Just to look at it, you’d never know Daren Keck’s handmade gizmo is a musical instrument. A flat plastic contraption about the size of a thin paperback novel, it bristles with wires of yellow, red, green and black alongside a row of stainless-steel switches. Any resemblance to, say, a violin or an oboe is nil.
To tease out the complex interplay of immunity and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), biomedical researcher Stephen Ramsey has designed software that can analyze both gene expression measurements and genetic information. With this new tool, he and his interdisciplinary team have found a significant increase in heart disease among animals deficient in a particular protein that regulates the immune system.
The wildlife in our yards and neighborhoods may please or sometimes annoy us, but they connect us to a web of life that appears to be unraveling before our eyes.
In this issue, you’ll get a glimpse of the vast, underwater world of drifting marine animals called zooplankton.
When Dr. Richard Besser was reporting from the Ebola crisis in Liberia in 2014, he knew how to keep himself safe. But, says the health and medical editor for ABC News, there was more at stake than his personal welfare.
Obstacles still exist to the full participation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to Rita Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation. Failure to address these barriers threatens the ability of the world to solve pressing problems in the environment, human health and other fields.