Science: October 2008 Archives

Rule #76 of science reporting (and wedding crashing): No excuses. Play like a champion. So we’re jumping right into champions for this week's "Beaker Hill" column. As reported last night right here, Woods Hole researcher and BU School of Medicine associate professor Osamu Shimomura won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of green fluorescent protein in a jellyfish called the crystal jelly. (The two scientists that shared the prize with him examined how to actually use GFP in research.) Many non-scientists are......

It may have been this Bostonist’s 24th birthday yesterday (seriously!), but we’re the ones doling out the presents here in this week’s edition of Beaker Hill. Today, we’ll give you everything you ever wanted to know about stem cells, as the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is back at it again. As mentioned in our first two editions of Beaker Hill, the HSCI specializes in producing induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), meaning that they are more or less identical to cells derived from embryos, but......