The Università degli Studi di Camerino, Italy, will be running a summer school programme on nutrigenomics on September 1 – 5 , 2014. The summer school is open to students and researchers interested in issues related to the interaction between the nutrients contained in foods and the (epi-)genome. The programme includes topics ranging from molecular… Read more »
In 2013, BioMed Central's blog and Biome magazine have dedicated quite some space to considering alternative models of peer review. One emerging approach is to reverse the traditional order of scientific evaluation by publishing first and peer reviewing later. Arguments in favor of this model include the crowdsourcing‑ization of peer review, in which the wisdom of… Read more »
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Nanotechnology deals in the tiny. A millionth the size of a pinhead. If a marble was 1 nanometre, then the Earth would be a metre. The physics at this nanoscale is peculiar, where properties change and objects move constantly. This is where the fundamental properties of matter are determined, carbon’s decision time between diamond or… Read more »
If you’re looking forward to a festive tipple this Christmas, you’ve probably already been thinking about what to buy. But have you also thought about what atmosphere to create while you’re drinking your purchases, or whether more expensive necessarily means more enjoyable? We’ve taken a look back at three pieces of research, co-authored by Professor… Read more »
The 6th National Conference of AIDS Society of India (ASICON) has been held December 13th through 15th at the Palladium Hotel (former Shangri-La Hotel), a luxurious hotel located in the heart of the city, within the residential and corporate hub of Lower Parel, above the Palladium, Mumbai’s most luxurious mall. The Conference, with contribution of… Read more »
Bats are able to detect and respond to emotion in a similar way to humans, finds new research published in Frontiers in Zoology this week. Using recorded acoustic calls, researchers showed that the false vampire bats showed a different response to ‘aggressive’ compared to ‘response’ calls. Hanna Kastein from the University of Veterinary Medicine… Read more »
Postpublication peer review of “Sex differences in brain connectivity” PNAS paper by Ingalhalikar
Written by Ahmed B Hamid, Thomas Liehr* Comment on: Design and validation of a pericentromeric BAC clone set aimed at improving diagnosis and phenotype prediction of supernumerary marker chromosomes; Castronovo et al., Molecular Cytogenetics 2013, 6:45 Castronovo et al. (1) suggest an excellent probe set for the characterization of the centromere-near regions of all human… Read more »
Wildlife collisions with aircraft pose a significant threat to public safety, having directly caused 221 fatalities since 1988. The “Miracle on the Hudson“, where a plane crash-landed into the Hudson river in 2009, was indeed caused by a collision with a flock of geese. In addition, wildlife collisions cost the airline industry over one billion… Read more »
The study of sex differences is relevant to all fields spanning biology and medicine. The sex of cells and tissues can have a large impact on their basic physiology, their susceptibility to certain diseases, and their response to therapeutic drugs. Experimental results can vary considerably depending on the sex of the experimental subjects. Biology of… Read more »