Writing  in Nature Medicine, scientists from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington say they have demonstrated how to increase the number of  progenitor cells capable of rapid myeloid engraftment after cord blood transplantation. The discovery clears a major technical hurdle to making umbilical-cord-blood transplants more widely available for treating leukemia and other blood cancers.

New insights about the scaly-foot gastropod, a tiny snail that lives near thermal vents on the floor of the indian ocean, could help scientists design better armor for soldiers and military vehicles, according to a new study appearing in PNAS.

MIT materials scientists report that the snail's shell is unlike any other naturally occurring or man made armor. Their study suggests that its unique structure dissipates energy that would cause weaker shells to fracture.

When a crab attacks a snail, it grasps the snail's shell with its claws and squeezes it until it breaks — for days if necessary. The claws generate mechanical energy that eventually fractures the shell, unless it is strong enough to resist.

Older people who suffer "mental lapses," or episodes when their thinking seems disorganized or illogical, may be more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than people who do not have these lapses, according to a study published in the January 19, 2010, issue of Neurology.

These cognitive fluctuations, are common in a type of dementia called dementia with Lewy bodies, but researchers previously did not know how frequently they occurred in people with Alzheimer's disease and, equally important, what effect fluctuations might have on their thinking abilities or assessment scores.

Though it's commonly thought that most opioid overdoses occur among drug abusers and people who obtain the drugs illegally, a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine links the risk of fatal and nonfatal opioid overdose to prescription use—strongly associating the risk with the prescribed dose.
 

People who experience trauma in childhood are more likely to pick up dangerous habits like smoking and contract lung cancer later in life as a result, say the authors of a new study in BMC Public Health. The researchers note, however, that the link is only partly explained by raised rates of cigarette smoking in victims of childhood trauma, suggesting that other factors may also be to blame.

Adverse event information was collected from 17,337 people between 1995 and 1997. Brown and his colleagues followed up on the medical records of these same people to study lung cancer rates in 2005.

What will geneticists and molecular cell biologists be doing in 2020? 10 years ago, genomic technologies like DNA microarrays were just beginning to change the way molecular biologists worked, and the draft sequence of the human genome was a year from publication. Over the next decade, genomics, in the form of high-throughput tools, and large sequence databases, completely transformed the day-to-day work of just about everyone in the basic biomedical sciences.

The success of today's particle physics experiments relies to a surprisingly large extent on a seldom told functionality of the giant apparata that detect the faint echoes of subatomic particles hitting or punching through their sensitive regions: the capability of triggering.