy authors from more than 40 institutions sequenced the first genome of a nonvascular land plant, Physcomitrella patens.

By Katherine Bagley Tara Kieffer: From helix to hepatitis © 2009 Leah Fasten Tara Kieffer fell in love with science during a visit to her father’s biology lab at Montgomery College in Maryland. Inspired by a model of DNA’s double helix, the 5- or 6-year-old Kieffer drew a replica of the structure that has hung on her walls ever since. “DNA was beautiful and it helped spark my interest in biology,” she says. Whil