While the anthrax letters of October 2001 sent microbiologists and geneticists into an unwanted limelight, the chemical community also found itself suddenly grappling with how their field fits into the post-9/11 world. The news from a Jan. 14-16 meeting at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in Irvine, California, "National Security and Homeland Defense," was upbeat. The goal of the meeting, the third in a series called Challenges for the Chem

For many animals, to stick is to survive. Nature's varied adhesive structures and substances enable animals to stick to inert substrates, to each other, and even to parts of themselves. An octopus uses its suckers to grab food, a gecko coordinates its highly specialized feet to ascend a wall, and a mussel emits strings of proteinaceous goo to hold fast to a rock in times of turbulence. Insects coordinate their jumping motions by choreographing contact of leg parts. Some species can even multitas

Single nucleotide polymorphisms--variants in DNA sequences better known as SNPs and pronounced snips--provide a shortcut to comparing genes and genomes within and among species. The need to study SNPs has spawned a number of companies aimed at matching SNP patterns to disease risks. A few other organizations, however, are taking a broader view: mining SNPs for clues to human diversity and evolution. Association studies that correlate SNP patterns to disease risks are straightforward. Clues to

Traditionally, high school and university curricula neatly fragment science into physics and chemistry, geology and biology. But that's not the way that the natural world works. In recognition of this disconnect, the National Science Foundation's "Biocomplexity in the Environment" program is funding explorations of the links that connect the living and nonliving components of the planet. Research sites involved in the effort span the globe, from coral reefs to estuaries, from urban/rural bound

A silicon chip biosensor the size of a grain of sand and developed at the University of Rochester can distinguish Gram-negative from Gram-positive bacteria. According to Benjamin Miller, assistant professor of chemistry, and Philippe Fauchet, professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering, this "smart bandage" offers promising applications in diagnostics, forensics, and food safety (S. Chan et al., "Identification of Gram negative bacteria using nanoscale silicon microcavities," The

It wasn't easy getting to the 4th International Meeting on Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and Complex Genome Analysis held Oct. 10-15 at the Wenner-Gren Foundation in Stockholm. A week earlier, as flight cancellations continued in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, SwissAir had declared bankruptcy and an SAS jet had crashed in Milan, further disrupting schedules. So it was little surprise that several speakers had to phone in their talks. But not J. Craig Venter, president and chief sc

Americans are getting a crash course in microbiology. The delivery of anthrax spores with the daily mail took the U.S. populace completely by surprise. But anyone who has read Ken Alibek's Biohazard, an account of bioweaponry in the former Soviet Union,1 or Richard Preston's fictional The Cobra Event,2 or followed periodic updates on bioterrorism here in The Scientist or in other journals, could have predicted an attempt to subvert biology into weaponry in the wake of Sept. 11. The government k

Plague has earned a place in history books as the Black Death of medieval Europe, and in novels, from Albert Camus' classic The Plague, to the more recent Year of Wonders.1,2 A different medium for telling the tale of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis is its genome, recently sequenced by researchers at the Sanger Centre, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine.3 In addi

In genetics, certain terms sometimes mask what scientists do not yet understand, such as "junk DNA." Similarly, the chromosomal regions just proximal to the tips--the subtelomeres--have been dubbed "buffers," ill-defined DNA sequences that somehow support the telomeres, which control the cell cycle and cellular aging. A team of researchers from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, the University of California, Irvine, and John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, has used single-copy sequences in

As the AIDS pandemic enters its third decade, viral resistance is beginning to counter the success of "highly active antiretroviral treatment" (HAART), the multidrug cocktails introduced in 1996. "Viral resistance is a significant problem, particularly for patients who began therapy in the pre-protease inhibitor era and who developed resistance to multiple reverse transcriptase inhibitors," says Robert Schooley, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Cen

To watch the X-Files' Dana Scully probe corpses, you'd think that every physician and scientist is expert in reading clues in maggot patterns. Not so. The American Board of Forensic Entomology (ABFE) lists just eight members; a total of 63 professionals practice this science worldwide. Forensic entomology is the study of arthropods, used to solve matters of legal interest, most often of a criminal nature. "It's mostly a repeated tale of human tragedy combined with some remarkable insect ecology,

The idea sounds audacious: catalog all life on Earth within 25 years, a human generation. The All-Species Inventory hopes to do just that, with private funds and the help of a worldwide network of scientists and nature lovers. "It is a dream, but a neat one," says A. Townsend Peterson, curator of ornithology at the natural history museum and associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He is one of 40 scientific advisers to the All-Species effort