The so-called "male lumpectomy"—a minimally invasive interventional radiology treatment for prostate cancer—is as effective as surgery in destroying diseased tumors and can be considered a first-line treatment for patients of all risk levels and particularly those who have failed radiation, according to studies released at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 34th Annual Scientific Meeting. Additionally, the use of 3-D transperineal mapping biopsy for determining the extent of prostate cancer—when compared with the commonly used transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) biopsy—heavily impacted how patients' disease was managed in 70 percent of the cases.

Children of older fathers perform less well in a range of cognitive tests during infancy and early childhood, according to a study published this week in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. In contrast, the study finds that children with older mothers gain higher scores in the same tests – designed to measure the ability to think and reason, including concentration, learning, memory, speaking and reading skills.

More and more information is being gathered about how human genes influence medically relevant traits, such as the propensity to develop a certain disease. The ultimate goal is to predict whether or not a given trait will develop later in life from the genome sequence alone (i.e. from the sequence of the bases that make up the DNA strands that store genetic information in every cell of the body).

Researchers have found what they say is some of the first unambiguous evidence that an animal other than humans can make spontaneous plans for future events. The report in the March 9th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, highlights a decade of observations in a zoo of a male chimpanzee calmly collecting stones and fashioning concrete discs that he would later use to hurl at zoo visitors.

The theory that a higher metabolism means a shorter lifespan may have reached the end of its own life, thanks to a study published in the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. The study, led by Lobke Vaanholt (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), found that mice with increased metabolism live just as long as those with slower metabolic rates.

Dust blown off the continents and deposited in the open ocean is an important source of nutrients for marine phytoplankton, the tiny algae that are the foundation of the ocean food web. But new findings show that some sources of dust also carry toxic elements that can kill marine phytoplankton.

With obesity reaching epidemic levels, researchers at the Ohio State University Medical Center are studying a potentially long-term treatment that involves injecting a gene directly into one of the critical feeding and weight control centers of the brain.