December 20, 2007 Bush gets holiday wish with R&D package approval In the end (and after a veto), the president got what he wanted-no year-end bonus for federal R&D. On Wednesday, Congress wrapped up its unfinished appropriations with the omnibus passage of 11 bills that featured largely flat funding for NIH institutes and small upticks elsewhere. Meanwhile, war funding is set to jump. Continue...



A trillion little passengers
An overlooked side effect to being human is that as much as 2% of our body mass isn't even "us". It's millions of microorganisms coexisting with us in a complex give-and-take—for better and for worse—that no one really understands. NIH's Human Microbiome Project hopes to change that. Continue...


Grounded: Atlantis' gauge failure traced to bad connnector
The fault that has played havoc with the Space Shuttle's fuel system seems as simple as a sticking needle, but Atlantis' bad sensor will require more than a few hard taps to fix. Worse, even after two previous launch delays, no one yet knows how far the planned Jan. 10 launch will need to be postponed. Continue...

Is animal testing dying?
Animal lovers and big pharma rejoice. The "Not tested on animals" label could become ubiquitous if a new set of bio-enabled computation chips comes to commercial fruition. The developers say toxicity studies are just the beginning for their BioChip. Continue...


Like a steel trap
Metallic memory foam relies on magnetism to help it retain whatever shape it started with when it was made. The real innovation, however, lies in the polycrystalline matrix itself, which retains some of the high-strain character of gemstones, yet is far cheaper to produce. Continue...

In mind control, neurons rule the roost When it comes to the learning power of the brain, a little goes a long way. So little, in fact, researchers at Janelia Farm and Cold Spring Harbor Lab were surprised discover the activation of just tens of individual neurons was enough to reliably alter behavior in laboratory mice. What they discovered about synapses was even more revealing.Continue... LC growth in India means business opportunities for vendors
Agilent this week announced a substantial order of high-speed liquid chromatography systems to Indian pharma firm Orchid. The company's biggest such sale on the heels of reports that HPLC in India is growing at a phenomenal rate.Continue...

Cytometer solution features automated robotic control Beckman's Coulter's Integrated Solutions Group has completed work on an automated "seed and feed" cell culture system that's intended to speed up drug discovery and development. The Cell Lab Quanta SC MPL provides data and cellular growth parameters for the evaluation of clone selection, cell expansion and protein expression results. The flow cytometer is integrated online with peripherals such as a robotic arm, and is well suited for cell count, viability, apoptosis, cell cycle and cell surface marker analyses. Continue... Stem cells resources rationalized at Thermo Fisher Scientific In recognition of the expanding needs of stem cell researchers, Thermo Fisher Scientific has launched the Stem Cell Excellence program, a collective of laboratory products, services, spanning instruments, reagents and informatics geared to developers of stem cell science. The initiative is organized around the four key steps in stem cell workflow, and more than 100 products are included, such as HyClone, AdvanceSTEM, Nautilus LIMS, Matrix water handling systems, and others. ...