A newly created molecular computer works in human cells and offers the flexibility of a general-purpose circuit. The advance, described in Nature Biotechnology in May, brings closer the eventual...
Oct, 01, 2007
While science educators actively debate the relative merits of teaching natural science in an integrated fashion, some authors are writing texts that will make it happen. Philip Nelson’s book,...
Jun, 01, 2005
Computer simulation helps explain how plants grow
The petals of every flower and the leaves sprouting from every plant stalk have characteristic arrangements, a phenomenon called phyllotaxis. For two centuries, botanists have puzzled over the force...
Jul, 01, 2007
How errors in data, software, and methodology can teach us how to do better
In 2006, a paper in Nature Medicine suggested a novel and potentially revolutionary method for predicting patient responses to cancer therapies using gene signatures. The finding piqued the interest...
Sep, 01, 2011
How Tat crosses the lipid bilayer--with help from the bilayer.
A powerful snippet of protein called the Tat peptide ferries itself across cell membranes dragging just about anything it’s attached to along with it. How it accomplishes this feat has been a...
Jul, 01, 2008
How mathematical models are transforming the fight against cancer
The most common test for prostate cancer (known as PSA screening) misses aggressively growing prostate tumors—the type typically seen in young patients. It’s a fact that was accepted by...
Apr, 01, 2007
The flu virus is an evolutionary marvel. Teams of experts design an appropriate flu vaccine annually just to keep up with the microbe’s ability to evade the human immune system. Multiple...
Jul, 01, 2006
To understand biology—and provide appropriate medical care—scientists need to understand interactions across multiple scales. Hence the Physiome.
This is the reality of human biology: events span a 109 range in lengthscale (molecular to organismal) and a 1014 range in timescale (molecular movement to years). To understand this biology—...
Jun, 01, 2010
Transparent peer review, replication studies, and journals of negative results all suggest change is on the horizon
As I was writing this editorial, I learned about yet another scientific paper being retracted. This time it was a genetics paper in Science, one of the hundreds of retractions that the blog...
Sep, 01, 2011
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007