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By Erica Check Hayden of Nature magazine Scientists have identified the molecular players central to an incurable brain injury common in premature babies, and have shown how such injuries might one day be treated, sparing people from lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy. In babies born before their lungs are fully developed, lack of oxygen can disrupt nerve cells' ability to make a protective coating, called myelin, that makes up the brain's 'white matter'. [More]

It’s one of the great frustrations of obstetric medicine: humans have been reproducing for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet doctors still haven't unraveled the mystery of why some women give birth well before their babies have fully developed in the womb. Despite researchers' and physicians' best efforts, the rate of preterm births--defined as babies born before 37 weeks of gestation--climbed 30 percent from 1981 through 2006.