One of the first chemotherapy drugs given to patients diagnosed with cancer — especially lung, ovarian or breast cancer — is cisplatin, a platinum-containing compound that gums up tumor cells’ DNA. Cisplatin does a good job of killing those tumor cells, but it can also seriously damage the kidneys, which receive high doses of cisplatin because they filter the blood.
Now a team of scientists at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) has come up with a new way to package cisplatin into nanoparticles that are too big …

Seahorses are helping scientists gain new understanding about how detailed vision develops – in research which may open a way to restore sight in people with age-related blinding diseases.
Researchers at the Vision Centre have found that the seahorses’ eyes share similarities with the human eye, leading to the possibility of imitating the development of the seahorse’s fovea to regenerate this vital region of the eye in people with impaired vision.
“The fovea is the tiny pit at the back of the eye, which is the source of all our detailed vision. …

Sex after menopause? Some experts will tell you it’s a downhill ride of waning sex drive and dried up hormones.
Sorry, we’re not buying it. We happen to think there are plenty of 50-plus babes who are rocking it just as much as in their younger days. (See Madonna.) And there’s no reason the rest of us shouldn’t too.
“You’re not bothered by menses. You’re not bothered by kids in the house. You can have sex in any room in the house,” says Irwin Goldstein, MD, the director of San Diego Sexual …

When your mind drifts, it’s hard to remember what was going on before you stopped paying attention. Now a new study has found that the effect is stronger when your mind drifts farther – to memories of an overseas vacation instead of a domestic trip, for example, or a memory in the more distant past.
Psychologists have known for a while that context is important to remembering. If you leave the place where a memory was made – its context – it will be harder for you to recall the memory. …

Doctors in Israel have developed a unique “sniffing” controller that allows people with severe disabilities to use their noses to write, surf the Web, and even navigate their wheelchairs.
The new technology might even be used in the future to create a sort of ‘third hand’ to assist healthy surgeons or pilots.
The device uses a “sniffing technology” that measures pressure changes in the nose from breathing in and out, and then translates these changes to electrical signals.
When tested on both healthy and quadriplegic volunteers, the system was easily mastered, with users …