Eugenie Samuel Reich speculates about the effect on US science should the debt ceiling not be raised by 2 August 2011: Republicans have made it clear that they will not cut defence spending, and Democrats are keen to protect social security and health-care programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, and Alan Dove Vincent, Rich, and Alan discuss live blogging of scientific meetings, the current outbreak of Hendra virus is Australia, and using zinc finger nucleases to make HIV-resistant CD4 cells. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV144.mp3"] Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV 144 ...

The Chilean salmon farming industry has been severely affected by disease caused by infectious salmon anemia virus. Salmon eggs shipped from Norway to Chile in 2007 are the cause of the outbreak (New York Times): A virus that has killed millions of salmon in Chile and ravaged the fish farming ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Michael Schmidt, Margaret McFall-Ngai, and Elio Schaechter On episode #12 of the podcast This Week in Microbiology, Vincent, Margaret, Michael and Elio review the use of photothermal nanoblades to dissect the Burkholderia intracellular life cycle, and manipulation of chromosomes in vivo for genome-wide codon replacement in E. coli. ...

Virophage is the name coined for viruses such as Sputnik and Mavirus that can only replicate in cells infected with a helper virus, whose replication they inhibit. I've never liked the name - it means virus eater - and neither does Brent Johnson, a virologist at Brigham Young University: "I believe ...