ASCB caught up in fraud scheme The American Society for Cell Biology was surprised to find out earlier this fall that con artists were using the ASCB name on fake checks to pay unsuspecting individuals caught up in a personal shopping scam. When one individual who received a fraudulent check became suspicious and contacted the ASCB,…

Where should we concentrate conservation efforts? Back in January, Kevin Gaston at the University of Sheffield argued in Science that conservation efforts should be directed towards common species as well as the ‘obvious’, rare and ‘threatened’ ones1. The argument is beguilingly simple. In the absence of a detailed understanding of what each species does in…

Next to a shiny new bike, the best Christmas present I could hope for when I was young was a box of LEGO bricks. We weren’t well off, so the LEGO was always more of a going proposition, and besides could be played with when it was raining. And we’re talking proper LEGO: not the…

Wolf Frommer is one of our Section Heads in Plant Biochemistry & Physiology. He is interested in sugar transport across the plant plasma membrane, and the sensors at the plasma membrane that regulate transporter activity and turnover. In this week’s Nature, a paper from Wolf’s group describes a new family of transporters, named SWEET, that…

I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Erwin a little while back. Doug is Curator of Paleozoic Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and a Faculty Member in Developmental Evolution. We were discussing a paper on the genome of a marine sponge, evaluated in F1000 and selected for our ‘Literature’ section…

Big merger at NIH A merger of two major institutes at the U.S. National Institutes of Health is moving forward. Last Thursday (Nov 18), NIH director Francis Collins threw his support behind the September recommendation of an NIH advisory board to create a substance abuse and addiction research center by combining the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA),…

More from the Society for Neuroscience meeting: Faculty Member David Adams is director of the Health Innovations Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne. His research on cone snail venom has led to development of a new analgesic against neuropathic pain. Cone snail toxins—conotoxins—are small peptides. David’s group engineered a proteolysis-resistant version by cyclizing alpha-conotoxin Vc1.11, which…

I know, you’re all expecting me to talk about rockstars and GQ this week. Well, that’s been done to death all over the place, so here’s something else I stumbled across—the periodic table at a party: Yeah, there are few things wrong with that (potassium should really be ripping the arms off water, for example)…

The F1000 roving camera was at the Society for Neuroscience meeting this week (you can get a somewhat peculiar take on the proceedings from my friend Tideliar). Faculty Member Randy Nelson, of Ohio State University, spoke to Sarah Greene about his recent work published in PNAS, which uncovered a potentially disturbing link between light at…

Could falling in love be a panacea for the chronic pain that is often associated with aging? The thought has certainly crossed the mind of Faculty Member Felix Viana, whose latest evaluation is of a very popular article in PLoS ONE, “Viewing pictures of a romantic partner reduces experimental pain: involvement of neural reward systems.”1…