So yeah, new year, new design! Everything isn't 100% complete - the site is still missing some features. Most of the ads are tests - I'm trying to find good spots for them, they will probably change. Only the 'Biology Forum' button at the top will stay there - the other 2 are placeholders for features to come in a near future (I hope).

So what's new? A newsletter, a poll, a cool new look, better search, mail-to-a-friend feature on every article, rss feeds for every category, and a script to display our news our your website!

What's coming next? Faster & better search, printer-friendly format for every article, a genetic-algorithm (or bayesian, we'll see) based news aggregator displaying links to biology website, in (near) real-time (would need help with this one, if someone has know-how for this kind of stuff), and (almost) everything you will suggest! Use the comments form (click on the title for the full entry, it's a the bottom) or contact me directly if you have some suggestions / comments!

If the design is broken or is not displaying properly, contact me (via the new contact form!) and describe the problem and your OS / browser / screen resolution.

Oh, a big thanks to designer Amanda Wray for the cool looking logo!

Psychotropic drug prescriptions for teenagers skyrocketed 250 percent between 1994 and 2001, rising particularly sharply after 1999, when the federal government allowed direct-to-consumer advertising and looser promotion of off-label use of prescription drugs, according to a new Brandeis University study in the journal Psychiatric Services.

(Lexington, Kentucky, USA, 1/2/06) Wendy and Jared Kennedy are thrilled with their New Year baby girl, Avery Lee, born December 31, 2005, at the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky. They are the first couple to deliver a baby from the first commercial donor egg bank in the world, which has offices in Lexington, Kentucky and Phoenix, Arizona.

Belgian chemists have developed "self-exploding" microcapsules that could one day precisely release drugs and vaccines inside the human body weeks or even months after injection. The study, by researchers at Ghent University and the Universit? Catholique de Louvain, is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 9, 2006, print issue of the American Chemical Society's journal Biomacromolecules.

Most sexually active teenage girls know relatively little about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) until it is too late, according to a paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers that will be published in the January edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University's Massey Cancer Center have created a new platinum-based, anti-cancer agent able to overcome acquired drug resistance by first modifying the way it is absorbed into cancer cells and then attacking the DNA of those cancer cells.

In an important new study assessing the demographic impact of the shift from foraging to farming, anthropologists use evidence from 60 prehistoric American cemeteries to prove that the invention of agriculture led to a significant worldwide increase in birth rate.

Use of the amino acid supplement L-arginine following a heart attack does not improve certain cardiac functions and measurements and may be associated with an increased risk of death, according to a study in the January 4 issue of JAMA.

The DNA in our cells is constantly being bombarded by environmental, chemical and cellular insults. Fortunately, our cells contain many enzymes devoted strictly to detecting and repairing any damage caused by these insults. In fact, failure of these enzymes to make needed repairs to genes can lead to the accumulation of mutations and, eventually, cell death or possibly cancer. However, it appears that the activity of some DNA repair enzymes is more critical than others, particularly in developing embryos. University of Pittsburgh researchers report in the Jan. 1 edition of Cancer Research that a poorly understood enzyme, known as DNA polymerase zeta, or pol zeta, has the uncanny ability to give cells with even heavily damaged DNA a new lease on life. Furthermore, when the enzyme is absent in cells that already have growth control problems, the consequences to chromosomes are catastrophic and may lead to cancer.