Are plastic tools spoiling experimental results?

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 weeks 12 minutes (www.nature.com)

Thousands of scientists could be unwittingly ruining their own experiments merely by using standard plastic lab equipment, according to a new study. These findings may have strong implications for the methodology of basic research.

Andrew Holt, a researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, was looking at how drugs affected the human enzyme monoamine oxidase B when he noticed that the drugs seemed to be inhibiting enzyme activity at much lower concentrations than they should

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Eyes: A New Window on Mental Disorders

jerry submitted, created time 2 months 2 weeks (www.sciam.com)

Clues about autism, Williams syndrome and the social brain come from tracking eye movements. This method may be useful, researchers say, because it is not necessary for the participant to understand or even know what the researcher is doing.

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DNA Sequencing Complete in Record Time!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 7 months 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

Dr. Watson, I presume? Although criticisms remain -- largely that the small fragments into which the man's genome was snipped might not have been reassembled properly -- a full genome in only four months is plenty to crow about.

Watson's genome is not the first to be sequenced. We may recall that J. Craig Venter's was as well, but Venter's project cost US$100 million and Watson's only $1.5 million.

What strikes me about this article is that it's the first time I've seen any reference to an X-Prize for sequencing

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FDA to vet embryonic stem cells’ safety

jane2007 submitted, created time 7 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

Investors, biotech companies and other stem-cell stakeholders are meeting in Gaithersburg, Maryland, this week for FDA’s first public hearing on the safety of therapies that use human embryonic stem cells.

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Putting Immunity in a Test Tube

jane2007 submitted, created time 8 months 1 day (www.time.com)

To streamline vaccine research and hasten the eradication of global killers, such as AIDS, VaxDesign company has created a simulated human immune system, called the Modular Immune in Vitro Construct (MIMIC for short). The dime-sized immune systems can predict how humans will respond to new vaccines.

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