Richard Knox

It's a quest that never seems to end — the search for a safer birth control pill.

Some thought it might be at hand almost a decade ago when a new generation of oral contraceptives came on the market. They contained a hormone called drospirenone, which some thought would be less likely to cause dangerous blood clots.

Two new studies may not be the final nails in the coffin of the hypothesis that a mouse retrovirus called XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome. But the hammering is certainly getting louder.

Well over a million U.S. men are thought to get prostate biopsies every year – a test that involves firing needles into a man's prostate gland from a probe stuck into his backside.

For the vast majority the test isn't fun, but it's not dangerous.

But specialists are worrying about an increasing risk of complications from prostate biopsy, especially hard-to-treat bloodstream infections that can send men to the ICU and require weeks of heavy-duty antibiotic treatment.

For a long time scientists have wondered whether coffee might lower the risk of prostate cancer.

Previous studies have been relatively small and have shown mixed results.

Dallas Wiens says when he woke up after surgery in March, he asked a nurse if he could touch his new face. Told he could, he gingerly felt his eyelids, nose and mouth — all transplanted from an anonymous donor.

"I said out loud that this should not be medically possible — because it doesn't seem like it should be," Wiens said at a Boston press conference before going home to Texas. "But here I am today."