October 2012

Cooperation, not competition, is the way forward.

October 2012's selection of notable quotes

Cockfighting and other cultural practices in Southeast Asia could greatly aid the spread of deadly diseases like bird flu.

A 10-year-old boy spends his summer vacation helping his chemist dad solve the structure of complicated materials.

Laboratory-raised populations of dung beetles reveal a mother's extragenetic influence on the physiques of her sons.

A dock dislodged by 2011's Japanese tsunami washes ashore in Oregon, posing an invasive species threat, but also serving as an unprecedented natural experiment in open-ocean dispersal.

Researchers and conscientious citizens must unite against the partisan rancor in American politics and restore the role of scientific information in policymaking.

A global R&D treaty could boost innovation and improve the health of the world’s poor—and rich.

Mass spec plus novel software equals dynamic views into the chemical lives of microbes.

A new assay shows that cells use lamellipodia as their primary mechanism to seal up holes in epithelial tissue.

An HIV drug can bind to and alter the function of an immune molecule, causing a dangerous reaction in patients with a particular allele.

Researchers reveal a new pathway of synaptic modulation in the hippocampus exclusive to females.

Unwilling to accept the finality of terminal differentiation, Helen Blau has honed techniques that showcase the flexibility of cells to adopt different identities.

Senior Research Fellow, Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, University College London, Age: 34

Advances in light microscopy allow the mapping of cell migration during embryogenesis and capture dynamic processes at the cellular level.

Imaging viruses in action

Advice on authoring a textbook, popular nonfiction, or even a novel

The biological and social ramifications of skin pigmentation are too often ignored by scientists, teachers, and the general public.

A unique organism sighted only once, more than a century ago, could shed light on the evolution of multicellularity—if it ever actually existed.

Check out image finalists and winners, as well as other memorable submissions to this year’s Labby Multimedia Awards.

Salinella salve, an organism described as a single layer of cells, ciliated on both inner and outer surfaces and surrounding…

Meet some of the people featured in the October 2012 issue of The Scientist.

Long non-protein-coding RNA (lncRNA) sequences are often transcribed from the opposite, or antisense, strand of a protein coding gene. In the past few years, research has shown that these lncRNAs play a number of regulatory roles in the cell. For exa

Regenesis and The Half-Life of Facts

Check out other memorable images and videos that were submitted to this year’s Labby Multimedia Awards.

Epigenetic changes accrued over an organism’s lifetime may leave a permanent heritable mark on the genome, through the help of long noncoding RNAs.