Brazil's Supreme Court upheld legislation yesterday (May 28) that allows research on embryonic stem cells, according to the Associated Press.

Six of the 11 court judges voted to maintain a 2005 law legalizing embryonic stem cell research, and turned down a petition arguing that the law was unconstitutional because it violates the right to life. The remaining... Click to continue

The National Institutes of Health announced plans today (May 29) to inject $533 million over the next five years into speeding up the bench to bedside trajectory for new treatments. The funding will go to researchers at 14 academic health centers - including Harvard University, The Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University and others - which will become part of the NIH's Clinical... Click to continue

Zookeepers in England are using blood-sucking insects to collect blood samples from zoo animals, according to the BBC. The bugs may allow routine health checks without the use of anesthetics.

Rather than needles and syringes, veterinary officers at the London and Whipsnade Zoos are taking advantage of the voracious appetite of South American ... Click to continue

Francis Collins told reporters at a conference call today that he'd be considering "a number of opportunities, some in the private, some in the public sector," and said he'd even consider heading up the NIH, after announcing plans to step down as director of NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute.

Collins said that he wouldn't be opposed to taking over the directorship of NIH should that position become available in the next year... Click to continue

The director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), Francis Collins, announced today (May 28) that he will step down from his position on August 1.

Collins started as NHGRI director in 1993 and led the institute through the Human Genome Project, which concluded in 2003.

... Click to continue

Greater coordination between Europe's biobanks is "urgently needed," says a group of leading European scientists in a policy briefing published yesterday (May 27) by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

Europe has many large biobanks -- repositories of biological samples and... Click to continue

Having a social life may just be the key to longevity, and the effect of interacting with peers shows up even in basic molecular pathways, according to a new study from University of Iowa researchers.

Though research has previously shown that animals engaging in social interaction may have longer life spans, a new study published in PNAS yesterday (May 26) explores the molecular... Click to continue

Scientists have long known of the tumor suppressors and oncogenes that kick-start cancer. Now researchers report that downstream genes affected by such mutations act synergistically to further promote cancer progression, according to a study published online in Nature on Sunday (May 25).

"When cells convert from normal to cancer," said Hartmut Land from the University of Rochester Medical Center, an author of the study, "you have a forest of... Click to continue

Yesterday the US Senate approved a bill that includes $400 million for NIH funding. The provision is part of the Senate's Supplemental Appropriations bill for 2008, primarily intended to support the Iraq war.

The bill was passed with 75 in favor, 22 opposed. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill if it contains non-military funding measures.

The bill will now be sent back to the House of Representatives for a vote.... Click to continue

When I first heard about a computer game based on folding proteins, I must admit, I was skeptical. How fun could it possibly be to manipulate a virtual protein for points? Well, after countless hours of first hand experimentation I've arrived at an answer: Very.

The game is called Foldit, and luckily for one of the game's principle founders, David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington, thousands of others have come to the same conclusion. Baker hopes that Foldit -- launched two... Click to continue

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not demonstrated that moving foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) research from an island lab in New York to a new mainland animal research facility would be safe, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told a Congressional committee this morning (May 22).

"We found that DHS has not conducted or commissioned any study" to assess... Click to continue

President Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) yesterday (May 21). GINA, which passed the House and Senate last month, prevents insurers and employers from using genetic test results to discriminate against employees.... Click to continue

Another US university has been found in bed with big tobacco, this time on the down-low. The New York Times reported today that Virginia Commonwealth University entered into a contract with Philip Morris in 2006 that severely restricts researchers' ability to disseminate findings from studies funded by the tobacco company.

Tobacco funding in academic research is a contentious issue, with the debate primarily... Click to continue

Biologists have been submitting research proposals in droves hoping to receive money from a new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant program aimed at improving global health. As Yiwu He, Gates foundation senior program officer in global health, told me at a biomarker meeting in Philadelphia on Monday (May 19), the Gates Foundation has gotten... Click to continue

Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is apparently making good on the promise to "turn the knob towards discovery" in HIV vaccine research, which he made at a meeting this March.

The NIAID today (May 20) announced a five-year, $15.6 million project to fund... Click to continue

A team of researchers has discovered millions of slender, sea star-like creatures - called brittlestars - thriving on a submerged oceanic ridge in the icy waters between New Zealand and Antarctica.

The researchers, Australians and New Zealanders participating in the Macquarie Ridge Expedition, announced their discovery... Click to continue

Mitotic cell divisions, long thought to produce two identical daughter cells, are not entirely equal, according to a new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Proteins destined for degradation are preferentially inherited by one cell over the other, the researchers found.

"We hit on an observation that people had missed for 100 years," said ... Click to continue

Scientists have created the first transgenic monkey model of Huntington disease (HD), according to a report that appeared yesterday in Nature. But it's unclear how closely the model represents the disease in humans.

The study, led by Anthony Chan, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, successfully bred five rhesus macaques with the repeated amino acid sequence CAG in the human huntingtin gene --... Click to continue

There still may be hope for a boost to National Institutes of Health funding in 2008. Yesterday the US Senate snuck some $400 million into a bill approved by the House earlier this week for funding the Iraq war.

At the end of last year, President Bush vetoed a 2008 appropriations bill that would have raised NIH funding by about $1 billion. In order to get the bill approved, Congress slashed $760 million of proposed NIH funding,... Click to continue

Disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk has set up a biotechnology firm in Seoul for cloning animal pets and producing organs for transplant, according to Agence France Presse.

Hwang was banned from research using human eggs following claims that he cloned the first human embryo that were later shown to be Click to continue

The FDA has delayed approval of an application for the first human embryonic stem cell clinical trial by Geron Corporation, the company announced yesterday.

Geron's compound, GRNOPC1, is a cell-based therapy to treat spinal cord injury. Yesterday, the FDA told Geron verbally that they were placing the Investigational New Drug submission of the treatment under a clinical hold. The company is awaiting a formal letter.

Thomas Okarma,... Click to continue

Some potential cancer therapies may do more harm than good: A class of compounds intended to boost tumor suppressor p53 activity may actually promote mutant versions of the gene, a study published tomorrow in Genes and Development reports.

p53, the tumor suppressor found in roughly half of all human cancers, works by signaling cell death, thus keeping cell growth in check. But p53 can be deleted during transcription or... Click to continue

A researcher in Canada has been living high on the government hog, spending thousands on toys and personal effects with federal money meant to fund his research.

According to a story from the Canwest News Service that ran in the Vancouver Sun yesterday, the scientist spent more than $20,000 on top-of-the-line ... Click to continue

British parliamentarians voted to allow the controversial human embryo bill to continue to the next stage of debate yesterday (May 12), according to Agence France Presse. Just nine members of the governing Labour party voted against the bill, which passed by 340 votes to 78.

On Sunday (May 11), it also emerged that a team at Cornell University's Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility led by Nikica... Click to continue

Publishers are getting a new tool in the fight against plagiarism in scientific manuscripts.

The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters announced on May 1 that they would be offering their clients - the publishers of many well-read science journals - the option to employ iThenticate, a tool that checks submitted manuscripts for potential copy-catting against databases of previously published work.

According to Logan Hutchinson,... Click to continue

A former Congressman, speaking at a meeting of researchers, policy makers, and advocates last Friday (May 9), urged scientists to become intimately involved in the political process. And he encouraged the nation's scientists to do much more than just cast their votes for the candidates of their choice in upcoming elections.

"Get inside their campaigns and then press to get science in their messages to voters," said ... Click to continue

BrainCells, a company that stakes its existence on the once-heretical notion of adult neurogenesis, is finally taking its novel treatment for depression into a phase II trial, CEO Jim Schoeneck told me at a neurotechnology meeting in Boston yesterday (May 8).

Researchers have recently begun to suspect that treating depression requires neurogenesis. Drugs such as Prozac, though, stimulate nerve growth via the serotonin pathway, which... Click to continue

The third annual Neurotech Industry meeting in Boston kicked off yesterday morning (May 8) with some big numbers:

Two billion people each year are affected by brain-related illnesses, from stroke to depression to chronic pain, with an economic loss worldwide of about $2 trillion.

Venture capital companies invested about $1.77 billion in neuroscience-related research last year.

Worldwide, neuro-related industry profits hit $130.5 billion in 2007-- a growth of 8% from the previous... Click to continue

A former postdoc at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) falsified and fabricated DNA sequences and methylation status in unpublished data about a tumor suppressor gene, a UNMC investigation, in conjunction with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), has found.

From 2002-2005, Lois Bartsch worked in James Shull's laboratory at UNMC, researching the... Click to continue

Victimless Leather, one of the works on show at the Museum of Modern Art's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, has claimed a victim: itself. Exhibition curator, Paola Antonelli, pulled the plug on the piece's life-support system last week, effectively "killing" the project, according to The Art Newspaper.

Victimless Leather was a miniature... Click to continue

Microbes may have the capacity for a type of learning generally attributed to higher organisms, suggests a paper published online in Science today (May 8).

"We have to start to think about bacterial behavior in a more sophisticated way," said Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University, who led the study.

Researchers have long assumed that microbes respond to... Click to continue

If you're thinking of buying flowers for mom this Sunday, beware of nature's seductive marketing. A new study published on-line this week in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology shows that flowers flutter in the wind to be attractive. But this floral advertising is not aimed at mother-loving children. Instead, researchers in the UK suggest, flower "waving" is a hitherto unrecognized way that plants entice... Click to continue

New findings help resolve a long-standing debate in immunology over what type of cells are behind the progression of type-1 diabetes: attacker or protector cells.

Scientists found that autoimmune destruction is likely due to a defect in levels of a cytokine within insulin-producing islets that reduce the numbers of protector cells. The research was published in today's online issue of... Click to continue

An Australian research group is proposing a surprising technique to alleviate the ecological damage that the invasive cane toad has caused to many regions of Australia.

Rick Shine at Sidney University suggested yesterday in a lecture to the Australian Academy of Sciences that researchers introduce tiny cane toads to areas where they have not yet been found, reasoning that it will help animals learn to avoid the toxic creatures, the... Click to continue

The platypus joins the ranks of fruit flies, rice, humans, and other subjects of intense genetic study with the publication of its genome sequence today (May 7) in Nature.

Researchers say that exploring the genome of the platypus, which sits at a... Click to continue

The number of fat cells in a person's body is determined during childhood and stays constant throughout life, with about 10 percent of fat cells dying and being replaced annually, according to study published in Nature yesterday (May 4).

Understanding the hitherto poorly characterized dynamics of fat cell production and turnover may help researchers target key processes in obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes.

"We are... Click to continue

The discoverer of telomerase, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Joan Steitz, known for identifying small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) and elucidating their role in DNA transcription, were awarded the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize today (May 2). They are the first women to receive the prize, which has been awarded since the year 2000.

Blackburn, at the University of California, San Francisco, was recognized for her work on telomeres with the 2006 ... Click to continue

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has agreed to reassess controversial treatment guidelines for Lyme disease after an unprecedented antitrust investigation was launched against the group last year, according to the Wall Street Journal Health Blog.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ... Click to continue

Botanists from all over the world have convened in New York City and are hammering out plans to assemble a DNA-based catalog of the Earth's tree species.

The scientists met yesterday (May 1) and are meeting today (May 2) at the New York Botanical Garden to discuss an effort to barcode - or identify using short, standardized stretches of genetic material - all 100,000 or so tree species on the planet. The project is called Tree-BOL, for the... Click to continue

A medical publisher has changed its copyright policy to ease the process for authors to comply with the federal public access mandate. Starting today (May 1), authors will automatically retain copyright of manuscripts submitted to Rockefeller University Press journals, according to an editorial published yesterday in the Journal of Cell Biology.

Giving copyrights to authors streamlines the process of submitting articles to... Click to continue

Before therapies using human embryonic stem cells can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers will have to answer one key question: where do the cells go when they are injected into the patient?

During an FDA meeting earlier this month on the safety of embryonic stem cell therapies, the agency grappled with the issues of tracking stem cells in vivo. ... Click to continue