Biology
Indiana University Bloomington biologists Thomas Kaufman and Michael Wade were elected this week to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, respectively. The elections are among the highest honors American scientists can receive. Wade will officially be inducted into the American Academy at a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 11. Kaufman will be inducted into the National Academy at the organization's next annual meeting (April 2009) in Washington, D.C.
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U.S. News and World Report magazine has chosen three programs at Indiana University -- including its School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) -- as top 10 among their peers. Three others, including its School of Education and Kelley School of Business, are among the magazine's top 20.
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A team of scientists from Indiana University, Princeton University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently gained new insight into how blowflies process visual information. The findings, published in an article in the Public Library of Science Journals, show that the precise, sub-millisecond timing of "spikes" from visual motion-sensitive nerve cells encodes complex, detailed information of what the fly is seeing.
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Indiana University Bloominton's newest science building, Simon Hall, has won high honors in R&D Magazine's 2008 "Lab of the Year," an architecture competition for research facilities. Madison, Wisc.-based Flad & Associates, which designed Simon Hall, submitted their contest entry in January. Flad architects worked closely with IU architects to design a 141,000-square-foot structure that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in fields as disparate as biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.
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Patricia Foster, an Indiana University Bloomington biologist who studies mutations in the bacterium E. coli, has been elected a fellow of the American Society for Microbiology. A committee of her peers chose Foster for her "excellence, originality and creativity in the microbiological sciences." An event in her honor will take place June 4 as part of the society's annual meeting in Boston.
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Hoping to piece together the intricate series of interactions that lead to Huntington's disease, Indiana University Bloomington scientists have determined the shape and structure of a binding site that may prove useful in combating the neurodegenerative disease. In the Feb. 1 issue of Journal of Molecular Biology, IU Bloomington biologists Joel Ybe and Qian Niu describe a region on the surface of HIP1 (Huntingtin-interacting protein 1) that could bind HIPPI (HIP1-protein interactor). The association of HIP1 and HIPPI is believed to lead to the degeneration of nerve cells.
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