News

Depression and negative emotions seem to worsen cardiac health, whereas a good laugh might improve blood vessel function. Clues from new experiments could help explain why and suggest better treatments for heart disease. Amy Coombs reports.

Timeline of events...a brief look at the headlines from the past month

Despite the restrictions and controversy confronting stem cell research, labs around the world continue to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines and make them available to the global research community. The EU-funded Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry (hESCreg) seeks to bring order to the growing number of available stem cell lines and the flood of related data, beginning with the cell lines created in European labs. The web-based registry, launched in January 2008 and accessible at http://www.hescreg.eu, aims to serve as a one-stop source of information about the origins and traits of these cell lines. Anna Veiga, the hESCreg scientific coordinator and director of the stem cell bank at the Centre of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, talks with Doug Sipp about how the project was conceived and where it might lead.

Timeline of events...a brief look at the headlines from the past month

Attacks against researchers by animal rights extremists have steadily increased in recent years. More than 70 such attacks occured in 2006 alone, according to data collected by the Foundation for Biomedical Research, a Washington, DC–based nonprofit that aims to serve as the voice of scientific reason in the ongoing debate that surrounds animal research. Frankie Trull currently heads the foundation, which she established in 1981. She explains to Nature Medicine why she has devoted her career to improving the public understanding of the essential role of lab animals in medical research and discovery.

Timeline of events...a brief look at the headlines from the past month

These days, if you want to have your entire genome sequenced, you need to spend about a million dollars and wait for months. But the Archon X Prize for Genomics—an international competition for speedy gene mapping—might change this by giving companies a huge incentive to develop better DNA sequencing technologies. The $10 million prize, first announced in late 2006, was donated by Stewart Blusson, a philanthropist and mining multimillionaire. Marc Hodosh, senior director of the Archon X Prize, explains why genomics was chosen for an X Prize and predicts what lies ahead for the field.

On 26 July, The New England Journal of Medicine published a curious article suggesting that obesity spreads though social ties: if your spouse, sibling or friend has gained weight, chances are you also need to buy larger shirts. Unfortunately, the popular media decided to interpret this quite literally as obesity being contagious...