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Cancer screening programmes could increase attendance by inviting people for screening close to birthdays or other annual milestones such as Christmas and the New Year, finds a study in the Christmas issue published on bmj.com today.

Doctors in the Christmas issue published on bmj.com today are urging the Vatican's medical team to keep a special watch over the Pope this Christmas, after their research investigating the link between papal deaths and Welsh rugby performance suggests that he has about a 45% chance of dying by the end of 2008.

Embryonic stem cells could provide a new way of testing drugs for dangerous side effects, according to a leading British researcher.

Speaking at the British Pharmacological Society's Winter Meeting in Brighton today (Thursday, 18 December), Christine Mummery, Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands, predicts that what is currently a small and sparsely funded research area will boom in coming years.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--Concern about increasing ocean acidification has often focused on its potential effects on coral reefs, but broader disruptions of biological processes in the oceans may be more significant, according to Donald Potts, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert in coral reef ecology and marine biodiversity.

Potts will give an invited talk on "Geobiological Responses to Ocean Acidification" at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco on Wednesday, December 17.

For kidney disease patients who need to undergo dialysis, one type of treatment is not best for all, according to a study appearing in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The findings indicate that certain patient characteristics should be factored into decisions on whether to choose hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis.

For patients on dialysis, taking medications to reduce levels of the mineral phosphorus in the blood may reduce the risk of death by 25 to 30 percent, reports a study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

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PITTSBURGH—University of Pittsburgh researchers have developed the first natural, nontoxic method for biodegrading carbon nanotubes, a finding that could help diminish the environmental and health concerns that mar the otherwise bright prospects of the super-strong materials commonly used in products, from electronics to plastics.

NEW YORK (Dec. 17, 2008) – The naturally high levels of leptin in diabetic patients may reduce the effectiveness of drug-eluting stents used to treat heart blockages, but using a chemical that differs from the one commonly used to coat stents could counteract this effect.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have designed a gene that produces a thousand times more protein in cancer cells than in healthy cells.

The findings may help address the prime challenge in anti-cancer therapy: improving treatments' ability to specifically and effectively target cancer cells. Using this new approach, scientists should be able to insert "self-destruct" codes into the modified gene, forcing cancer cells to kill themselves while healthy cells remain largely unaffected.

The primary cilium, the solitary, antenna-like structure that studs the outer surfaces of virtually all human cells, orient cells to move in the right direction and at the speed needed to heal wounds, much like a Global Positioning System helps ships navigate to their destinations.

Montreal, December 17, 2008 – Here's another argument against intelligent design. An evolutionary geneticist from the Université de Montréal, together with researchers from the French cities of Lyon and Montpellier, have published a ground-breaking study that characterizes the common ancestor of all life on earth, LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their findings, presented in a recent issue of Nature, show that the 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined.