Squirrels are famous for their bushy tails and leaping ability, and it is well known that nuts are their preferred snack. Thanks to genetic engineering, soon squirrels from Florida to Maine could be hiding a nut they haven’t seen in over 60 years: the American chestnut.
Did you know that the average American eats about 16 pounds of apples every year? That number used to be more like 20 pounds back in the 1980s, but the iconic apple has fallen out of vogue. A new genetically engineered version of the fruit has the potential to have people reaching for them more often (especially the sliced version).
On what very well may have been my first day of graduate school, sitting in my first class, our professor began by telling us the story of how he had found an error in a physics text book.
Who owns your cells? The FDA seems to think it does, given its lawsuit against Regenerative Sciences, a company that treats orthopedic injuries by extracting, culturing and reinjecting adult stem cells derived from a patient’s bone marrow.
The Climategate documents — the hundreds of emails and other data hacked from the Climatic Research Unit of England’s East Anglia University — have exposed serious breaches of scientific integrity. They contain evidence of collusion among a small but highly influential group of climate researchers to suppress and even delete key data, to manipulate the scientific peer-review process, to exclude the work of dissenting scientists, and allegedly to evade Freedom of Information requests by destroying requested materials.