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Vaccinating women against the human papillomavirus (HPV) may prevent some forms of breast cancer and save tens of thousands of lives each year, new Australian research suggests.

Using genetic probes, researchers at the University of New South Wales tested cancerous breast cells and found several strains of HPVs known to have a high risk of initiating cancer of the cervix. HPV has a causal role in 90-95 per cent of cervical cancers.

Newly published research suggests that government use of torture has increased worldwide despite international norms discouraging it.

The study, published in The Journal of Legal Studies, found that between 1985 and 2003, reports of state-sponsored torture collected by the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International increased, even as a growing number of countries signed on to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Reptiles are not known to be the most social of creatures. But when it comes to laying eggs, female reptiles can be remarkably communal, often laying their eggs in the nests of other females. New research in the September issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology suggests that this curiously out-of-character behavior is far more common in reptiles than was previously thought.

The first genetic link in the evolution of the heart from three-chambered to four-chambered has been found, illuminating part of the puzzle of how birds and mammals became warm-blooded.

Frogs have a three-chambered heart. It consists of two atria and one ventricle. As the right side of a frog's heart receives deoxygenated blood from the body, and the left side receives freshly oxygenated blood from the lungs, the two streams of blood mix together in the ventricle, sending out a concoction that is not fully oxygenated to the rest of the frog's body.

Chimpanzees in the Congo have developed specialised 'tool kits' to forage for army ants, reveals new research published today in the American Journal of Primatology. This not only provides the first direct evidence of multiple tool use in this context, but suggests that chimpanzees have developed a 'sustainable' way of harvesting food.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports a potential new investigational therapy for advanced and metastatic basal cell skin cancer tested at the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare and other sites appears to demonstrate tumor shrinkage and limited side effects in patients.

The Hedgehog signaling pathway is involved in a preliminary study and case report describing positive responses to an experimental anticancer drug in a majority of people with advanced or metastatic basal cell skin cancers. One patient with the most common type of pediatric brain cancer, medulloblastoma, also showed tumor shrinkage.

A key compound resupplies bone marrow with fast-acting stem cells that can more quickly rekindle blood cell production, according to a study published in the journal Blood. While the study was in mice, the authors say it has the potential to increase survival among patients with life-threatening blood cell shortages.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Dietary supplements claiming to help postmenopausal women with bone health may not be doing what they say, according to new research from Purdue University.

Some obese prostate cancer patients may have improved treatment outcomes when treated with image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) over traditional external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) because IGRT corrects for prostate shifts, which, if not planned for, can lead to incorrect doses of radiation to the disease site, according to a study in the September 1 issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, .

Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) have traced the evolution of the four-chambered human heart to a common genetic factor linked to the development of hearts in turtles and other reptiles.

The research, published in the September 3 issue of the journal Nature, shows how a specific protein that turns on genes is involved in heart formation in turtles, lizards and humans.

Researchers Dr. Marc Therrien at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) of the Université de Montréal, and Dr. Frank Sicheri, at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, have discovered a new target that may be instrumental in the development of new, more effective cancer therapies.

Research published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology has found that an individual's quality of life prior to treatment can help predict the overall survival of patients with advanced stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Scientists here are the first to demonstrate that the link between diesel fume exposure and cancer lies in the ability of diesel exhaust to induce the growth of new blood vessels that serve as a food supply for solid tumors.

The researchers found that in both healthy and diseased animals, more new blood vessels sprouted in mice exposed to diesel exhaust than did in mice exposed to clean, filtered air. This suggests that previous illness isn't required to make humans susceptible to the damaging effects of the diesel exhaust.

A laboratory study by University of Maryland researchers suggests that some of the worst fears about a virulent H1N1 pandemic flu season may not be realized this year, but does demonstrate the heightened communicability of the virus.