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Using new approaches scientists have gained a view of activity in key brain areas associated with a core difficulty in patients with borderline personality disorder -- shedding new light on this serious psychiatric condition.

Only a third of patients with breast cancer discussed breast reconstruction options with their surgeon before their initial surgery, according to a new study. What's more, women who did discuss reconstruction up front were four times more likely to have a mastectomy compared to those women who did not discuss reconstruction.

A hormone secreted by cells throughout the body and known to play a role in cardiovascular disease and other cell functions is also critical for proper formation of the lymphatic system in mice, according to new research.

Neuroscience researchers demonstrate for the first time that brain-derived neurotrophic factor is an essential component of neural circuits which regulate body weight in adult mice and that its expression in two particular brain regions is required to suppress appetite.

Scientists report that an evolutionarily conserved transcription factor may have both positive and negative effects on the growth of tumors, depending on whether or not the tumor cells have enough oxygen. The research provides critical new information about how normal cells and cancer cells survive under stress.

Over the course of the 20th Century, doctors waged war against infectious bacterial illness with the best new weapon they had: antibiotics. But the emergence of dangerous, multi-drug resistant strains of tuberculosis and other killer infections means that in the 21st century antibiotics are losing ground against bacterial disease. Researchers now say exciting new molecular targets -- so-called "virulence factors" that bacteria use to thrive once they are in the host -- present an alternative, potent means of stopping TB, leprosy and other bacterial illness.

Scientists have identified the long-sought telomerase RNA gene in a single-cell research model. Chromosomes shorten with every cell division. In stem cells and in cancer cells, this shortening is compensated by telomerase, an enzyme that adds short repeat sequences to the ends of chromosomes to replenish lost DNA. As telomerase is required for the continued growth of most cancer cells, the enzyme is considered a promising target for new anti-cancer drugs.

Immigrant children are five times as likely as US-born children to suffer from lead poisoning in New York City, according to a new Health Department study, and the risk is highest among the most recent immigrants.

To ensure that women and men express equivalent levels of the genes found on X chromosomes, one of the two X chromosomes in the cells of a women is inactive. X chromosome inactivation (XCI) occurs early in development, at approximately the time an embryo implants in the womb, and all cells stemming from a given cell have the same X chromosome inactivated.

A group of signaling proteins known as Wnt -- which help build the human body's skin, bone, muscle and other tissues -- depend on a complex delivery and recycling system to ensure their transport to tissue-building cell sites. Failure of this system may be a mechanism of cancer, heart disease or birth defects related to Wnt proteins, according to new research.