November 2006

Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute. Credit: http://www.LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM _blank" />Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute. Credit: http://www.LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM _blank When Shivani Sud was six years old, a member of her immediate family had surgery to remove a brain tumor. Desperate to help, Sud dragged a stepstool to the kitchen sink, sprinkled soap on a sponge and began w

Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER" />Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER It was sometime in the late 1990s that Caroline Snyder first read news reports about a couple in Greenland, NH, who were blaming recycled sewage sludge - also known as biosolids - for the death of their son. Although she was an environmental scientist, Snyder didn't really know anything about sludge, but the story piqued her interest because she had recently retired to New Hampshi

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

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Russian scientists are testing a proposed system to bring a more merit-based approach to the doling out of funds supplementing basic salaries. The effort by the Russian Ministry of Science is meant to address criticism of the current system, "a crazy combination of uniformly low pay with distribution of extras by the will of the management," says Mikhail Gelfand, a scientist at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow. Paychecks for Russian post-docs are about 5,000-

Graduating from a mid-ranked university may put you at even more of a disadvantage than finishing a life sciences doctorate at a lower-ranked school, according to research by Laurel Smith-Doerr, an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University. Smith Doerr sampled 2,062 life scientists who were on average 5 years out of grad school. As she reports in the June issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, those who had completed their PhDs at elite universities were mu

Credit: © JAMES PAULS" /> Credit: © JAMES PAULS Ellen McMahon was a rising star as leader of the cardiovascular research group at Pharmacia before its merger with Pfizer. But she started to get grumbling from her team, and talks about management style from her bosses. McMahon says her staff "was struggling with my leadership, they didn?t feel involved in making decisions. I was more in the mode of driving towards goals rather than considering team dynamics." McMahon, an acknowledg