linkurl:Paul Nurse,;http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/abstract.php?id=316 Nobel Prize-winning cell biologist and president of Rockefeller University in New York City since 2003, has been linkurl:nominated;http://royalsociety.org/Sir-Paul-Nurse-nominated-as-next-President-of-the-Royal-Society/ by the Council of the Royal Society to lead the Royal Society in London. Following a vote of the Society's Fellows, the appointment will be confirmed in July.
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Image: Wikimedia commons, Ryoko Mandeville |
In a new analysis of climate change consequences, an inter-agency working group led by the linkurl:National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences;http://www.niehs.nih.gov/ released a linkurl:report;http://www.nih.gov/news/health/apr2010/niehs-21.htm last Wednesday outlining eleven key health areas that have been or will be affected by global warming. The list includes asthma, cancer, food and waterborne diseases, and human developmental effects, among others. Vatican funds stem cell research
The Vatican will fund researchers at the University of Maryland $2.7 million to study adult stem cells from the intestines, linkurl:according to The Baltimore Sun.;http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-stem-cell-research-vatican-20100423,0,2976764.story The Vatican has previously funded adult stem cell research at Catholic dioceses in South Korea and Australia, the paper reports. Not everyone is impressed by the scientific-religious partnership: It's "a very trivial amount of money and it's a safe area to study," John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Sun. "No one's going to get bent out of shape about this." Microbiologist defends anthrax suspect
Two months after the U.S. Department of Justice closed the case on Bruce Ivins, the suspect in the 2001 anthrax attack killing five people, a former colleague defended him in front of a National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the FBI's scientific work on the case. Henry Heine, a former Army microbiologist, argued that it would have taken Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, a year of intensive work using the army's lab equipment to produce the quantity of spores found in the letters, and that colleagues would have noticed, linkurl:The New York Times reports.;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/us/23anthrax.html?ref=science "Among the senior scientists, no one believes it," Heine told reporters. See an upcoming feature on the FBI's growing involvement in biology in our May issue. Human-Neanderthal mixer?
A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from 99 populations around the world suggests that extinct species, possibly Neanderthals, interbred with our ancestors on two different occasions, linkurl:Nature News reports;http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/news.2010.194.html from the annual meeting of the linkurl:American Society of Physical Anthropologists;http://physanth.org/annual-meeting/2010 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The finding was unexpected, Jeffrey Long of the University of New Mexico, who led the study, told Nature News. "There is a little bit of Neanderthal leftover in almost all humans," he said. RIP Xena
Last but not least, the first pig cloned from fetal pigskin cells in Japan, Xena, has been euthanized after difficulty standing due to natural causes, linkurl:reports Kyodo News.;http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=497230 Xena was nine years and eight months at the time of her death, the oldest cloned pig in the world.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:The Englishman coming to New York;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/21068/
[31st January 2003]*linkurl:NAS to review anthrax evidence;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55015/
[17th September 2008]*linkurl:Xena: small cloned piglet;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/19108/
[21st August 2000]
