When the heat is on, boys will be girls, at least among bearded dragons.

Australia's great e-health vision continues to stall with new research showing that greater use of ICT in the health sector could generate savings worth more than $1.5 billion per annum.

Australia's best-known and most venerable medical research institute, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Parkville, Melbourne, celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. Graeme O'Neill interviewed the Hall's former director, Prof Sir Gustav Nossal, and his successor, Prof Suzanne Cory, about the institute's history and their view of science in Australia today.

Joe Sambrook tells Susan Williamson about the opportunities and challenges in understanding, treating and, ultimately, preventing breast cancer.

US regulators are moving to get drug safety warnings to patients and physicians earlier, which should limit prescribing and cut the number of dangerous side effects, a top US Food and Drug Administration official has told the United States congress.

DNA chipmaker Affymetrix and the Harvard Medical School-Partners HealthCare Centre for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG) have entered into a partnership to study the genetics of atherosclerosis.

The US Food and Drug Administration is on the verge of approving the first "ethnic medicine" -- a heart disease drug called BiDil that is particularly effective in African-Americans. Some see this as a belated effort to redress long-standing health inequalities in the United States. Others view it as a treacherous first step en route to racial discrimination in the name of personalised medicine.

A leading geneticist has warned that approval of BiDil, proclaimed as the first 'ethnic medicine', will be premature without pharmacogenetic evaluation to validate reports of its enhanced effectiveness in African-Americans.

Researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) have begun building a large-scale 3D database of gene-expression data that may lead to a better understanding of normal heart development and the causes of congenital heart disease.

IBM is expanding its IT financing business into healthcare, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, the company has announced at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting in Chicago.