Aspirin can significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular events -- a combined endpoint including stroke, heart attack and death due to cardiovascular disease -- in both men and women, according to a new meta-analysis of more than 95,000 patients by a Duke University Medical Center cardiologist.

When medics are treating trauma patients, every second counts. Yet bruises, burns, and other physical conditions often make it difficult to locate veins and administer lifesaving drugs or solutions.

Using technology that allows DNA from thousands of genes to be collected and surveyed on a 3 x 1½-inch chip, University of Utah medical researchers have confirmed that a region on a single chromosome probably harbors a gene that causes autism. The researchers at the U School of Medicine made the finding by tracing variations in the DNA of an extended Utah family that has a high occurrence of the disorder and whose members are descended from one couple.

Treena Arinzeh, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) who is one of the nation's leading stem cell researchers, has received two grants that will help her bring the promise of stem cell research a step closer to reality.

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a molecular interaction that triggers a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer, and suggest that attacking this target with selective drugs might improve treatment.

Biologists have long believed that bigger is better when it comes to body size, since many lineages of animals, from horses to dinosaurs, have evolved into larger species over time.

Nerve cells store and transmit information via special contact sites called synapses. Synapses also play a role in determining what we remember and what we forget. When we learn, both the structure and the functional characteristics of these contact sites change. Scientists are only now beginning to understand the molecular processes which cause that change.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will build a state-of-the-art computational resource and develop software tools to decipher the genetic code of communities of microbial life in the world's oceans.

Corn plants emit a cocktail of scents when they are attacked by certain pests, such as a caterpillar known as the Egyptian cotton leaf worm.