The McGill University Health Center (MUHC) in Montreal is pleased to announce the first successful birth in Canada resulting from frozen eggs. A team led by Professor Seang Lin Tan, Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at McGill University and Director of the McGill Reproductive Centre at the MUHC in Montreal confirmed the birth of a healthy baby boy, weighing 3740grams on April 29. "We are the first in-vitro fertilization (IVF) Centre in Canada to achieve this success," says Dr. Tan. "This is fantastic news for both the family and for fertility health research and we would like to congratulate the parents on the birth of their first child."

A research team based at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has identified 80 new genes essential to the process of RNA interference (RNAi), a powerful new research tool for inactivating genes in plants or animals. They used the RNAi process itself to find new genes that participate in the gene-silencing mechanism, which someday may help to fight human disease. The report will appear in the journal Science and is receiving early online release on the Science Express website at http://www.sciencexpress.org.

Until now it has been impossible to accurately measure the levels of important chemicals in living brain cells in real time and at the level of a single cell. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology and Stanford University are the first to overcome this obstacle by successfully applying genetic nanotechnology using molecular sensors to view changes in brain chemical levels. The sensors alter their 3-dimensional form upon binding with the chemical, which is then visible via a process known as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or FRET. In a new study, the nanosensors were introduced into nerve cells to measure the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate--the major brain chemical that increases nerve-cell activity in mammalian brains. It is involved in everything from learning and memory to mood and perception. Too much glutamate is believed to contribute to conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The research is published in the May 30-June 3 on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mass extinctions seem to occur on Earth roughly every 26 million years, leading some scientists to propose that they may be caused by rare collisions with comets or asteroids. A researcher in Poland thinks it may be possible that extraordinary predators are at fault instead.

Children with a fatal genetic disorder called Krabbe disease can be saved and their brain development preserved if they receive stem cells from umbilical cord blood before symptoms of the disease develop, according to a study published in the May 19, 2005, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In this month's issue of the freely available online journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Thomas N. Williams and colleagues from Kilifi, Kenya, show that the protection against malaria given by carrying the gene for sickle cell haemoglobin may involve the immune system. Studying a group of children and adults in the Kilifi District of coastal Kenya, they found that this protection increased during childhood up to age 10, and then declined.

Thinking small in a time when everything was big has helped Queensland researchers to unearth new evidence that climate change, instead of humans, was responsible for wiping out Australian giant marsupials or megafauna 40,000 years ago.

Instead of only excavating 'trophy specimens' such as giant kangaroos and wombats, the researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Queensland Museum performed the first systematic analysis of a site in the fossil rich Darling Downs region of south-eastern Queensland.