Laboratories

La Jolla-based National Health Laboratories said Monday that it has reached agreement to buy a smaller Massachusetts-based medical testing company in a $257-million deal that would create the nation's second-largest medical laboratories firm. The acquisition of Damon Corp. of Needham Heights, Mass., would also allow National Health to cut costs and strengthen its position in a medical testing industry that is rapidly consolidating, analysts said.

As part of an ongoing nationwide consolidation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it will move more than 100 employees to Irvine from Los Angeles in March and is seeking property to build a laboratory nearby that will replace an aging facility in Los Angeles.

One of the many horse urine samples that recently have shown evidence of cocaine has been analyzed by an independent laboratory that is not calling it a positive test, according to Dennis Hutcheson, executive secretary of the California Horse Racing Board. Hutcheson said the independent lab's report has been given to Rick Vulliet, the state's equine medical director, who will review the result and make a recommendation to the racing board.

As news of Wen Ho Lee's impending release from jail reached laboratories across the country, vocal jubilation was tempered by the realization that deep problems plaguing classified weapon research and Asian American scientists will not be solved simply by letting Lee out of his jail cell. "I think it's good news, but I'm not sure the damage is undone," said Robert C.

Like all amateur photographers, Hollywood real estate broker Arnold Carlson wants his pictures clear and sharp. But Carlson has an additional need for detail: He paints still lifes from those photos. "I take 20 to 30 rolls a year, more lately since I got my new camera," Carlson says. "I need to get really good close-ups of things." He asked a friend who is a professional photographer to recommend a good one-hour photo processing shop where he could get high-quality prints.

A communications gremlin sabotaged the launching of a $213-million European laboratory from the space shuttle Atlantis early Saturday, frustrating what was supposed to have been the easy part of a demanding week in orbit. Prevented from determining whether the laboratory was ready for free flight, officials of the European Space Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration postponed its planned release until early today.

When it blows, snows, rains or turns foggy on this rocky, 6,288-foot high New England summit, science pays rapt attention. Whipped by reputedly the hardest winds on Earth, this "stormiest mountain in the world" is besieged by a unique combination of weather forces. As a result, the peak, highest in the northeastern United States, has been a premier cold weather testing laboratory for science and technology for more than a century.

The Los Angeles Police Department crime laboratory, much maligned during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, needs $7.2 million in new funding and should be subjected to a review by a panel of outside experts in order to become a first-rate facility, a draft internal LAPD report has concluded.

Left alone in an expensive Laguna Niguel home with her parents undergoing a divorce, the 22-year-old daughter of a construction executive built an elaborate methamphetamine laboratory that spread throughout the house, authorities said Wednesday.

Even by the recklessly violent standards of the drug underworld, it is a particularly savage and desperate collection of criminals that congregates around methamphetamine. There are the Hells Angels, who distribute huge amounts of the drug known as "crank" or "speed." There are the well-armed crews of "cookers" who make the substance in 36-hour sprees, frantically churning it out from filthy, toxic laboratories.