Fossils have long provided researchers with critical evidence of how life evolved, revealing how structures such as fins, feathers, jaws, and backbones developed over time. But often the remains can be hard to interpret. Scavengers can jumble and break bones and shells, rot dissolves signature soft tissues, and geologic forces flatten 3D carcasses into papery imprints. To make sense of such puzzles, paleontologists often try to match fossils to modern, living organisms, looking for similar features.

The problem, says paleobiologist Mark Purnell of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, "is that most fossils preserve decomposed remains, so we should be comparing the fossil to rotting things, not living animals. But there's often no database of what rotting things look like." One result: Researchers studying the evolution of early vertebrates have sometimes spent decades fiercely debating whether a particular fossil represents a big news missing link, or just another mangled carcass.

To make comparisons easier, Purnell and two colleagues, Leicester's Sarah Gabbott and Robert Sansom, now at the University of Manchester, decided to take on some "smelly and unpleasant but useful research." First, they collected living specimens of six species that researchers believe are similar to early vertebrates, including the Atlantic hagfish (Myxine glutinosa), jawless lampreys, a couple of sharks, and the fishlike chordate known as Amphioxus. It wasn't easy: Hagfish, for instance, produce copious amounts of slime, and Sansom had to empty a suitcase full of goop while returning by train from a collecting trip to Sweden. "The slime was leaking out the zipper, and some of the other passengers complained," Gabbott says. Once back at the lab, the team let specimens rot in water for as long as 300 days, periodically photographing the disintegration.

The images are the heart of the atlas, published in this month's issue of Palaeontology. Sometimes, they show that "what may be the most useful [body] parts for identifying a fossil rot away first," Gabbott says. Soft cartilage and distinctive muscle tissues, for instance, can melt away within weeks. But the atlas also highlights hardier structures that could help scientists separate special fossils from the ordinary. A decayed shark, for instance, looks suspiciously like an "enigmatic," 400-million-year-old fish fossil found in Scotland that some researchers believe could be an early vertebrate ancestor, Purnell says.

The authors of the atlas "have done fantastic, important work by making stuff rot," says paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Researchers trying to piece together evolutionary trees "can be misled by fossils," he says, "because we only see what is preserved, not decayed away. But understanding what was there and isn't now can be really important to getting it right."

For his part, Purnell concedes that that the atlas isn't for the squeamish. Still, he says, "every coffee table should have one."

"This will fill a gap. Serono's exit had caused hundreds of researchers to lose their jobs," Jean-Paul Clozel, head of biotech company Actelion in Basel, Switzerland, told La 1ère, a Swiss public radio station, yesterday.

Merck Serono sold the building to a consortium called Campus Biotech, made up of the Bertarelli family, the Wyss Foundation, the University of Geneva (UNIGE), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Bertarelli is, in fact, buying back the site of his former family business, biotech firm Serono, which he had sold to Merck in 2007.

Clozel praised the billionaires, regional authorities, and university leaders for their joint work. "It's quite rare to see so many people agreeing among themselves," he said, adding that politicians should now let scientists lead the endeavor. "Creating this kind of center cannot be done without political will and support … but at the end, the venture's success will be down to the research projects," Clozel said.

Merck Serono said that it will hand over the property to Campus Biotech on 28 June but did not disclose details of the sale. In December 2012, Swiss newspaper the Tribune de Genève wrote that the site includes 32,000 square meters of offices and 42,000 square meters of vacant land, with an estimated price tag of $517 million. UNIGE and EPFL will occupy about 15,000 square meters of the site; about half of this will be used by the Wyss Institute and the other half by research groups from the two universities. The remaining space will be available for businesses, the consortium said in a statement published on Wednesday.

Forbes magazine now ranks Bertarelli and Wyss as the two richest men in Switzerland. Wyss made part of his fortune by selling his company Synthes, a manufacturer of medical devices, to U.S. firm Johnson & Johnson last year. After selling Serono to Merck, Bertarelli launched investment company Arès Life Sciences in 2008.

The drug industry remains one of the most important economic activities in Switzerland. According to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, R&D spending in the Swiss pharma industry amounted to €4.62 billion in 2010—an amount comparable to that of much larger countries such as France and Germany.

The work, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton, was notable for two reasons: It's the first time anyone has used cloning to create personalized human embryonic stem (ES) cells, and it's the same result that was described back in 2004 and 2005 by a group of South Korean scientists in what turned out to be one of the world's most notorious cases of scientific fraud.

Stem cell scientists were initially delighted, with one telling Science that the work was a "hard-won triumph after many years of diligent research." After a commenter posted on a site called PubPeer, alleging duplicated and mislabeled images in the paper, delight turned to dismay. "It's a shame that this important area of research has come under scrutiny once again," writes Kevin Eggan of Harvard University to ScienceInsider in an e-mail.

Mitalipov spoke with ScienceInsider this afternoon, and says that he and the other co-authors simply overlooked the mistakes, in part because the images in question are meant to show that the cells are similar. "With the naked eye, it's very hard to see if this is the same image or a different image." He says that he is curious whether the PubPeer contributor used image-checking software to catch the duplications. "I wish we had that software to run the paper through," he says.

The second duplication appears in supplemental figure S6, where a scatterplot purporting to show gene expression similarities between the cell lines was used twice. Mitalipov says that the wrong scatterplot was used, and the correct one will be published in an erratum. The original microarray data are publicly available, he notes.

Mitalipov argues that the key data proving whether the cell lines are really derived from cloned embryos is unaffected by these errors. What's most important is whether the ES cells' mitochondrial DNA matches that of the egg cell donor and whether the nuclear DNA matches the cell that was cloned. The researchers deliberately chose a widely available cell line for their experiments, Mitalipov says, making it easy for outside labs to try to confirm the results. He says that he is ready to ship the cloned ES cell lines to several labs that have requested them as soon as the Oregon institutional review board signs off on the transfers, which could happen in a matter of days. (Federal funding restrictions forbid National Institutes of Health-funded labs from working on the cells, because they were derived via cloning, so recipients also need to show that they have a legal place to work with the cell lines.)

Cell , meanwhile, sought to defend itself. Editors from the journal declined to speak with Science, but spokesperson Mary Beth O'Leary released a statement, noting that "it seems there were some minor errors made by the authors. … We do not believe these errors impact the scientific findings of the paper in any way."

Several stem cell experts tell ScienceInsider that the images in question aren't key to the paper's conclusions. Nevertheless, Eggan writes, "we'll likely have to wait until the cell lines in question are validated by others, or an independent group replicates the [cloned ES cell] finding before we'll know for sure." Dieter Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation in New York City tells ScienceInsider that he and his colleagues are already working to replicate Mitalipov's claims.

Cell was not able to address one key question before our deadline: What was the rush in securing the paper? It had an unusually rapid turnaround, submitted on 30 April and accepted on 3 May. "The reviewers graciously agreed to prioritize attention to reviewing this paper in a timely way," Cell's statement read. "It is a misrepresentation to equate slow peer review with thoroughness or rigor, or to use timely peer review as a justification for sloppiness in manuscript preparation."

In a story by Nature, Mitalipov seemed to imply that he pressed for rapid review because he wanted to present the work at a conference. But that meeting isn't until mid-June, and Cell has previously permitted authors of high-profile papers to publish in the journal after describing their research at a meeting.

Mitalipov tells ScienceInsider that although he mentioned the conference when he submitted the paper, it wasn't the reason for speedy review, nor was competition from another group. He says he first sent the paper to the journal "5 or 6 days" before the official 30 April submission date as part of a presubmission inquiry. After Cell editors indicated that they were interested, he says, he officially submitted via the website on 30 April. He says the journal simply asked reviewers to look at the paper promptly, "and they did it in a day." The reviewers had only minor critiques, he says, which the authors were able to address quickly. Cell may have been worried about news of the paper leaking, he says, which might have prompted the publication online shortly after acceptance. The paper is scheduled for publication in the 6 June print issue of the journal.

Tachibana is "devastated" by the mistakes, Mitalipov says. Still, the senior scientist is confident that their results will soon be confirmed. "We have the cell lines. We can show what the mitochondrial [DNA] data is, and what the nuclear data is," Mitalipov says. He and his co-authors are now combing through "every dot" in the paper to make sure that there are not any more undiscovered errors before they submit an official correction.

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Researchers already know that heavy-duty commercial fishing lines and lobster and crab traps, connected to the surface by long ropes, pose a formidable threat to whales in the North Atlantic, by inflicting deep wounds and sapping their energy reserves. Accidental entrapment is the leading cause of death for Atlantic whales in records going back to 1970. The National Marine Fisheries Service reported 25 sightings of entangled whales in 2010. Five did not survive the encounter. Many of the surviving whales were described as thin and weak.

The whale spotted on Christmas, a 2-year-old female right whale cataloged as Eg 3911 (Eg for the species' scientific name, Eubalaena glacialis), tangled with a fishing trap line sometime between February and December 2010. By the time researchers rescued her on 15 January 2011, she was 20% thinner than other right whales her age. The team suspects she wasn't able to dive deep enough to reach the plankton and crustaceans she'd normally feed on.

Once liberated, Eg 3911 began swimming faster and diving deeper, but she had no way to bulk back up. Right whales normally feed in cool northern waters during the summer, and Florida's winter waters offered no food sources. "You're tired, you're hungry, you're really skinny, and there's nothing for you to eat," says Julie van der Hoop, a marine mammal biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and lead author of a new paper documenting the incident. Eg 3911 was found dead in the water on 1 February, sporting lethal shark attack wounds. Van der Hoop suspects that the whale was lethargically bobbing at the surface when she was bitten.

Following Eg 3911's death, van der Hoop and colleagues wondered how much the gear taxed the emaciated whale's energy reserves. Scientists lowered some of the very fishing gear removed from Eg 3911 into the water behind a moving skiff to estimate how much drag the lines and buoys generated, and how much energy the whale would have to expend to compensate. They estimated that Eg 3911 was burning up to twice as much energy while entangled. Their results appear online this week in Marine Mammal Science.

The team doesn't know how long Eg 3911 was entangled—it could have been only weeks, or closer to a year. Whales can live with the tight, cutting, restricting lines for 6 months to a year before succumbing to injury, infection, or starvation, van der Hoop says. "That is a really long time to be subject to this type of injury."

Long-term consequences may linger long after entrapment, even when whales return to health. Marine mammal biologist Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium in Boston, who was not involved in the study, says that he plans to use these results to reexamine the life history of whales postentanglement. "We've tended to think that entangled animals either get free or die," he says. "The sublethal effects of entanglement have not been considered."

Kraus says that he's learned a sobering lesson from Eg 3911's story—whales are not home free once they're loosed from entangling lines. "The impact of humanity on these creatures does not end when they go out of sight."

Scientists have known for a long time that sensory neurons called TRPV1 cells can detect itchy substances on the skin, says Mark Hoon, a neuroscientist at National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland. Because TRPV1 neurons also respond to hot and painful stimuli, however, it wasn't clear whether the neurons that respond to itch are unique, or if itch might simply be low-grade pain. That's made it difficult to develop treatments that target itch without affecting other sensory systems, Hoon says.

While analyzing molecules excreted by TRPV1 cells in search of anything that might be itch-specific, Hoon and his colleagues came across a small group of the neurons that produce natriuretic polypeptide b (Nppb), a hormone that regulates heart function and can also act as a neurotransmitter. "We wondered what those cells were doing," Hoon says. To find out, the team genetically modified mice to block production of Nppb in TRPV1 neurons, then injected the skin on their shoulders with a range of itch-inducing compounds, including histamine, an inflammatory molecule involved in immune responses, and the malaria drug chloroquine. Normally, these substances make mice scratch nonstop, but the knockout mice hardly scratched themselves at all after the injection, showing that Nppb was required to produce the sensation of itch, the authors report online today in Science. No other sensory systems appeared to be affected in the knockout mice, Hoon says.

Next, the researchers looked to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, where signals from peripheral nerves are routed to the brain, and found the receptors for Nppb in a group of neurons that release a molecule called gastrin-releasing peptide, or GRP. GRP was previously thought to be the original molecular trigger for itch, Hoon says. Now, he says, it's clear that Nppb-releasing TRPV1 neurons, not GRP-releasing cells, are the first trigger in transmitting itch, presenting a new "Achilles heel" that could be investigated for treatment. "These cells weren't known before," Hoon says. "They weren't even envisaged."

New therapies for humans that safely block Nppb activity are still be a long way off, however. Although the Nppb-knockout mice lived a normal lifespan, when the researchers killed the receptor cells in the spinal cord, the mice died prematurely, suggesting that it could be dangerous to try humans, Hoon says.

The results of the study remain "very convincing, and important," says Glenn Giesler, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities. A treatment that could disrupt itch signaling at the level of the spinal cord would be "a tremendous boon," he says. "At least they now have a new target."

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Last week, a group led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton reported in Cell that it had used cloning to make personalized human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). The news was widely covered (including in Science) that Woo-Suk Hwang and his team claimed to have created individually tailored hESCs by cloning skin cells. That report, in Science, soon unraveled when it was found that the team had manipulated images and faked their data.

After last week's report, a commenter on PubPeer, a site dedicated to postpublication peer review, alleged several instances of "image reuse" in the Cell paper. The commenter also noted that "in the paper, it is recorded that the journal Cell accepted this paper just 4 days after submission."

The claims of image inconsistencies were enough to pique the journal's concern. "I can confirm that our editorial team is assessing the allegations brought up in the PubPeer piece," writes Cell spokesperson Mary Beth O'Leary in an e-mail to ScienceInsider. "I will get back to you as soon as they have fully investigated the claims raised in PubPeer."

"This will probably be the first time that a parliament orders a clinical trial," says Elena Cattaneo, director of UniStem stem cell center at the University of Milan.

The merits of Stamina's treatments have long been under dispute in Italy. The foundation says that it has found a way to transform a patient's own mesenchymal stem cells, derived from bone marrow, into newly minted nerve cells that can be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. But many stem cell scientists have dismissed those claims; the International Society for Stem Cell Research recently said that there is no "compelling evidence from clinical trials that such cells provide benefit to patients with neurological conditions."

In March of this year, then-health minister Renato Balduzzi—under severe pressure from patients—expressed his support for the treatment and proposed a law to settle the controversy. The first version of his bill horrified scientists because it provided that the treatment could be administered to thousands of patients, without any prior clinical trials, and apparently outside the European Union's regulation for so-called advanced therapies.

Today, the Italian Senate gave its final green light to an amended bill that will allow Stamina to continue giving the injections to patients whose treatment had already begun in Brescia; the foundation can't accept new patients, however. In addition, AIFA, the Italian National Health Institute, and the National Italian Transplant Centre will lead a €3 million clinical trial of the treatment. The law offers no specifics on the study's setup, or which disease it should target; it does provide for the creation of a scientific board to design the trial.

Davide Vannoni, a psychologist at the University of Udine and the director of the Stamina Foundation, could not be reached today for comment on the Senate vote. In an interview a few weeks ago, Vannoni told ScienceInsider that his treatment is effective against a variety of neurodegenerative disorders and that it is based on in vitro and preclinical studies published in Chinese scientific journals; he did not provide copies of the papers, however. That's not convincing, says Francesca Pasinelli, general manager of Telethon, an Italian nonprofit foundation for the advancement of research into genetic diseases. "The language of the international scientific community is English," she says, adding that even Chinese researchers use English if they seek international credibility.

On his Facebook page, Vannoni today said that his treatment cannot be prepared under international quality standards known as Good Manufacturing Practice, as required by the new law, because this could hamper its efficacy.

Cattaneo says that the trial is the result of Balduzzi's "original mistake" of supporting the therapy. "This is the only thing that could be done at this point," she says. Three million euros is a very large amount, Cattaneo says, considering that stem cell research last received support at the national level in 2009, for only €8 million.

"It's a waste of money," says Massimo Dominici, a cell biologist at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. But he adds that the lack of regular support for stem cell research is part of the problem. "If the government would provide enough research funding, we could translate research into [therapies] under scientific rules, rather than this way," Dominici says.

Fossils of prehistoric humans and other primates are relatively rare because bone does not last well in most environments. Teeth, on the other hand, are hard and strong enough to survive through the ages, and they are often found at paleontological and archaeological sites. Researchers have worked diligently to extract information from ancient teeth. Paleontologists recently reported finding the teeth of the earliest apes, and archaeologists have used chemical isotopes in the teeth of early farmers to track their movements across the landscape.

A team led by Manish Arora, an environmental health dentist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, hypothesized that it might be possible to detect when a child was weaned from the amount of barium in its growing teeth. Barium is an element similar to calcium and is present in water sources and many types of soils, explains co-author Christine Austin, a dental researcher at Westmead Hospital in near Sydney, Australia. Barium makes its way into both teeth and bone in small amounts. As a tooth grows, both dentine, which makes up the center of a tooth, and enamel, which forms its hard surface, are laid down in daily layers, which are clearly visible under a microscope. The teeth begin growing before birth, but while a child is still in the womb the placenta blocks most barium—but not calcium—from reaching their dentine and enamel. After birth, barium in breast milk can more easily reach the teeth; and when a human baby is switched to infant formula, even more barium enters the teeth, because both cow- and soy-based formulas contain higher levels of the element than breast milk. Then, when the child switches from formula to solid food, the barium level goes back down.

The team, which reports its findings online today in Nature, started off by looking at the ratios of barium and calcium in the teeth of human children, using an instrument that scans the teeth with a laser and detects the elements found within the dentine and enamel layers. The researchers analyzed 25 baby teeth donated by mothers in Monterey County, California, who had kept careful records of their breastfeeding and infant formula habits as part of a child health program. Most of the teeth, a total of 22, revealed markedly higher barium levels right after birth; and in nine of 13 children who had first been breastfed and then given infant formula, the team could see a transition between the lower barium levels from breast milk and the higher barium levels of the formula. (The team could also distinguish children who went straight from breastfeeding to solid food without being given formula—their barium levels went down at the transition point.)

The researchers then looked at the molars of four young macaque monkeys at the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis, and correlated the barium signatures of the dentine and enamel of these teeth with data previously collected on the breastfeeding habits of the mother and infant monkeys. Again, the barium levels closely followed the course of breastfeeding and weaning among these animals, rising after birth and then falling to lower concentrations after weaning.

Finally, the researchers focused the technique on the molar of a 100,000-year-old Neandertal child earlier found at Scladina Cave in Belgium. Laser scanning of the tooth revealed that barium levels started off high right after birth and continued to be elevated for 7 months, apparently due to exclusive breastfeeding; they then fell to intermediate levels for another 7 months, suggesting that the mother's milk was supplemented by other food sources. But after 1.2 years, the child—who died at about 8 years of age—was abruptly weaned from breastfeeding, and barium fell to very low levels. (See photos.)

The researchers caution that it's impossible to draw broad conclusions about Neandertal life histories from this one sample, such as whether Neandertals weaned their children earlier or later than modern humans who lived at the same time, or whether Neandertal children grew up faster, as some earlier studies have suggested—questions that could heavily bear on why Neandertals could not keep up with modern humans in the survival sweepstakes. But the new technique could eventually provide some answers, says co-author Tanya Smith, an anthropologist at Harvard University. "Now that we've established an accurate and precise approach, we hope to examine additional fossils to determine at what age Neandertals actually weaned their infants."

Anthropologist Shara Bailey, an expert in ancient human teeth at New York University in New York City, says that "the barium method is novel and appears to be even more powerful" than previous approaches, adding that despite small sample sizes, "the authors present a strong argument for the utility of this method for extrapolating weaning history." Julia Lee-Thorp, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, agrees that the work with children and monkeys represents a "very solid validation" of the method, although she cautions that the amount of barium that children absorb through their guts and into their teeth could decrease as they get older and this could skew the results.

But Lee-Thorp, Bailey, and other researchers caution against reading too much into the findings from one Neandertal tooth, particularly any conclusions that Neandertals weaned their children early. "We have to keep in mind that the Scladina individual died quite early, and this might present a bias in our interpretations," Bailey says. She adds that future data from adult Neandertals might "lend more credence to any hypotheses about what Neandertals were doing on a regular basis."

Louise Humphrey, an anthropologist and tooth expert at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees, although she says that the early weaning of the Scladina child is "intriguing" because it is more than a year earlier than the nearly 30 months typical of modern human nonindustrial societies. If early weaning was typical of Neandertals, Humphrey says, it would be consistent with other evidence for a "faster pace of development" and raise the possibility that Neandertal mothers had shorter intervals between births and thus more kids on their hands at any given time.

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