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Friday, 16 September 2011 17:57 |
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 David Berry is sitting in a midtown Manhattan coffee shop, taking a break from a carbon-trading conference across the street, when a news report on the wall-mounted television catches his eye. The CNN dispatch describes how scientists have shown, in animal experiments, that Viagra might be used to alleviate symptoms of jet lag.
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Monday, 15 August 2011 08:30 |
 Organisms that live in exotic environments have evolved unique traits in order to survive. Michelle Chang, an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, hijacks the chemical reactions that confer those traits, combining them in novel ways. |
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Friday, 15 July 2011 17:54 |
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 How do you get a molecule to stop jiggling long enough to get a good look at it? It's a problem that has vexed biologists for years. But Adam Cohen, who worked on it for the last four years as a graduate student at Stanford University, has solved it.
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Wednesday, 15 June 2011 16:37 |
 As a graduate student, Trey Ideker published a paper that helped define the discipline of systems biology. His research goals today reflect those of the entire field: to integrate the myriad data that researchers can collect about a cell into coherent computer models. |
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Saturday, 07 May 2011 11:28 |
 Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 2004 and has since served as Chief Executive Officer. In addition to leading Sirtris as an independent discovery performance unit within GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Dr. Westphal serves as the Senior Vice President of GSK’s Centre of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD). At CEEDD, Dr. Westphal and his team are developing a network of external alliances with world-class biotech companies to bring breakthrough medicines into the GSK pipeline. Dr. Westphal is based at Sirtris, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
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Tuesday, 05 April 2011 10:47 |
 Glance at a newsmagazine and you probably recognize the face on the cover right away--Al Gore looking serious in profile, or perhaps a smirking Dick Cheney. But in that instant, your brain performs a lot of complex computations: identifying the object as a face (regardless of size or viewing angle), interpreting its expression, and accessing memory to determine whether it's familiar. |
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Tuesday, 08 March 2011 13:11 |
 Mad-cow disease occurs when an unruly protein called a prion causes healthy proteins in cattle brains to misfold. The same is true for the human versions of mad cow—“variant” Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is contracted from beef, and the naturally occurring “sporadic” form. But until Kelvin Lee, a professor of Cornell University, unleashed a new style of protein analysis, diagnosing these maladies required a postmortem brain biopsy—obviously, too late for patients. |
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Monday, 07 February 2011 13:06 |
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 Pathogens often exploit our cells to thrive. Fiona Brinkman, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University, therefore hypothesizes that some of their genes are similar to human genes. By identifying such genes computationally, Brinkman is trying to understand how drugs could stop pathogens from storming the body’s fortress.
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Monday, 10 January 2011 06:07 |
 Silicon chips have revolutionized electronics, but for certain purposes, such as radio frequency transmission, chips made from compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide or indium phosphide work much better. Erik Bakkers of Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has found a way to mix semiconductors on a single chip. |
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Monday, 20 December 2010 15:28 |
In recent years, Asia has been the epicenter of many emerging and reemerging diseases, including avian influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), malaria, and chikungunya.
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Friday, 09 September 2011 17:01 |
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 The market for protein-based drugs, such as insulin and human growth hormone, has doubled over the last five years, to more than $50 billion. But making therapeutic proteins is difficult. Unlike small-molecule drugs, such as aspirin, which can be synthesized chemically, proteins are typically made by genetically engineering bacteria, growing them, and extracting the final protein from them. |
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Monday, 15 August 2011 08:08 |
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 In 2006, scientists demonstrated that inserting four embryonic genes into mouse skin cells induced a small fraction of them to look and behave like embryonic stem cells.
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Friday, 15 July 2011 16:59 |
 Even in the hypertechie milieux of MIT and Stanford science departments, Edward Boyden stands out, bubbling with brilliance, energy, infectious enthusiasms, imaginative approaches to impossibly ambitious projects--and through it all, at his most earnest, with a vibrant sense of play. |
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Wednesday, 15 June 2011 16:16 |
 While earning his PhD, Kevin Eggan helped make Rudolf Jaenischs lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research a preeminent cloning lab. Eggan became "arguably the most skillful mouse cloner in this country," says Jaenisch. |
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Thursday, 05 May 2011 11:20 |
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 Chris Burge, associate professor at Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, admits it’s been hard to choose a research focus. In high school he won math contests but in college majored in biology. He traveled to Nicaragua to see if medicine was his calling but wound up teaching people there about computers. |
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Tuesday, 05 April 2011 10:42 |
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 As a former member of the infamous MIT blackjack team, Neil Renninger, now CTO and Co-Founder of Amyris Biotechnologies, knows what it means to make big, calculated risks and see them pay off. Three years ago, he took just such a risk, cofounding synthetic-biology startup Amyris while a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Tuesday, 08 March 2011 12:46 |
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 With two degrees and three part-time jobs, Helene Andersson is bridging disciplines to build and market microprocessor-size laboratories. As Stockholm, Sweden-based startup Silex Microsystems, she serves as business manager and designs custom “labs-on-a-chip” for commercial uses ranging from bedside medical testing to detecting chemical and biological attacks.
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Monday, 07 February 2011 12:30 |
 Utkan Demirci, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, wants doctors to take one look at his invention and "trash it." That's no knock on the device, a fast, easy-to-use--and disposable--test that measures the concentration of CD4 cells in the blood; doctors use that number to monitor HIV infections. |
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Monday, 10 January 2011 05:52 |
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 Figuring out how genes coordinate the complex phenomena of life involves more than deciphering a DNA sequence. Proteins called transcription factors control genes by attaching to DNA; discovering where each of these proteins binds is critical to understanding how genes regulate working cells.
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Monday, 20 December 2010 09:11 |
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 Soon after Watson and Crick found that DNA is made up of four subunits, including one called cytosine,scientists discovered a so-called fifth subunit: methylated cytosine. |
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