Some leukaemia patients who do not respond to conventional treatments may benefit from bone marrow transplants selected to target the cancer directly.

The technique, pioneered in Italy, uses transplants from family members who are not a perfect match.

"Natural killer" cells in the new bone marrow then attack the leukaemia.

Survival rates rose after the treatment, but UK experts say these need to be reproduced on a bigger scale and in different types of the disease.

From blood vessels to muscle tissue, Atala and his team at Wake Forest University believe that in theory anything inside the body can be grown outside the body, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports. And it's real: They've made 18 different types of tissue so far.

"That's a heart valve?" Andrews asked.

Atala said: "This is an engineered heart valve."

What he pointed to was a pulsing heart valve to be transplanted into a sheep.

"When people ask me 'what do you do,' we grow tissues and organs," he said. "We are making body parts that we can implant right back into patients."

Once considered a Frankenstein fantasy, the field of regenerative medicine is on the verge of unimagined breakthroughs. Scientists believe every part of the body has cells capable of regeneration - all researchers need to do is isolate those cells and coax them to grow.

Minimally invasive surgery has obvious advantages - it can mean smaller scars, reduced hospital stays and shorter recovery times.

Surgeons are also looking at ways to avoid skin incisions altogether.

One approach is Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery or Notes. This means operating in the peritoneal space through natural orifices or cavities, such as the bowel.

Lord Darzi said: "The unrivalled imaging and sensing capabilities coupled with the accessibility and sensitivity of i-Snake will enable more complex diagnostic and therapeutic procedures than are currently possible.

The new 256-slice CT machine takes large numbers of X-ray pictures, and combines them using computer technology to produce the final detailed images.

It also generates images in a fraction of the time of other scanners: a full body scan takes less than a minute.

The Philips machine was unveiled at the Radiological Society of North America.

Because the images are 3D they can be rotated and viewed from different directions - giving doctors the greatest possible help in looking for signs of abnormalities or disease.

All images also can be accessed on any computer in a hospital or by colleagues and researchers remotely, to make it easier for the whole team to share information.

It produces lethal vibrations in the protein coat of micro-organisms, thereby destroying them. The effect of the vibrations is similar to that of high-pitched noise shattering glass.

However, the line of attack can be perfected so that the proteins which coat human cells remain unaffected.

So far experiments have been done on E. coli bacterial cells, Tobacco Mosaic Virus cells, as well as human and hamster cells.

After several attempts, the researchers found a level which "inactivates both viruses and bacteria while leaving sensitive materials such as mammalian cells unharmed".

Lead researcher Professor Kong-Thon Tsen, of Arizona State University, said: "The research so far suggests that ISRS will be ready for use in disinfection and could provide treatments against some of the worst, often drug-resistant, bacterial and viral pathogens."

Those chips are now being implanted in some people, especially Alzheimer's patients, and encoded with their medical records. The Food and Drug Administration called the microchip one of 2005's top innovative technologies.

The microchips have been implanted in hundreds of people like Ida Frankel, who has Alzheimer's disease. If she gets lost and ends up in a hospital, doctors can scan her arm and get all of her medical records.

But when the government approved these chips for use in humans three years ago, it didn't mention that there were studies showing that similar chips caused malignant tumors in lab rats and mice.

Cancer doctors who spoke to The Associated Press, which broke this story, say you can't make the leap between cancer in mice and cancer in humans.

The electric fields' different effects on normal and dividing cells mostly have to do with geometry. A dividing cell has what Palti calls "an hourglass shape rather than a round shape." The electric field generated by the NovoCure device passes around and through round cells in a uniform fashion. But the narrow neck that pinches in at the center of a dividing cell acts like a lens, concentrating the electric field at this point. This non-uniform electric field wreaks havoc on dividing cells. The electric field tears apart important biological molecules, such as DNA and the structural proteins that pull the chromosomes into place during cell division. Dividing cells simply "disintegrate," says Palti.

Palti, who for years has been studying the effect of electric fields on cancer and normal cells, says that he has verified this mechanism in computer models and experiments in the lab. "The physics are solid," says David Cohen, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.

Patients in the glioblastoma clinical trial wear the device almost constantly, carrying necessary components in a briefcase. A wire emerging from the briefcase connects to adhesive electrodes covering the skull. Alternating electric fields pass through the scalp, into the skull, and on to the brain. The Food and Drug Administration approved the device for late-stage clinical trials for glioblastoma following promising results from a pilot study in 10 patients, one of whom had a complete recovery.

The summer before Lee Spievack's accident, Dr. Alan Spievack had used it on a neighbor who'd cut his fingertip off on a tablesaw. The man's fingertip grew back over four to six weeks, Alan Spievack said.

Lee Spievack took his brother's advice to forget about a skin graft and try the pig powder.

Soon a shipment of the stuff arrived and Lee Spievack started applying it every two days. Within four weeks his finger had regained its original length, he says, and in four months "it looked like my normal finger."

Spievack said it's a little hard, as if calloused, and there's a slight scar on the end. The nail continues to grow at twice the speed of his other nails.

"All my fingers in this cold weather have cracked except that one," he said.

All in all, he said, "I'm quite impressed."

This high-resolution, high-speed imaging system will contribute to better treatments for knee, shoulder, wrist and back injuries and help scientists understand the evolution of complex movements, from the flight of birds to the leap of frogs.

"This will be like having X-ray vision - you'll be able to see through skin and muscle and watch a skeleton move in 3-D," said Elizabeth Brainerd, the Brown University biology professor overseeing development of the new system. "Imagine animated X-ray movies of flying bats or flexing knees. It's very cool technology that is also very important from a biomedical standpoint."

The system will be designed and built with a $1.8-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, one of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations and a major supporter of pioneering discoveries in science, engineering and medical research.

The system will fill a void in medical and scientific imaging. Right now, researchers trying to understand the complex motions of bones and joints are held back by technology. Computed tomography, or CT, delivers detailed 3-D images, but CT scanners are too slow to capture rapid motion. Cinefluoroscopy, a technique that uses X-rays to view objects, can produce moving images in two dimensions, but not 3-D.

More than 200,000 volunteers, including long-term users, are to be monitored for at least five years to plot mobile phone use against any serious diseases they develop, including cancer and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

Professor Lawrie Challis, who is in the final stages of negotiation with the Department of Health and the mobile phone industry for the &3 million that he needs to fund the study, told The Times that research has shown that mobiles are very safe in the short term but that there is a "hint of something" for people using them longer.

In an interview, Professor Challis, a world expert on mobile phone radiation, and chairman of the government-funded mobile telecommunications health research programme, emphasised that the "hint" was just that. One European study has found a slight association and using a mobile for more than ten years. The few long-term users developed more acoustic neuroma brain tumours which were found close to the ear used for phoning.

But, because of the tiny numbers involved, "it could be by chance," he said. Asked whether the mobile phone could turn out to be the cigarette of the 21st century in terms of the damage it could inflict, he replied: "Absolutely."

He said that the study was necessary because all the important breakthroughs in what caused cancers had shown that the effects often took more than ten years to show. "You find absolutely nothing for ten years and then after that it starts to grow dramatically. It goes up ten times. You look at what happened after the atomic bombs at Nagasaki, Hiroshima. You find again a long delay, nothing for ten years. The same for asbestos."

The researchers painted glass with long chains of molecules, called polymers, which anchored to the surface to form tentacle-like spikes.

When the team then applied the surfaces with E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus (both common disease-causing forms of bacteria) and the influenza virus, they found the coating killed them with 100% efficiency within minutes.

The scientists said they believed the tethered spikes were inactivating the particles by rupturing their surfaces.

The team, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, said many diseases were spread by particles that settle on surfaces and are subsequently touched by others.

An experimental ultrasound technique that measures how easily breast lumps compress and bounce back could enable doctors to determine instantly whether a woman has cancer or not without doing a biopsy.

In a small study of 80 women, the technique -- called "elastography" -- distinguished harmless lumps from malignant ones with nearly 100 percent accuracy.

If the results hold up in a larger study, elastography could save thousands of women from the waiting, cost, discomfort and anxiety of a biopsy, in which cells are removed from the breast -- sometimes with a needle, sometimes with a scalpel -- and examined under a microscope.

"There's a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, a lot of fear involved" with biopsies, said Susan Brown, manager of health education for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. "And there's the cost of leaving work to make a second appointment. If this can be done instead of a biopsy, there would be a real cost reduction."

To explain elastography, Ophir likens the body to a box-spring mattress, but "a crazy mattress made out of millions of small springs and each one is a little different. Each is moving around at a different rate, depending on their individual stiffness." Cancerous tumors are like stiff springs. Normal tissue and benign lesions compress more easily.

Is it at all possible to improve a mundane everyday item such as a pair of tweezers? After all, it has the simplest of forms and has worked reliably for as long as anyone can remember. "Most definitely," is the reply from Ralph Schneider as he reaches for a streamlined item made of plastic with a black head and two transparent arms. As if by magic, the pincers light up, directing the light to the tips and illuminating a small point on the desk top. Perfect for shining the spotlight on a thorn that has to be removed...

"This little item has the capacity to provide the electronics market with new impetus," explains Ralph Schneider. The pair of tweezers, developed in a project he supervised, is a prototype that uses an innovative and completely invisible switching technology. Today, the former mechanical engineering student is right in the middle of things instead of just watching events unfold. What began a few months ago as a degree thesis at Bayer MaterialScience AG quickly resulted in a permanent appointment in the Creative Center at one of the biggest plastics manufacturers in the world.

This rather bizarre sounding treatment involves exposing yourself to extremely cold, dry air in a sealed room for up to three minutes at a time.

In Poland cryotherapy has become a popular treatment for rejuvenating and revitalising the body. It is also widely used by eastern European athletes as an alternative to the "ice bath" to aid post-training recovery.

But it seems there could be also serious medical uses for the treatment. Some experts claim it can alleviate the painful symptoms of everything from rheumatism and osteoporosis to multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression, and even suggest it as an anti-cellulite and skin-firming treatment.

Cryotherapy apparently shrinks the molecules in the body and then, when you emerge from the cold, the molecules then expand, increasing the blood flow which then helps ease pain and swelling, as well as fighting inflammation.

I have suffered from eczema around my eyes for four years; I use a medicated cream daily to stop flare ups, but remarkably, since having cryotherapy it's been itch and pain free.

I've not needed to use my medication for the first time in a year and a half. As bizarre as whole body cryotherapy sounds it's worth remembering that commonplace alternative treatments such as reflexology, acupuncture, massage and osteopathy, now available on the NHS, were once considered "loony" and ineffectual.

"There's an adrenaline high that people who use technology constantly get from trying to balance the BlackBerry, the cell phone … trying to keep all these balls in the air at the same time," author Bryan Robertson said.

To make time for the gadgets, some users will "give up time with family," Rutgers University School of Business Gayle Porter said. "They'll give up getting together with friends. They'll give up taking care of themselves, getting enough sleep - things like that."

She's researching a paper that will argue that businesses could be sued by employees who feel they were encouraged or even forced to stay connected 24 hours a day and then developed an addiction to their gadget.

The trends are clear, the dangers incontrovertible. Uncontrolled use of Blackberry-type devices can lead to physical, mental and social debilitation. Someone is bound to announce the development of a new 12 step program for Crackberry addicts. The road to recovery will begin with the assertion that "I am an addict." Meanwhile, employers should develop comprehensive written warnings to accompany the provision of any PDAs. These guidelines should set clear parameters for appropriate Blackberry use. With half the marriages in this country already ending in divorce, employers need to avoid any possible inference that work - and work-provided equipment - is a significant cause of marital discord. In the ever-expanding definition of risk management, this is one area where increased vigilance - and a few disclaimers - are definitely in order.

This isn't a GE product - but it's fascinating. Anyone who's ever gotten an IV knows how unpleasant the process can be. The Veinviewer is fast (no waiting for a scan) and uses simple near-infrared light, a digital video camera, and a digital video projector (using DLP technology from Texas Instruments) to project onto your skin an image of the vein structure below. It's tough to overstate how simple and easy this is.

The VeinViewer by Luminetx uses a combination of near-infrared light and patented technologies to image vascular structures, thus allowing physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals to clearly see accessible vasculature (or lack thereof) in real time, directly on the surface of the skin.

Goldman said a calendar with pictures of actress Sophia Loren at the age of 71 wearing only a pair of earrings underlined how perceptions of age had changed.

"If somebody told you 14 years ago that they were going to have a former sex symbol pose in earrings only, you would have been disgusted or you would have closed your eyes," he said. "Today she looks great at the age of 71."

Stem cell therapy will allow people to regain lost hair, remove wrinkles by renewing skins, and grow new nerves for paralyzed patients, Michael Klentze, director of the Klentze Institute of Anti-aging in Munich, Germany, told Reuters.

Stem cells have the ability to act as a repair system for the body, because they can divide and differentiate, replenishing other cells as long as the host organism is alive.

"People who have hair loss they can hope in the next months they've got new hair, not strange hair, but their own hair," he said.

The campaign features the iconic Biotech Bay Map, created by BioSpace's professional artist, which displays the corporate logos and facilities of participating organizations. The map is further enhanced through the integration of many functional components, including a Biotech Bay Hotbed Homepage on BioSpace's industry-leading Web site, BioSpace.com. Copies of the Biotech Bay Map are available through BioSpace.

New research out of the United Kingdom found mobile phones are a technological petri dish for tens of thousands of germs.

Why? Germs multiply in warm places. Between the heat the phones generate and the germs on faces and hands, you've got a bacterial breeding ground.

"You put it in a warm place, you hold it in your hand, you put it in your pocket like I do, it's nice and warm," said microbiologist Chuck Gerba. "Bacteria like that. It can grow in these types of places."

"This is the dirtiest phone I have ever tested," Gerba said. "He has somewhere between 10 and 50 million bacteria on his phone. If there is ever a new life form on this planet, it will be on this phone."

"Right now, we plan to use it to fix fractured or diseased teeth, as well as asymmetric jawbones, but it may also help hockey players or children who had their tooth knocked out," Jie Chen, an engineering professor and nano-circuit design expert, told AFP.

Chen helped create the tiny ultrasound machine that gently massages gums and stimulates tooth growth from the root once inserted into a person's mouth, mounted on braces or a removable plastic crown.

The wireless device, smaller than a pea, must be activated for 20 minutes each day for four months to stimulate growth, he said.

It can also stimulate jawbone growth to fix a person's crooked smile and may eventually allow people to grow taller by stimulating bone growth, Chen said.

Currently, says David Barthel, president and CEO of the SmartPill Corporation, the company that makes the brainy capsule, gastroparesis patients must endure a gauntlet of invasive, expensive, and often inconclusive tests.

"They would go anywhere from an endoscope [in which a tube is passed through the mouth to the stomach], to a barium test [in which a thick liquid that shows up on X-rays is swallowed and tracked], to a gastric emptying centrifugy test," Barthel explains. "These patients will often run through all these procedures [and others] and it could take anywhere from six months to two years to accurately diagnose a motility patient."

The company's bionic pill is designed to replace this hodgepodge of tests, helping doctors diagnose the condition within days.

As the plastic-sheathed pill passes through the stomach, intestines, and bowel, it transmits critical diagnostic information—such as pH, temperature, and the amount of pressure in the stomach and intestines—to a receiver that a physician later connects to a computer. Included in the digital signal is the pill's position in the body, giving doctors a clear picture of how effectively the stomach and other GI-tract components are pushing food toward the final destination.

US scientists have successfully implanted bladders grown in the laboratory from patients' own cells into people with bladder disease.

The researchers, from North Carolina's Wake Forest University, have carried out seven transplants, and in some the organ is working well years later.

The achievement, details of which have been published online by The Lancet, is being described as a "milestone".

The team is now working to grow organs including hearts using the technique.

The robot, developed by Dmitry Oleynikov and colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, can move around inside the stomach or abdomen to give surgeons a new perspective on the area being operated on. It is also equipped with a retractable needle, allowing it to perform biopsies.

The device is made up of two rotating aluminium cylinders connected by a thick axle, which carries the camera. The spiral pattern on the surface of the cylinders allows them to grip the walls of the abdominal cavity and move around. "They have been designed not to slip or damage the tissue," Oleynikov says.

The robot is only 15 millimetres in diameter, allowing it to be inserted through the small incisions in the abdomen used for keyhole surgery (Surgical Endoscopy, vol 20, p 135). It is controlled from a console equipped with a joystick.

Dubbed 'iPod Finger' the problem affects the fingers of "music-mad consumers who are constantly using the scroll-wheel or buttons on their MP3 players to organise their song library, update playlists and adjust the volume of their favourite artists".

BCA spokesman Dr Carl Irwin said: "Hand-held music machines are extremely popular and users are constantly using small, difficult buttons with the same finger in a repetitive motion.

"The nature of modern technology means that these devices are only going to get smaller and I would not be surprised if hand and finger related injuries become one of the most common repetitive strain injuries that chiropractors treat."

Prestwich began working on creating the hydrogel when he arrived at the U. in 1996 and he had developed a functioning material for wound-healing applications by 2000. Now researchers are hoping to use it to repair damaged organs in real time.

The NSF study will try first to print blood vessels and cardiovascular networks. Once they prove it can be done, the scientists will look at more complex organs such as livers and kidneys and simpler but more mechanical organs like the esophagus, Prestwich said.

The hydrogel has other uses. Besides use in organ printing, Prestwich believes it is about ready for prime time in basic medicine applications. He said he expects it will be used in humans within the next year, perhaps in treatment of chronic sinusitis.

Experts believe that millions of people who need transplants eventually will benefit from organ printing. "I believe in five years we're going to be able to print simple organs, such as a cardiovascular network or a urethra," Prestwich said.

The PMED device is a single-use, disposable device powered by high pressure helium. The cassette containing the powdered vaccine is loaded into the body of the device at the end of the manufacturing process. As the powdered vaccine is stable at ambient temperature and the cassette is sealed, PMED can be stored simply and cheaply.

Using the device itself requires minimal training. The nozzle end of the device is placed against the skin at the delivery site where the vaccine is to be delivered and the actuation button is then pressed to administer the vaccine.

On actuation, the release of helium from a self-contained micro-cylinder ruptures the cassette membrane and propels the particles from their stationary state in the cassette through the nozzle and towards the skin surface at high velocity. This results in the deposition of the microscopic DNA coated gold particles in the epidermal cells of the skin.

Repetitive motion injuries, which have long afflicted desktop and laptop computer users, are invading the mobile handheld world.

There's even an informal name for the malady -- "BlackBerry Thumb" -- a catch-all phrase that describes a repetitive stress injury of the thumb as a result of overusing small gadget keypads.

Business executives and tech-savvy consumers are increasingly using BlackBerries, Treos, Sidekicks and other devices with miniature keyboards designed for thumb-tapping to stay connected while on the go.

And that has some ergonomic and hand experts worried about injuries from overexertion.

"If they have true tendinitis, I might give them a cortisone shot," Benhaim says. "Or I might use a thumb brace, maybe. I would certainly tell them to rest it. And then to minimize the stress and strain. Do more typing on your keyboard and then sync over to your BlackBerry rather than typing longer messages on BlackBerry itself."

Merchandisers have been quick to cash in on the trend. Several thumb splints and glove-type treatments are available. But Allan warns that these quick cures may actually aggravate the problem.

"With the thumb splint, it is very iffy that it will change the mechanics of the motion to make it better. And it might make it worse," he says.

A healthy skin sample is taken from the patient, and split in the laboratory to separate out the surface cells, known as keratinocytes.

These cells are then cultured for two to three weeks, and made up into a suspension.

At the same time other skin cell tissue from the patient is put through a different type of meshing machine, known as a meek mesher.

Instead of creating a string vest pattern of tissue, this machine cuts the skin sample into tiny little squares.

The cultured cells are then sprayed on to the small pieces of tissue and combine to create new skin for the patient.

Getting a quick result is important for hospital screening and isolating infected patients to prevent disease outbreaks.

The e-nose gives a result within minutes, which is much faster than the current way of analysing ear, nose and throat swabs, which involves sending samples off to the lab and waiting 72 hours for a result.

Tests on hospital patients showed it could correctly detect three strains of Staph aureus, including MRSA, with more than 99% accuracy.

However, it cannot yet distinguish MRSA from its close cousin MSSA (methicillin-sensitive Staph aureus), which does respond to convetional antibiotics unlike MRSA.

Carbon nanotubes, incredibly strong molecules just billionths of a meter wide, can function as scaffolds for bone regrowth, according to researchers led by Robert Haddon at the University of California at Riverside. They have found a way to create a stronger and safer frame than the artificial bone scaffolds currently in use.

Human bones are both organic and inorganic. The organic part is made of collagen, the most abundant protein in mammals. The inorganic component is hydroxyapatite, a type of calcium crystal. The collagen forms a sort of natural scaffold over which the calcium crystals organize into bone. The idea in Haddon's research is to use the nanotubes as substitutes for the collagen to promote new bone growth when bones have been broken or worn down.

"Nanotubes are already a big deal in the rubber and elastomer industries," Tour said. "It's going to be a big deal in the medical industry. When we talk about enhancing rigidity in the medical field, one immediately thinks of bones. That's a good place to start."

Dai and his team shine a very thin laser beam of near-infrared light on something called a carbon nanotube.

The electrons in the nanotube -- a hollow tube, resembling straw, made of interwoven carbon atoms about one-100,000th the diameter of a human hair -- become excited by the light and release energy in the form of heat.

The heat is so extreme that it is deadly to cells.

To test this approach as a therapy, Dai placed the carbon nanotubes inside a collection of cancer cells, then shone the three-centimeter laser beam on them. The cancer cells were destroyed.

``They were literally cooked to death,'' Dai said. ``The tube acts like a tiny heater.''

But cells without the carbon nanotubes showed no ill effects -- the light passes harmlessly through them.