] "They certainly had access to the two sons, Uday and
] Qusay, who were killed," he says. A "very quick way" of
] identifying Saddam Hussein would be to compare the new
] sample with variable regions called short tandem repeats
] on the sons' Y-chromosomes. As this male sex chromosome
] is passed directly from father to son, it should match.

Ask MemeStreams, get an answer...

New Scientist - Fast-track DNA tests confirm Saddam's identity

This is kind of fun. You can do a hell of a lot with multi-media in an educational setting. I found multi-media animations of filter functions in DSP class to be incredibly insightful. Calculus is really a poor way of explaining things that are really very intuitive if you can see them in action. There is a lot of distance we can get out of something that seems so simple.

Dissect a Frog!

"A genetic mutation might explain why only one fifth of people infected with West Nile virus go on to develop symptoms - and why only one fifth of these people develop a severe, often fatal, brain inflammation, say French researchers. "

Genetic Mutation might explain West Nile Infections; Vaccine being tested

"To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier. "

Creating life in a lab from a recipe downloaded from the internet... Soon, everyone will be doing it.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | First synthetic virus created