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Injured heart tissue normally can't regrow, but researchers now offer a groundwork for regenerating heart tissue after a heart attack, in patients with heart failure, or in children with congenital heart defects. They show that a growth factor involved in the development of the heart and nervous system can spur heart-muscle growth and recovery of cardiac function when injected systemically into animals after a heart attack.

Researchers now show that ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our -- multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed -- selves. This is not the case of humans being 'stupider' than ants.

Researchers have developed a screening method that would use ionic liquids -- a special type of molten salt that becomes liquid under the boiling point of water (100 degrees Celsius) -- to separate carbon dioxide from its source, making it a cleaner, more viable and stable method than what is currently available.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center are among an elite group of cancer scientists to share a $2 million grant to find biomarkers for lung cancer that develops in people who have never smoked.

New Zealand researchers are clashing with US health officials over a new anti-smoking aid, after a world-first trial was run by Auckland University. . . . 'They're not going to die from an e-cigarette,' says Dr Murray Laugesen. 'But they could die tomorrow from a heart attack due to their smoking.' The FDA, which regulates medical products in the US, isn't so sure. It says its tests found cancer-causing chemicals in e-cigarettes and wants them banned from sale until more studies are done. 'What's remarkable actually is the lack of evidence that these products are any better than standard smoking cessation treatments, and secondly the inadequate testing for their toxins,' says Dr Michael Thun, American Cancer Society. Auckland University has run the first ever trial of the e-cigarettes. It looked at withdrawal symptoms after using one compared to a nicotine inhaler and a regular cigarette. Researchers can't reveal the results until they are published in a medical journal, but they

Dog breeds selected to work in visual contact with humans, such as sheep dogs and gun dogs, are better able to comprehend a pointing gesture than those breeds that usually work without direct supervision. A series of tests, described in BioMed Central's open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, should caution researchers against making simple generalizations about the effects of domestication and on dog-wolf differences in the utilization of human visual signals.

Researchers from Rhode Island Hospital's department of psychiatry propose that the definition for major depressive disorder (MDD) should be shortened to include only the mood and cognitive symptoms that have been part of the definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for the past 35 years. Their recommendation would exclude those symptoms that are currently part of the definition that may be associated with medical illness rather than depression.

During its summer session, the Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has approved funding for six new Research Units. Within these Research Units, researchers from different disciplines work together on a particular scientific topic. Funding for Research Units provides the personnel and equipment required for medium-term (usually six years) cooperation and contributes to the establishment of new research directions.

Researchers at The University of Nottingham are hoping to find out if inflammation of the knee could be an early sign of osteoarthritis - a condition which leads to pain, stiffness, swelling and disability. Up to six million people in the UK suffer from osteoarthritis in the knee.

Researchers appear to have a new way to fix a broken heart. They have devised a method to coax heart muscle cells into reentering the cell cycle, allowing the differentiated adult cells to divide and regenerate healthy heart tissue after a heart attack, according to studies in mice and rats reported in the July 24th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.