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.

A new study from Bangladesh published online today in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal shows that routinely vaccinating infants against H. influenzae type b (Hib), a bacterium that causes deadly Hib pneumonia and meningitis, could save hundreds of thousands of children in Asia. Results showed that routine immunization of infants with a Hib conjugate vaccine prevented over one-third of life-threatening pneumonia cases and approximately 90% of Hib meningitis cases. A similar impact would be expected in other parts of the region.

Exercise has a similar effect to antidepressants on depression. This has been shown by previous research. Now Astrid Bjørnebekk at Karolinska Institutet has explained how this can happen: exercise stimulates the production of new brain cells.

In a series of scientific reports, she has searched for the underlying biological mechanisms that explain why exercise can be a form of therapy for depression and has also compared it with pharmacological treatment with an SSRI drug.

Penn State researchers did a study and found that web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results preferred Yahoo first and Google second even though more claimed to use Google regularly. These results, they say, provide evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off and that there is "carry over" branding in effect too.

Here is their method - they copied identical Google results pages (“camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music”) and attributed them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine they created for the study.