August 2007

A recent graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Jenny Marder is freelance journalist from Los Angeles whose writing has earned awards from the Los Angeles Press Club, the Association of Health Care Journalists, and the California Newspaper Publisher's Association. From 2004 to 2006, Marder covered local politics and started a health beat at the Long Beach Press-Telegram in California. Here, she writes about Russell Romeo, a researcher who

Can systems biology save the drug industry?

"On non-scientific forums, it's best to keep your qualifications to yourself." Altitude or attitude? In "Kids climb Everest,"1 Janet Stocks reports that kids and adults had vivid dreams and difficulty sleeping, and seems to imply that this is a result of high altitude. Take any kid or adult transport them to an exotic place like Nepal, with its fantastic scenery, peoples, cultural and gastronomic experiences (both positive and negative) and I bet exc

Mohammad Sajid Credit: Courtesy of UCSF" />Mohammad Sajid Credit: Courtesy of UCSF Last July, a British biologist strolled into the US embassy in London to get his temporary (J-1) visa stamped so he could return to his California lab. He wasn't worried, even after he learned he needed to undergo a background check. The last time he left London for the United States, a mere 15 months earlier, a background check delayed him for six months. He was told any later checks would be mu

You don't have to be smart to be rich, study finds," reads a press release from Ohio State University released on April 24th, 2007. This study determined that people with below-average intelligence are just as wealthy as those with higher IQs, and being smart doesn't prevent you from having financial troubles.Starving PhD students might not be all that shocked. Want to know the elusive secret about how to quiet a screaming baby? Throw away that subscription to

Sitting around a table piled with seafood and wine, a group of scientists came up with an idea. It was the Fall of 2005, and the diners were from the DNA sequencing company 454 Life Sciences, celebrating the launch of the company's sequencing technology, the Genome Sequencer 20. 454 was established with the goal of making human genome sequencing an everyday technology, and that night the ambition seemed within reach. At the Stone House restaurant on the marina at Guildford,

Monkeys react to a throw Credit: Courtesy of David Glynn" />Monkeys react to a throw Credit: Courtesy of David Glynn For a couple of months last summer, neuroscientist Justin Wood filmed himself aiming rocks at monkeys. Technically, he was only pretending to hit the monkeys. He just wanted to see how they'd react, in a bid to pin down the neurologic underpinnings of a uniquely human trait: throwing. Early every morning, under a sky streaked with the colors of dawn, the H

The stone statues of Easter Island Credit: Courtesy of Terry Hunt" />The stone statues of Easter Island Credit: Courtesy of Terry Hunt Related: Slideshow: Solving the Easter Island mysteries On one side of a quarry roughly two-thirds the size of a football field is "El Gigante," a half-finished stone statue seven stories tall, and weighing almost 300 tons. Prehistoric tools lie scattered nearby. Whoever made these head-and-torso statues, kno

Credit: Greg Kessler" /> Credit: Greg Kessler STRESS IN HUNGARY >> On page 52 of this issue, Jenny Marder profiles the work of Rockefeller's Russell Romeo, who studies stress hormones in rats. Learn more about cellular responses to stress at the World Conference of Stress in Budapest, August 23-26. For more, see http://www.stress07.com. SUPERCOMPUTING >> Andrea Gawrylewski went to Pittsburgh to see the BigBen Supercom

Elizabeth Jonas was supposed to be a physician. A summer with Rodolfo Llinás changed all that.

Four groups simultaneously identify the same adaptor in the viral RNA immune-response pathway.

The paper: J.V. Zhang et al., "Obestatin, a peptide encoded by the ghrelin gene, opposes ghrelin's effect on food intake." Science , 310:996-99, 2005. (Cited in 99 papers) [PUBMED] The finding: Aaron Hsueh's group from Stanford University isolated a new peptide hormone, dubbed "obestatin." Using in vitro binding studies, the group found that obestatin served as a natural ligand for

Credit: Adapted from Nature Genetics" /> Credit: Adapted from Nature Genetics The paper: I. Bentwich et al., "Identification of hundreds of conserved and nonconserved human microRNAs," Nat Gen , 37:766-70, 2005. (Cited in 148 papers) [PUBMED] The finding: Isaac Bentwich and colleagues at Rosetta Genomics upped the number of sequenced human microRNAs using a new technique integrating bioinform

To characterize transcriptional regulation in human embryonic stem cells Richard Young at the Whitehead Institute and colleagues used a genome-wide analysis with chromatin immunoprecipitation and DNA microarrays, finding that transcription factors OCT4, SOX2, and NANOG target 353 genes, roughly half of which are not expressed. They also found that the three transcription factors co-occupy genes' promoter regions to regulate each others' activity.

T.Y. James et al., "Reconstructing the early evolution of Fungi using a six-gene phylogeny," Nature 443:818-22, Oct. 19, 2007. This paper presents a broad molecular phylogeny of the fungi and highlights the basal nature of the chytrids. This six-gene phylogeny is a major advance for understanding the evolution of fungal traits. Joe Heitman Duke University Medical Center, USA

Credit: David M. Phillips / Photo Researchers, Inc" /> Credit: David M. Phillips / Photo Researchers, Inc To uncover the inflammatory pathways involved in cell injury and death, Kenneth Rock at the University of Massachusetts and colleagues injected necrotic cells into mice deficient in various toll-like receptors and found that neutrophilic inflammatory response was not significantly reduced.1 Using the same strategy in interleukin-1 (IL-1) receptor-deficient mice, along with mice

HIV-1 strains in humans arose from three independent ape-to-human transmissions in the early 20th century, but the viral adaptation in humans remained unknown until now. Paul Sharp and colleagues from the University of Nottingham Queens Medical Centre in England compared full-length genome sequences of chimpanzee HIV strains with inferred ancestral sequences for three different phylogenetic HIV-1 groups in humans: M, N and O. They found that cross-species transmission in all three gr

Credit: © Cody Pickens" /> Credit: © Cody Pickens In May, two years after Chris Voigt moved into his new lab at the University of California, San Francisco, his light-colored wood desks and cabinets still smell like sawdust - just as you'd imagine a traditional toy maker's shop to smell. Voigt doesn't build toys out of wood, however; he builds them out of biological parts. Having trained in chemical engineering, Voigt never intended to become a biologist. As a

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Norbert Riedel's focus on science has helped pull Baxter out of a slump.

The mass manufacture of penicillin during World War II stimulated urgent interest in other medicinally important soil microorganisms.