I work for the company (CRi) that produced the polarized light imaging system (Oosight) that this guy credits for much of this new cloning success. In case anyone's interested the product website is here. and has links to movies of actual monkey eggs being manipulated and having their original DNA removed.

The basic principle is that the highly-ordered molecules on which the chromosomes are mounted are birefringent (they change the polarization-state of light), so if you know what the original polarization state was and if you can measure the state afterwards, then you can detect those molecules, even though they are transparent. As the BBC article says, this means you don't need to use toxic dyes to find them (which is obviously a bad idea, if you want the egg to actually survive the process).

Yeah, yeah, I got a little excited thinking I made a first post on slashdot. My false start, my bad! Peace, love, and friendship my comrade, no need to call me a lamer!

Also, as has been pointed out in this thread, it doesn't seem that Microsoft goes out of its way to target niche areas the way Apple has, which is something I can't disagree with. I would like to point out, however, that just about every piece of software that has to do with the modern PC user: browser, chat, email, word processing -- has a Microsoft "solution." They've overwhelmingly succeeded in just about every one of those areas except for maybe chat, where AOL still reigns on high.

But hey, 3/4 (in this limited selection) isn't bad if you ask me...and I think a lot of people here would agree that this 'niche' area probably consumes over one-half of the time spent on a computer.