Newswire

June 22, 2010


“Some of my colleagues have put forth what are called green or renewable solutions or technologies, and they’re OK at a boutique scale—single households,” says Jesse Ausubel, who is director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York City. “But when you look at two billion households, you find out that the solution isn’t green at all. Things that work on a boutique scale don’t necessarily work for billions of people and terawatts of power.”

June 21, 2010


Elaine Fuchs: "I’ve always been interested in how things work. When I was child in 1950s Chicago, there weren’t many women scientists. So to ask the kinds of questions that interested me was unusual. I remember as one of three females among 200 male chemistry majors at the University of Illinois, I was terrified that if I did well in class, the professors would think I’d cheated. That’s how much I didn’t think I belonged. So I studied like crazy and routinely got the best grades on examinations because if I was No. 1, then who could I have cheated from?...I took these things as an invitation to prove people wrong about women in science. It made me work harder."

March 30, 2010


“‘We put so much emphasis on food and purity of ingredients and where they come from,’ said Mark Stoeckle, a physician and DNA expert at Rockefeller University who advised the students. ‘But then there are things selling that are not what they say on the label. There's an important issue here in terms of economics and consumer safety.’”

March 29, 2010


“Children, Elaine Fuchs says, have a natural fascination with science. She remembers that she did. ‘I think like many of the children in our world, I got interested in science just from having a butterfly net and from having a few strainers and some boots and going down to the streams and creeks and being out in the fields,’ says Fuchs.”

March 27, 2010


“Forget the sweet smell of success. When it comes to scents in the city, New Yorkers rank vanilla as the most pleasant. That’s according to Dr. Leslie Vosshall, who led a five-year study of what smells please or annoy New Yorkers, how we interpret odors and ‘how does smell affect our daily experiences.’ Isovaleric acid — the odor of sweaty socks — has the baddest bouquet, according to New Yorkers who rank it as the least pleasant essence. They also find the smell of buttered popcorn ‘pretty unpleasant,’ Vosshall said.”

March 25, 2010


“One protein appears to play an integral role in protecting telomeres, and possibly preventing cancerous growth, according to a study published this week in Science. The protein in question is part of a complex called shelterin, which prevents a potentially dangerous type of DNA repair that can shorten telomeres and therefore cause cells to age quickly. Alternatively, the repair process can help elongate telomeres in cancer cells, allowing them to proliferate. This protein ‘is required in the complex to repress one of the two DNA repair pathways that can act on DNA ends,’ said cell biologist and study author Titia de Lange of The Rockefeller University. ‘It’s important for cells to repress this [because it can be] dangerous for telomeres, lead[ing] to abrupt changes in telomere length [that] can kill the cells or reset telomere length.’”

March 14, 2010


“Why do some people succumb to whatever illness is going around while other soldier on, seemingly unaffected? It’s all in the genes. Research from the Rockefeller University in New York presented at the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia annual conference recently revealed a strong genetic link to a person’s ability to survive infection. ‘There is solid evidence which shows that during the course of an infection some people remain asymptomatic, while others may end up with a life-threatening disease,’ said paediatrician and immunologist Jean-Laurent Casanova. ‘That is to do with a number of known factors, such as family background and the population the person is living in. However, now we have proven the genetic link, too.’”

March 9, 2010


“‘In more than 90 percent of human deafness, what’s missing are hair cells, the sensory receptors of the internal ear,’ Dr. Hudspeth said. ‘What we want to do and what we hope to do is to replace those cells. Now the zebrafish can tell us how those cells might be replaced. We hope to learn what genes are involved, and then to learn how to switch those same genes in our own ear, and by that means to restore hearing.’”