Most colleges and universities across the US are facing cuts in state funding of up to 20%, and many are preparing by cutting administrative costs, hiring fewer faculty, and focusing their resources on already strong programs. Proposed state budgets aren't final yet; however, despite the fact that it only gets 4% of its $2.9 billion budget from the state, the University of Washington is bracing itself for hard times. The expected 13% cut in state funding, said President Mark Emmert, is "the w

Willem Kolff with artificial heart courtesy of the Willem J. Kolff Collection at the University of Utah Marriott Library Willem Kolff, a University of Utah physician who invented the precursor to kidney dialysis and the first artificial heart, died last week a few days shy of his 98th birthday. Kolff received the 2002 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. He died of natural causes, the New York Times reported. The artificial heart that he helped develop "has now been used in ov

A poet uses cutting-edge technology to see the world and capture it in images

A former UCLA biologist falsified data on biomarkers and treatments for cancer in two journal articles and multiple grant applications, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) reported last week. According to the ORI notice, Mai Nguyen, an associate professor of surgery at UCLA from 1995-2005, falsified data published in a 2000 Oncology Reports paper, which has been cited 5 times, and a 2001 article in The Lancet, which has been cited 25 times. The papers examined the effect of Livistona chine

New findings suggest a hypothesis for a much-debated question in neuroscience : what exactly is the role of new neurons born in the adult human brain? These brain cells may help link memories of events that occurred within a week or two of each other, a paper published in Neuron reports. "It's really novel, and I think it's quite informative," said behavioral neuroscientist linkurl:Andrea Chiba;http://neurograd.ucsd.edu/faculty/detail.php?id=21 of the University of California, San Diego, who w

An unlikely source has provided the answer to a long-standing question over how the geographically isolated Pacific Islands became populated: bacteria. By analyzing both genetic variations in human gut bacteria and linguistic evidence, scientists found that people migrated to the Pacific Islands approximately 5,000 years ago from Taiwan, two papers in this week's Science report. "This is the first paper where bacteria were specifically used for human migration patterns," says Mark Achtman, a p

It's not just genes that are inherited. Chemical tags that affect gene expression levels may be inherited too, a new study published online this week in Nature Genetics reports. Molecular biologist Arturas Petronis and his colleagues at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada compared DNA methylation patterns from epithelial cells inside the mouths of 39 sets of identical and 40 sets of fraternal twins. Compared to fraternal twins, identical twins had more similar methyla

There's a new technique for targeting gene therapy to specific tissues: sound waves that turn on gene expression, according to an article published online in PNAS. The technique could eventually also help orchestrate stem cell differentiation, the authors note. Currently scientists can control the timing of gene activation with techniques like ionizing radiation. They have also used small molecular switches to turn on gene expression. But ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer, limitin

An improvement in magnetic resonance imaging has allowed scientists to view a virus that measures just 18 nanometers across, a study in the early version of PNAS reports. A group led by linkurl:Dan Rugar;http://www.stanford.edu/group/cpn/research/investigators_13_2.html of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. used magnetic resonance force microscopy to detect changes in the spins of hydrogen nuclei, a resolution 100 million times better than conventional MRI, allowing them to pe