Nature Newsblog
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Report highlights native vegetables needing extra attention.
Ever snacked on bambara beans or lablab? If not, it may be because these vegetables are among the "lost crops of Africa" identified in a new report by the US National Academies.
Read the story here.
A costing for a giant sunshade in space shows that there are probably better ways to spend the money.
The leading economist Nicholas Stern has just handed us, in advance, the bill for the impacts of climate change: close to $4 trillion by the end of this century1.
And with perfect timing, astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has delivered the equivalent of a builder's estimate for patching up the problem using a cosmic sunshade2. It will set us back by... well, let's make it a nice round figure of $4 trillion by the end of the century.
Read the column here.
The Stern Review won't be the last word on the cost of global warming. But it has upped the stakes in the debate. Jim Giles reports.
He's a highly respected researcher and a former chief economist at the World Bank. He had a year and the help of more than 20 of Britain's brightest civil servants and academics. His work was commissioned by Gordon Brown, who controls Britain's budget and is likely to be the country's next prime minister. So could Nicholas Stern settle the debate about the economic impact of climate change?
Read the story here.
Servicing mission will keep telescope aloft until 2013.
NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced today that the agency will mount a manned mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Read the story here.
Virus from distant past may throw light on role of retroviruses in cancer.
Researchers in France have recreated a 5-million-year-old virus whose remains are now found littered across the human genome. The ancient virus could help us to understand how these genetic remnants contribute to cancer.
Read the story here.
Hybrid fossils in Romania add to story of ancient human pairings.
The idea that Neanderthals and early humans living in Europe may have interbred has been strengthened by a re-analysis of bones unearthed in a Romanian cave more than 50 years ago.
Read the story here.
New addition to the animal elite that can recognize themselves.
Elephants possess the highly cerebral ability to recognize their own jumbo reflections in mirrors, scientists have found.
Read the story here.
The United Kingdom's Stern report calls for investment into technologies and adaptation.
Today the UK government releases a report by chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern, on the financial costs of climate change, and the counter-costs of efforts to mitigate or adapt to the changing world. Here news@nature.com unpicks how this report differs from those that have come before, and why it is important.
Read the briefing here.
Physicists help a US basketball team get to grips with its new ball.
This year, the US National Basketball Association (NBA) is switching from using a leather to a synthetic, microfibre ball. The animal-welfare group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is thrilled, but basketball players complain that the new ball is slippery and doesn't handle as well as the old one.
Read the story here.
Microsoft co-founder withholds funding from radio telescope.
An ambitious radio array project that will join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is running into money problems.
Read the story here.
Electricity from microbes could shield ships and rigs.
Ships, buoys, oil rigs and other ocean-bound steel objects can be protected from rust by plugging them into the seabed, says a team of Argentinian researchers.
Read the story here.
Mars rover unperturbed by potential software disaster.
Mars rover Spirit has quietly survived its own version of the millennium bug during its winter break.
Read the story here.
Commission’s proposals aim to avoid last-minute quota decisions.
Last-minute wrangling over European fishing quotas could be curbed by a science-based procedure proposed by the European Commission.
Read the story here.
The twin STEREO satellites, intended to take three-dimensional images of the Sun, launched successfully from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, just before 9 p.m. local time. The two spacecraft will now go into orbit about the moon, and gradually separate to take up their observing positions. They should be sending back images by December. Read news@nature's pre-launch story here.
Sometimes there is a sweet moment when staying to the bitter end of a meeting proves worthwhile.
And sometimes there is not.
That’s OK though, because I did learn about feng shui in fertility clinics based on a survey of patients. A board of baby photos, they found, is good. (It provides encouragement of babies to come, rather than a reminder of those that might not.) ‘Explicit visual aids’ in the ‘semen production room’ also get the thumbs up for providing encouragement.
I almost didn’t make it to the meeting’s end -- but for a free sugar-boosting sample of prenatal vitamins cleverly transformed into chocolate and caramel chews. Yum. Wish I’d known about those when I was growing my own embryo.
That’s it from reproductive medicine. I have to go back to dealing with the consequences of reproduction instead: an 18 month old toddler.
IVF has many flaws, but a new one to me is that it skews the sex ratio. A lot. Normally in the US, just over 51% of babies born are boys and 49% are girls – and apparently there has been a worldwide trend in recent years towards fewer boys. (Is a global boy shortage approaching? Panic.)
Could IVF be contributing? The team at Montefiore Medical Center in Hartsdale, New York, found that only 41% of babies born after IVF were boys and 59% were girls, in their clinic at least.
The team suggests that stress during the procedure of IVF (which is intrinsically stressful) could prevent male embryos from implanting or surviving.
There have been various studies before showing that stressful situations tend to favour the birth of girls, such as war, earthquake, starvation. For some reason, male embryos are less likely to survive stress in the mother’s body. No doubt there is some evolutionary advantage to this that I am too ignorant to know about.
An aside. I’ve just realized that virtually everything I’ve written about has been from clinics in New York. Clearly it is some kind of reproductive biology research mecca.
On this week's Nature Podcast hear about giant terror birds, the honeybee genome, the Neuroscience 2006 conference, monitoring North Korea's nuclear materials, connecting brains, and how biodiversity affects ecosystems.
This week's topic for discussion: will the genetic sequence of the honeybee offer insights into human sociality?
You can find out more about the honeybee genome in our special video web focus
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Dawkins's attempt to test the existence of God is as silly as using logic to tear down Santa Claus in the eyes of a child, says Henry Gee.
In his book Unweaving The Rainbow, Richard Dawkins boasts (boasts!) that he told a six-year-old that Father Christmas doesn't exist. His logic was purely scientific - there wouldn't be time for Santa to reach the homes of all the good children in the world in one night.
Read the column here.
The pong from handling iron or copper comes from your own skin.
Why does metal smell? Chemists have found a surprising answer: it doesn't.
Read the story here.
Around the world, researchers are being harassed, imprisoned and murdered.
Six medical workers are on trial in Libya, facing the death penalty for deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, despite the fact that international experts say there is no evidence of their guilt (see 'A shocking lack of evidence').
Read the story here.
Fossil find reveals 'terror bird' was fast on its feet.
An ancient meat-eating 'terror bird' discovered in northern Patagonia has a record-breakingly large head — but the big beast could still sprint for its prey.
Read the story here.
Mouse study suggests stem-cell work could be made more efficient.
US researchers say they have improved the technique by which stem cells can be coaxed from an embryo without harming it.
Read the story here.
“You can’t just do things with people’s tissues without talking to them about it,” said UK stem cell expert Peter Braude this morning. This, to a participant who asked whether it was OK to take embryos which women had given their permission to discard, and use them to extract stem cells. Ethicists must be squirming.
Many of these people spend their time trying to get their hands on eggs and create embryos. So it was refreshing to hear Braude talk about how to do this ethically, even if he did it at a galloping pace.
Braude said he was troubled by one proposed way to get embryos for stem cell research. The idea is to identify IVF embryos that are defective in some way (because genetic tests have shown that their chromosomes are abnormal). These embryos are not considered fit to replace into a woman, but maybe they could be used for research.
Braude points out that many of the cells in this embryo may actually be genetically normal and that the embryo might continue to develop normally – so it is difficult to argue that they are good enough for stem cell research but not good enough to form a baby. “I’m unhappy about the idea that we can declare embryos unfit for therapy but suitable for research,” he said.
This whole topic “is not uncontroversial,” he said, with typical British understatement
What are the limits of an embryo’s powers? Scientists seem to marvel at how cells from early embryos can do remarkable things – and indeed, it is astonishing that they can grow an entire new person from a single cell.
I chatted to one researcher who has tested whether the first two cells in an embryo are the same -- or whether, after this very first division in the dawn of the embryo’s life, one cell is already headed towards one fate and the other has a different cellular career in mind. There’s actually quite a debate about this amongst developmental biologists.
Jiying Hao separated the two cells of mouse embryos and tested whether both cells could grow into a line of embryonic stem cells, or just one of them could. She found only two cases, amongst many attempts, in which both cells produced stem cells – compared with numerous cases in which one cell could and the other could not. So even at this stage, the two cells seem to have different aptitudes.
For more weirdness, you can count on fertility doctor Panos Zavos, who regularly courts controversy. He had a poster up (and a recent paper) in which he stretched embryos even further, although I couldn’t find anyone to talk to about it. The team took two cell mouse embryos, split them in half and let each half grow into a new two-cell embryo. Then they split them again and repeated. And again. At each stage, they tested whether some of the embryos were able to develop further.
After the first split, 74% of cells grew into new embryos. But after each subsequent split, less of the cells were able to grow into a fresh embryo – as if their regenerative superpowers were slowly being sapped.
Hao struggled to tell me how her study could be used. Perhaps it means you can’t chop a human embryo in half (or in half again and again) and create artificial twins without consequences. Or something.
But I promised weird stuff with embryos and here it is.
Some numbers this morning made me think.
First, the cost of an egg. Sigal Klipstein wanted to know whether the $5000-$10,000 paid to women who donate their eggs in the US is too much. So she asked them how they spent it.
40% used the cash to pay back loans or debt; 20% saved it; 20% paid college expenses; 20% used it as a down-payment on a house. Klipstein concluded that these women were not being coerced into donating their eggs, because they weren’t using the money to pay for rent, food or to escape poverty.
Hmm. It seems rather convenient to find that the amount being paid is just the perfect amount to recruit enough egg donors without pressurising them into donating. I doubt this will resolve the debate about the appropriate price for an egg. (And anyway, some places pay extra for a more ideal egg – from tall, blue-eyed women with good exam scores.)
Second, the cost of embryos. One of the biggest problems in assisted reproduction is that of multiple births: there is pressure to place multiple IVF embryos into women (to boost the chances of a pregnancy); but this increases the risk of having twins, triplets or more, with well-documented health hazards for mother and baby. Some European countries have laws limiting the number of embryos transferred. There are no such laws in the US.
But maybe, as is so often in this country, economics will force the issue in the end. Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College estimated that health insurers would save around $7,000 per couple if they paid for IVF treatment (something hardly any do) and mandated that only a single embryo be transferred per cycle.
That’s because the costs of IVF would be far outweighed by the money saved on intensive care needed for sick newborns from multiple births. And it would save all those people from mortgaging their houses to have a baby.
STEREO to create 3D images of solar explosions.
A pair of solar satellites are due to lift off Wednesday in an effort to provide researchers with their first three-dimensional images of the Sun's surface.
Read the story here.
Unpicking the problems of infertility may help guide treatment.
A battery of genetic tests might soon foretell which women are more likely to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization (IVF) — and which are more likely to face problems and disappointment.
READ THE STORY HERE.
You know you’re at a meeting attended by lots of doctors (the medical kind, rather than research scientists) when (a) most people wear suits and (b) the cookie supply is constantly replenished during break. Oh, and the water fountains are sponsored.
More from the fringes of reproductive medicine. (I know I haven’t delivered yet on the weird things that doctors do with embryos, but that will come I’m sure.)
Women who are born as heavy babies are more likely to go gray early (in their 20s). Author Lubna Pal of Albert Einstein College of Medicine said she is a bit embarrassed to even present the study. She originally wondered if women who hit the menopause early also tend to show other signs of aging, such as gray hair, and whether this premature aging was somehow established in the womb.
But what actually fell out of her analysis was the larger baby, grayer hair connection. One rather unsubstantiated idea behind this link is that heavier babies have higher insulin levels -- and that over the years this causes more oxidative damage to many cells including those that manufacture our hair dye. (There are previous links between early graying, heart disease and bone health.)
If gray hair is really an indicator of past and future health, it might help explain our obsession with covering it up.
This evening I met someone who teaches medical clowning. My eyebrows shot up too. But Shevach Friedler and his friend (the clown) teach other clowns how to cheer up ill people.
And this is relevant to reproduction because…? Because he presented a study showing that 15 minutes spent with a medical clown after an IVF cycle bumps the pregnancy rate from 20% to 36%. Which must be about the same as knocking a few years off a woman’s age.
Obviously I asked what the clown does. (I was hoping for a video presentation and a quick fertility boost, but no luck.) Friedler said it took three months to find the best routine. Red-nose clowning didn’t do the job for young, infertile women. So the clown dresses like a chef, does magic tricks and makes jokes, presumably the kind that young, infertile women find funny. I’m still struggling to think of examples.
Supposedly the clown reduces the stress that afflicts women undergoing IVF, or somehow tickles those embryos into staying put.
Statins used to lower cholesterol may also ease inflammation caused by smoke.
Cholesterol drugs called statins could protect smokers from some of the lung damage inflicted by their habit, a team of researchers report today.
Read the story here.
Fat could send the wrong signals to sick cells.
Too much fat on your frame can be a recipe for health problems, including an increased risk of cancer. Now researchers say they might know why: fat cells, they say, seem to send out signals that stop tumour cells from dying.
Read the story here.
“It’s like three jumbo jets packed with pregnant women going down every day.” Now that’s the way to get attention.
Herbert Peterson, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, was talking about the half a million women who still die every year from pregnancy and childbirth in the developing world. Another 8-9 million become sick.
So much of this meeting seems to focus on ways to help women who want to get pregnant and cannot – and yes this is important. But when you consider reproduction on a global level, infertility is only a small part of the equation. In many places, poor women are still having too many babies, in bad conditions and they don’t have much choice about it.
The world’s population is expected to rocket to over 9 billion by 2050 and all of this will happen in the poorest countries in the world. Women and children die or fall ill because they don’t have access to contraception or clinics.
People like Peterson advocate that all women should have a right to choose when and how many children they want to have, and that this would go a long way towards solving the planet’s ills. But the solutions involve strategies and capacity and infrastructure, all those words that always seem rather vague and impossible to achieve.
NASA keeps its cash as X-Prize Cup fails to find a winner
It was a showcase of high-tech space technology, but this weekend's X-Prize Cup was cursed by mis-directed post, mis-measured competition equipment and entrants that nearly blew away in the wind.
Read the story here
Last week, Icelandic authorities announced that they would resume commerical hunting of minke and fin whales; over the weekend they made their first kill. News@nature.com takes a look at the issue.
Iceland has had an on-again off-again relationship with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which instigated a moratorium against commercial whaling from 1986.
Read the briefing here.
I’ll be blogging from the meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine – in a nutshell, strange stuff that doctors do with embryos.
For a society largely devoted to helping people have babies, the opening ceremony didn’t bode well. The only toddler member of the audience (who is, after all, what many of these people spend their lives trying to produce) drew disapproving glances when he became bored and whiny. I thought it was understandable: 30 minutes in, the suits of the society were still slapping each other on the back and giving each other awards. Perhaps like me, the toddler was wondering where the science is?
The science didn’t appear – and the kid was lucky enough to be carried out on the verge of a full blown tantrum. I stuck out the rest and was at least rewarded with some New Orleans gospel and the sight of doctors uncomfortably forced to join in.
Almost total relief of symptoms tempered by hints of cancerous side effects.
The symptoms of Parkinson's disease have been relieved in rats using a stem-cell treatment. But a potentially cancerous side effect might put the brakes on such therapies for humans.
Read the story here.
A wet weekend may be enough to set off an earthquake.
A spate of rain is all it takes to set off some earthquakes. That's what a team of German geologists has discovered after monitoring swarms of tiny tremors in the mountains of Bavaria.
Read the story here.
Helen Pearson finds out the latest from scientists devoted to making embryos. Read her diary reports from New Orleans, Louisiana, from 22-25 October, here in our newsblog.
Results show increased health risk for computer factory workers.
A paper suggesting that IBM factory workers are at higher risk of contracting cancer has been published after more than two years of controversy and a court battle.
Read the story here.
Space elevator games kick off on Friday.
An airfield in New Mexico will this weekend host a celebration of space technology: the second annual X Prize Cup games.
Read the story here
Radar images dash hopes for Moonbase water supply.
If hopes of colonizing the Moon are ever to become reality, water needs to be found there. Sizeable amounts of ice could provide Moon-dwellers with drinking water and, if they split it into its atomic components, hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe. If lunar water is scarce, colonizers would have to carry water and fuel with them from Earth, or perhaps extract hydrogen from the rocks, either of which could be hugely expensive.
Read the story here.
This week I've learnt about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS and Huntington's. Then there was autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I've blogged on suicide and child abuse. So it's some relief to end the conference blog with a poster that has the excellent title of "No disease in the brain of a 115-year-old woman".
Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper pledged to donate to her body to medical research in 1972. Almost 30 years later, at the age of 111, she wondered whether medical research still had any interest in her body. So she called the University of Groningen, near where she lived in the Netherlands.
Gert Holstege, a neurosurgeon at the university, released that van Andel-Schipper presented a rare opportunity. He popped round and they chatted about politics and van Andel-Schipper's favourite soccer team, Ajax. She appeared totally alert. Cognitive tests later placed her in the range of performance associated with a 50-70 year-old. So when she died of cancer at 115, Holstege was able to study her brain to answer an intriguing but hard to answer question: do humans inevitably develop some form of brain disease as they age?
Van Andel-Schipper's brain tells us that the answer is no, at least up to age 115. Her brain was almost totally undamaged. In fact she was in remarkably good shape overall, says Holstege, and could have lived for several moer years if she hadn't developed cancer.
In this week’s Nature Podcast discover galactic rings of fire, methane worms and mud volcanoes, the origin of the ground beneath our feet, Darwin online, and hear the latest analysis on the US mid-term elections and Iraq war death toll calculations from our news team.
THIS WEEK'S TOPIC FOR DISCUSSION: In the US has science been manipulated to meet political agendas?
This week discuss this issue on Nature's Newsblog. See our US mid-term election 2006 special for more.
To SUBSCRIBE to the Nature Podcast for FREE copy and paste this URL into iTunes or your preferred media player or RSS reader: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/rss/nature.xml
The 7 November 2006 US mid-term elections will decide who holds all seats in the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate seats, and 36 governorships. As Democrats and Republicans war for the hearts and minds of their voters, is science playing a role? And what are the science-based arguments taking a front seat in the debates?
Find out in our special.
Are you a working scientist, and would you vote for someone based on their science policies alone? What if a candidate puts the environment ahead of the economy? Would a positive attitude towards stem cell research outweigh, say, questionable policies on education? Tell us!
Targeting of larger fish makes populations prone to collapse.
Fishing makes fish populations more variable from year to year, and so more vulnerable to complete collapse, says a study in Nature this week.
Read the story here.
Learning the language of antibiotics could help fight superbugs.
By shuffling protein segments like words in a sentence, researchers have created what they hope is a language for finding potent new antibiotics.
Read the story here.
Multimillion-dollar facilities escape mostly unscathed.
On a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii, astronomer Tom Geballe had just wrapped up his graveyard shift at the giant, 8-metre Gemini telescope. He had retired to the off-site dormitory and was settling in to watch some American football when he felt the ground begin to move. Quickly, he leapt into a doorframe and waited until the earthquake passed. "It was a good shake," Geballe says. "We realized immediately that we had to go back up the mountain."
Read the story here.
Can verbal abuse to a child can be as damaging in later life as some forms of sexual abuse? Apparently so. The signs of serious criticism and shouting can even show up as long-term changes in the brain, according to a study presented here.
Martin Teicher of Harvard Medical School says he was motivated to study verbal abuse after treating a patient with severe trauma symptoms. The patient said felt that she should not have been so scarred by her childhood, since she had “only been shouted at”.
The patient stuck in Teicher’s mind. When he saw four more people with similarly severe symptoms with a history of only severe verbal abuse he decided to look carefully at the problem.
He published an initial study this June, confirming that people who had been verbally abused as children show the same levels of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as those who suffered other forms of abuse, such as witnessing domestic violence or being sexually abused by someone from outside their family (M. H. Teicher et al. Am. J. Psychiatry 163, 993-1000; 2006). That’s a problem, says Teicher, since people don’t normally take this sort of abuse so seriously. “We don’t look at what people say to their kids,” he notes.
By comparing the severity of the trauma patients’ symptoms with their childhood memories, Tiecher’s team also learnt that the frequency of the abuse was much less important than the degree to which parents criticized their child.
In a follow up study, presented on 17 October at the annual meeting of Society for Neuroscience, held in Atlanta, Georgia, the Harvard team show that verbal abuse appears to influence the development of areas of the brain that process sounds and language.
They looked 17 young people who reported having being verbally abused as children, and used magnetic resonance imaging to compare their brains to those of controls. Two auditory areas of the brain – the superior temporal and frontal gyri – were around 10% smaller in subjects who had been abused. Behavioural studies on the same patients revealed corresponding verbal memory problems.
Teicher says the results mirror those seen in people who have been sexually abused, where victims suffer defects to visual areas. That work has revealed that the abuse generates more severe problems if it takes place before puberty, and Teicher now wants to see if a similar sensitive period exists for verbal abuse.
But the major question, he adds, is whether the damage can be reversed. Teicher doubts whether the anatomical deficits can be turned round. But he wants to assess whether different types of therapy, such as that used to treat PTSD patients, can alleviate some of the trauma symptoms associated with verbal abuse.
Posted on behalf of Jim Giles
There are lots of papers on sleep at this year's meeting, which is appropriate for a conference that always features a lot of socializing -- and a lot of caffeine to compensate for that socializing. Many of the papers expand on messages we've heard before about the cognitive penalty we pay for not sleeping properly. But one paper today contained a more unusual result: sleep sometimes helps us make more mistakes, but in a creative way.
Jessica Payne of Harvard University has been looking at what sleep make us better at. She asked people to read a list of words and then, 12 hours later, to write down as many words as they could remember. Half the subjects were tested at the beginning and end of the day, the others before and after a night's sleep.
Here's the surprise result: those who slept made more mistakes.
Payne's lists contained words that centred on a theme word, but that theme was not actually on the list. So one set might be house, glass, handle. The theme is 'window', but that was not on the list. Psychologists know that people tend to recall seeing the theme word, even if it wasn't there. Both groups did indeed do this, but those that slept made more of these mistakes.
What's interesting is that the sleep group included words that were linked to the theme in more creative ways. In one extreme case, the phrase "washing machine" was included. Payne says she can't work out how this connects to the list.
The implication of this may be that sleep helps us remember the gist of an event, but not the details. As events recede into the past, our memories naturally lose details of them but retain the gist of what happened. It may be that sleep plays a role in this process.
We need to look seriously at nanoparticle risks, not invent a nanohazard sign to stick on everything.
When a fire at the chemistry department of the University of Texas, Austin, several years ago required firefighters to enter the labs, they were horrified to discover that there were inflammable substances inside. The department briefly faced the threat of having to label every door with warnings to that effect ("Danger: this chemistry lab contains ethanol").
Read Philip Ball's column here.
Conflict epidemiology study counts the cost of war.
It is one of the most politically charged questions that any researcher can tackle: how many people have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion?
Read the story here.
Animal study suggests even low caffeine doses could effect fetus.
Tentative evidence has emerged to suggest that low doses of caffeine, equivalent to just one or two cups of coffee per day, can affect the development of unborn babies.
Read the story here.
Atlanta was never the first choice. The SFN annual meeting has met in New Orleans every three years, and 2006 was again New Orleans’ turn after San Diego and Washington DC.
But then, Katrina struck, and the society decided last year to move the 2006 meeting to Atlanta. Fair enough.
But the society won’t be returning to New Orleans any time soon, instead meeting in November 2009 in Chicago. Weather considerations aside (they don’t call Chicago the Windy City for nothing), some say the society has rashly abandoned New Orleans just when it needs the economic boost large conferences can bring.
A few enterprising young scientists here took matters into their own hands and began handing out stickers saying “New Orleans for 2009”, which they urged attendees to affix to their badges. Sadly, they don’t seem to have made much headway. Few attendees have seen them and even fewer are wearing the stickers. Looks like it will be blues, not jazz, in 2009 after all.
Apoorva Mandavilli
News editor, Nature Medicine
[posted on her behalf by Nicola Jones]
There are 25,651 people at the Society for Neuroscience conference this year. Sounds like a lot. But it’s actually a solid drop from last year’s 35,000 attendees—and it shows.
The normally overflowing conference halls are emptier. The lines at the food stalls are a bit shorter. Even in the press room, there are fewer journalists banging away at their keyboards.
Why? Last November’s meeting in Washington DC “was in a different location, it was a different time of year, and the Dalai Lama was a big draw. You can’t discount that,” says Joe Carey, the society’s senior director of communications.
A whopping 14,000 people listened to the Dalai Lama, who last year inaugurated the special Science & Society series. This year’s speaker, architect Frank Gehry, attracted considerably fewer people. And Atlanta is no match for the attractions of San Diego or New Orleans, where past meetings were held.
But that’s not the whole story. Judging by the most common refrain in the hallways here, the real reason is obvious: money. The NIH pay line just dropped to an abysmal 7% and most scientists simply can’t afford to be here.
The average age for someone to win their first independent grant is now 44, prompting the society’s president to announce rather dramatically (at the press breakfast on Sunday), “If the young people don't get the grants, all of us will get old and there'll be no science.” Still, the 25,651 here does include a lot of young grad students and postdocs.
Apoorva Mandavilli
News editor, Nature Medicine
[posted by Nicola Jones on her behalf]
Russian-US team claims to have created element 118
For the second time in seven years, researchers say they have made the heaviest chemical element ever — the exotically titled ununoctium, or element 118.
Read the story here.
There are lots of shiny high-tech stands here selling equipment that can track the movement of lab animals or peer into their brains. Sitting a little oddly amongst them is John Gach's stand. He's selling old scientific textbooks, and is doing a very nice trade.
My favourite was his copy of the 1794 Zoonomia, in which Erasmus Darwin discusses ideas about evolution that later influenced his grandson's theory. It's yours for $1,750. Pricey, but there were others that would set you back more. A copy of a monograph by Sigmund Freud on child neurology, signed by the author, is listed at $5,000.
Mice don't like to booze. That's a problem, since it means that it's hard to use them to study alcohol dependence. But maybe not a problem for much longer, since researchers were describing today how they managed to persuade mice to properly sloshed. The answer? Given them the liquour when the lights go down.
John Crabbe of the Portland Alcohol Research Center has been doing that for a few years now, and says that mice given ethanol a few hours after the lights in the lab go out will drink far more than normal. It makes sense, since this is the time when mice normally feed. Crabbe's mice will drink enough for them to get intoxicated, something that mice normally avoid. If they could talk, says Crabbe, they would be slurring their words.
Once he discovered how to get the mice drunk, Crabbe pulled out those that developed the highest blood alcohol levels and bred them together. After five generations they are now prepared to drink enough to reach double the level of blood alcohol level of their forebears. Crabbe is going to keep on going, and will eventually make his mice available to alcohol researchers.
A study suggests that facial expressions may be hereditary.
Has anyone ever told you that you have the same expressions as your siblings or parents? You might think you picked that up by hanging around with your family too long. But scientists now say that such family 'signatures' may be genetic.
Read the story here.
Is the way we classify colour physiologically hardwired or culturally shaped? As a new analysis comes out in favour of the former, Heidi Ledford takes a hard look at the decades-old debate.
It is essentially a 'nature versus nurture' argument about how different languages divide colours into categories. For instance, in English, there is a word for red and a word for purple, but is that the case in every language?
Read the briefing here.
Suicidal behaviour linked to serotonin receptors.
There is growing evidence that suicidal behaviour is a condition is its own right and not just a consequence of other psychiatric disorders, say brain researchers.
Read the story here.
Synesthesia is one of those weird brain conditions that fascinates researchers and the public alike. For the uninitiated, synesthetes are people of sound mind and regular intelligence who, for reasons unknown, get their senses mixed up. They hear sounds when they read words, or see colours when they hear sounds. Or experience a change in temperature when they touch things. And so on: just about every possible combination of mixed-up senses has been reported by researchers who study synesthetes. But something about this work has always bugged me: how do the researchers know their subjects aren't just making it up?
I talked to David Eagleman of the University of Texas earlier today and he explained that it's all about consistency. He has studied hundreds of synesthetes and says that they always report the same kind of associations. If someone sees the colour green when they read the word Tuesday, then Tuesday will always be green for that person. It doesn't matter how many words you ask them to link to colours, they will always link the two things in the same way.
He also says that around 1% of the populations are synthesthetes. So if you think you might be a synesthete, check out http://synesthete.org. Eagleman has put all his tests up there, and you can run them on yourself.
The Society for Neuroscience annual conference is, as usual, a big crowd-puller. Looking down the huge poster halls you get the impression you can see the curvature of the Earth. Well you could if the place wasn't totally heaving. I started by heading straight for a poster that I hoped was going to make me feel terribly self-satisfied.
It was about calorific restriction (CR): the theory that says animals live longer if they restrict the number of calories they eat. It works in rodents and tests in primates are underway. It also has its human fans, and they annoy the hell out of me. They eat markedly less calories, say 80% of normal, and smugly talk about out-living their peers.
Now this is clearly a crazy idea, since there is no point living longer is it means less cheese, hamburgers, beer and the other things that making living worth it in the first place. So I was delighted to see a poster that revealed that mice on CR diets suffer more from stress. You eat less pies and, in the short term at least, all you get is more moody spells; surely this was the nail in the coffin for CR?
Unfortunately it seemed my hopes were a little too high. The data is very preliminary and only suggests that the CR mice are becoming more susceptible to stress. More interesting are the implications for weight-loss diets. The initial findings show that once off a CR diet, the mice go into a spectacular rebound. Four months later they are still eating more than controls. Tracy Bale, the University of Pennsylvania researcher behind the study, said she couldn't believe how fat the CR mice were. Which, she says, might explain why the majority of diets don't help people loose weight -- perhaps humans get the same cravings when they finish diets, and simply put the weight straight back on.
A genetic switch that produces testes has been found.
The battle of the sexes continues to rage — right down to the level of our genes.
Read the story here.
Experiment reveals how expectation interferes with perception.
When we look at a banana, does our brain tell us it looks yellow, even if it isn't? A recent study shows that it does.
Read the story here.
Size study highlights possibilities of the dog genome.
A single gene may explain the vast size difference between that tiny terrier yapping in the park and the massive mastiff ignoring the din.
Read the story here.
Last night, NIH director Elias Zerhouni warmed up the geneticists with a sure-fire crowd-pleaser: a joke about the mishaps of Vice-President Dick Cheney, who's in town for a Republican fund-raiser. Zerhouni apologized for the bad traffic yesterday, which was all tangled up due to Cheney's motorcade. Zerhouni said he'd asked Cheney to divert his motorcade away from the convention center. In reply, Cheney invited Zerhouni on a hunting trip. "But I said no - I have a prior commitment to the American Society of Human Genetics," Zerhouni said, adding after a small pause: "That was an act of self-preservation."
After the giggles died down, however, it was all bad news. Zerhouni talked about the "apparent paradox" that even though NIH budgets doubled from 1998 to 2003, success rates - that is, the percent of grant applications that earn funding - are down. "There is a fundamental phenomenon at work here," Zerhouni said: just as the doubling drew to a close, the NIH was deluged with a huge increase in grant applications. "The demand for grants took off just as the NIH budget was landing," Zerhouni said, adding that genome czar Francis Collins prefers the word "crashing" to "landing" - "and he might be right," Zerhouni said.
Zerhouni has faced a lot of critics, who claim he's making decisions that are whittling away at the NIH's budget for basic research. Last night, Zerhouni countered these claims with data. And he said that scientists must do a better job talking about NIH's successes, so that the agency will get more money. He named some recent successes of genetic research as examples, such as finding the genes that cause most cases of age-related macular degeneration.
Zerhouni also said that scientists must sell the public and Congress on the idea that NIH is vital to help solve one problem that won't go away otherwise: "Health care as we know it today is not sustainable. We have to move from a curative to a preemptive paradigm," Zerhouni said.
Join Jim Giles at this annual meeting of minds. He'll be sending diary reports back from Atlanta, Georgia, from 15-18 October. Check here for all his entries.
Nature also has a page devoted to this conference here.
And why not also visit the Nature Neuroscience gateway?
Even just walking to and from the convention center here in New Orleans, it's impossible to miss the fact that this city is still recovering from the mass disaster of Hurricane Katrina last year. Lots of businesses are empty or shut down. Workers are still clearing away rubble and there's small damage on some of the buildings. And this isn't even the part of town that was most affected by the storm.
Today, a handful of geneticists talked about their work to help the city recover. The geneticists were part of the team that tried to reunite families with their lost loved ones - whether dead in the storm or missing in its wake.
Most of the geneticists who helped out were volunteers. They spoke to families who were looking for lost relatives. They would help the families draw pedigrees, give DNA samples, and search for missing people who evacuated to other states.
But a huge part of their job was also to convince people to cooperate with a system that was failing them in so many other ways. The Federal Emergency Management Agency became notorious in Katrina's wake, for its slow and bungled response to the storm. The geneticists even had to use their own cell phones to contact families, because the phones at the Family Assistance Center were registered to FEMA - and the families were so fed up with FEMA that when they saw it appear on their caller ID, they wouldn't answer the phone. "People were furious," said geneticist Amanda Sozer. And it was hard to explain why the identification process sometimes moved slowly, or didn't give definite answers. "They thought it would be like [the TV show] CSI," she said.
In the end, geneticists were able to help most families find their loved ones. And maybe, they hope, their work will help build faith in science and scientists. Siobhan Dolan of the March of Dimes says that the public so often hears stories about genetics being used in sketchy ways - for cloning, or for things like sex selection in reproductive medicine. "Sometimes people think we're mad scientists," Dolan said. "But there could be nothing more universal than reuniting families in devastating circumstances. It was important to show that this technology can be used for tremendous good."
How much can you remove from a bacterium before it stops working?
How small can a genome get and still run a living organism? Researchers now say that a symbiotic bacterium called Carsonella ruddii, which lives off sap-feeding insects, has taken the record for smallest genome with just 159,662 'letters' (or base pairs) of DNA and 182 protein-coding genes. At one-third the size of previously found 'minimal' organisms, it is smaller than researchers thought they would find.
Read the story here.
Cassini snaps the perfect photo-shot.
This September brought a fantastic photo opportunity for Cassini, the spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Its trajectory brought it into the ringed planet's shadow for about 12 hours, giving it a striking view with the Sun lying directly behind.
Read the story here.
At least 250 postdocs and grad students attended a networking session here Tuesday night, in the ASHG’s new drive to provide content for younger members. The message was sobering: available academic positions are decreasing, and the number of PhD’s keeps increasing. What to do?
The session was kicked off by Bill Lindstaedt, Director of the UCSF Office of Career and Professional Development [http://student.ucsf.edu/osl/contact/]. He delivered the depressing news first: the median age of first tenure-track positions is 38; the median age of receiving a first NIH research grant R01 is 42; and only 4% of such grants go to first-time investigators. Yowch. As most people already know, this means many young investigators are trapped in repeated post-docs or other non-tenure-track positions for up to ten years. Bill suggested completing an individual development plan where you catalogue your strengths and weaknesses, and it sounded quite detailed. It’s probably a great idea but I found myself thinking that it was about the same length and quite similar to as filling out an application for an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship, where at least you have a chance (however slim these days!) to get some money at the end.
At the ASHG session, there were six speakers; two were more traditional academicians, and the rest of us had gone into other things. What I find heartening is that there are many more presentations about “alternative careers in science” than there were when I got my PhD eight years ago. I know because I speak at a number of them each year now! The six speakers each echoed one point: pursue the thing that keeps you up at night, the thing that you are most passionate about.
Every student in science should hear the message that you don’t have to go into a faculty position to make a difference in science or to pursue your love of the field. After the short talks here, there was a schmoozing session where students could ask questions of a number of geneticists in many fields. Several asked me the same question: how do you feel about “stepping off the track” and not being a ‘principal investigator’? I always answer this the same way: in what position do you think I have more influence, particularly at a younger age? Working away to get my first R01, or determining which genetics and genomics papers are published in Nature?
The other question that I’m asked most often is, if someone is interested in editing, what should they do in grad school or postdoc to get started? My advice is to ask your advisor to let you help them complete reviews on papers being considered for publication – your advisor probably gets asked to do them all the time, and could use some help with them. You should also try to write review articles in your area or summaries of papers for journals that publish them in their front half. It’s great to be able to come to an editing interview and point to places that you’ve shown you can read papers and summarize the important advance reported.
Chris Gunter
Nature manuscript editor, DC
[posted by Nicola Jones on her behalf]
A quick sampling of three Fab Facts I learned today:
1. Neanderthals didn't do it with our ancestors (or so the latest genome studies claim).
2. Genealogy is the second most popular pasttime in America, after gardening, and the second most popular use of the Internet, after porn.
3. Tetrahymena thermophila - a single-celled organism better known as "pond scum" - has seven sexes.
What does it even mean for something to have seven sexes? I don't really know. But it sort of blows my mind.
OK - so genetics hasn't delivered a slam dunk cure for fat. You still have to give up chocolate cake if you want to lose weight. As our interloper asked this morning, what gives? Where's the wonder drug that's going to save our sorry asses from dieting and exercising?
Well, there are lots of reasons why we don't have it yet. But one of the major ones is that the human genome contains so much information that it's difficult and expensive to pull out the "signal" amid the "noise." It's hard to pinpoint the few genes that control body fat, for example, when they're buried in so much other DNA, and when each one of the "fat" genes only accounts for a small part of a big belly.
That was part of the reason why scientists made the HapMap - basically, it was supposed to winnow down the amount of noise that scientists had to slog through in their search for the signals. But it's still a bit expensive to do a genome scan using the HapMap data, even though it's getting cheaper all the time.
So the U.S. National Institutes of Health has enlisted support from Big Pharma to help with the job. Pfizer, Abbott, the NIH, two biotech companies and Harvard University are spending $26 million to do massive gene hunts in a handful of diseases. Their partnership - called GAIN - announced its first six targets yesterday.
And - go ahead and call me cynical - but is it a sheer coincidence that some of Big Pharma's traditional cash cows top GAIN's wishlist? GAIN's first funded grants are looking for genes involved in diseases like depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder...chronic, common illnesses, without good cures, that force patients to take medicines for a long time. But, Francis Collins - head of the National Human Genome Research Institute - says market forces didn't play any role in helping GAIN choose its targets.
To be fair, these are also awful illnesses. And the drugs we have now leave a lot of patients high and dry. And all GAIN's data goes straight into the public domain, which is something that doesn't usually happen in parterships with the drug industry. GAIN also asks people not to file patents that will block research on the data - but the project can't legally enforce this. So it'll be really interesting to see how this goes over the next few years. If GAIN turns up any good genes, what's going to happen to the project's equitable ground rules?
On this week’s Nature Podcast explore the primordial 'Great Oxidation', find out how the orbit of the Earth may have shaped mammalian extinction patterns, enjoy a light-hearted roundup of the Nobel and Ig Nobel Prizes, get an update on the fate of the 'Tripoli Six', and hear how novel vaccination strategies might save the Ethiopian wolf.
This week's topic for discussion: which are sillier -- the Nobel or Ig Nobel prizes?
To SUBSCRIBE to the Nature Podcast for FREE copy and paste this URL into iTunes or your preferred media player or RSS reader:
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Spanish rodents lived and died by changes in our orbit.
Can a tiny change to the Earth's orbit wipe out life? New evidence suggests that perhaps it can — in Spanish rodents, at least.
Read the story here.
There are only 500 of these wild dogs left.
Ned Stafford finds out if and how they might be saved from extinction.
Read the briefing here.
Saturn's moon could be swimming in ethane sludge.
Bored with smog? Tired of the tedium of dust? Then spice up your life by looking to Titan, Saturn's largest moon, where the surface may be covered with a thick layer of 'smust'.
Read the story here.
Authors of study deny accusations of political bias.
Have over 650,000 people, or 2.5% of the population, really died in Iraq as a result of the US-led invasion?
Read the story here.
Sorry about the rocky start, folks - but I'm not the only one having trouble out of the starting gate! This morning, the geneticists got their own cold water in the face at a session on diabetes and obesity.
There the geneticists were, happily sharing their data - none of which is totally overwhelming. It's not that they're not finding anything - there are clearly some genes that have *something* to do with fat, and with diabetes. But - statistically - none of these genes explains more than a small part of the problem. And people are just beginning to understand how such genes work to cause these ailments.
Well, apparently this just isn't good enough. Midway through the session, during a break, a fellow in the audience got up, strode to the mike, and declared, "I'm not a geneticist, but frankly, I'm disappointed!"
It turned out the fellow, David Baylink, is an endocrinologist who traveled here all the way from Loma Linda, California to find out what the geneticists are learning about diseases like diabetes. And, apparently, Baylink wasn't impressed. He chastised the scientists for wasting money on methods that - he claimed - aren't delivering good results.
The geneticists are used to hearing these complaints: "You mean, we've got the human genome, and the HapMap, and there still isn't a sure-fire cure for fat, or heart disease, or depression? Wasn't that the whole point of spending all that taxpayer money on this research?" Geneticists spend lots of their time trying to answer questions like this - from funding agencies, the Congress, and random people on the bus.
But it's rare for an outsider to invade the hallowed halls of a meeting and confront scientists about whether their work is really worthwile. Over the next few days, we'll see how the geneticists answer these concerns.
Hello all. Erika is having some troubles with computer connections but will be blogging madly starting today... stay tuned.
Nicola.
Paper predicting demise of field is massaged after complaints from researchers.
Werner Marx and Andreas Barth have decided to revise their recently published paper on the future of high-temperature superconductivity research after complaints about their ominous conclusions. They stand by their data, they say, but add that some things could perhaps have been better phrased.
Read the story here.
Animals pick different strategies for survival above and below the sea.
Diving headfirst into a tank of chilly water would cause even the most stoic of us to shiver, but not the hooded seal (Cystophora cristata). Although the plucky marine mammals shiver on cold, dry land, they stop as they plunge into nippy waters — a strategy that probably helps them to conserve oxygen and minimize the brain damage that could result from long dives.
Read the story here.
North Korea's nuclear test raises more questions than answers. Despite the small size of the blast, Jim Giles and Geoff Brumfiel get little reassurance from the weapon watchers.
It was probably the worst first nuclear test in history, say weapons experts who have carried out preliminary analyses of the seismological data. But the North Koreans will have learned a great deal from the nuclear blast they set off on 9 October. And although experts' estimates of the country's technological expertise aren't much altered, North Korea's intent is now unmistakable.
Read the story here.
Officials fear yellow fever may hit in wake of raging outbreaks.
BANGALORE A series of outbreaks of the viral diseases dengue and chikungunya in India are being blamed on the collapse of mosquito control programmes and poorly planned urbanization.
Read the story here.
Researchers to climb Everest for a better understanding of acclimatization.
For most people who attempt to climb Mount Everest, getting to the top is achievement enough. But an intrepid band of British medical researchers aims to go one better. They plan to study the effects of altitude on their own bodies by conducting physical tests on the roof of the world.
Read the story here.
News@nature.com looks at how much we know about the country's nuclear abilities.
On Monday morning, North Korea announced it had performed an underground test of a nuclear bomb, apparently warning China about 20 minutes beforehand. North Korea has been asked to step back from nuclear ambitions; the news of this first test has brought widespread international condemnation.
Read the briefing here.
Here find our blog from the American Society of Human Genetics conference in New Orleans, where Erika Check will be sending back diary reports from 10-13 October.
You can also find the Nature homepage about this conference here.
A personal account of the silliest Nobels around.
While respectable folks are in Sweden, attending the real thing, I'm here at Harvard for the low-rent alternative: the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. That's the one that famously aims to award quirky scientific research that "first makes you laugh, then makes you think".
Read the diary report here.
By confronting ExxonMobil, the Royal Society is not being a censor of science but an advocate for it.
It isn't clear whether Bob Ward, former manager of policy communication at the Royal Society in London, knew quite what he was letting himself in for when he penned a letter taking the oil company ExxonMobil to task for funding groups that deny the human role in global warning. But with hindsight the result was predictable: once his letter was published by the British Guardian newspaper, the Royal Society was denounced from all quarters as having overstepped its role as an impartial custodian of science.
Read the column here.
A buzz is building that one of mathematics' greatest unsolved problems may have fallen.
Read the story here.
Frontal cortex referees the conflict between being selfish and fair.
All societies rely on individuals to police each other: if we think someone is behaving unfairly, we say so. Such rebukes rein in selfish behaviour and provide social glue.
Read the story here.
Anxious mice could point to better treatment for human conditions.
When depressed or chronically anxious people are prescribed drugs to treat their condition, it can take weeks before they know whether the pills have worked or not. Now psychiatrists have laid the foundations for a genetic test that could bypass that trial-and-error process by identifying patients who will not respond to particular drugs.
Read the story here.
What drives environmental activists to fire-bomb laboratories?
Emma Marris investigates a radical fringe of the US green movement in our news feature, In the name of nature.
PLUS
Editorial: To build bridges, or to burn them
Environmentalists who have grown impatient with science and technology need not be dismissed as beyond the reach of reason.
One day in June 1998, three young environmental activists of a radical bent drove from Eugene, Oregon, to Olympia, Washington. Their route took them through some of the loveliest country in the Pacific Northwest: up Interstate 5, through the Willamette Valley, between dark green forested mountains and misty hillside vineyards. Their van shared the road with logging trucks carrying immense trees hung with lichens and mosses.
Zeus bugs bear their freeloading mates to stop them from thieving.
In the rough and tumble world of insect love, having a Zeus bug for a boyfriend just sucks. The girls haul the boys around on their backs for weeks at a time, feeding them all the while from a special gland located right where his royal head rests.
Read the story here.
On this week's Nature Podcast take a look at insect eyes, Jupiter-sized exoplanets, the sinking sea floor, enjoy a pub guide to zoology, and hear more on string theory nonsense, eco-activism, climate change regulation, and a quantum leap for teleportation.
You don't need an iPod to listen to the Nature Podcast!
Listen to the show now and start a discussion on subjects in science that matter to you.
To SUBSCRIBE to the Nature Podcast for FREE just copy and past this URL into iTunes or your preferred media player or RSS feed reader:
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The discovery that turned cosmology into hard science scoops award.
The discovery that finally turned cosmology into a hard science has scooped this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. John Mather and George Smoot's measurements of the earliest moments of the Universe, made with the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, created a whole field of research and captured the imagination of millions around the world.
Read the story here.
Award comes just eight years after publication.
The call from Stockholm was received by two unusually young scientists, an impressively short time after they demonstrated a fundamental control of gene expression.
Read the story here.
Structural determination of RNA polymerase unlocked secrets of cells.
At the age of 19 Roger Kornberg coauthored a paper with, among others, his father Arthur Kornberg and Paul Berg. This obscure paper, 'On the heterogeneity of the deoxyribonucleic acid associated with crystalline yeast cytochrome b2'1, has the extraordinary pedigree of having three Nobel laureates among its authorship. Kornberg senior won a medical Nobel in 1959 (for discovering the mechanisms behind DNA and RNA synthesis), Berg took the chemistry prize in 1980, and now Kornberg junior, too, has snapped up a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Read the story here.
Stars who become famous for an illness can have a huge impact on medical research. Helen Pearson talks to physician and historian of medicine Barron Lerner about the good and the bad of celebrity patients.
You have just written the book When Illness Goes Public. What's it about?...
Read the interview here.
Therapy failure highlights difficulties of tricking the body into shedding pounds.
Efforts to hold back the world's expanding waistline have been dealt another blow this week, as scientists announce disappointing results from a clinical trial of their latest obesity drug.
Read the story here.
Swell from Alaskan storm breaks up megaberg at opposite end of the globe.
It was hailed as a harbinger of global warming; it caused a glacial hit-and-run smash; it even terrorized a hapless group of penguins. And now, it has been revealed that the death of the world's most infamous modern-day iceberg was likewise worthy of a Hollywood film — it was broken up by a storm surge that swept the entire length of the Pacific Ocean.
Read the story here.
Swell from Alaskan storm breaks up megaberg at opposite end of the globe.
It was hailed as a harbinger of global warming; it caused a glacial hit-and-run smash; it even terrorized a hapless group of penguins. And now, it has been revealed that the death of the world's most infamous modern-day iceberg was likewise worthy of a Hollywood film — it was broken up by a storm surge that swept the entire length of the Pacific Ocean.
Read more here
Gene silencers get something to shout about.
Two US geneticists who discovered one of the fundamental mechanisms by which gene expression is controlled have received a Nobel prize for their achievement. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who revealed the process of RNA interference (RNAi) in 1998, will share the US$1.4-million award.
Read the story here.
And stay tuned for more Nobel news...
PLUS
Nature research
Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans
The original Fire and Mello paper from 1998.
Nature collections on RNAi
FREE: web focus
Celebrating some groundbreaking work from 2004, here find a collection of hot research papers and an animation of RNA interference.
RNAi in focus
A collection of news stories on this hot topic.
Nature insight
Reviews of how RNAi works, spurred by excitement in the field in 2004.
David Brill talks to forestry expert Wayne Shepperd, at the Rocky Mountain Research Station at Fort Collins, Colorado, about the mysterious death of these trees in the western United States.
Aspen here in the western United States regenerate by sprouting from the root system of existing trees, rather than growing from seeds. Normally if a parent tree dies you would expect to see thousands of sprouts coming back up immediately from the roots. But what we're seeing now is that the roots appear to be dead and we're not getting any new sprouts...
Read the story here.
Adult blood cells seem to be easier to reprogramme than stem cells.
By cloning two mice from cells fated never to divide again, researchers in the United States have defied the notion that cloning mammals is easiest from stem cells, or other cells that are still dividing.
Read the story here.
