One of the most ambitious efforts to re-engineer the mouse is taking place in a sprawling, Starship Enterprise-themed facility set in a bucolic enclave outside Houston. It’s the headquarters of Lexicon Genetics, a biotech company dedicated to developing new, genetically offbeat strains of mice; it is, in effect, a designer-mouse factory. The company’s goal: to [...]

Liver-transplant operations are almost routine these days. Finding suitable donors remains the hard part. Each year thousands of patients suffering from cirrhosis, hepatitis and other severe liver ailments die while on waiting lists. Artificial livers aren’t likely to fill the gap, either. The liver is almost as complex as the brain: it handles some 400 [...]

If the synthesizer business has a household name, it’s Robert Moog – even if most people don’t know how to pronounce it. In the mid-’60s, Moog (rhymes with rogue) built the first keyboardcontrolled synthesizers, huge switchboard panels that generated the R2-D2-style bleeps and faux orchestral sounds of the space age. In the early ’70s, his [...]

Comic book writer Peter Milligan explains why the Princess of Wales is perfect mutant material
The comic book’s characters have crazy mutant powers, but these powers are really vehicles for exploring our celebrity and fame-obsessed society.
The New York Times called it “a witty blast of media criticism disguised as a garish spin-off of the [...]

Japanese researchers said on Wednesday they have proved mice act strangely after being exposed to electromagnetism similar to that often monitored ahead of a big earthquake.
In their experiments, researchers exposed mice to low levels of electromagnetism which people cannot feel, said Takeshi Yagi, professor at Osaka University in western Japan.
“The mice then became [...]