A new article in The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics calls for a change in the regulations surrounding xenotransplantation, the transplanting of animal cells, tissues or organs into humans.

Although few xenotransplantation procedures have been done to this time, there appears to be a lack of awareness among potential xenotransplant patients about the risk of the procedures, and the required lifetime of infectious disease monitoring that come with it.

“When animal cells are transplanted into a human, there is always a risk of new diseases emerging, which is why the federal government requires that a recipient must always be monitored long-term,” says Dr. Monique Spillman, co-author of the study.

Massive Jupiter is undergoing dramatic atmospheric changes that have never been seen before with the keen "eye" of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Jupiter's turbulent clouds are always changing as they encounter atmospheric disturbances while sweeping around the planet at hundreds of miles per hour. But these Hubble images reveal a rapid transformation in the shape and color of Jupiter's clouds near the equator, marking an entire face of the globe.

The semi-major axis of Jupiter's orbit about the sun is 483 million miles. The planet has a diameter of roughly 88,789 miles (142,984 km) at the equator.

Juries across the country make decisions every day on the fate of defendants, ideally leading to prison sentences that fit the crime for the guilty and release for the innocent. Yet a new Northwestern University study shows that juries in criminal cases many times are getting it wrong.

In a set of 271 cases from four areas, juries gave wrong verdicts in at least one out of eight cases, according to “Estimating the Accuracy of Jury Verdicts,” a paper by a Northwestern University statistician that is being published in the July issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board Mars Express has provided snapshots of the Aeolis Mensae region. This area, well known for its wind-eroded features, lies on a tectonic transition zone, characterised by incised valleys and unexplained linear features.

Illuminated by the Sun from the west (right side in the image), the pictures are of a ground resolution of approximately 13 metres per pixel. The region, imaged on 26 and 29 March 2007, during Mars Express orbits 4136 and 4247, is located at approximately 6° South and 145° East.

The prognosis for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune disease that mainly affects women in their reproductive years, has improved recently, prompting a shift toward improving quality of life.

For men with SLE, concerns have been raised about their future fertility.

However, no studies have been conducted to date on testes function and its relevance to sperm abnormalities in male SLE patients. A new study examined gonad function in male SLE patients and found that they have a high frequency of sperm abnormalities associated with reduced testicular volume. In addition, the study identified intravenous treatment with the immunosuppressant cyclophosphamide (IV CYC) as the major factor in permanent damage to the testes.

USC computer scientist Kristina Lerman thinks she has found a new source of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems of information classification, reliability, and meaning - people.

She says that extracting 'metadata' about transactions -- who is talking to whom, who is listening, how conclusions are reached, and how they spread -- can help researchers answer currently refractory problems about documents: their accuracy and quality, their categorization, the relation of their embedded terminology.