Brain scans used to track changes in a dozen patients who received an experimental gene therapy show that the treatment normalizes brain function - and the effects are still present a year later.

Andrew Feigin, MD, and David Eidelberg, MD, of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research collaborated with Michael Kaplitt, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan and others to deliver genes for glutamic acid decarboxylase (or GAD) into the subthalamic nucleus of the brain in Parkinson’s patients. The study was designed as a phase I safety study, and the genes were delivered to only one side of the brain to reduce risk and to better assess the treatment.

New research from Northwestern University finds that college students’ choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents’ education.

The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate.

“That race, ethnicity and the education level of one’s parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests there’s less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed,” says Eszter Hargittai, author of

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new tool for quantitatively measuring elusive atmospheric chemicals that play a key role in the formation of photochemical smog.

Better measurements will improve scientists' understanding of the mechanisms of smog formation and their ability to select and predict the effectiveness of various mitigation strategies. The Brookhaven scientists have been issued a U.S. patent for their apparatus, which is available for licensing.

The device measures atmospheric hydroperoxyl radicals - short-lived, highly reactive intermediates involved in the formation of ozone, a component of photochemical smog - in the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere.

A multi-national team of biologists has concluded that developmental evolution is deterministic and orderly, rather than random, based on a study of different species of roundworms. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology.

The researchers were interested in how development evolves in organs which themselves do not change. To do so, they examined the vulva—the female's copulatory and egg-laying organ—in nearly 50 species of roundworms. Because the vulva does not significantly change across species, one might predict that there would be little variation in vulva development.

However, the researchers found an astonishing amount of developmental variation.

The number of “test tube babies” is growing year by year, and in highly developed countries it will soon make 1% to 3% of all new-borns. How safe are auxiliary reproductive technologies (ART)?

Specialists of the Research Institute of Medical Genetics (Tomsk Scientific Center, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences) recently examined one aspect of ART safety – the risk of genomic imprinting diseases.

Normal development in mammals requires that maternal and paternal gene sets differ functionally. In certain genes, only the maternal copy should work and, in others, only the paternal copy should.

Traditional roles of women in the home and a negative bias in workplace support result in less career success for women versus men at the same stage of their research careers, determined researchers at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in a study appearing in the November 2007 issue of EMBO reports.

Despite the fact that more than half the European student population is female, women hold less then 15% of full professorships in Europe, according to the She Figures 2006 from the European Commission. While the percentage of female university graduates and PhD holders has increased, the gender gap is not closing at the same rate as careers advance.