Even early in adulthood, aging begins to slow the mind's growth -- but it does not have to stop it altogether, suggests a Princeton University study on the brains of adult monkeys.

Humans are hard-wired to form enduring bonds with others. One of the primary bonds across the mammalian species is the mother-infant bond. Evolutionarily speaking, it is in a mother’s best interest to foster the well-being of her child; however, some mothers just seem a bit more maternal than others do. Now, new research points to a hormone that predicts the level of bonding between mother and child.

Experts called on government and medical organizations involved in blood transfusion to “reverse one of the most serious public health policy errors in the history of transfusion therapy in the United States.” Neil Blumberg, M.D. and Joanna M. Heal, M.D., specialists in transfusion medicine and hematology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, urged that universal adoption of leukocyte reduction, the removal of leukocytes (white blood cells) from all transfused blood by filtration, be mandated throughout the United States. In a commentary in the October 15, 2007 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, they refer to leukocyte reduction as “the greatest advance in preventing short-term complications and death due to blood transfusion in the past half-century.”

As many as four out of ten HIV positive African-American men could be putting their partners at risk by not using condoms, according to research in the latest UK-based Journal of Advanced Nursing.

Despite its deadly reputation, the gas carbon monoxide (CO) could actually save lives and boost health in future as a result of leading-edge UK research.

Scientists since the early '90s have seen the potential for cleaning up contaminated sites by growing plants able to take up nasty groundwater pollutants through their roots. Then the plants break certain kinds of pollutants into harmless byproducts that the plants either incorporate into their roots, stems and leaves or release into the air.

Determining the structure of a protein called hemagglutinin on the surface of influenza B is giving researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston clues as to what kinds of mutations could spark the next flu pandemic.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Roche NimbleGen Inc., a fully integrated part of Roche Applied Science, today have published details of a highly efficient and cost-effective method for capturing targeted regions of the genome via NimbleChip™ microarrays in preparation for high-throughput 454 Sequencing™. The technology, called “sequence capture,” enables fast and accurate enrichment of thousands of selected genomic regions, either contiguous or dispersed, such as segments of chromosomes or all genes or exons. The study, entitled “Direct Selection of Human Genomic Loci by Microarray Hybridization,” appears online (ahead of print) in the journal Nature Methods¹.

Although defects in the "breast cancer gene," BRCA1, have been known for years to increase the risk for breast cancer, exactly how it can lead to tumor growth has remained a mystery. In the October 15, 2007, issue of the journal Cancer Research, scientists from the University of Chicago and Kyoto University, Japan, suggest that a mechanism that normally repairs damaged DNA may function abnormally in BRCA1 carriers leading to one type of poor-prognosis breast cancer.

The relatedness of an animal food protein to a human protein determines whether it can cause allergy, according to new research by scientists from the Institute of Food Research in Norwich and the Medical University of Vienna.