Recently added articles from The Scientist:
Back in Black
Feb 01, 2009; ... Here's how microorganisms may be the power plants of the future. Here's to a new field: Black biotech THE LIFE SCIENCES ARE UBIQUITOUS. THEIR APPLICATION IN MEDICINE (known in some quarters as red biotechnology), agriculture (green biotech) and industrial processes (white ...
Mail
Feb 01, 2009; ... Write The Scientist 400 Market Street, Suite 1250 Philadelphia, PA 19106 Email mail@the-scientist.com Fax (215)351-1146 "Alexander McPherson is doing the right thing by refusing to participate in sexual harassment training." It's us vs ....
Fancy this
Feb 01, 2009; ... One year ago this month, Jennifer Hipsley brought seven of her best mice to the East Coast Mouse Association's first mouse show in Lynchburg, Va. Her mice had an array of colorful coats, including splashes of chocolate, or black with striped patches. Some were sleek and glossy, one completely ...
Facts First
Feb 01, 2009; ... In my youth, I designed a cell biology course I thought grad students would love. They hated it. I ENJOY READING ONLINE NEWS AND OPINIONS NOT ONLY BECAUSE OF convenience, but also because of the responses from readers. I know that these responses tend to be biased towards the extremes of ...
Time for an IP Share Market?
Feb 01, 2009; ... Direct investment in market-valued intellectual property could drive translational success. Thirty years of investment in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and life sciences industries have yielded returns that fall short of their potential. The prognosis is even worse: Investors' ...
Catching crabs
Feb 01, 2009; ... It was late last September when 73-year-old farmer Archie Page pulled a six-inch blue crab out of his pond in Swansboro, NC. After catching it, Page spent the day parading around in his pick-up with the crab in the back. "I couldn't believe it," he says with a soft Southern twang. Two months ...
Energy from E. coli
Feb 01, 2009; ... Jay Keasling watches as 700 billion Escherichia coli swish around inside a benchtop bioreactor in the brand- spanking new fermentation room of the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, Calif. Seven copper pipes line the wall with a ready supply of nitrogen, oxygen, water, and other ...
Can Bacteria Rescue the Oil Industry?
Feb 01, 2009; ... Microbes in oil deposits withstand enormous hydrocarbon loads, intense heat, high salt and immense pressure. How can we put them to work for us? On a cold December day in 1998, I was swimming in my survival suit in the Trondheim-fjord, Norway, practicing for the offshore certificate. The ...
Receptor deciphered
Feb 01, 2009; ... HOT PAPER IN STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY The paper: E. Gouaux et al. "Structure of acid-sensing ion channel 1 at 1.9 Å resolution and low pH," Nature, 449:316-23, 2007. (Cited in 68 papers) The finding: Neuroscientist Eric Gouaux's team at Oregon Health and Science ...
Sticky speciation
Feb 01, 2009; ... Zoologist Jennifer Glow had a hunch. So she booted up her laptop, launched Google Earth, and zoomed in on Nelson Island, a small, largely unpopulated island along the British Columbia coastline. Gow, a postdoc at the University of British Columbia, had studied the handful of lakes where pairs of ...
Junction function
Feb 01, 2009; ... HOT PAPER IN VIROLOGY The paper: M.J. Evans, et al., "Claudin1 is a hepatitis C virus co-receptor required for a late step in entry," Nature, 446:801-5, 2007. (Cited in 81 papers) The finding: In attempts to find out why hepatitis C virus (HCV) would not infect ...
Antifungal fight
Feb 01, 2009; ... Kishor Wasan, a pharmacologist at the University of British Columbia, needed a negative control. It was 2000, and he was investigating a new way to deliver anti-fungal drugs in pill form, generally cheaper and easier to administer than intravenous injections. "I said, 'Let's take a drug I know ...
BRICK BY BRICK
Feb 01, 2009; ... Now five years old, a student competition in synthetic biology embodies the struggles of the emerging discipline. On a November weekend, more than 800 people gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to show off six months of hard work. Each person wore one of 84 different ...
microRNA: target this
Feb 01, 2009; ... HOT PAPER IN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY The paper: A. Grimson, et al., "MicroRNA targeting specificity in mammals: determinants beyond seed pairing," MoI Cell, 27:91-105, 2007. (Cited in 109 papers) The bottom line: Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist David ...
Mapping with Mice
Feb 01, 2009; ... Nancy Jenkins' decision to combine molecular biology with formal genetics uncovered key mutations involved in development and cancer. Plus, the couple that publishes (700+ papers) together, stays together - just ask her husband, Neal Copeland. It was 1980, in the early days of the ...
FUTURE OIL
Feb 01, 2009; ... Biofuels made from algae are the next big thing on the alternative energy horizon. But can they free us from our addiction to petroleum? Near the southern horn of San Francisco Bay, hectares of shallow ponds the color of blood, pumpkin pie, and murky emerald stretch out across crusty ...
Michelle Chang: A catalyst for change
Feb 01, 2009; ... As a child, Michelle Chang would sit listlessly in a University of California, San Diego, lab while her mother, a geneticist, ran experiments. As hours ticked by on the lab clock, the young Chang made a decision: she would not grow up to be a researcher. But after only a handful of ...
Freeze Frame
Feb 01, 2009; ... How to troubleshoot sample preparation for cryo-electron microscopy, an up-and-coming structural biology technique. Cryo-electron microscopy may be the new kid on the structural biology block, but it is a technique on the rise. Although X-ray crystallography remains the dominant ...
Profiting from Pluripotency
Feb 01, 2009; ... How companies plan to make money (really) off of embryonic stem cells. In April of last year, the US Food and Drug Administration invited three large biotech companies- Geron, Advanced Cell Technology, and Novocell-to testify about how to safely test human embryonic stem cell (ESC) ...
Retiring from Science
Feb 01, 2009; ... How to plan a smooth career exit in a crumbling economy. Financial planners hate having to tell their clients that they need to delay retirement. Yet as the global economic meltdown drags on, many researchers in both academia and industry are facing that reality. "I wish I had ...