Science

Tony Zador is a professor of biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies auditory processing, attention and decision-making in rodents.

He spoke recently at the laboratory’s 79th annual symposium on quantitative biology, which focused this year on the topic of cognition. Zador talked about his recent work trying to demonstrate how brain circuits might be mapped by using techniques for sequencing genes. I talked to Zador at the conference and an edited transcript follows—or you can watch the whole interview here.

Stanford University researchers have devised a noninvasive way to detect heart-transplant rejection weeks or months earlier than previously possible. The test, which relies on the detection of increasing amounts of the donor's DNA in the blood of the recipient, does not require the removal of any heart tissue.

The discovery of an inhibitor of the Insulin Degrading Enzyme (IDE), a protein responsible for the susceptibility of diabetes because it destroys insulin in the body, may lead to new treatment approaches for diabetes. In collaboration with the discoverers of the inhibitor, David Liu and Alan Saghatelian, Stony Brook Medicine scientist Markus Seeliger, PhD, and colleagues nationally, demonstrated the efficacy of the compound in a research paper in the early online edition of Nature.

A Stanford electrical engineer has invented a way to wirelessly transfer power deep inside the body, and use this power to run tiny electronic medical gadgets such as pacemakers, nerve stimulators, or new sensors and devices yet to be developed.

The discoveries reported Monday May 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) culminate years of efforts by Ada Poon, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, to eliminate the bulky batteries and clumsy recharging systems that prevent medical devices from being more widely used.

A molecular compound developed by Saint Louis University scientists restored learning, memory and appropriate behavior in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, according to findings in the May issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. The molecule also reduced inflammation in the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.

For years, scientists have feared the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet—a vast swath of ice that could unleash a slow but unstoppable 10-foot rise in sea levels if it melted. So here is today's terrible news: we now know the ice sheet is melting. And there's pretty much nothing we can do to about it.

The robust defenses that yeast cells have evolved to protect themselves from environmental threats hold lessons that can be used to design computer networks and analyze how secure they are, say computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.

The dream of generating a bank of stem cells to treat injury and illness is a step closer. Embryonic stem cells have been custom-made from adult cells without manipulating the cell's genes, a process that could trigger cancer.

Using a similar cloning technique to the one that created Dolly the sheep, two teams have independently shown that it is possible to turn an adult cell into an embryonic stem cell, which can then become any cell in the body.

Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the ‘60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.

Several years ago, as the therapeutic potential of stem cells was first being recognized, the only way to create them was to harvest cells from an early embryo. That embryo could come from the large collection of those that weren't used during in vitro fertilization work. But to get one that was genetically matched to the person who needed the therapy, researchers had to create an embryo that's a genetic duplicate of that individual—meaning they had to clone them.