Every year, in Germany alone, around 7000 people wait for a new cornea to save their eyesight. But donor corneas are in short supply. Researchers have now developed an artificial cornea which is to be clinically tested in early 2008. A patient whose cornea is damaged through a congenital malformation, hereditary disease or corrosion is at risk of going blind. One solution is to implant a donor cornea but they are in short supply.

  Researchers have identified a new gene that, if mutated, may increase a woman's risk of breast cancer by more than a third. Further, the researchers found that the gene, HMMR, interacts with the well-known breast cancer gene BRCA1. Alternations in either gene cause genetic instability and interfere with cell division, which could be a path to breast cancer developing. This leads researchers to not just a single gene, but a pathway that may be a potential target for treating or detecting breast cancer.

  Researchers have created the first evolutionary history of the duplications in the human genome that are partly responsible for both disease and recent genetic innovations. This work marks a significant step toward a better understanding of what genomic changes paved the way for modern humans, when these duplications occurred and what the associated costs are - in terms of susceptibility to disease-causing genetic mutations.

  Evidence of benefit is lacking for many common ways of treating osteoarthritis of the knee, including popular dietary supplement ingredients, a common surgical procedure, and injected preparations according to a new review. The review found that glucosamine and chondroitin, over-the-counter dietary supplement ingredients that are used widely because of their purported benefits to relieve knee pain caused by osteoarthritis and improve physical functioning, appear to be no more effective than placebos.

  Are you a terrorist? Airport screeners, customs agents, police officers and members of the military who silently pose that question to people every day, may soon have much more than intuition to depend on to determine the answer, thanks to computer and behavioral scientists.

  Depression in the elderly increases the risk of subsequent mental impairment and can act as a predictor of future intellectual decline psychiatrists have found. The researchers looked at loss of so-called executive functions that involve high-level mental processes, such a making decisions, organizing, planning and doing a series of things in sequence.

  The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance -- technology that is used to read data on hard disks. The effect has made it possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.

  High levels of the primary component of DDT, in women exposed before mid-adolescence, were found to be predict a five-fold increase in breast cancer risk. Many American women heavily exposed to DDT in childhood have not yet reached 50 years of age, therefore the public health significance of DDT exposure in early life may be large.

  While shoulder changes can allow pitches to go faster, too much of a good thing can be bad for growing kids. Repeated pitching does cause changes in the upper arm bone and soft tissue in the shoulders of young baseball players, but that these types of changes generally help protect players from injury, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, unless it is done to extremes.

  Patients with micropapillary thyroid cancer--small tumors equal to or less than 1 centimeter--and tumors even smaller, less than 1 millimeter (mm)--are more common and not without a risk as previously thought, according to a new study. This is contrary to the widely perceived belief that small papillary thyroid cancers are clinically insignificant and don't require active treatment. Papillary is the most common type of thyroid cancer, accounting for about 80% of all thyroid cancers.

  Despite great concerns that small amounts of ingested perchlorate -- a chemical which is ever-present in the environment -- decreases thyroid function among individuals, it has no effect on the thyroid function of women in early pregnancy, including those with a low-iodine diet, according to a new study. Thyroid hormone is critical for the neurodevelopment of a fetus--particularly in the first trimester of pregnancy--and requires the mother to receive an adequate intake of iodine.

  At a time when encroaching human development in former wildlife areas has compressed African elephants into ever-smaller home ranges and increased levels of human-elephant conflict, a new study suggests that strategically placed beehives might offer a low-tech elephant deterrent and conservation measure.

  From 135,000 to 90,000 years ago tropical Africa had megadroughts more extreme and widespread than any previously known for that region, according to new research. Learning that now-lush tropical Africa was an arid scrubland during the early Late Pleistocene provides new insights into humans'migration out of Africa and the evolution of fishes in Africa's Great Lakes. The new finding provides an ecological explanation for the Out-of-Africa hypothesis that suggests all humans descended from just a few people living in Africa sometime between 150,000 and 70,000 years ago.

  New research shows that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a group of drugs commonly used to treat depression, may double the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding. When the drugs are taken with aspirin and other similar pain medications, the risk is more than 600 percent higher.