The Scientist articles from December 2002

The Scientist archives from December 2002

Imagine the gall: altered plant-chemical signatures attract insect mates. (Frontlines).(Brief Article)
December 9, 2002... Humans don't usually select mates on the basis of their gall, but the male gall wasp does. Antistophus rufus can search through a maze of dead plants and locate an inconspicuous gall that houses his intended bride, thanks to his ability to...

Carcinogens in the holiday dinner: you'll still fare better than the turkey. (Frontlines).(Brief Article)
December 9, 2002... Planning on eating roast turkey, sweet potato, and pumpkin pie for holiday dinner? Then you will also consume a sampling of mutagens and carcinogens, including heterocyclic amines, furfural, coumarin, and benzo(a)pyrene. A tongue-in-cheek but...

Brain-based binging: Weight Watchers[TM] meet the nucleus accumbens. (Frontlines).(Brief Article)
December 9, 2002... A reward center in the brain that plays a key role in maintaining drug addiction also appears to influence overeating in rats, according to research presented at this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting. The nucleus accumbens has direct...

January.
December 9, 2002... January SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY 1 DNA identified ...

Salute to sagacity. (Commentary).
December 9, 2002... "Men are only so good as their technical developments allow them to be." --George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays, 1940 There are numerous awards and prizes for scientific achievement, and rightly so. Today's...

DNA Mouthwash, revisited. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... I just noticed a reader's letter that was critical of your article on the DNA Mouthwash. (2) The letter writer works for a clinical research center at a university hospital in Utah. He is not a forensic scientist and is apparently not...

Animals in research. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... As a college professor, I was interested to read your opinion on animal research. (1) My interest and experience is in animal use in college laboratories. I taught at Iona College, a medium-sized liberal arts college in New Rochelle, NY, from...

On chaperones. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... Your article, "Chaperones to the Rescue," implied that the use of specific compounds (agonists, antagonists, substrates, or modulators) as chaperones to rescue misfolded proteins is a novel concept. To set the record straight, we draw your...

On ferreting out fraud. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... We envy universities who have antifraud squads in the sciences. (1) Our university not only slipped badly in past AsiaWeek surveys of Asian universities (mercifully when AsiaWeek folded up, the annual ranking stopped), but has been struggling...

Blackboard vs. laptop. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... You're right! PowerPoint is out of control. (1) Speakers have forgotten that they are expected to speak. Graphics are to support the speaker, not vice versa. How many speakers have you heard say, when presenting a slide full of words, "You...

Commercialization of academic research. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... No doubt, there are abuses in commercialization of research at universities. (1) I know of some, at universities and in industry. In two of these cases, academic researchers knew that the invention was stolen from them (in one instance by a...

Erutan, seance, and sell. (Letters).
December 9, 2002... Interesting that you should suggest that we should not take the "Big Three" so seriously. (1) Sir Hans Krebs was more than dismissive toward Nature. His advice to young scientists was not to publish in comics! He did, however, have a most...

Harmless energizers or dangerous drugs? Government ponders ephedrine-containing dietary supplements. (News).
December 9, 2002... You've probably seen the ads in the supermarket checkout aisle, or on radio and TV. "I lost 63 pounds with Hydroxycut," screams the headline in Cosmopolitan, above pictures of a woman going from corpulent to bathing-beauty trim in 19 weeks....

ACEs wild: clinical trials, lab evidence, and a new theory probe untapped potential for ACE inhibitors. (News).(angiotensin I-converting enzyme)
December 9, 2002... Clinical trials are under way in the United States to test new uses for angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, as lab researchers around the world continue to compile evidence of further possibilities for the antihypertensive...

Above and beyond: universal classifier detects bacteria in space--and on the homeland. (News).
December 9, 2002... Researchers at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) are developing technologies to identify and monitor anticipated and unanticipated microorganisms in space--technologies, they suggest, that could also help to more...

The biological basis of the placebo effect: imaging technologies bring empirical rigor to the study of a mysterious medical phenomenon. (Cover Story).
December 9, 2002... The placebo effect baffles patients, confounds clinicians and frustrates drug developers. Until now, relatively little empirical evidence existed for the biological mechanisms that underlie the effect. But recently, researchers have begun...

A conversation with Stephen E. Straus. (Research).(Interview)
December 9, 2002... Stephen E. Straus is the director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which was formally established in 1999. Prior to this appointment, he was chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the...

Is NCCAM a sham? One researcher asks: "does anyone really need to study coffee enemas?" (Research).(National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine)
December 9, 2002... Shark cartilage, coffee enemas, high-intensity light, and energy field manipulation: Complementary and alternative medicine has its curiosities and, of course, its doubters. Cancer biologist Saul Green, retired from Memorial Sloan-Kettering...

Targeted comparative sequencing illuminates vertebrate evolution: this technique may revolutionize the model species concept. (Research).
December 9, 2002... Aristotle envisioned humanity as the pinnacle of a "Great Chain of Being," a parade of organisms that evolved toward a state of undefined perfection. He might be surprised to learn that to understand how humans came to be, science needs to...

Atomic resolution of large ribosomal subunit reveals structure: researchers confirm that the ribosome is, indeed, a ribozyme. (Hot Papers).
December 9, 2002... Scientifically speaking, the ribosome's make-up and raison d'etre is elementary: Composed of RNA and proteins, it's the cell site where amino acids get strung together to form new proteins. And, while protein synthesis'is a well-studied...

Retrograde signaling another way: cells get survival signals even when the axon cannot internalize large beads. (Research).
December 9, 2002... The reports of two research groups interested in retrograde signaling caught the attention of investigators at the recent Society for Neuroscience (SFN)meeting; the teams used similar methods but arrived at two distinct conclusions. One team...

Lab holiday wish list: gifts that the scientist in your life would love. (Lab Consumer).
December 9, 2002... Editor's Note: With the gift-giving season upon us, The Scientist wanted to know what today's life scientists would be most grateful to receive this holiday season. We queried researchers throughout the world for ways to push life sciences to...

The Scientist Readers' Choice Awards: stand and be counted. (Lab Consumer).
December 9, 2002... This past November, millions of Americans headed for the polls, exercising their right to participate in the democratic process. The Scientist also believes in the democratic process, and earlier in the year it asked readers to vote on who...

Cell screening goes high throughput: Amersham Biosciences' IN Cell Analyzer systems provide rapid, automated cellular imaging and analysis. (Tools & Technology).
December 9, 2002... Drug discovery frequently involves the screening of large numbers of candidate compounds, and any technology that helps researchers weed out the less-promising contenders can potentially save pharmaceutical companies a great deal of time and...

Toward a `one-chip-fits-all' array: Exiqon's LNA technology enables the development of universally applicable arrays. (Lab Consumer).(locked nucleic acid)
December 9, 2002... Scientists at Vedbaek, Denmark-based Exiqon are working toward the goal of a "one-chip-fits-all" array based on the company's locked nucleic acid (LNA[TM]) technology. According to Niels Ramsing, director of new technologies, Exiqon is...

Locking down locked nucleic acids: Proligo offers custom LNA oligonucleotide synthesis. (Lab Consumer).
December 9, 2002... Boulder, Colo.-based Proligo, under license from Danish biotech firm Exiqon, is now marketing a novel class of nucleic acid analogs called locked nucleic acids (LNA[TM]). Sporting increased thermal stability, higher affinity for native...

The guide.
December 9, 2002... GLASS BOTTOM DISHES INTRODUCTORY PRICES WPI's new series of optical quality glass bottom dishes (with lids) provide exceptional imaging clarity. Available in two sizes (35mm and 55mm diameters) with a choice of five different glass...

Balancing business and science at ImClone; researchers in business struggle to manage conflicts of interest. (Profession).
December 9, 2002... John Mendelsohn had reached the pinnacle of his scientific career when he was called before US congressional investigators this autumn to answer questions about his role in ImClone Systems, the Manhattan technology company whose CEO, Sam...

Economizing on your grant: experts advise how to make your grant dollars stretch further and longer. (Profession).
December 9, 2002... When it comes to doing research on the cheap, few scientists can hold a candle to the late physicist Herbert Anderson. While a graduate student at Columbia in the 1930s, he needed large amounts of tungsten for the cyclotron he was building....

Protect your ideas. (Fine Tuning).(intellectual property and patent protection)
December 9, 2002... In the movie, Unforgiven, William Munny, the hardened gunfighter played by Clint Eastwood, remains standing after a high-mortality gunfight. The timid reporter who witnessed the shooting comes out of hiding and stutters while referring to one...

Getting patents on track at NIH; the largest revenue earner among government agencies adapts technology to streamline the patent process. (Profession).(National Institutes of Health)
December 9, 2002... The National Institutes of Health has launched a new tracking system to streamline the licensing of discoveries. Officials hope the new system will improve the technology transfer process, allowing promising biomedical discoveries to be...

Let's get physical ... biophysical: however defined, biophysics means advancement in drug discovery. (Profession).
December 9, 2002... Even before Francis Crick used his physics training to help calculate the structure of DNA, physics has informed biology. And while many biophysicists focus on basic research, they increasingly use their discipline to predict the effects of...

John Gearhart: stem cell guru. (Profile).(gynecology and obstetrics professor, John Hopkins University School of Medicine)
December 9, 2002... It is a sobering time for US stem cell researchers. Just days after a national election set the stage for the possible criminalization of embryonic stem cell research, a popular television program portrayed such cells incubating in patients...