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This article presents information on the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD), which opened up shop in Singapore in 2003 and moved into Biopolis in July 2004. The NITD is plugging into the country's strengths in infectious disease research by concentrating on developing new treatments for dengue fever and tuberculosis. On another floor is Paradigm Therapeutics, which plans to extend the genomics-driven research on the central nervous system and metabolic diseases that it does at its British home in Cambridge. Apart from Ian Gray, Paradigm Singapore's director of research, there are five researchers at Biopolis, with another three being trained in Great Britain. INSETS: THE PUBLIC RESEARCH SECTOR;CAN YOU MAKE THE BIOTECHS BLOOM?.

Focuses on efforts made by the government of Singapore to make country as a biomedical center for research as of September 20, 2003. Overview of the Biopolis, Singapore's science city formally inaugurated in October 2003; Estimations regarding the economic development of Singapore by the year 2005; Role of various pharmaceutical industries in the rapid growth of Singapore as a biomedical center. INSETS: GROWING A FUTURE FOR STEM CELLS;VIRUS ATTACK.

This article reports that many more species are at risk of extinction than the people thought. That is because some species depend on another for their survival, so if one disappears, many more that have gone largely unnoticed by conservationists will follow. There are 12,200 species at risk according to the World Conservation Union Red List, the definitive audit of rare, threatened and endangered species. But the true number is likely to be much higher, says a team led by Lian Pin Koh at the National University of Singapore and Robert Dunn at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. In addition to 399 extinct host species of plants, fish, birds or mammals on the Red List, they estimate another 200 affiliate species have already been lost. And of the 9536 endangered host species on the Red List for which there is sufficient data to run the model, another 6300 affiliate species are likely to go with their hosts.

A novel interactive way to relate children's stories has been developed by researchers in Singapore. The Magic Story Cube uses augmented reality technology, in which computer graphics are superimposed on the real world, to overlay an animated version of a story on top of a child's traditional magic cube. A standard magic cube is made up of a handful of smaller wooden or plastic cubes connected at various edges. These can be unfolded in a variety of ways to reveal a sequence of puzzles or different pictures.