As oil and sludge continue to surge onto the Gulf Coast from BP’s blown out Deepwater Horizon well, more and more animals are suffering. But one company sees a way to profit from the calamity. And if you’re the betting type, you could pad your pockets along with it.
What do you get when you cross Charles Darwin with John Rambo? Well, it’s certainly not Dar-lose. Watch and see! Dana Carvey is “DARWIN” – watch more funny videos I don’t know about you, but I’d pay double the ticket price to see this movie. – Bob Grant, Associate Editor, The Scientist
The UK has prohibited Andrew Wakefield from practicing medicine — you’ll remember him as the first to publish a peer-reviewed report linking autism to the MMR vaccine, in The Lancet in 1998 (which has since been retracted). Additional research has failed to find a connection between autism and any vaccine.
Last week, the FDA raised concerns about Pathway Genomics’ genetic test kits they had planned to sell in Walgreens across the country. Now, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating Pathway’s tests as well as those sold online from 23andMe Inc. and Navigenics, all of which analyze saliva to determine a person’s risk of…
Reed College in Portland, Oregon, won’t have its federal funding pulled anytime soon, after the school’s normally raucous end of the year party went off last month without a hitch. Administrators at Reed were warned in April that the liberal arts school, which has a reputation for drug use among students, could get lose its…
Over the weekend a fire in Brazil destroyed what might have been the world’s largest collection of preserved snake and arachnid specimens. The blaze gutted a lab in Sao Paulo’s Instituto Butantan on Saturday (15th May), reducing 80,000 snakes and several thousand spider and scorpion specimens to cinders. “The entire collection was lost, the biggest…
University of Wisconsin at Madison biologist Gary Splitter won’t be doing much pipetting or centrifuging for the next few years. UW-Madison just pulled Splitter’s laboratory privileges for violating strict rules governing research on “select agents,” or microbes that pose serious dangers to human health and could be used as bioweapons.
One of our most popular stories last week revealed that some scientists applying for foundation funding are getting caught up in legal snags that are delaying — or perhaps even preventing them from accepting — the award. We profiled William Ja, a Scripps molecular biologist who received an award from the Found Animals Foundation to…
Once a mere means of mobile communication, cell phones have taken on a suite of other social tasks, including music playing, web surfing, and now data management. Exco InTouch, a UK-based provider of interactive patient communication solutions, suggests that cell phones may be a new way to capture real-time patient data from clinical trials. The…
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