California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a state bill Sunday (Sept. 28) that aims to protect academic researchers - especially those who use animals in their studies - from the types of attacks that animal rights groups have employed in the state recently.

The law, called... Click to continue

The financial crisis befalling the nation has proven that its tentacles reach even into the scientific community. On Saturday (Sept. 27), the US Senate decided to freeze federal funding of any program except those relating to veterans affairs and national security by passing bill HR 2638.

This leaves many US science agencies including NASA, the National... Click to continue

A single-celled phytoplankton has a wily way of resisting viral attack, according to a study out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The organism makes itself invisible to its viral predator by shifting from the diploid to haploid life cycle stage.

The findings are the first to show a eukaryote is capable of switching stages in its life cycle to avoid viral attack, and to point to a previously unrecognized role of sexual reproduction in the phytoplankton,... Click to continue

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has chosen a University of California, Berkeley, biochemist and stem cell researcher to serve as its next president.

Robert Tjian, an HHMI investigator since 1987, will replace outgoing president, Thomas Cech, on April 1, 2009, when Cech leaves his post.

HHMI sent an E-mail to its investigators earlier today announcing the decision.

"Bob... Click to continue

If you've been following the news of NIH-funded researchers seemingly entangled in webs of unreported, underreported, or misreported financial ties to industry over the past year or so, you know that the buck often stops at the desk of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). You might have also noticed that many of the subjects of Grassley's recent inquiries are psychiatrists who are funded by NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

In... Click to continue

A protein belonging to part of the immune system that researchers once hoped to harness to attack cancer cells actually spurs tumor growth, according to a study reported in Nature Immunology.

Researchers knocked out a receptor for one of a group of 30 proteins called complement proteins, part of the body's normal immune defense repertoire, and observed... Click to continue

How is a kidnapper's text message similar to a jellyfish? Both are tiny points in a sea of data that scientists can use to draw conclusions about a bigger picture -- be it identifying a serial rapist or measuring biodiversity, according to Andrew Price, a marine ecologist who is working with forensic scientists to apply taxonomic techniques to crime assessment.

Ecologists... Click to continue

Until now, reprogramming fully differentiated cells into a pluripotent state has had a major drawback: the use of genome-integrating retroviruses to do the job. But a new study published tomorrow in Science reports on the creation of reprogrammed cells without such integrating viruses.

"The number one priority for labs working on iPS translation is to alleviate this problem of integration of viruses into the human genome,"... Click to continue

In the last several years, stem cell banks and registries have begun springing up across the country and internationally. But are all these facilities helping research, or just duplicating efforts?

The latest addition to the list of such facilities is the stem cell registry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, launched earlier this month. That school also has a human embryonic stem cell (HESC) core facility to store and distribute the cell lines. There are plenty of others: the... Click to continue

Big pharma's interest in stem cell research is picking up speed. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is expanding its research into the technology and plans to open a second regenerative medicine unit in Cambridge, UK, this November, Reuters reported yesterday.

Pfizer isn't the only one. In July, GlaxoSmithKline entered a ... Click to continue

The 15th head of the National Institutes of Health, Elias Zerhouni, will step down from his post, he announced today (Sept 24). In a conference call with reporters today, Zerhouni said that he would be leaving NIH at the end of October as a part of what he called "the natural cycle of tenures for this position."

"It's with mixed emotions that I move on," he said.

President George W. Bush... Click to continue

The MacArthur Foundation today announced the recipients of its 2008 MacArthur Fellows (a.k.a. Genius Awards): Among the 25 winners, who will receive $500,000 over the next five years, four were life scientists.

Here's the line-up:

Kirsten Bomblies, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, studies genetic incompatibility in Arabidopsis as a model for the development of new plant species in... Click to continue

Researchers hoping to develop nanoparticles as medicines or carriers of therapeutic molecules have much more to worry about than the type of material they plan on miniaturizing, according to a study in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Researchers in Ireland found that the corona, or cloud of proteins and other biomolecules that... Click to continue

While Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama unveiled an impressive stable of science policy advisers last week, his opponent John McCain has yet to ante up.

As Wired reported on Wednesday, the Obama science team includes Nobel laureates ... Click to continue

Forty-seven researchers -- including 31 early career investigators -- will split a pot of $138 million dollars for research recognized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as bold and potentially transformative.

The NIH Director's Pioneer and New Innovator Awards aim to fund high risk-high reward projects that tend to get passed over during the peer-review selection for NIH R01 grants.

"There's a tendency for investment early in... Click to continue

Were animals with four limbs the first to evolve fingers and toes-- or did such digits evolve long before? A study published today (September 21) in Nature claims to resolve this long-standing question.

For many years, most paleontologists debated whether digits arose 380 million years ago as a novel evolutionary trait in tetrapods, or four-footed creatures. The new study, led by Catherine Boisvert, at Uppsala... Click to continue

Do you strongly support the war in Iraq and strict immigration policies? If so, you're more likely to have strong physiological responses to threatening stimuli such as loud noises and disturbing images, according to a study published in Science this week.

Using tests of skin conductance in response to different types of images and startle response to loud sounds, researchers found that people with higher physical sensitivity to threatening stimuli are more likely to favor political... Click to continue

A fat-based hormone, the first of its kind to be identified, may regulate the body's metabolic rate, according to a report in this week's Cell. The results paradoxically suggest that aspects of metabolic disease could be controlled by spurring the production of new fat cells.

"There's a strong dogma that excess fat is bad in every form, that the effects will always be negative," said principal investigator... Click to continue

The National Institutes of Health may be getting a healthy funding boost by year's end.

Within the next couple of weeks, the US Senate is expected to debate a supplementary funding package that includes $500 million to NIH for 2008. Senate Committee on Appropriations chairman Robert Bryd (D- WVa) introduced the supplement at... Click to continue

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) yesterday (September 16) announced it will turn over scientific evidence against their chief suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, a US army microbiologist who committed suicide in July, to scientists at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for independent review.

Bruce Ivins, a researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Institute for Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Md, conducted studies on... Click to continue

The trio of hurricanes that raked across Haiti recently left the HIV/AIDS clinic that I visited there earlier this year battered but not broken. While Gustav, Hanna, and Ike wrought widespread destruction across the country and killed hundreds of people, the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO) clinic in Port-au-Prince continues to function, according to the center's director ... Click to continue

US Republican Presidential candidate, John McCain, appears to be backing off from his strong support of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, according to his responses to an online questionnaire on national science issues.

"While I support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research," Senator McCain (R-AZ) wrote in response to a survey from science advocacy... Click to continue

Three researchers, Victor Ambros, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Gary Ruvkun, at Massachusetts General Hospital, and David Baulcombe, at the University of Cambridge in the UK, will share the 2008 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for their discovery of microRNAs, the Albert and... Click to continue

The wires - including, um, Wired - are abuzz this week with talk of research by Jack Szostak, a Harvard researcher who is trying to create synthetic life. The attention stems from results he presented last week at an Origin of Life conference, as well as data he's published recently.

Loyal readers will recall that we wrote about Szostak's work nearly two years... Click to continue

A new bill seeks to undo the NIH mandate requiring federally-funded research papers to be made publicly available within 12 months of acceptance for publication.

In a hearing yesterday (September 11) the US House Committee on the Judiciary considered whether the mandate violates publishers' copyright. The committee's chairman, John Conyers (D-Mich), sponsored the bill, HR6845, titled the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which... Click to continue

There are many ways to ward off a predator, but perhaps none so enthusiastic as the Giant honeybee's team "wave."

New research, published this week in PLoS One, demonstrates that a communal motion called the shimmering effect, in which hundreds of bees successively flip their abdomens upwards in a rapid wave, protects a hive by startling wasps away.

"People have known for a long time that the Asian species of honeybees do this... Click to continue

Systematics and taxonomy, sciences involved with identifying and organizing living things into distinct groups and establishing the relationships between those groups, are in serious danger of going extinct, according to a report released last month by a committee focused on science in the... Click to continue

A government hearing set for next week will discuss a bill in the works that may address publishers' concerns with public access laws, according to the Library Journal.

The House Committee on the Judiciary hearing is slated for September 11, according to the committee's online schedule. Although text for the legislation, entitled "Fair copyright in... Click to continue

UK-based medical journal The Lancet has retracted a paper reporting on a clinical trial of a stem cell therapy for urinary incontinence, which has been mired in allegations of misconduct.

In this week's issue of the journal, editors Sabine Kleinert and Richard Horton write that authors of an Austrian government inquiry "raise doubts as to whether a trial... Click to continue

Thirty-eight researchers were awarded with grants totaling $42.2 million dollars this week for their "wild and crazy " ideas to change the way science is done.

The EUREKA program (Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration), sought proposals from investigators that were innovative, but required little or no preliminary data.

"There were so many good... Click to continue

In the largest act of US philanthropy for biomedical research, Eli and Edythe Broad have donated $400 million to the Broad Institute, a joint project between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The gift builds on the $200 million with which the Broads first funded the genomics institute in 2003 and 2004.

"We're now making a $600 million dollar bet in total that this will be the place where the world's greatest... Click to continue

The NIH has turned the locks and barred the windows on several previously open access databases of genetic information in response to new research proving it's possible to identify a single individual's genetic profile out of a pool of DNA.

Last week in PLoS Genetics, researchers from the University of California, Los Angles, and the Translational Genomics Institute in Phoenix published a new bioinformatics method for pinpointing an... Click to continue

As controversy and rumors swirl around John McCain's newly-tapped running mate like tropical depression-force winds and the Republican National Convention sputters to a start, Barack Obama vowed to lift the ban on stem cell research and set targets to reduce carbon emissions, and promised to double basic research budgets over the next decade.

His promises are spelled out in responses to a science policy survey issued by research and... Click to continue

Researchers have known for almost a decade that the adult brain produces new neurons. But a new study appearing yesterday (August 31) online in Nature Neuroscience gets a better look at what adult neurogenesis in two regions of the brain is actually for.

"I think the conclusions are really groundbreaking," Barbara Beltz, neuroscientist at... Click to continue