October 2005

It used to be that the record of scientific work was complete when it was all published in journals.

began working on DNA-damage response as a graduate student more than 20 years ago.

There is clearly politics masked beneath science when it comes to the controversy over the Dalai Lama speaking at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.1 That many of the petition's organizers are of Chinese origin is a dead giveaway about the political motivations of the petitioners. We just "know the Buddhists more than Western people do," says Min Zhuo from University of Toronto, who helped draft the petition. Did he consult any neuroscientists of Indian origin? Surely the Indians also know th

Re: How to fix peer review.1 I currently serve on review panels for the Department of Defense Congressionally-Directed Medical Research Programs in breast and prostate cancers. A stated goal of this funding program is to stress innovation. That makes it unlike NIH programs that require extensive preliminary data – typically the first specific aim of the grant – and are looking for the next logical step in a non-controversial research plan. While the DOD research proposal is significa

Mean 9-month salaries of full professors as a function of the institution's academic reputation. Academic year 2004–05. The correlation coefficient for this sample of 14 universities is r = 0.96 (p < 0.001). Salary data from the AAUP's annual report.2 Reputation data from the U.S. News &World Report's college guide (peer assessment).3Adjusted 9-month salaries of full professors as a function of the institution's academic reputation. Academic year 2004–05. The correlation coeff

The conventional wisdom among the scientific community and the public is that the present federal US policy on stem cell research, which provides National Institutes of Health funding only for research on stem cell lines developed before August 2001, has significantly reduced funding for stem cell research and diminished the translation of this platform technology to important therapies.

William Neaves could be forgiven for feeling popular last month.

Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens occupy a lovely parcel of harbor-side land, right alongside Australia's biggest downtown district.

It's tough to please an elite crowd of scientists, financiers, and other luminaries.

and many since have sought to explain correlations between a gene's physical location and its activity.

In the years since they were first developed, microarrays have been applied to an extraordinary range of situations.

The human brain is still evolving.

These papers were selected from multiple disciplines from the Faculty of 1000, a Web-based literature awareness tool http://www.facultyof1000.com.A.J. Dupuy et al., "Mammalian mutagenesis using a highly mobile somatic Sleeping Beauty transposon system," Nature, 436:221–6, July 14, 2005.This paper describes a modification of the Sleeping Beauty fish transposon which allows it to be used for efficient mutagenesis screens in mice. The authors provide proof-of-principle for the usefulness of t

Nature has once again beaten nanotechnology to the punch.

Gadget freaks love to "mod" their toys, and protein engineers are no exception.

When the next outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) will emerge is anyone's guess.

Microarrays present researchers with something of a catch-22: In order to find something, you have to know what you're looking for.

To study tissue samples from multiple patients, researchers use tissue microarrays (TMAs), a technology in which hundreds of tissue cores are arranged on a single glass slide for analysis by immunostaining or in situ hybridization.

Courtesy of Eppendorf UKHungry scientists taking a trip to the vending machine for refreshments may soon find Taq polymerase and IPTG next to their Coke and M&Ms. Helena BioSciences of Sunderland, UK http://www.helena-biosciences.com has developed the Smartstore, a -20°C reagent-vending system for 40 Eppendorf and Fermentas reagents. The machine, which is accessed via a cashless "smartcard" that can also track inventory wirelessly, is offered free-of-charge to research institutes, and r

Most commercially available reagents for RNAi are synthetic oligos, which can yield good results with immortalized cell lines but are less effective in hard-to-transfect primary cells.

Researchers at Stanford University have miniaturized the chemostat, a device widely used as a steady culture environment for bacterial cultures.1 Using only 16 nanoliters of culture media (nearly 109 less volume than conventional chemostats), the "microchemostat" avoids the problem of biofilm, which grows on chemostat walls and ultimately leaks into the culture media, causing contamination.The group worked out a cleaning scheme in which one of the device's six independent reactors is closed off

With just a few protein comprising 85% to 90% of human serum, low-abundance components can be difficult to identify by mass spectrometry.

It was the beginning of 2002, and employees of Renovis, a biopharmaceutical company based in San Francisco had many reasons to celebrate.

© Anthony FosterFunding for biomedical research in the United States jumped from $37.1 billion in 1994 to $94.3 billion in 2003, a doubling of support when adjusted for inflation, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Private industry provided 57% of this total and the National Institutes of Health supplied 28%."We were surprised to find that the total numbers are as large as they are," says lead author Hamilton Moses III, chairman of the Alerion In

European Union legislation designed to limit workers' exposure to electromagnetic radiation will seriously hinder research involving the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), leading investigators warned the British government recently.

The field of pharmacogenetics has been overhyped and is still more than a decade away from living up to its promise in clinical practice, largely due to shortages in researchers and lack of international coordination, according to a recent report from the UK's Royal Society.

Think of China, and what comes to mind?

A century before Ebola, SARS, or avian flu began making head-lines, another invisible killer was carving a swath of death and fear across the Russian Empire: the plague.