France’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that aims to give single women and lesbian couples legal access to in vitro fertilization, egg freezing and fertility medication. The assisted reproduction measures are part of a broader bioethics bill voted by the National Assembly, the lower house, where French President Emmanuel Macron’s government has a majority. The bill passed 359-114. It must still go to the Senate for debate.

After a decade of searching, the UC San Francisco scientists who identified the only human gene known to promote “natural short sleep” – lifelong, nightly sleep that lasts just four to six hours yet leaves individuals feeling fully rested – have discovered a second.

In the battle against antibiotic resistance, many scientists have been trying to deploy naturally occurring viruses called bacteriophages that can infect and kill bacteria. Bacteriophages kill bacteria through different mechanisms than antibiotics, and they can target specific strains, making them an appealing option for potentially overcoming multidrug resistance. However, quickly finding and optimizing well-defined bacteriophages to use against a bacterial target is challenging.

CVS pharmacies become the latest to withdraw Zantac, a drug being investigated for cancer links.

Japanese researchers said they have developed artificial blood that can be transfused into patients regardless of their blood type and can vastly improve the chances for survival of seriously injured people. The artificial blood created by a team of scientists primarily from the National Defense Medical College has proved effective in experiments on rabbits.

More than half of patients can now survive a deadly skin cancer that was considered untreatable just a decade ago, say UK doctors. Ten years ago only one-in-20 patients would live for five years after being diagnosed with late-stage melanoma. Most would die in months. But drugs to harness the body's immune system mean 52% now live for at least five years, a clinical trial shows.

EPFL scientists are developing new approaches for improved control of robotic hands – in particular for amputees – that combines individual finger control and automation for improved grasping and manipulation. This interdisciplinary proof-of-concept between neuroengineering and robotics was successfully tested on three amputees and seven healthy subjects. The results are published in today’s issue of Nature Machine Intelligence.

A new type of drug that blocks one of cancer’s key evolutionary escape routes from chemotherapy could be used to treat aggressive breast cancers, a new study has shown.

Every primary school child in England is to be offered vaccination against winter flu in an attempt to safeguard them and their family from the virus, the health service has announced, promising no shortage of vaccines regardless of the Brexit outcome. This year’s flu vaccination campaign will be the biggest ever, with 25 million people offered vaccines free, including 600,000 school children aged 10-11. Children are considered “super-spreaders”, liable to infect others in their family and a danger to the elderly. All children aged two to 11 will be offered the nasal spray vaccine in the coming weeks.

In 1904, the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro shook with violence as citizens rioted. Property was destroyed, dozens were wounded, and 30 people lost their lives as the population rose up against a perceived common enemy: a mandatory vaccine for smallpox

A Japanese woman in her forties has become the first person in the world to have her cornea repaired using reprogrammed stem cells. At a press conference on 29 August, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida from Osaka University, Japan, said the woman has a disease in which the stem cells that repair the cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, are lost. The condition makes vision blurry and can lead to blindness.

Scientists in eastern China have discovered that a drug derived from seaweed can regulate bacteria in the human gut and could bring relief to patients suffering from mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers say they’ve successfully plunged human livers to subzero temperatures and then warmed them back up. The “supercooled” organs were still in good shape after 27 hours, adding nearly a day to how long livers can last outside the body. The research is part of a wider effort to learn how to keep organs operational outside the body for longer periods of time.

Recurring miscarriages may be caused by an underlying infection, scientists believe, as they launched a major trial to find if the problem can be cured with a simple course of antibiotics. Around 14,000 couples each year in England and Wales experience two or more consecutive miscarriages, yet the reason has proved elusive.

Up until just a few years ago, scientists thought your lungs were sterile. They were wrong. In the lungs of healthy people live a diverse range of bacteria, fungi and viruses.

Any American who has paid the price of a patent-protected medicine knows the core flaw in the U.S. prescription drug system: our elected leaders have handed over control to profit-hungry corporations. And for-profit corporations gonna for-profit, as the kids would say.

A space-age metal that formed part of the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs could provide a new method of treating cancer tumours selectively using light.

Scientists have raised hopes of a new treatment for multiple sclerosis after animal studies showed a common diabetes drug can repair nerve damage caused by the disease. The effect of the drug was so striking that doctors in Cambridge are now planning a clinical trial of MS patients next year.

William G Kaelin, Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg L Semenza win 9m Swedish kronor prize for work on how cells adapt to oxygen availability

Fifty years ago, children with an aggressive form of leukemia went from diagnosis to death in a few months, as the disease rampaged through their lymph nodes, spleens, livers, and nervous systems. Today, 90 percent of children with the blood malignancy, called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), are cured.