Women feel pain more than men despite the popular notion that the opposite is true, according to research.

Scientists investigating gender differences in pain have found that not only do women report more pain throughout the course of their lifetime, they also experience it in more bodily areas, more often and for longer duration when compared to men.

Nerves talk to each other using chemicals called neurotransmitters. One of those "communication chemicals," aptly named GABA (gamma amino butyric acid), shows up in unusually high amounts in some aggressive tumors, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Cornell University researchers have learned how a common fish found along the West Coast can hum and hear outside sounds at the same time.

Safety in transfusion medicine is an ongoing challenge to blood services worldwide as new threats, such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), emerge. An update on the latest measures to protect the public from the human form of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called Mad Cow Disease, and minimize risk of transmission through blood transfusion was presented here at the International Society of Blood Transfusion Congress. At the "Safety in Transfusion Medicine" symposium, Pall Corporation (NYSE: PLL) released new research results further validating the performance of its Leukotrap® Affinity Prion Reduction Filter System, which was CE marked with a 99.9 percent prion removal efficiency in May 2005. It is the first technology that reduces infectious prions from red cells, the most widely transfused blood component. Abnormal prions are believed to be the causative agent of vCJD.

A Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator from Albany, New York, and an HHMI international research scholar from Buenos Aires, Argentina have combined their expertise to identify two peculiar features of the protein-making machinery of the parasite that causes Chagas disease. Their findings could help scientists develop a safe and effective drug for the disease, whose cardiac complications kill up to 30 percent of those infected.

Research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that damage to a cell's DNA sets off a chain reaction that leads to the increased expression of a marker recognized by the body's immune system.

Analysis of the brain of a patient suffering from Parkinson's Disease has shown that the experimental treatment he received caused regrowth of the nerve fibres that are lost in this disease. The findings are reported in the July issue of Nature Medicine.

This is the first time that any treatment has been shown to reverse the loss of nerve fibres in Parkinson's Disease.