Courtesy of David McKay, NASAIt weighs only 1.9 kilograms and is an estimated 4.5 billion years old. Yet the ALH84001 meteorite is probably the most argued-about rock in the universe (or at least in our solar system.) The anonymous member of an Antarctic geological field survey who found the rock in 1984 wrote in the field ticket's margins, "Yawza yawza!" Twenty years later, scientists are still making exclamations about the rock's innards. Some suspect that the ghostly forms in this scanning el

Courtesy Sidarta RibeiroSleep, to the joy of nappers everywhere, appears to be a building time for memories. Researchers at the Duke University Medical Center successfully recorded the electric signature of individual neurons firing during the two types of sleep, slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.The team, led by postdoc Sidarta Ribeiro, implanted microscale probes into rat forebrain to determine the firing patterns of individual neurons "resonating" with recently captured memor

Biological databases are everywhere. From protein libraries in Switzerland to genome repositories in Maryland, one could spend hours tracking down all the sources of information on the Internet. An ambitious new project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, aims to bring them all into one easy-to-use, centrally hosted place that is open to all.Culling data from over a dozen databases, the Encyclopedia of Life project (EOL, http://eol.sdsc.edu/) seeks "to catalog the co

Last summer, a member of the biology department of the University of Udine in Italy approached Nicola Vitacolonna with an intriguing project. The ANREP program, which annotates structural motifs in gene or protein sequences, was out of date having been written more than a decade ago. Although still used by molecular biologists, its slow computing ability meant a straightforward multiple search could take all night on a desktop PC. The Udine biologist wanted Vitacolonna, a postdoctoral fellow in

Figure 1When David Mirelman went to China 15 years ago for a conference on amoebic dysentery, a Chinese physician, claiming he knew a cure, handed Mirelman a bottle of fermented garlic. Mirelman took the bottle back to the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, where he began studying the biochemical basis of garlic's curative powers.He quickly honed in on the protein allicin. When a cook crushes a garlic clove, the membranes of its cysts, which are filled with the protease alliinase, break. The

NASA's second lander arrives on red planet to study gray hematite

When Glen Otero worked as a postdoc at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, he noticed a project called NPACI Rocks, which fine-tunes the operating system for cluster computing. That software now forms the core of Otero's own Linux distribution called BioBrew http://www.bioinformatics.org/biobrew.Based on Red Hat Linux kernel 7.3, BioBrew is optimized for cluster computing and bioinformatics. Besides the usual collection of networking and programming tools, the distribution includes such clusteri

The Martian Landers are a first step on a long journey that is part of the new agenda at a biology-centric NASA

Steven Benner is writing a book about the science behind the TV series Star Trek. Benner, a biochemist at the University of Florida, contemplates how basic biochemistry might be different elsewhere in the universe. This search for alternative biochemistry is described by a new phrase: the search for 'weird life.'To many scientists, Benner's night and day jobs aren't separated by much. He disagrees heartily. "There's a vast difference between science fiction and the search for weird life," he say

NASA's Spirit Lander to touch down in tricky Gusev Crater

$22 million program would provide employment for former weapons researchers

European and NASA Mars landers trip over each other to be first to discover life on Mars