Medieval alchemists devoted their lives to the pursuit of the infamous Philosopher's Stone, an elusive substance that was thought to convert base metals into valuable gold. Needless to say, nobody ever discovered the Philosopher's Stone. Well, perhaps some alchemist did get lucky but was wise enough to keep the discovery...

The week following the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15 was a very sad week for me. Boston is one of my most favorite cities in the world. It is the first U.S. city that I ever visited. I spent many months there when I was a student in the 1990s. Boston eased me...

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Plagiarism is back in the headlines. The German Education Minister Annette Schavan recently resigned because of allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation. There was also significant outrage when it became public that the now discredited science journalist Jonah Lehrer was paid $20,000 to speak at the Knight...

There is quite a bit of debate about the scientific validity of the proverb "money can't buy happiness," because studies on this topic have resulted in discordant results. Some studies support the idea that richer people are happier on average than poor people, but there are also reports that while...

AMSTERDAM -- Academic publishers are currently under attack by scientists, governments and the general public for hiding the majority of published research articles behind paywalls. Readers have to pay either a one-time access fee of up to $50 to read one article or obtain an annual subscription to the journal...

Scapegoating Muslims has become a convenient tool for promoting a far right political agenda. A Center for American Progress (CAP) report carefully outlined anti-Muslim fear-mongering in the United States, with the long-term hope that, by exposing the roots of anti-Muslim hostility, strategies can be developed to overcome such...

Amphibians such as frogs or salamanders have a remarkable ability to regenerate amputated limbs and tails. The regenerative process involves the formation of endogenous pluripotent stem cells, which then expand and differentiate into the tissue types that give rise to the regenerated body part. The complex interplay of the cell...

The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is one of the most fascinating discoveries in the history of stem cell biology. John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Biology for showing that adult cells could be induced to become embryonic-like stem cells (iPSCs). Many...

WASHINGTON, December 22, 2012 - The National Rifle-Manufacturer Association (NRA) held a press conference in Washington, D.C. to offer "meaningful contributions" in the debate about education reform. This highly anticipated press conference was chaired by Charlton TheRock, president and Grand Wizard of the NRA. TheRock read out a prepared press...

Some cardiovascular researchers believe that the heart contains cardiac stem cells or progenitor cells which can become mature cardiomyocytes (beating heart cells) following an injury and regenerate the damaged heart. The paper "Mammalian heart renewal by pre-existing cardiomyocytes" published in the journal Nature by Senyo and colleagues (online publication...

When we hear the word religion, we often associate it with violence or conflict. The reason for this is that religion is frequently used as a means to ostracize or demean fellow humans and to justify violence. Political and socioeconomic causes of conflicts are also sometimes masked by invoking religious...

A search of the PubMed database, which indexes scholarly biomedical articles, reveals that 997,508 articles were published in the year 2011, which amounts to roughly 2,700 articles per day. Since the database does not include all published biomedical research articles, the actual number of published biomedical papers is...

NOVEMBER 5, 2012 - LOS ANGELES, California - A sensational new study was presented at the Annual Conference of the American Society for Innovative Cardiologists. In a study conducted by the cardiologist Dr. Baskin at the Klondike Bar University, fifty-two participants were enrolled for an evaluation of their cardiac temperature....

MIT-based researcher Rick Young is one of the world's top molecular biologists. His laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has helped define many of the key principles of how gene expression is regulated, especially in stem cells and cancer cells. At this month's symposium organized by the

SEPTEMBER 2, 2012 CHICAGO, IL -- The Wisdom Truth Fortitude (WTF) Academy is the nation's best elite pre-school. For an annual tuition of $57,000, three-year-old child prodigies can enroll in the WTF Academy if they can pass a highly competitive entrance examination. When the WTF students graduate two years later,...

F1000 Research is an Open Access publishing program that allows biomedical researchers to submit a scientific manuscript, which is subjected to a rapid in-house editorial review to confirm the appropriateness of the article:

Our editorial team will check the appropriateness of the article (including content, quality,...

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Blogger... We now have numerous ways to share information with each other and many of us already feel overwhelmed by the massive amount of information that we are presented with. When I read that the co-founders of Twitter Evan Williams and Biz Stone are...

The announcement that Paul Ryan would be Mitt Romney's running mate in the upcoming presidential election created ripples of joy among Democrats and Republicans. Democrats felt that President Obama's chances of winning the election had significantly improved because the majority of Americans will oppose the severe budget cuts that Paul...

Humans have an astonishing capacity for empathy and love, but they also have a dreadful capacity for committing vicious acts and inflicting pain on fellow human beings. The horrific shooting rampage at a Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin is a sad reminder of the latter. The shooter

During the month of Ramadan, Muslims all around the world fast by abstaining from food and drink during daytime hours. In addition to participating in these physical aspects of fasting, Muslims also see the month of Ramadan as an opportunity for spiritual growth. How this spiritual growth is achieved varies...