June 2005

Careful! What you're looking at is a collector's item, the first ever split run cover of The Scientist. Our Art Director, Marlene Viola, created two versions of the artwork, black on white and white on black. And, to emphasize the binary nature of digital biology, we decided to make equal numbers of each. Ask a colleague which version he or she received!

In a recent essay bemoaning the loss of psychology in favor of what he considers an overly biologically deterministic psychiatry, Richard C. Morias, a senior editor at Forbes, confesses a "vague suspicion" that "21st century America is ... suffering from an unhealthy obsession with science and technology."1 Certainly, it's difficult to escape from coverage of these issues. Morias' is an intriguing and provocative thesis, but sadly, his claimed obsession is just a loud idle burbling rather than a

Despite its importance as the ultimate gatekeeper of scientific publication and funding, peer review is known to engender bias, incompetence, excessive expense, ineffectiveness, and corruption.

, a new magazine from the Nature Publishing Group.

The patients were working out in a hospital's warm therapeutic pool in Boulder, Colorado, when Mark Hernandez walked in and dipped sterile bottles in the water.

If you want to win at combative sports, emulate the most aggressive and dominant animals: wear red.

Recently, in the halls of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, Calif., a revelation was taking shape.

Experimental biologists today sit at the edge of enormous bodies of information.

In Singapore, we have found the best of both worlds.

Simple, fast-growing, and sexually reproducing, yeast have been a stalwart model for generations of geneticists.

HIV-1 elicits RNA silencing in human cells, but it also contains a sequence that suppresses the process, according to researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

© Mike Quinn, Texas Parks & WildlifeResearchers have identified a molecular pathway possibly linking the Monarch butterfly's central circadian clock to photoreceptors involved in its "sun compass," which is used to orient its flight during migration.1 Steven Reppert and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School performed three experiments focusing on polarized light inputs.They first characterized a specialized dorsal rim area of the Monarch eye that is monochromatic

Mice engineered to produce high levels of the antioxidant catalase live longer than their wild-type counterparts.

Several British funding organizations say they are seeking proposals from groups interested in running a new free-access archive of papers arising from research they have supported.

A National Academies committee issued a report in May that calls for the creation of a new category of visa to make it easier for international graduate students and postdocs to study in the United States.

Three Health Canada scientists, who say they were fired for raising questions about the way the agency approves veterinary drugs, have won another round in their years-long battle for reinstatement.

In 1991, Ewan Birney, a lad of 19, left England with his high-school diploma and went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to "fool around" for a year before going to college.