Articles by Lauren Urban

The grand piano in the National Institutes of Health's Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Center fills the facility with music

By Lauren Urban Administrating Science Moving up in academia? How to take on administrative roles while still running a successful and productive lab. © KEITH NEGLEY When Susan Henry was a young professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine she found herself acting as a liaison between graduate students and faculty; she says she just had a “knack” for that kind of work. Henry’s first administrative position was the dir

Last April, approximately 25 high school biology teachers from around the country arrived in Woods Hole, Massachusetts for a 3-day mini-course on insect biology. In classrooms overlooking the Vineyard Sound, the teachers worked in groups to label and identify bugs and process their DNA. The goal: learn how to bring this kind of college-level research into their classrooms.Teachers at a 3-day mini-course in Woods Hole "We are trying to get students to do hands-on, problem-based, student-led in

College students have never been known to go to bed early, and an increasing number of schools are now offering classes at midnight.St. Michael's College at nightImage: Wikimedia commons, MarcusObal "We have a 24-hour town here, this is when our students work," said Sally Johnson, dean of the School of Math and Science at the linkurl:College of Southern Nevada.;http://www.csn.edu/ The 2-year college with 12 campuses in southern Nevada, including a main campus in Las Vegas, chose to offer midn

By Lauren Urban Milica Radisic: Mending broken hearts © Hill Peppard Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, and Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. Age: 33 One night while working in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, grad student Milica Radisic saw how “beautifully and perfectly” an individual cardiomyocyte was pulsating when she

By Lauren Urban US Malaria Deaths, 1870 While malaria still kills over 1 million people each year, most of those deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa—the United States has been free of the disease since 1951. In the 19th century, however, malaria was extremely common within the United States, with over 1 million cases reported during the Civil War alone. The map below depicts deaths from malaria in 1870—10 years before the malaria parasite

There is growing concern about the loss of biodiversity worldwide, but scientists cannot measure how much an ecosystem has changed without good historical data. However, this data may be skewed, with certain time periods, species, or regions better represented than others. linkurl:Elizabeth Boakes,;http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/e.h.boakes an ecologist at Imperial College's Natural Environmental Research Council Centre for Population Biology in Berkshire, United Kingdom and her team looked f

The worst-case scenario of the consequences of global warming - mass extinctions - appears to be a reality for lizards, according to a new report in Science. The authors found that 12 percent of local populations of lizards have already disappeared from hundreds of sites in Mexico. Furthermore, within the next 70 years, the authors predict that 1 in 5 lizard species will no longer exist anywhere on the planet, all the result of rising global temperatures.Sceloporus occidentalisImage: Wikimedia

Far far away, on the mythical world of Soma, an epic battle rages. Heroic warriors are locked in mortal combat with an army of depraved villains, hell bent on infecting the planet and wreaking awful destruction. The fate of Soma hangs in the balance.Coxiella burnettiImage: The Healing Blade, Nerdcore Learning Though Soma isn't real -- it's actually the setting for a new fantasy card game developed by two physicians/self-professed geeks -- it may help medical students learn important lessons abo

A specific epigenetic switch appears to cause age-related memory loss in mice, suggesting this dysregulation could eventually serve as a biomarker for dementia, according to this week's Science. linkurl:Andre Fischer;http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/57944.html at the linkurl:European Neuroscience Institute in Goettingen, Germany;http://www.eni.gwdg.de/ and his team found that older and younger mice exhibited marked differences in one type of epigenetic change to a specific region of one histone,

By Lauren Urban Evolution of science Science is made up of cliques. Throughout Alex Shneider’s career, he has noticed certain people drawn to certain types of science, and certain types of grant proposals always being funded. Shneider, the founder and CEO of Cure Lab, a vaccine biotech based in Massachusetts, came up with a theory to explain why these cliques occur. At first, it wasn’t too popular. Shneider concluded that a certain type

Cells multiply and divide millions of times each day in our bodies, but researchers still don't know exactly which genes are involved in mitosis. The linkurl:MitoCheck;http://www.mitocheck.org/ consortium, a European research collaboration, aims to change that. Like sports trainers filming individual players to dissect the finer points of their games, MitoCheck researchers capture individual cells dividing to tease apart the contributions of individual genes to the process of mitosis. The conso

Human pollutants can cause drastic decreases in microbial diversity, but the bacteria that survive the contamination may yield clues for how to remove such toxins from the environment, according to a study published in The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal. This study suggests "that bacteria can survive in highly toxic environments," said linkurl:Mihai Pop,;http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/~mpop/ a bioinformaticist at University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research.Aircraf

Material from crushed up crab and shrimp shells can restore electrical function to damaged guinea pig spinal cords, suggesting it may one day serve as a treatment for spinal cord injuries, according to a study published April 16th in the Journal of Experimental Biology. This paper is an "intriguing first step," said linkurl:Scott Whittemore,;http://louisville.edu/kscirc/bios/dr-scott-r-whittemore.html professor of neurological surgery at the University of Louisville, who was not involved in th

Alaskan wildlife biologists are questioning the new head of the linkurl:Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation at the Department of Fish and Game;http://www.wildlife.alaska.gov/ (ADFG) -- both his qualifications (or lack thereof) and his pro-hunter management strategies. A group of nearly 40 retired state biologists wrote a linkurl:letter;http://media.newsminer.com/docs/2010/rossiletter.pdf last month to linkurl:Denby Lloyd,;http://www.adfg.state.ak.us/commissioner/commissioner.php commission