Cells

Q. Is it OK to take ibuprofen if you have a broken bone? A. It’s not a great idea. Ibuprofen - and other NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) - can impede healing. “Smoking and NSAIDs are probably the most important causes of failure in bone healing,’’ says Dr. Malcolm Smith, chief of the Orthopedic Trauma Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. In fact, he said, with a patient who has had surgery to remove bone, “we give them NSAIDs to make sure the bone doesn’t grow back.’’ NSAIDs inhibit bone healing by blocking a natural substance in the body,...

CAMBRIDGE — Two-year-old Verastem Inc., which raised $55 million in an initial public offering in late January, was one of the first biotechnology start-ups in years to take its shares public before its drugs had entered clinical trials, a coup in an era of skeptical investors. Four months later, as executives on Tuesday remotely rang the opening bell on the Nasdaq exchange from their research lab in Cambridge, the company's shares were buffeted by the volatile stock market as Verastem adjusted to life as a newly public company.

"YOU SEE all those brown little things?" Ann McKee asked me as I looked through a microscope. I was viewing a slide sample of the brain of Dave Duerson, the Notre Dame All-American defensive back who won Super Bowls with the 1985 Chicago Bears and the 1990 New York Giants. Duerson was a Notre Dame trustee, a National Football League Man of the Year for community service, and an economics major who completed a management program at Harvard Business School. Early in his football retirement, he nearly tripled the annual sales of a meat supply company to $63.5 million.

The chief executive officer of industrial conglomerate United Technologies Corp. hinted Tuesday that it could sell its fuel cell business. CEO Louis Chenevert of the Hartford-based company — which owns jet engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, Otis elevator, Carrier heating and cooling and other aviation and building systems companies — told analysts Tuesday that United Technologies is evaluating the future of UTC Power as it reviews its...

No. "You can do anything you want to a mole, pretty much," said Dr. Bernard Cohen, interim chair of dermatology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "If you want to pluck, shave, wax, or use electrolysis on a mole, there's no evidence that this will cause a melanoma, or any other kind of skin cancer. " The only caution about moles, he added, is that it's a good idea to keep them out of the sun, which means being sure to put sunscreens on moles as well as the rest of your skin.

LOS ANGELES - Zapping away abnormal, precancerous cells in the throat may lower the risk of later developing esophageal cancer, the first major study to test this technique finds. In a study of 127 people suffering from a heartburn-related problem known as Barrett's esophagus, only about 1 percent who had a procedure that uses heat to burn off precancerous spots went on to develop cancer over the next year. That's compared with more than 9 percent of those who got a fake treatment in which no cells were destroyed.

NEW YORK - Scientists in Oregon say they've reached the longsought goal of cloning monkey embryos and extracting stem cells from them, a potentially major step toward doing the same thing in people. The research has not been published or confirmed by other scientists. But if true, it offers fresh hope in a field that has been marked by frustration and even fraud. The claim of a similar breakthrough with human embryos by a South Korean scientist in 2004 turned out to be false. The hope is that one day such a procedure could be used to create...

For centuries, love has been celebrated - and probed - mostly by poets, artists, and balladeers. But now, its mysteries are also yielding to the tools of science, including modern brain scanning machines. At a university in Stony Brook, N.Y., a handful of young people who had just fallen madly in love volunteered to have their brains scanned to see what areas were active when they looked at a picture of their sweetheart. The brain areas that "lit up" were precisely those known to be rich in a powerful "feel good" chemical, dopamine -- the substance that brain cells release in...

Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles and Advanced Cell Technology in Marlborough have become the first to publish a study involving the use of embryonic stem cells in humans. The study, published online in the British medical journal The Lancet and involving two patients, was designed to test the safety of injecting the cells into patients with degenerative eye conditions. In both patients, the cells behaved as expected after four months, with no safety concerns arising, the researchers found, and the patients reported improved vision.

WASHINGTON -- Injections of human stem cells seem to directly repair some of the damage caused by spinal cord injury, according to research that helped partly paralyzed mice walk again. The experiment, reported yesterday, isn't the first to show that stem cells offer tantalizing hope for spinal cord injury; other scientists have helped mice recover, too. But the new work went an extra step, suggesting the connections that the stem cells form to help bridge the damaged spinal cord are key to recovery.

All underground portions of the MBTA subway system should be fully wired for cellphone reception by the end of the year, the company designing and installing the network predicted. But many T riders may have to wait longer before they can talk, text, and check e-mail throughout the system's 19 miles of tunnels: Only two major mobile carriers, AT&T and T-Mobile, have immediate plans to introduce or expand their subterranean coverage. Verizon offers service at four downtown stations and the tunnels between them but has not announced plans to expand its coverage.

Bridgewater State Hospital Location: Bridgewater Year opened: 1974 Security: Medium Square footage: 171,966 What has been done: Cells double-bunked. Bristol County Jail and House of Correction Location: North Dartmouth Year opened: 1990 Security: Minimum, medium, maximum Square footage: 261,000 What's been done: Cells double-bunked. Temporary "boat" beds used in the past.

NEW YORK - Passengers on certain Virgin Atlantic flights are now able to use their cellphones to make and receive calls at 35,000 feet, the airline said Tuesday. The British airline's new service could be a blessing for business travelers who want to stay connected during eight-hour flights across the ocean. It could also be a nightmare for the passenger sitting next to them. "I suspect most passengers, like myself, would prefer not to listen to somebody on the phone for what might be hours," said airline analyst Robert Mann.

After two days of being handcuffed in a tiny holding cell and desperate for food and water, Daniel Chong said he realized he had to stop wondering when he'd be let out and start thinking about how to stay alive. Entering what he called "survival mode," and already drinking his own urine, he futilely tried to trigger an overhead fire sprinkler for some water, stacking clothes and a blanket and swinging his cuffed arms in an attempt to set it off. Chong, 23, a student at the University of California, San Diego, had been picked up in a drug sweep but was never arrested or charged.

SAN DIEGO - The Drug Enforcement Administration issued an apology Wednesday to a California student who was picked up during a drug raid and left in a holding cell for four days without food, water, or access to a toilet. Acting Special Agent in Charge William R. Sherman of DEA San Diego said in a statement that he was troubled by the treatment of Daniel Chong and extended his "deepest apologies" to him. The agency is investigating how its agents forgot about Chong. Chong, 23, was never arrested, was not going to be charged with a...

A college student picked up in a drug sweep in California was never arrested, never charged and should have been released. Instead he was forgotten in a holding cell for four days and says he had to drink his own urine to stay alive. Without food, water or access to a toilet, Daniel Chong began hallucinating on the third day. He told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he saw little Japanese-style cartoon characters that told him to dig into the walls to find water.

Giving heart attack survivors stem cells from their own bone marrow did little to repair their damaged hearts, according to the three most comprehensive studies to date of this controversial therapy. The modest results suggest more study is needed and, some scientists say, demonstrate the need to lift federal funding restrictions on using stem cells from embryos, which offer more promise for turning into heart-repairing tissue. "The optimal cell type has not been discovered yet," said Dr. Kenneth Chien, director of Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center, who had no role...

NEW YORK -- Scientists say they have created a stem cell line from a human embryo that had stopped developing naturally, and so was considered dead. Using such embryos might ease ethical concerns about creating such cells, they suggested. One specialist said the technique makes harvesting stem cells no more ethically troublesome than organ donation. But others said it still carries scientific and ethical problems. Scientists want to use human embryonic stem cells to study diseases and create transplant tissue for treating illnesses such as diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

Federal authorities said they will review their detention policies after they left a forgotten 24-year-old college student in a holding cell for five days. The unidentified man and eight others were detained following a drug bust on April 21 that yielded 18,000 ecstasy pills, other drugs and weapons, according to U-T San Diego (http://bit.ly/JKak5j). Seven suspects were taken to county jail, and another was released, but the student from the University of California, San Diego, was somehow left behind, said Amy Roderick, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Two teams of Boston scientists have developed new ways to turn stem cells into different types of lung tissue, surmounting a major hurdle in trying to harness the power of stem cell biology to study and develop treatments for major lung diseases. One team used skin cells from cystic fibrosis patients to create embryonic-like stem cells, then, working in lab dishes, used those cells to grow tissue that lines the airways and that contained a defect responsible for the rare, fatal disease.