May 2005

If you've ever had doubts about the power of advertising, take a look at a recent study appearing in the Journal of American Medical Association.1 Richard Kravitz, from the University of California, Davis, and colleagues found that when "standardized patient" actors portraying depression visited doctors and asked for Paxil, 27% of them walked out with a prescription for the drug, compared to just 3% of patients who described the same symptoms but did not ask for Paxil. That finding should be con

was in graduate school when he was bitten by the programming bug.

As scientists at the National Institutes of Health, we share the belief of director Elias Zerhouni and others, including Congress and the US public, that any financial conflict of interest at the agency is unacceptable and should be absolutely prohibited by regulations.

It's been hard to miss the recent antagonism between elements in the religious and scientific communities over issues such as evolution and the ethics of embryonic stem cell research.

If you could teach the world one thing about science, what would it be?

A touch of acrimony is infused into many diplomatic relationships between the United States and European nations.

An ancient scourge, tuberculosis has made a comeback in recent years.

Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohn disease seem clinically diverse, but they arise from acommon problem: poor discrimination between self and nonself.

In the estimated 5 million years since humans and chimpanzees began diverging, they've acquired major anatomical and cognitive differences.

These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool http://www.facultyof1000.com.S.G. Tringe et al., "Comparative metagenomics of microbial communities," Science, 308:554–7, April 22, 2005.This important paper provides the first comparative analysis of both phylogenetic and functional diversity of entire microbial communities. The communities considered include those associated with farm soils, deep-sea whale carcasses, the S

© 2005 Center for Development BiologyResearchers at the University of Utah are among the first to use large-scale genetics to study the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, which contains a genome thought to contain insight into adult stem cell pluripotency and tissue regeneration.1Because the organism does not reproduce sexually, it cannot be studied using traditional genetic techniques. But by using bacterial-fed RNA interference against 1065 planarian genes, the study "effectively makes an

It's been a busy year for the microfluidics industry.

I slipped into bioinformatics through the back door.

Visualizing gene expression in living animals, at high spatial resolution and in real time, has been a long-held goal in molecular research.

The same technology that reveals to expectant parents the sex of their developing fetus is now being used for noninvasive, real-time imaging of small, live animals such as mice, rats, chick embryos, and zebrafish.

Since their introduction as a life science tool 15 years ago, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) systems have offered highly sensitive, label-free, real-time detection of molecular interactions.

If you were a small business owner looking for a loan, you'd expect financial and perhaps accounting advice from your banker.