Magazine Issue - November 2007 | November 2007

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November 2007

Contributors

Since beginning his career as an engineer for Douglas Aircraft, Frederick Sachs has been a research fellow at NIH's biophysics laboratory, and served as both an NIH physiology reviewer and NSF consultant. His most recent work, as professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Buffalo, pinpointed a protein in tarantula venom as a potential drug candidate to treat atrial fibrillation. In a provocative Opinion, Sachs proffers that funneling more money into the NIH budget ha

Editorial

OA, OK?

How far has open access come in a decade? And where will it go in the next?

The Agenda

Credit: © THOM GRAVES" /> Credit: © THOM GRAVES FOCUS ON NEUROSCIENCE >> In "A Channel At Large," Kerry Grens explores why the identity of an ion channel in the inner ear has eluded scientists for decades. That's just one of several neuroscience-related pieces in this issue, which you may very well be reading at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego, from November 3-7. Also see "Facelessness, faced," "The singing ear," and "Alzheimer's: Type

Notebook

Facelessness, faced

Related Articles A Channel at Large The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery Cracking Open a New Channel Family Channel Candidates The singing ear Baby brain bank Alzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes? Model of insulin's influence on amyloid β Opening Potassium Channels to Scrutiny After giving a lecture in Windsor, England last February, neuroscientist Bradley Duchaine was approached by a man who'd been in the audience. He told Duchaine, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscienc

The singing ear

Related Articles A Channel at Large The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery Cracking Open a New Channel Family Channel Candidates Facelessness, faced Baby brain bank Alzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes? Model of insulin's influence on amyloid β Opening Potassium Channels to Scrutiny About 16 years ago, Ralph Harvey, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Tennessee's College of Veterinary Medicine, walked into an examination room where a small, white poodle sat atop an examinat

Buzzing for bombs

Related Articles Manna from hell Birth of a plant Clerkship in Croatia Baby brain bank Slideshow: A mysterious kidney disease From ten meters away, the sound of a million honeybees is surprisingly soothing, like treetops whooshing in the breeze. At a daring six meters, the droning becomes ominous and insistent. At two meters away, the humming is so malevolent that the sky seems to darken. "Beautiful music, yes?" says Nikola Kezić, as if there is no doubt. Arranging folding ch

Frog killer

The already-endangered Atelopus zeteki (Panamanian Golden Frog) is now facing extermination from the Bd fungus." />The already-endangered Atelopus zeteki (Panamanian Golden Frog) is now facing extermination from the Bd fungus. While working on her PhD in 1992, Karen Lips went to Las Tablas, Panama, to study the biology of a tree frog, Hyla calypso, an inch-long, spiny, bright-green creature. As she walked through transects in the forest, measuring and sexing frog individuals, here and

Column

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?

Scientists instinctively love nanotechnology, which is why they shouldn't be in charge of it.

Soda, with a Side of Chagas

How did a deadly disease creep into a popular Brazilian beverage?

Uncategorized

A Channel at Large

A Channel at Large What is the mechanotransduction channel in hearing that has evaded scientists for decades?

The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery

The Inner Workings of Hearing Machinery var FO = { movie:"http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53808/infographic.swf", width:"520", height:"580", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Please download the Adobe Flash Player to view this content: Related Articles A Channel at Large Cracking Open a New Channel Family Channel Candidates Baby brain bank Facelessness

Cracking Open a New Channel Family

Cracking Open a New Channel Family Michael CahalanCourtesy of Karinne Cahalan What lessons can hearing-channel researchers learn from a similar but ultimately successful search? By Kerry Grens Related Articles 1-3 Orai is a four-transmembrane protein with high calcium selectivity that interacts with a calcium sensor called Stim to mediate calcium influx. CRAC bears "no channel homology, obviously, [and] no classical pore sequence,

Channel Candidates

Channel Candidates By Kerry Grens While many potential mechanotransduction channels have been disregarded outright, a few have proved promising and others still remain a possibility. here are a few of the likeliest candidates, past and present. Those that remain a possibility are marked with an asterisk (*). CHANNEL EVIDENCE FOR EVIDENCE AGAINST REFERENCES Nompc, transient receptor potential (TRP) channel in Drosophila

Manna from hell

Manna from hell Photographs by Mirko Beović/ 1 "This so-called Chinese-herb nephropathy is characterized by a pattern of interstitial fibrosis similar to that of Balkan endemic nephropathy," the authors wrote. Pavo Lukšić (above) and his horse (below) in front of his uncle's house. Grollman, a pharmacologist who has pushed for stricter regulation of herbal supplements, says he immediately phoned a Croatian colleague. Grollman was soon on a plane

Slideshow: A mysterious kidney disease

var FO = { movie:"http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53785/53785.swf", width:"505", height:"500", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); A mysterious kidney disease Julia Mead traveled to Croatia to learn how an international team of scientists confirmed that poisoned bread causes a kidney disease endemic to the Balkans and verified that the same toxic ingredient was in herbal supplements used around the world. Photographs

Clerkship in Croatia

Clerkship in Croatia A coincidence sent a second-year medical student to the Croatian countryside to survey farmers, and led her to an important hypothesis about food contamination. By Julia C. Mead Related Articles 1 Every other year or so, except when the war intervened, health investigators visit a cluster of endemic villages to track the numbers of endemic nephropathy deaths and diagnoses and to screen for warning signs of the disease. Bearing a lengthy qu

Birth of a plant

Birth of a plant Aristolochia's place in pharmacopeias worldwide By Julia C. Mead Related Articles 1 Practitioners in India, Japan, and Sudan use Aristolochia plants, too. The United States and a few other countries now ban the import of those supplements, but seeds, roots, and supplements are available over the Internet. Every single part of the plant - the leaves, roots, seeds, and stalks - and every Aristolochia species is poisonous. References

Percent of non-native respondents per country

var FO = { movie:"/supplementary/html/52903/Charts/FC_2_3_Column2D.swf", width:"520", height:"420", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true", flashvars:"&dataURL=/supplementary/xml/53804/nonNativeRespondents.xml&chartWidth=520" }; UFO.create(FO, "currEmployer");Percent of non-native respondents per countryWhile the majority of this year's international survey respondents reported working in their native country, a large fraction crossed borders to do science elsewhere. I

Highest scoring institutions on the categories that matter most

Highest scoring institutions on the categories that matter mostUse the interactive chart below to sort the top ranked institutions by category. Resize the rows or scroll within the chart to view category. US Institutions // create ActiveWidgets data model - CSV text table var table = new AW.CSV.Table; // provide data URL - plain text comma-separated file table.setURL("/supplementary/csv/53794/topbyfactor_us.csv"); // start asyncronous data retrieval table.r

Aspects of work that this year's US respondents ranked most important

Aspects of work that this year's US respondents ranked most importantUse the interactive chart below to sort the top ranked institutions by category. Resize the rows or scroll within the chart to view category. // create ActiveWidgets data model - CSV text table var table = new AW.CSV.Table; // provide data URL - plain text comma-separated file table.setURL("/supplementary/csv/53794/most_imp_factors.csv"); // start asyncronous data retrieval table.request(

Respondents' Type of Institution

var FO = { movie:"/supplementary/html/52903/Charts/FC_2_3_Pie2D.swf", width:"520", height:"450", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true", flashvars:"&dataURL=/supplementary/xml/53804/institution.xml&chartWidth=520&chartHeight=450" }; UFO.create(FO, "citizenship");Respondents' Type of Institution Half of this year's respondents work in the university setting, with researchers in medical schools making up 21% of respondents. Replacement content Rollover graph f

Respondents' Primary Work Activity

var FO = { movie:"/supplementary/html/52903/Charts/FC_2_3_Bar2D.swf", width:"500", height:"250", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true", flashvars:"&dataURL=/supplementary/xml/53804/primaryWorkActivity.xml&chartWidth=500&chartHeight=250" }; UFO.create(FO, "citizenship");Respondents' Primary Work ActivityHalf of all respondents this year said their primary function is laboratory research, with 14.6% reporting that teaching came above research. Across all fields except labor

Best Places to Work in Industry 2007 Results PDF

Best Places to Work in Academia 2007: Survey Findings PDF Related Articles Best Places to Work in Academia 2007 Easy livin' at Dalhousie First-Timers Massachusetts General Hospital: View from the top Purdue pushes forward Survey Methodology Ranking Tables Top 15 US Academic Institutions Top 10 International Academic Institutions Top 40 US Academic Institutions Best Countries for Academic Research

Best Places to Work in Academia, 2007

Best Places to Work in Academia, 2007 Image Courtesy of Andre Az For the first time since 2004, peer relations were ranked more important than tenure. Find out what your peers are saying about this year's best places.By Edyta Zielinska Related Articles 1 This year, for the first time since the survey's inception in 1993, Belgium was ranked the best country in which to do research. The country rebounded following a downward trend (from fourt

Easy livin' at Dalhousie

Easy livin' at Dalhousie By Bob Grant Related Articles Best Places to Work in Academia, 2007 First-Timers Massachusetts General Hospital: View from the top Purdue pushes forward Survey Methodology Ranking Tables Top 15 US Academic Institutions Top 10 International Academic Institutions Top 40 US Academic Institutions Best Countries for Academic Research Best Places to Work: Survey Findings PDF

Best Places to Work in Academia 2007: Top 40 Companies

Top 40 US Academic Institutions Use the interactive chart below to sort the top ranked institutions by category. Resize the rows or scroll within the chart to view category. Click here to view the printable PDF. // create ActiveWidgets data model - CSV text table var table = new AW.CSV.Table; // provide data URL - plain text comma-separated file table.setURL("/supplementary/csv/53794/top40_07.csv"); // start asyncronous data retrieval table.request(); // defin

First-Timers

First-Timers By Kirsten Weir Related Articles Best Places to Work in Academia, 2007 Easy livin' at Dalhousie Massachusetts General Hospital: View from the top Purdue pushes forward Survey Methodology Ranking Tables Top 15 US Academic Institutions Top 10 International Academic Institutions Top 40 US Academic Institutions Best Countries for Academic Research Best Places to Work: Survey Findings PDF

Comparison chart of the Top 15 US Academic Institutions

The Top 15 US Academic Institutions Use the interactive chart below to sort the top ranked institutions by category. Resize the rows or scroll within the chart to view category. Click here to view the printable PDF. // create ActiveWidgets data model - CSV text table var table = new AW.CSV.Table; // provide data URL - plain text comma-separated file table.setURL("/supplementary/csv/53794/top15.csv"); // start asyncronous data retrieval table.request(); // defi

Best country for Academic Research

Best countries for Academic Research This year Belgium ranked top country to do academic research, for the first time in the survey's history. In another first, Brazil and Mexico debuted on the best countries chart at 11 and 14th place respectively Use the interactive chart below to sort the top ranked institutions by category. Resize the rows or scroll within the chart to view category. Click here to view the printable PDF. // create ActiveWidgets data model - CSV text table

Top 10 International Academic Institutions

Top 10 International Academic Institutions Use the interactive chart below to sort the top ranked institutions by category. Resize the rows or scroll within the chart to view category. Click here to view the printable PDF. // create ActiveWidgets data model - CSV text table var table = new AW.CSV.Table; // provide data URL - plain text comma-separated file table.setURL("/supplementary/csv/53794/top10_internat.csv"); // start asyncronous data retrieval table.reques

View from the top

View from the top By Kirsten Weir Related Articles Best Places to Work in Academia, 2007 Easy livin' at Dalhousie First-Timers Purdue pushes forward Survey Methodology Ranking Tables Top 15 US Academic Institutions Top 10 International Academic Institutions Top 40 US Academic Institutions Best Countries for Academic Research Best Places to Work: Survey Findings PDF What makes Massachusetts Gene

Model of insulin's influence on amyloid β

By Kerry Grens LITERATUREARTICLE EXTRASRelated ArticleAlzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes?Channel CandidatesA Channel at LargeThe Inner Workings of Hearing MachineryCracking Open a New Channel FamilyFacelessness, facedThe singing earBaby brain bankOpening Potassium Channels to ScrutinyDownstream of insulin signaling are links to amyloid β (Aβ), the principle peptide that forms the plaqu

Building Vaccine Consensus

By Stephen PincockBIOBUSINESSWhen Klaus Stöhr left the World Health Organization to take a job at the Swiss drug giant Novartis in February, there were some who questioned whether the most prominent figure in the global fight against avian influenza had forsaken public health for profit margins. "I don't see why this should be good news," wrote one blogger with the moniker "gsgs" on a site devoted to pandemic flu soon after t

A Microscopic History

Slideshow: A Microscopic History The National Museum of Health and Medicine has an extensive collection of microscopes. Here, in text by Adrienne Noe and Michael Rhode of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and photos by Jason Varney, is a virtual guided tour. var FO = { movie:"http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/53973/53973.swf", width:"500", height:"580", majorversion:"8", build:"0"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Please download the Adobe Flash Player

Profile

Not Faking It

Jack Szostak's pioneering work has already been rewarded with a Lasker Award. Now he has one more big item on his to-do list: Creating artificial life.

Books etc.

Opening Potassium Channels to Scrutiny

Crystal structure of "open" K+ channel leads to new ideas on how it works.

Alzheimer's: Type 3 Diabetes?

Neurodegeneration research turns to insulin for answers

Hot Paper

Mining mammalian genes

Credit: Courtesy of Piero Carninci" /> Credit: Courtesy of Piero Carninci The paper: The FANTOM Consortium and RIKEN, "The transcriptional landscape of the mammalian genome," Science, 309:1559-63, 2005. (Cited in 251 papers) The finding: Techniques such as cap-analysis gene-expression and gene-identification signature technology allowed a group led by Yoshihide Hayashizaki at the RIKEN Institute in Wako, Japan, to look more in-depth at the mouse tran

This teeming earth

Credit: Jeremy Burgess / Photo Researchers, Inc" /> Credit: Jeremy Burgess / Photo Researchers, Inc The paper: J. Gans et al., "Computational improvements reveal great bacterial diversity and high metal toxicity in soil," Science, 309:1387-90, 2005. (Cited in 72 papers) The finding: John Dunbar and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory developed a statistical technique to more accurately estimate the diversity of bacteria found in soil. Their reanalysis

Auto-induction protein production

Credit: Omikron / Photo Researchers, Inc" /> Credit: Omikron / Photo Researchers, Inc The paper: F.W. Studier, "Protein production by auto-induction in high-density shaking cultures," Protein Express Purif, 41:207-34, 2005. (Cited in 124 papers) The finding: While working on the National Institutes of Health's structural genomics project, William Studier at the Brookhaven National Laboratory devised a method that produced up to 10 times the protein

Scientist To Watch

Jennifer Elisseeff: Bringing cartilage to light

Credit: BILL CRAMER / WONDERFUL MACHINE INC." /> Credit: BILL CRAMER / WONDERFUL MACHINE INC. In Jennifer Elisseeff's small tissue-culture room at Johns Hopkins University, she points to an eraser-sized pellet of two-layered hydrogel floating in culture medium. She explains how the cells, encapsulated within juxtaposed layers of gel, exchange signals to help them grow. Knowing what those signals are could help her design a hydrogel that would regenerate diseased tissue. As a teen

Lab Tools

Going Live

How to choose a live-cell imaging microscope setup from the maze of available options

Pooling resources

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface User: Lynne Coluccio, a cell biologist at Boston Biomedical Research Institute, Watertown, Mass. Project: Structure and function of the unconventional (nonmuscle) myosin, myo-1c, expressed in the hair cells of the inner ear. Problem: Unless a lab focuses primarily on imaging, few researche

Tips for choosing a microscope setup

Related Articles Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface Know your needs - "The decision is not wide-field versus confocal," says Watkins. "It's what you're trying to get out of the system." Figuring out the options can easily take a year. Talk to others who have set up similar experiments, and try out as many systems as possible. Or, suggests Maddox, reach out to live-cell microscop

Mix and match

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Deep down view Sticking to the surface User: Anna Barsukova, a graduate student in the lab of Michael Forte, a cell biologist at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Project: Imaging calcium flux in mitochondria of primary neurons in response to cellular stress, a key apoptotic mechanism in neurodegenerative disease.

Prioritizing speed

Related Articles Tips for choosing a microscope setup Going Live How it Works: Two-Photon Microscopy Pooling resources Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface User: Peter Robin Hiesinger, a neurogeneticist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Project: Real-time imaging (seconds to minutes) of synaptic transmission at the neuromuscular junction of the developing fly larva; time-lapse imaging (hours to days) of neuronal outgrowth in cultures of dev

How It Works

How It Works: Two-Photon Microscopy

Related Articles Going Live Tips for choosing a microscope setup Pooling resources Prioritizing speed Mix and match Deep down view Sticking to the surface Two-photon microscopy offers two advantages over other live cell imaging techniques: It penetrates up to 1 mm into tissue and it minimizes phototoxicity because the beam excites just a single focal point at a time. In order to excite a fluorophore labeling the tissue, two long-wavelength, low-energy photons must meet nearly simultan

Pulse Oximeter

Bringing Order to Authorship

How to resolve authorship disputes - and avoid them altogether.

Managing Authorship

Related Articles Bringing Order to Authorship How to avoid disputes Establish who's who early on - When authorship disputes arise, young researchers are often in the most precarious situation. Markovitch advises that they push for meetings early in the process of research (long before the paper is written) to establish who will be considered the first author and the last author. If you work in a collaborative setting, this conversation may have to happen a few times. Stephen

Foundations

The Hooke Microscope

Related Articles Slideshow: 17th-century microscopes from the National Museum of Health and Medicine Many images are closely associated with the 17th-century English experimentalist Robert Hooke: the hugely enlarged flea, the orderly plant units he named "cells," among others. To create them, Hooke used elaborately gold-stamped and turned microscopes such as the one pictured. Hooke's images, which persist among the most well-known depictions in all of science, appeared along with