Smokers trying to kick the habit might stand a better chance of staying smoke-free if they begin using replacement nicotine patches or gum in the weeks before they quit cigarettes.

Pathogens are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, causing problems for therapy. Doctors need to have antibiotics available that work in new kinds of ways. The last few years of research have, however, found few such ways. One major difficulty for developers of antibiotics is choosing the proper point of attack against bacteria. There are hundreds of possible points of attack, according to genome analysis and laboratory culture experiments – but validation in in vivo infection models is largely lacking.

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Bone cells appear as a clump at left, carbon nanotubes appear on the right.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have published findings that show, for the first time, that bone cells can grow and proliferate on a scaffold of carbon nanotubes.