Content by The Scientist

Contributors The highlights of biochemist S. Lawrence Zipursky’s 25-year-long career in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, are the surprises he’s unearthed along the way. Topping his list is one gene in particular, Dscam, which codes for tens of thousands of different protein products that may help give neurons distinct molecular signatures (p. 40). “I didn’t think that kind of recognition specificity existed in

Mail On the Media Re: “Why Trust a Reporter?”1 Good journalists are after a story that fits the facts they can garner through their investigations. And they don’t think that everyone out there owes them information or a living. If you don’t want to reveal information, you say so, and the journalist who knows his/her place in the scheme of the things will take that for what it is. Plus, in most cases, there are other plac

Eavesdroppings Science Quotations of the Month © James O’Brien Some have said that honeybees are messengers sent from the gods to show us how we ought to live: in sweetness and in beauty and peacefulness. —From Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell UniversityBecause we have, in truth, learned nothing from the [human] genome other than probabilities. How does a 1 or 3 percent incre

Top 7 From F1000 1. How cilia talk» Primary (non-motile) cilia use membrane proteins in their role as a coordinator of the cell’s signaling pathways. New findings show how a cilium retains those membrane proteins—a barrier at its base made up of proteins called septins.Q. Hu et al., Science, 329:436-39, 2010. Evaluated by Y. Barral, ETH; M. Wirschell & W. Sale, Emory; H. Folsch, Northwestern; Y. Yamashita, U Mich; M. Bettencourt-Dia

Contributors Philosopher-turned-biochemist Yves Barral has a hard time explaining where he’s from. He usually settles for: “I am, for sure, from this planet.” Born in Mexico City to African-born parents, he spent most of his childhood in various parts of France. He currently resides in Zürich, where he runs his own lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and studies the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to understand how h

Mail Peer review: Rejected? Re: “I Hate Your Paper,” 1 the real problem is that publications have lost their purpose. The point of publication is to inform the scientific community of really important findings and to contribute to the growth of knowledge. When I hear—as I typically do when a speaker is being introduced—that some very senior scientist has hundreds of publications, I always wonder: do any of them matter? We

Eavesdroppings Science Quotations of the Month Avi Spivak We’re not really attracted to each other, we’re attracted to each other’s microbes. —Yale University microbiologist Jo Handelsman, quoted in an August 2010 The Scientist article about how gut flora affects the ability of male fruit flies to attract a mate We are realizing that conservation is not about managing wildlife as much as it is about managing ourselvesR

Top 7 From F1000 1. How fat causes diabetes» There are new molecular links between obesity and diabetes—a high-fat diet in mice activates proteins associated with obesity, but these changes can be reversed by a well-known diabetes drug, suggesting the same pathway may also cause insulin-resistance. J.H. Choi et al., Nature, 466:451-56, 2010. Evaluated by L. Hamann, Novartis; M. Andresen, OHSU; P. Webb, TMHRI. Free F1000 EvaluationRelated Articles

Shrinking birds Ary Hoffmann discusses a paper reporting that many kinds of birds are getting smaller as a result of global warming. Global temperatures have risen an average of 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last century. What effect that may have on the planet’s species is hard to predict, but a recent paper evaluating data from more than 100 different bird species over the past 5 decades found that many of them have shrunk in size. F1000 Faculty Member

Contributors Anna Marie Pyle is a professor at Yale University who works on unraveling RNA folding and the dynamic process of RNA assembly (p. 34). Her love for science was seeded by her physician father and blossomed during a childhood spent playing in the Sandia National Laboratory’s backyard in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I was always surrounded by people who loved science and nature,” she says. From an amateur chemist who’d mix and bub

Mail Eyelashes Up Close Fascinating article by Peter Satir about cilia’s role in development and disease.1 I wonder if improper immune responses like vasculitis might be caused by degradation of the non-motile cilia on the mast cells along the lumen. The known chemical responses to foreign matter in the bloodstream which trigger inflammation through the histamine reaction along with leukocyte activity might be intimately linked to the sensi

Eavesdroppings Science Quotations of the Month © Hadley Hooper “It’s still acceptable in [the UK] for people to say, almost as an aside, while drinking their claret, ‘Of course, I don’t understand science, I did classics.’ You’re not considered to be a philistine....But [this] should be like driving around without a seatbelt….It should become just an unacceptable thing to do.” —Brian Cox, phys

Top 7 From F1000 Wikiagk / wikimedia commons 1. Gene + virus + injury = disease? » New details on how the interaction of genes and environment results in disease: A bowel disease resembling Crohn’s needs a specific mutation, virus, and injury to develop in mice. K. Cadwell et al., Cell, 141:1135–45, 2010. Eval by A. Baum and A. Farcia-Sastre, Mt Sinai; C. Karp, Cincinnati Children’s; C. Weber and J. Turner, Univ of Chicago. http://bi

Metal therapy Jon Zubieta talks about the promise of new metal-based compounds in treating cancer. Platinum-based compounds, such as cisplatin and carboplatin, are among the most powerful and widely used chemotherapeutic drugs. Their platinum centers bind to the DNA of cancer cells, ultimately triggering apoptosis. Unfortunately, resistance to these drugs is fairly common across a variety of cancer types. Inorganic chemist and F1000 member Jon Zubieta discusses th

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