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Only a handful of social animals — songbirds, some marine mammals, some bats and humans — learn to actively style their vocal communications. Babies, for instance, start by babbling, their first chance to experiment with sounds. Now, new research in songbirds shows that vocal experimentation may...

The development of the brain proceeds a little like the European settlement of North America. The earliest pioneers settled on the east coast with subsequent waves of settlers forming communities further and further westward. In cortical regions of the developing brain, generations of young neuro...

Mike Rossner, executive director of The Rockefeller University Press, has been named the newest SPARC Innovator by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Announced last week, the award honors Rossner for his work as a proponent of data integrity in and wider public access to s...

Bacteria know that they are too small to make an impact individually. So they wait, they multiply, and then they engage in behaviors that are only successful when all cells participate in unison. There are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in such communities. Now researchers at Rocke...

Telomeres, the repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of linear chromosomes, have an important function: They protect vulnerable chromosome ends from molecular attack. Researchers at Rockefeller University now show that telomeres have their own weakness. They resemble unstable parts of the genom...

For perhaps 1.8 billion years after life first emerged on Earth, a sort of evolutionary writer’s block stalled the development of organisms more complicated than single cells. Then, a burst of experimental creativity about 1.7 billion years ago brought the cell nucleus onto the scene, stashing th...

Coming soon, to The David Rockefeller Graduate Program Plans for Convocation kept many offices busy this spring, but behind the scenes, another group was already planning for the fall. Rockefeller’s application screening committee pored over 675 applications of potential new students, eventually ...

2009 is a landmark year for science. The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary biology, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his classic text On the Origin of Species, this year is being marked with tributes across the world. It is also a milestone ye...

by TALLEY HENNING BROWN Generations of new scientists have been affected by the work of Thomas R. Cech and Maurice R. Greenberg. Dr. Cech, former president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a dedicated teacher for over 30 years, has long been an advocate for the advancement of young scie...

by TALLEY HENNING BROWN Those who can, teach. From left, Fernando Nottebohm, Paul Nurse and A. James Hudspeth at the Convocation Luncheon. While more than 1,000 students have braved the rigors of scientific pursuit to earn Rockefeller University doctorates, the faculty who mentored them have brav...