Second face transplant
Chinese surgeons have successfully carried out the world鈥檚 second face transplant, China鈥檚 state media has reported. A 30-year-old man who had been disfigured by a bear in 2004 was given a new cheek, nose, upper lip and an eyebrow from a single donor. Doctors think it will take six months before the man has any feeling in his new face, assuming it is not rejected.
Not-so-great outdoors
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Video games, surfing the web and high petrol prices can explain a dramatic fall in the number of people visiting US national parks, says a study published online in the Journal of Environmental Management. After rising steadily since the 1940s, the number of park visits per head of population dropped 20 per cent between 1987 and 2002.
Mystery swirl on Venus
The first pictures sent bac k to Earth by the European Space Agency鈥檚 Venus Express probe show an unexpected single vortex of swirling clouds spiralling in towards a point at the planet鈥檚 south pole.
Making a century
Want to live to be 100? It helps if your mother was under 25 when she gave birth to you, according a team at the University of Chicago who reviewed census data for 198 centenarians across the US. The odds of living to be 100 doubled for people born to mothers under 25 compared with older mothers, the Population Association of America annual meeting was told.
HRT oestrogen 鈥渟afe鈥�
Post-menopausal women who take oestrogen alone as hormone replacement therapy have no increased risk of breast cancer, according to a study of 10,739 women published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. An earlier study had revealed that women taking a combination of oestrogen and progestin faced a greater risk of breast cancer than untreated women.