Okay, I must admit the title is a bit melodramatic. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this thing that is, shall we say, concerning. It all starts back in 2009, when I received some ARRA money for a couple of projects I had going in my lab. That was great, because it has allowed…
Unless you’ve been living under an arsenic-laden rock, you have probably heard the news that wasn’t news from NASA. We didn’t find alien life, and we didn’t even find a new form of life on Earth. What Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues found was a type of bacterium that can grow (albeit very, very slowly) in…
We’re pleased to be able to offer congratulations to two of our Faculty Members, who have been selected to be EMBO Young Investigators: Aurelio Teleman, FM in Developmental Biology, at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg Daniel Wilson, FM in Structural Biology, at Department of Biochemistry, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Munich.
Faculty Member Etienne Joly has been busy lately, evaluating everything from a classic text on evolution to the adjuvant effect of laser light. I sent him a Naturally Selected sweatshirt for other bits of material he provided for The Scientist and this blog, and here he is, wearing it (keep reading for your chance to…
Yesterday I was to meet a friend at the coffee shop. She showed up almost an hour late and in tears. I had received an email from her saying she would be 15 minutes late. It turns out that because she was running a bit late to begin with, she was in a rush. In…
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,…
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…
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…
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