Nobody can say for sure what lies ahead for Beatrice, because no one really knows what's wrong with her. Hugh has taken her to see some of the nation's finest medical experts in hopes of finding a diagnosis, but the doctors have all been baffled by the girl's strange array of symptoms. This has left her in a sort of diagnostic purgatory, making her illness all the more fearsome and traumatic.

Families facing this kind of medical uncertainty are often paralyzed by their distress. But rather than give in to his anguish, Hugh Rienhoff made an extraordinary decision: He would dig into Beatrice's genetic code and find the answer himself. A biotechnology consultant by day, Rienhoff has been an avid student of clinical genetics since he earned his medical degree nearly 30 years ago. Now he has used this expertise to transform his Bay Area home into a makeshift genetics lab. Surrounded by his children's artwork and bookshelves loaded with his wife's political literature, Rienhoff set about sequencing a number of Beatrice's genes, preparing samples using secondhand equipment and turning to public databases to interpret the results.

The survey found that 94 per cent of the girls said that they used a computer or laptop compared with only 88 per cent of the boys. It also found that 50 per cent of children chose their mothers to help them to use new technologies, versus 22 per cent, which chose their fathers.

“What is clear from these results is that mothers are taking the lead,” said Professor Pine. “Overall, mothers are more likely to engage with their children using new technologies especially when it comes to formal learning or research. The mothers were also the most experienced and capable computer and Internet users.”

Schoedinger in central Ohio is offering live Web streaming and archived online video for use by military personnel overseas and others who can't be present for a loved one's funeral.

It's a way for mourners to take part in the experience without the time and expense of a long-distance trip, especially one arranged on short notice.

"This just allows people to share in the grief and share in the grief experience with everyone," said company President Michael Schoedinger.

The family organizing the funeral controls who has access to the private Web site used for broadcasting. The company offers the service for free but eventually may charge a fee to cover its costs, Schoedinger said.

Funeral directors say better technology and cheaper equipment have prompted more funeral homes to offer webcasting and videotaping services nationwide.

A research paper, published in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, details how researchers are harnessing piezoelectricity, the energy force most commonly used to trigger-start a gas stove, to produce microbot motors just 250 micrometres, a quarter of a millimetre, wide.

The new paper targets an area of the brain known as the primary motor cortex, which helps control muscle movements. The authors focused on a learning task, one they describe as similar in principle to the process we go through when we learn a new sport. Subjects were given a device that measured the pressure applied between the thumb and forefinger, and asked to use it to maneuver a cursor through an on-screen obstacle course. One group of subjects received a current; the controls had electrodes attached, but received no current. The subjects were asked to come in for five consecutive days to repeat the process so that researchers could track how their skill improved.

On this historic day, I thought it would be instructive to look back on just how wrong some of the pundits were when Barack Obama (D) launched his bid for the presidency two years ago, including the embarrassing remark by an esteemed member of the self-described "Best Political Team on Television" (CNN):

The incident came as 16 other people were also killed in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua in attacks the authorities believe are linked to the country's drug wars.

"Hitmen cut off commander Martin Castro's head and left it in an ice cooler in front of the local police station," said a statement issued by the state justice authorities.

His head was left in the town Praxedis with a message from the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

The police commander was abducted on Saturday, along with five other police officers and a civilian, only five days after starting his job.

Six bodies in police uniforms bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds were found on Monday in a street in the state capital, Chihuahua, officials said.

It was thought that British black squirrels, that appear to be more aggressive than the greys, were a mutant produced by two grey squirrels mating.

However scientists looking at the growing population in the eastern counties have found that the black squirrels are in fact an introduced subgroup that escaped from a menagerie of exotic animals in the east of England more than 100 years ago.

The first wild black squirrel was spotted in 1912 outside Letchworth in Hertfordshire and has been spreading throughout the area since.

Dr Alison Thomas, a professor of life sciences of Anglia Ruskin University, conducted a number of genetic tests to work out the background of the new squirrel.

She found that the DNA was exactly the same as black squirrels found in the US.

A 16-year-old man, named only as Wu, became the fourth reported victim in two weeks. The Health ministry said he had fallen ill in Guizhou on January 8 and was then transferred to a hospital in the neighbouring province of Hunan. He has since died.

Two of the other victims, a 27-year-old woman in Shandong province and a 19-year-old woman in Beijing, also died. The third, a two-year-old girl in Shanxi province, is critically ill. Her mother, meanwhile, has died from kidney failure but has not been confirmed with the H5N1 virus.

There is a growing sense of panic ahead of the Chinese New Year holidays, which begin this weekend, as hundreds of millions of people migrate home to visit their families. Duck and chicken are both traditional dishes to celebrate the holiday.

A new antimicrobial compound has been isolated from the freshwater animal Hydra. The compound, called hydramacin-1, shares virtually no similarity with any other known antibacterial proteins except for two other antimicrobials found in leech, and has been shown in laboratory studies to be highly potent.