Embryology regulator won't make resolution on whether or not to permit research on human-animal hybrids until autumn, to the relief of many scientists

Twenty-one years ago, a young Australian geneticist named Nick Martin published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (83:4364-8, 1986) that described a curious sideline to his regular work on the epidemiology of disease in twins. The study, which Martin coauthored with his mentor Lyndon Eaves, probed the transmission of social attitudes among more than 4,500 pairs of fraternal and identical twins. The results suggested that genetic factors, rather than cultural o

When Russell Snell and his colleagues at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, were recently designing a study to test a candidate Alzheimer's gene, they ran up against a roadblock: How to put together a control group? "It's a problem," says Snell. "How do you identify a person who is not going to develop Alzheimer's?" Need 100-year-old research subjects? Try Medicine. The obvious answer was to find a group of healthy people who had passed the usu

A couple of years ago, Australian postdoc Nate Lo was working at the University of Milan, looking for human pathogens in the tick species Ixodes ricinus, the main vector for Lyme disease. It was all routine until the day his PCR screening protocol revealed a novel 16S rRNA sequence. When his team took a tick apart to look for the new bug, they found it in the ovaries. And, when they looked closely at electron micrographs of infected ovarian tissues, they could see that the microbes w

Chinese expert in communicable diseases to lead the organization

On a brisk August morning in southern Australia, 16 recent PhD graduates and postdocs from around the country are sitting in a windowless room, fretting about the way science is portrayed in the media. They're attending a weeklong media-training boot camp, and the fraying of their nerves is palpable as they talk about what worries them most: the superficial way their research might be handled, overhyping, and how to handle difficult questions. "What's the point of science communicati

When the space shuttles Discovery and Atlantis blasted off in the direction of the International Space Station (ISS) this year, passengers of a more botanical variety vastly outnumbered the seven astronauts on board. Secured in small seed cassettes, some 1600 seeds of the cress species, Arabidopsis thaliana, took the flight for a research project designed to help tease out the tropic influences of gravity and light on plant growth, while perhaps helping to find a way to grow crops for lo

An exhibit at London's Dana Centre uses fairground rides to explore the biology of excitement

What the Park Grass Experiment has to say about seed, fertilizer, and more

An initial six cell lines will soon be ready for withdrawal

Tactical voting in the Executive Board could mean top candidates don't make the shortlist

Legislative changes giving Russia's government more authority over the Academy of Sciences raise concerns