The technique accurately predicted relapse in 12 of 15 patients about eight months before their tumors were spotted by conventional imaging.

The identities of some volunteers who donate personal genome sequence data for research can be revealed using only publicly available information, researchers report in the 18 January issue of Science.

Analyzing DNA from Pap smears could help detect endometrial and ovarian cancer, according to a new study appearing in the 9 January issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The finding could be a potentially life-saving screening tool for women. The routine Pap smear, which allows doctors to detect abnormal cells in a woman’s cervix, was recently updated to screen for human papillomavirus or HPV using DNA testing.

Two new reports show that a bacterium, known as GFAJ-1, requires small amounts of phosphate to grow—and that it cannot substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive, as a 2010 report in Science had suggested.

The GFAJ-1 bacterium, which was discovered in the arsenic-rich sediments of California’s Mono Lake, became the center of a controversy last year after Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues reported that the microorganism could incorporate arsenic into its DNA when phosphorus wasn’t available.

In October 2009, a Science report that patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) were infected with XMRV attracted a great deal of attention, but subsequent studies could not confirm this finding. Now, a new study in the 22 September edition of ScienceExpress reports that the lab tests used to detect the retrovirus called XMRV in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome are unreliable. The study is accompanied by a partial retraction of the original Science paper.