Overturning more than 40 years of accepted practice, new research proves that the tools used to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. This key finding challenges reliance on such exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions even in the face of well-documented gaps between mean scores of white and minority populations.

Thirty million women will benefit from the new health reform law over the next decade, either through new or strengthened insurance coverage, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund. The law will stabilize and reverse the growing exposure to health costs that women now experience by subsidizing health insurance for up to 15 million currently uninsured women, and strengthening existing coverage for 14.5 million women who are considered underinsured.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center looked for a learning curve phenomenon in the data record of a large, multi-site clinical trial. Their findings point to ways to improve the quality of future trials through better training and simulation exercises.

A recent study from Australian researchers determined that transforaminal injection of steroids was a viable alternative to surgery for lumbar radicular pain due to disc herniation. Full details of the study appear in the August issue of Pain Medicine, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, and the International Spine Intervention Society.

Using the model organism Ciona intestinalis, commonly known as the sea squirt, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have uncovered the origins of the second heart field in vertebrates.

Researchers from the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich have shown that the ADAM10 protein can inhibit the formation of beta-amyloid, which is responsible for Alzheimer's disease. ADAM10 acts like a pair of molecular scissors to cut the protein from which beta-amyloid is formed, effectively preventing the formation of beta-amyloid. This makes ADAM10 a key molecule in Alzheimer's therapy.

Researchers around the world are working on the development of quantum computers that will be vastly superior to present-day computers. Here, the strong coupling of quantum bits with light quanta plays a pivotal role. Professor Rudolf Gross, a physicist at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, and his team of researchers have now realized an extremely strong interaction between light and matter that may represent a first step in this direction.

Mutations in a gene known as "Fritz" may be responsible for causing human genetic disorders such as Bardet-Biedl syndrome, University of Texas at Austin developmental biologist John Wallingford and Duke University human geneticist and cell biologist Nicholas Katsanis have found.

Researchers from Brown University and the University of California have shown that the epigenetic profiles of breast tumors are related to patient diet and alcohol use as well as tumor size.

The doors are closing on the AIDS virus. A study by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas has developed a method of attack against the AIDS virus The method involves creating a prevention system, i.e. an "armor" in the cells that are likely to be infected and thus impede, de facto, the virus from accessing them and starting to act on their immunological system.

Australian scientists researching environmental restoration projects have found that the reforestation of damaged rainforests is more efficient at capturing carbon than controversial softwood monoculture plantations. The research, published in Ecological Management & Restoration, challenges traditional views on the efficiency of industrial monoculture plantations.

A research team from China investigated the effect of galangin on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. They found that galangin mediates apoptosis through a mitochondrial pathway, and may be a potential chemotherapeutic drug for the treatment of HCC.

Vanishing bile duct syndrome (VBDS) is an important cause of jaundice, and results from destruction of bile ducts in the liver. However, this syndrome is rare in patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection. Nevirapine, an anti-retroviral that is being increasingly used, was implicated as the cause of VBDS in a patient described in a recent report.

Malnutrition is a common problem in patients with cancer and is associated with a poor outcome. The assessment of nutritional status and its evaluation plays an important role in tailoring nutritional support. A study from South Korea evaluates the relationships between objective and subjective nutritional assessment of gastric cancer patients and suggests that a specific tailored nutritional assessment is needed for accurate measurement of the nutritional status of gastric cancer patients.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent non-hematopoietic cells capable of differentiating into hepatocytes. Valproic acid (VPA), a histone deacetylase inhibitor, has recently exhibited profound therapeutic activity in preclinical tumor test. A research group in China investigated the induction of hepatic differentiation of mouse bone marrow MSCs (mBM-MSCs) by VPA. Direct evidences have been shown that the usefulness of VPA in the trans-differentiation of mBM-MSCs into hepatocytes both in vitro and in vivo.