The thyroid may play an important role in longevity, with longer-lived rodents showing significantly lower levels of a thyroid hormone that speeds metabolism, a new study has found.

Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis.

MIT and Hong Kong University researchers have shown that some simple biodegradable liquids can stop bleeding in wounded rodents within seconds, a development that could significantly impact medicine.

The current cost to determine the sequence of nucleotide bases in the 6-billion-base-pair human genome is roughly $10 million, but researchers at UC San Diego and eight other universities and biotech companies hope to use a federal grant to lower the cost to only $1,000 per human genome sequenced. Determining the genome sequence of individuals is considered crucial to understanding and routinely treating hundreds of inherited diseases, predispositions to other diseases, and cancers.

How a harmless virus called GB Virus type C (GBV-C) protects against HIV infection is now better understood. Researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Iowa City Health Care System and the University of Iowa have identified a protein segment that strongly inhibits HIV from growing in cell models.

A mathematical discovery has extended the reach of a novel genome mapping method to humans, potentially giving cancer biology a faster and more cost-effective tool than traditional DNA sequencing.

Using environmentally safe compounds like sugars and vitamin C, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have vastly improved a popular technology used to generate a diverse range of industrial plastics for applications ranging from targeted drug delivery systems to resilient paint coatings.

Using a two-drug approach, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston have demonstrated that it may be possible to rescue heart function after a heart attack and protect the heart from scarring. Working with rats, they combined an agent that overcomes a natural inhibitor of cell division with a naturally occurring growth factor that encourages blood vessel growth (angiogenesis). Together, these two agents enabled heart-muscle cells to multiply and the heart to regain its function after a simulated myocardial infarction. The study will appear in the October 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (posted online during the week of October 9).

Staying in a room in the intensive care unit (ICU) previously occupied by a patient with treatment-resistant bacteria may increase the odds of acquiring such bacteria, according to a report in the October 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

As many as 18 percent of adults who have no history of stroke report having had at least one symptom of stroke, according to results of a large national study published in the October 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

One of the most dangerous risks of contracting a serious bacterial infection is that the victim may develop sepsis--an overreaction by the immune system causing destructive inflammation throughout the body, often leading to heart and other organ failure and death. Even the best hospital intensive care units may be helpless to save patients stricken by severe sepsis. According to a 2003 study by Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sepsis killed 120,491 hospitalized people in 2000. The same study found cases of sepsis in the U.S. have risen dramatically in recent decades, nearly tripling from 82.7 cases out of every 100,000 Americans in 1979 to 240.4 cases per 100,000 in 2000. Muppets creator Jim Henson died of the disease in 1990 at age 53.