Scientists from NASA and the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have confirmed the ozone hole over the Antarctic this September is not only much smaller than it was in 2000 and 2001, but has split into two separate “holes.”

The researchers stressed the smaller hole is due to this year’s peculiar stratospheric weather patterns and that a single year’s unusual pattern does not make a long-term trend. Moreover, they said, the data are not conclusive t

A novel form of vitamin D has been shown to grow bone in the lab and in experimental animals, a result that holds promise for the estimated 44 million Americans, mostly post-menopausal women, who suffer from or are at risk for the bone-wasting disease osteoporosis.

The research, conducted by a team of scientists led by biochemist Hector F. DeLuca at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was reported this week (Sept. 30) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a leading

Two independent research groups, led by Drs. Haruhiko Siomi (Institute for Genome Research, University of Tokushima, Japan) and Gregory Hannon (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA) have discovered that the Drosophila version of the human fragile X mental retardation protein associates with components of the RNAi pathway, suggesting that the molecular mechanism underlying fragile X syndrome may involve an RNAi-related process.

“It has been our feeling since we became involved in the field sev

The c-myc gene is commonly activated in a variety of human tumors. As a new report in the October 1 issue of Genes & Development shows, scientists are gaining a better understanding as to why.

Dr. John Cleveland and colleagues at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have discovered that c-Myc is essential for tumor development, as it regulates factors necessary for the growth of blood vessels into tumors – lending a new potential target to anti-angiogenic cancer therapies.

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3D Molecular Sciences presented a poster providing new assay data on the Company’s multiplexing enabling platform technology for molecular medicine at the BioArray Europe conference, taking place in Cambridge, UK, on 1 October 2002. The new patented assay system consists of microfabricated encoded particles of a variety of designs, attachment chemistries and a choice of readers to interpret the results.

The poster presentation, entitled Several Assay Systems Presented Using a New Patented 3

Speaking at BioArrays Europe (Cambridge, UK, 30 Sept-1 Oct), Dr Tony Smith, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Solexa, presented data on the progress of the Company`s proprietary Single Molecule Array™ technology for human genetic variation applications, highlighting significant progress in the massively parallel detection of single molecules using fluorescence.

Solexa’s Single Molecule Array technology is being applied to the measurement of individual genetic variation to develop a method f